Apple and OpenAI make a deal

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss takeaways from WWDC, this week's gadget news, and Elon Musk dropping his lawsuit against OpenAI. Further reading: Apple and OpenAI aren’t paying each other yet, says Bloomberg MKBHD interviewed Tim Cook. Tim Cook is ‘not 100 percent’ sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations Can Apple Intelligence fix the iPhone’s broken notifications system? The AI upgrade cycle is here Here’s how Apple’s AI model tries to keep your data private The best small updates Apple didn’t mention at WWDC Apple IDs are becoming Apple Accounts Apple skipped over the best visionOS 2 updates iOS 18 will let you record calls — and tells everyone for their privacy SharePlay is coming to Apple TV, HomePods, and Bluetooth speakers Finally, offline maps with turn-by-turn guidance. The new versions of iOS and macOS will let you rotate your Wi-Fi address to help reduce tracking. Xbox boss: ‘I think we should have a handheld, too’ Microsoft announces a discless Xbox Series X console in white Xbox chief confirms more games are coming to other platforms Jabra’s earbuds are going away, but the impact they made isn’t The best thing about Jabra’s new earbuds is the case The Light Phone 3 adds a better screen, a camera, and new ways to replace your smartphone The Windows on Arm chip race heats up with a challenger to Qualcomm Did startup Flow Computing just make CPUs 100x faster? Here’s the white paper and FAQs Google is putting more Android in ChromeOS Elon Musk drops lawsuit against OpenAI Elon Musk has unusual relationships with women at SpaceX, WSJ reports Sony buys Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Pew: A growing number of Americans are getting their news from TikTok Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of thinking we should have a handheld, too.

• 1:07David Pierce?

  We should have a handheld.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  I would be awesome.

• 1:10Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna make one.

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  We should do it with an LCD screen that we claim is an E映 screen.

• 1:16Alex Cranz?

  Just play the game.

• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  That's coming for later, but if you know, you know. I'm just hinting towards...

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  There's gonna be a real theme on Vergecast this year, which is: Are you telling the truth?

• 1:27Alex Cranz?

  And then we just look into the camera.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  Does it work the way that people think it works? Or does it work not at all?

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm your friend Nilay. Alex Cranz is with me in the studio.

• 1:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm your friend who's excited to talk about all the gadgets that are definitely real and work.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  It's 2024. It's probably broken. I don't believe you. David Pierce is here.

• 1:47David Pierce?

  Hello. This was more fun when we were all sitting in like a needlessly fancy house together. Can we just do that officially as the Vergecast?

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  With air conditioning next to it. Oh, my God. So if you watched us on YouTube, you probably saw us glistening. It's because that house was 5,000 degrees when we were doing that episode.

• 2:02David Pierce?

  When we stopped recording between segments when they went to break, and Liam, our producer, hands me a paper towel and goes, "From this angle, your head is a mirror." And I've been thinking about that for four days now.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  This is why he needs...

• 2:15David Pierce?

  That's what we do to make the Vergecast for you.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to go too far down this road. I'm saying, this is why you should do banks.

• 2:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Alex Cranz?

  David would rock some bangs.

• 2:26David Pierce?

  I would say there are several things preventing me from growing good bangs and I'm happy to talk about them anytime you want.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  That's a whole episode. David gets bangs. That's what AI is for. If someone can make an AI-generated image of David with bangs. I have very like bouncy curly hair. There's a lot of stuff in my hair to make it not do that.

• 2:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  But we watched the fall guy and I came out of the bathroom the other day with just like full floppy bangs.

• 2:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, Beck, should I do this? And she was like, no. She was like, just don't.

• 2:55Alex Cranz?

  Just sent you right back into the bathroom?

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:57David Pierce?

  I appreciate that you, like me and most men, watch Ryan Gosling for an hour and a half and then it's like, what if I changed everything about myself? Could I be more like him if everything about me was different? I've had a lot of those moments recently.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  Becky met me when I had blonde highlights in my hair. So I think there was like an immediate. She's like, I can't go back.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  I suffered through this already. No, thank you. All right. A lot to talk about. We promised an entire episode of the show not about the AI stuff. Apple announced a W W C. There has also been a ton of gadget news. We're gonna go through that. And then lightning round, unsponsored. And I've seen the tweets from people who are like, I'm trying to sponsor the lightning round. Quite frankly, you've got to just bring a suitcase of money to our office directly.

• 3:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, you're not trying hard enough. That's all I'll say.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  You can't just be tweeting at me or posting on threads. Physical money in a suitcase. A good suitcase.

• 3:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't want Amazon alphabet soup suitcases.

• 3:57Alex Cranz?

  We want to see you in the lobby. Just make icons.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  Samsonite, Toomey, you know, like good suitcase. That's actually, it's not the money in the suitcase.

• 4:07Alex Cranz?

  You just want a suitcase? Do you need a new suitcase?

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  This is sponsored by a suitcase company. I didn't know any other luggage brands. American Tourister.

• 4:15Alex Cranz?

  Topo.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  Do they make topo?

• 4:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  I would say Away, but we wrote that story about Away one time and they threatened to sue us.

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  She doesn't work there anymore. She's not CEO. Anyway, that's deep Verge lore. We can set that aside. All right. So we should talk about all the other stuff from W W C that isn't AI. But first, we should mention two quick things about Apple AI. Apple Intelligence, if you will.

• 4:35Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  One, we talked last week about the confusion over who was paying who. And the way Apple was treating OpenAI, which was just a plugin to their system, to basically do all the risky stuff. Apple will do a very small set of things. And then if you're like, this might create horrible brand risk for us by telling you lies. So like, would you like to use chat G P T? And then they had said, well, eventually you'll plug Gemini into this and maybe some other models. So it it seemed like they were just extending the capability of their system, and we couldn't tell who was paying who. Mark Gurman has reported, no one's paying anyone. Apple is paying OpenAI an exposure. And the the idea here sort of makes sense.

• 5:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, everyone in media starts there. You get paid an exposure. This is just like.

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  I haven't paid cranes in a year.

• 5:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I I just live off of like McDonald's that I steal from dumpsters. It's great.

• 5:30Nilay Patel?

  No, but the the idea, right, is people will see the chat G P T logo. They'll see the capabilities. They'll wanna go and log in. This is where it gets real fuzzy. And then they will pay for chat G P T. The 20 bucks a month or whatever. And then Apple will take 30%. It's always it's always in the background. What's Apple's plan? 30%.

• 5:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Nilay Patel?

  That's that you walk into an Apple store, 30%. Show up with a Samsonite, you know, like, that's Tim Cook's vibe.

• 6:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know if that's going to work for a few reasons. One, I asked very specifically while we were at W W C, is there going to be an interface for people to sign up for the chat G P T subscription? And the answer very clearly was no.

• 6:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  The Safari is available to you. You you may go and sign up over there.

• 6:24Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  So they need to build the flow. Which means Apple has to upsell you to someone else's product inside of its own interfaces and then take 30%.

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  Lots of question marks there.

• 6:37David Pierce?

  Does that exist anywhere? I'm trying to think of a version of that that exists currently on iOS and I can't think of one. Where you're buying someone else's product inside of an Apple product and how that flow would work. I don't think that exists.

• 6:50Alex Cranz?

  Oh, um, uh, streaming. They did it for like some of the streaming.

• 6:53David Pierce?

  That's fair. That's probably the closest analog. That kind of, that kind of works.

• 6:56Alex Cranz?

  That's all I got.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I don't know. It's, it's new, right? But, but the economics as reported by Mark German would look like you use the stuff. You like it so much. You say to yourself, I wish this robot would remember me.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  And then you go pay the money. So it has it, it has statefulness, which is the thing you would basically pay for at this point.

• 7:18Alex Cranz?

  Aren't people kind of like getting fed up with paying the robot for money?

• 7:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think the, the question here, how this works out is if you're getting the basic version for free, which you are, you're the full GPT four O, all of its features somehow for free. What you are not getting is, does it remember you? Can you use the chat GPT app on your phone for free? I think not. I think you get to use it inside of Apple's experiences for free.

• 7:47David Pierce?

  That's right. All of the custom instruction stuff doesn't work. It seems like the custom GPTs wouldn't work. So there is a lot of stuff, like the, the access you would get as far as we know through the OS level thing is very limited. And so the, the upsell for chat GPT seems plausible. What seems wild to me is how expensive the customer acquisition cost there is going to be if I'm OpenAI. I, I can see two things going on here. One is that OpenAI is going to launch a search product, which I think everybody believes to be true and seems to be true.

• 8:24David Pierce?

  And it's possible that that is going to be part of this, right? That like maybe one thing Apple will be happy to do is kick you to the web through OpenAI's search product. And one very good thing you can do there is have ads. So it's, there's like, there is maybe a version of that that is like a direct correlation to Apple's Google deal, where when you search, you look at ads and Apple gets some of that revenue. That's very straightforward. That product doesn't exist. We have no idea what it's going to look like. So who knows? We'll see. The other one is, this is just like OpenAI spending a tremendous amount of money giving you free stuff in the hopes that it can find some way to get you to pay. And I think it's going to be so fascinating to see how Apple implements

• 9:07David Pierce?

  that, because you'll be able to tell everything you've ever wanted to know about Apple's priorities by when it tries to upsell you. You know what I mean? Like, if the first time you do it, Apple's like, wouldn't it be better if you had, then it's like, oh, this is a 30% company. Like, this is, this is what you're after. You are immediately trying to get me to pay more money to do a thing that you have promised me is baked into the operating system. Or if Apple is like, happy to push this all the way out, and just make it a teeny tiny box you can find in Safari if you want to. That's very different. And I think that, that tension between these two companies and that product is going to be so weird and so interesting if this is the actual business dynamic here.

• 9:44Nilay Patel?

  And it ramps up even higher if you can just switch it to Google Gemini, or whatever next model in China they have to use, or whatever models come out of Europe, or whatever. Right? The idea that there's this other architecture beyond Apple Intelligence that these companies can plug into, and that will drive them customers, sort of also implies that Apple believes the economics of all these problems are subscriptions.

• 10:06David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  You plug Google Gemini into this, but how is Google going to make money? Well, it's not Apple paying Google. It's hopefully they, you sign up for Gemini at $20 a month.

• 10:16David Pierce?

  Right.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if that's the way it will actually play out. I think there-

• 10:20Alex Cranz?

  Well, there's not, I mean, I think there's not a lot of risk for Apple in this right now. Like, if they're paying for exposure, then if ChatGPT is just sucks and nobody uses it, right? Which probably won't happen, but could, then it's fine. Apple's like, okay, yeah, there's something that we'll, we'll close down in a couple of years when everybody stops talking about it. But if it like, actually takes off, okay, they make money. And it's just like, okay, we get free money now. Like, it doesn't feel like there's a huge risk for Apple in this.

• 10:49David Pierce?

  You know who you sound like, Alex Cranz, is everyone who argues that Apple is a monopoly that needs to be broken up by antitrust law. Like-

• 10:56Alex Cranz?

  Hmm, that's true.

• 10:57David Pierce?

  I totally agree. Like, this is all, it's, it's, Apple is an incredible leverage point where it has the distribution and nobody else does. And if you're OpenAI and you want to get in front of a lot of people who are not otherwise likely to go to your website or your app- This is your move and that gives Apple all the power in the world.

• 11:15Alex Cranz?

  This is huge for OpenAI, right? Like, like they they have that first mover advantage and that's it. Scale, everything else, everybody, all the other competitors just have it all. So, so like they need this.

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, except that their their big competitor is Google and Apple has been very clear that Google is coming to the same plugin system.

• 11:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but not yet.

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  But but none of it chips. So this is my second point. So that was point one on Apple Intelligence is it appears we understand the economics based on March reporting. No one's really refuted it. Apple's not saying it doesn't seem like anyone at OpenAI is running around crowing about a windfall of profits. That's what we know so far.

• 11:56David Pierce?

  I will say, though, everyone at OpenAI is running around pretty aggressively overstating the extent to which they're involved in all of this. There had been a bunch of people tweeting like, we're so excited to be working with Apple to help power all of the AI experiences on the iPhone. And it's like, easy buddies, like,

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:11David Pierce?

  You're a like last resort checkbox kind of situation here. Like, let's, let's pump the brakes on what's happening here.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  We're so excited to bring the voice of Scarlett Johansson to Siri.

• 12:23David Pierce?

  But only if you get past three pop ups. This can be great. You're gonna love it.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  So that's one is we seemingly understand the economics. Two, actually directly right to what you just said, Alex, it is important, I think, to note that no one has seen this work yet.

• 12:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there have been some briefings. We've talked to a bunch of reporters. Apple had briefings. They showed a bunch of stuff on Rails. Great. Very cool. Love a controlled demo.

• 12:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  But having just gone through this with the Vision Pro and the Rabbit and everything else, I would just caution everyone that there are only two kinds of news where the truth just comes out. One is sports and one is tech products. One team wins or loses, you just that you get an answer, or the gambling economy forces the wrong answer. But that's like, whatever, there's another thing happens over there. But like, at the end, you get a result, right? It's like, there's not a lot of dispute about what happened at the end of the Super Bowl. In tech, the products work or they don't. And then real people get them. And then all bets are off. And I've said this a million times now on the show this year.

• 13:38Nilay Patel?

  All bets are off once you start shipping the thing to thousands or millions of people. They're just gonna do stuff you never expected. They're gonna break it in extremely esoteric ways. They're definitely not gonna read the instruction manual. Nope. All of your great ideas just fall apart. Once like millions of regular people get this stuff. Apple is gonna ship this to a billion people, the Oprah line. They're in a billion pockets, y'all. That's what Oprah said when they announced Apple TV plus. Why'd you make this deal with, with, with Tim Cook and Apple Oprah? They're in a billion pockets. That's a real quote, you can go look it up. Yeah, I remember. You put this in a billion pockets. Some weird stuff is gonna start. I guarantee you some weird stuff is gonna start happening.

• 14:21Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook said to the Washington Post opinion section, they're not 100% sure they can stop A I hallucinations. And he would never make a claim, cuz why, cuz why, you can't. Don't, don't worry about hallucinations, it's fine. It's just gonna lie to you sometimes. That's what you expect from your iPhone. It's just, yeah, some creative lies. Kevin Roos was at the event, just waiting to see if Apple Intelligence would make love to him. By the way, I saw him at the event. I apologized directly to Kevin for getting so much mileage out of that joke. And he's like, no, everyone is. So I love, I love you, Kevin. Including his family, he said, so that's, it's good for everybody. Rest, rest assured, he knows I continue to make the joke. We haven't concretely seen the phone handoff from local inference

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  to the private cloud inference that Apple wants. Like, we just haven't seen any of this work outside of a very controlled context. And I'm just, just, just reminding everyone gently.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  The AI economy so far has largely run on hype. And then they ship it and it's like, you should put some glue on your pizza.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  And I'm not saying Apple doesn't have a better track record than everyone else. I'm not saying that it's wrong to, to believe that they can out execute most of their competitors. Apple can definitely out execute most of its competitors. The last time the company out executed most of its competitors is ship the Vision Pro, which is easily the most technologically advanced VR headset ever made.

• 15:51Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  It's still a VR headset, like it has all of the problems of the category. It does not have a bunch of really novel solutions to them. It is just the best engineered, most complete version of the thing that it is. We have yet to see it. So I'm just.

• 16:06Alex Cranz?

  Didn't Apple also have like the disclaimer of like, sometimes it lies?

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's right in the interface. Chat GPT, sometimes check this info.

• 16:13Alex Cranz?

  Built right in.

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  So I'm not saying it's not gonna work. I, I just wanna call that out gently. Like.

• 16:19Alex Cranz?

  Gently.

• 16:20Nilay Patel?

  It, we, we have months to go, like maybe even a year or more to go before all of the features we saw demoed at WWDC ship, shipped to thousands, if not millions or billions of people. And then a bunch of stuff that no one anticipated happening is gonna happen at massive scale. I'll give you an example. Casey and Platformer wrote, "Apple is now in the business of content moderation at scale." And I wrote back, I was like, they have the App Store. He was like, no, no, no, no. Someone's gonna ask this thing to draw a gun and Apple won't do it. And then Tim Cook is gonna end up in front of Congress. Like, that is the level of chaos that is coming for these systems. They have to bear the pressure. And so it doesn't mean they've won. It doesn't mean they're ahead or behind.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  It just means like, we came off a very good show. And now we have to get the thing. And I keep saying, like, there's only two categories where you definitively know at the end if it worked or not. It's sports and tech. Like, I would even say, a lot of people, when I bring up this comparison, say, politics, because there's elections. Look around, man. A lot of people don't think that's one of the categories anymore.

• 17:29Alex Cranz?

  I think this will probably be the same thing. I think, I think a lot of people are gonna debate it because, you know, well, I've heard this a lot. I'm very vocal about thinking hallucinations are an enormous problem and everybody is glossing over them and should stop. And I get a lot of comments being like, don't worry about it.

• 17:45Nilay Patel?

  The goalposts on hallucinations have fully moved. I've noticed this recently. We just had the CEO of Coher on Decoder. He's one of the people who wrote Attention is All You Need at Google, the paper that famously described transformers, which Google loves, reminding everyone of. And I was like, can you, can you fix it? Like, if you program a computer and it delivers some answer to you, and sometimes it's wrong, like, that seems like a bad computer. And he was like, well, you get stuff wrong, too. Sure. And he's not, that's a totally correct answer. But it's like, that's why I have a computer.

• 18:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  Is to be far more reliable than.

• 18:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, my computer does the math correctly. Like, that's, I feel pretty good about that.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  Every single time.

• 18:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  The example I gave him was like, I would not let an LLM, like, an F-22 cannot be flown without a computer. Like, it just can't, like, a human being cannot operate an F-22 fast enough to keep it stable in flight. And so you would just not give it to an LLM.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  He did make the point that the rate of hallucinations coming down, and importantly, in the context of Apple, Apple Intelligence is doing such little stuff, that they've scoped down what they want it to do, what they want to be responsible so far. And then anything else is ChatGPT, which can lie to you.

• 19:02Alex Cranz?

  We just, I think that's a smart way to do it. So, like, I think ChatGPT is being hugely irresponsible by being like, yeah, use this for everything. But Apple, that is a much more responsible, like, approach, right? Saying, you know what? It's bad at that. So we're just not gonna let it do that.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  We've let some of series, we've improved some of series for natural language.

• 19:21Alex Cranz?

  What if it, like, hallucinates meetings for you?

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that'd be great. Because if I could, if I could incorporate a lying robot into my meeting scheduling. I take it. But when speaking of scoped all the way down, this is another really important piece that I didn't even think about while we were there. But Gen 2 has a piece coming up on the site, but it'll be up by the time you read this. The new Apple Intelligence, the new Siri won't work on the HomePod. It won't work on the Apple TV and it appears it will not work with HomeKit.

• 19:50David Pierce?

  Wait, it won't work with HomeKit at all? Like, the devices thing makes sense, but to not even be part of HomeKit is really fascinating and seems bad.

• 19:58Nilay Patel?

  It'll like fall back to the old Siri. So you'll be like, turn on the lights and I'll like do, it's not gonna not work, but the complicated orchestration piece where you're like, I'm just talking to my phone and stuff is happening. It's fuzzy. We don't know yet.

• 20:13Alex Cranz?

  Is all of this AI-ification of Siri gonna improve the fact that Siri doesn't understand me half the time?

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  I think this is like the thing that they're gonna fix.

• 20:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that was my impression is that they're gonna fix that, but like-

• 20:27David Pierce?

  That is the thing I'm most confident about with new Siri is that like text to speech and speech to text have gotten very, very, very good, very fast. And I think if Apple can't do that better with Siri, it would, it's just a gigantic failure. Like, I have a lot of faith in Siri recognition being very good and the transcription stuff being very good. Like, there's no excuse for that stuff not to be very good anymore. The state of the art on that is really good.

• 20:53Alex Cranz?

  Does this mean that it would work or not work with HomeKit? I guess we'll just have to see?

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  Right. So I think that you pick up a phone, you open Siri and say, turn, open the garage door. That appears like it will not get routed through the Apple Intelligence version. The command will get recognized and it'll go to like, whatever was happening.

• 21:09Alex Cranz?

  And hopefully, they've kind of like made all of Siri smarter in that respect.

• 21:14David Pierce?

  And then old Siri will say, here's what I found on the web for turn on garage lights.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So again, we don't know because it hasn't shipped, but the idea that HomeKit is not yet part of this appears to be like what Jen has, like that's what she's writing about. And I think that's really fascinating because so much of what you want Siri to orchestrate, all the examples they gave, right? The canonical example is, tell me what time to leave for the airport to go to my daughter's dance recital, right? And it's always this like made up, very transactional thing you wanna do.

• 21:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, I'm gonna go to a place because I'm cool. I have a family and a means of transportation. I leave the house. My daughter's in dance class. It's, this is all very normal.

• 21:58Alex Cranz?

  You sleep in a race car bed.

• 22:02Nilay Patel?

  I've got a phone. But like, one thing you would want to do is like, tell me when to leave the office to catch the train, also turn on my thermostat.

• 22:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, you would just add that in, or like, a very common thing people script in HomeKit is like, turn on the lights by the time I get home. Like, you can see how you'd want to have this more complicated conversation about stuff in your house. And it, that all feels like not yet.

• 22:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:28David Pierce?

  Well, and that's also one of the big things they're talking about with Apple Intelligence is context awareness. And the, the deep rabbit hole of context awareness is like, inside of your smart home. Right? Like, knowing where you are and what you're doing and how you're feeling. Like, that's the, that's how we get all this stuff going down the road. So I, I'm actually surprised that that wouldn't be like a flagship feature of this. But they really didn't come up at all during the keynote, so I guess I'm not tracked.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that is more or less what Jen's entire piece is about. But by the way, there's also another piece in Business Insider that came out today, right, just where we started recording, about the Alexa unit at Amazon that is like, ringing the bell about how bad Alexa is at this stuff and how Amazon is under invested in it. And the pivot is just not easy to do.

• 23:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, you can't have had this thing and be like, we're gonna turn it off. And here's a somewhat unreliable, extremely horny robot. Like, you're just gonna like, brick a bunch of Alexa devices that people depend on. So it is a very hard pivot. And, you know, because Apple is Apple, they can just do it, especially because Siri is bad. Like, I feel like most people are like, oh, Siri is bad.

• 23:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  Here's a newer, hornier Siri. Fine, let's try that out for a while. Whereas I think Alexa exists in your house. In no other context, and you cannot break people's houses in that way.

• 23:48Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that's enough on the AI stuff. There's a bunch of other stuff that we promised people we would talk about from Dub Dub. You want to do the small updates?

• 23:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's, there's a bunch of stuff that we found, like, that people have found. Some of it, we, we already talked about, like, the, the buttons, the volume buttons. When you press them, there's like a cool little animation. And now that I've seen it, it looks sick.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  It does. But they're, they're definitely gonna take the buttons off the phone.

• 24:11Alex Cranz?

  I, I don't want to talk about it.

• 24:15Alex Cranz?

  I'm fine. It's okay. But also bilingual typing is gonna be a thing now, which I'm super, super excited about because like, some of us speak a little Spanglish, and it sucks when it tries to autocorrect you, and you're like, no, I know I'm bad at Spanish, but like, come on. I knew this one. So, and it won't just work with Spanish, it will work with a lot of other languages. And so that's gonna be like, really, really cool. Also, the light is like, the flashlight only on the iPhone 15 Pro, you'll be able to like, control the beam of it, and like, the brightness of it.

• 24:50David Pierce?

  The interface for it looks awful. Cool feature, but it looks insane to try and manage.

• 24:56Alex Cranz?

  I am excited to watch people use that in the movie theater, when they're trying to find their seats. That's gonna be a really fun time. If somebody, if they can make like, a shortcut to just do like, a movie theater mode, that would rule. The widgets are gonna be a little easier to customize, which I think we kind of, we saw a little bit of that during the event, but it'll be nice. Wes, our, like, Vision Pro lover on staff, is super excited that he will, can see his keyboard now.

• 25:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Alex Cranz?

  When he like, if he puts the headset on, he'll be able to see his keyboard, whereas before, I guess he just like, typed in oblivion and hoped he was right.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's very much the Vision Pro experience until recently.

• 25:38Alex Cranz?

  So less oblivion!

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  Also, you can use any Bluetooth mouse you want.

• 25:41Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Which, incredible future update for a $3,500 computer.

• 25:46Alex Cranz?

  Now you can use your own inputs on your computer.

• 25:49David Pierce?

  I mean, as we heard Tim Cook say to Marquez this week, he loves the Magic Mouse, and it's perfect, and nothing has ever been wrong with it. So, it's surprising that they would allow this at all, frankly.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  He didn't, I'm sorry, he didn't, I don't wanna be pedantic about this. That was more information about the Magic Mouse than existed in Tim Cook's brain at that time. I encourage everyone to go watch that clip. It's on, we posted Marquez's tweet of that clip. He was like, rank product launches, and a bunch of easy ones, and you see, like, the devil on Marquez's shoulder, like, Magic Mouse. And you just the grin on his face. It's very good. And then Tim Cook, very good. I interview a lot of CEOs. I watch them scramble. And you just, the dust in that man's brain, where he was like, what's in this wildcard?

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  He's like, magic mouse. And then, yeah, he came up with ergonomics. He's like, what's a word I can say about mouse?

• 26:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't, we love the magic. That's true. It's ergonomics. Are they good? Are they bad? Yeah, he's like, it doesn't stab you when you hold it. That's the Apple design.

• 26:54Alex Cranz?

  Low bar, low bar. They sat there. Um, there's also going to be some new wallpapers that are like very retro looking and, and look kind of cool. I personally love the one that's the, the green and, and gray.

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  Of course you do.

• 27:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I was like, bring me back to that eighties monitor experience.

• 27:08Nilay Patel?

  We know.

• 27:09Alex Cranz?

  You know, you know.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  Last week, everyone else knows too.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  I just sometimes, there's like listeners who might've skipped an episode. Why? But I want, I want them to know as well. Um, so, but they, they're like animated. They look really sick. So you gotta, we, we did a whole story, um, kind of chronicling a lot of these things. And, and there's a video in there and it just looks, it looks dope.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Alex Cranz?

  Like it.

• 27:29Nilay Patel?

  The Susan Kerr wallpaper. She was a original Mac designer. They have a lot of her iconography. It's very cool.

• 27:34Alex Cranz?

  It's very, very cool. And then, um, now when somebody leaves you a voicemail, it'll like just transcribe it. So it looks almost like a text in your phone. So that'll be really cool if the transcription actually works, because if it's anything like the Google transcription, it does not understand my mom.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 27:56Alex Cranz?

  It also, my, my, my best friend who says mayor, mayor, the same way that the horse and the, the office, those came up the same way as Siri, she was telling me yesterday, cannot comprehend that.

• 28:12Nilay Patel?

  Wait, she often talks about mayors and horses?

• 28:15Alex Cranz?

  She often talks about mayors.

• 28:17Nilay Patel?

  The problem is that they're confused.

• 28:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And so it's always like, yeah, there's a lot of mayors in your area. And she's like, cool.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so just to confirm, you have a friend who calls you and leaves you voicemails about the number of horses in your area.

• 28:33Alex Cranz?

  In her area.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  And the problem that we have identified is that Siri thinks that she's talking about local elected officials.

• 28:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's.

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  Just checking that I understand.

• 28:43Alex Cranz?

  I, like I said.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  Sam, if you're listening, that's right up there with Magic Mouse Ergonomics.

• 28:47Alex Cranz?

  It's up there. Like, let's fix it. Well, it does, it struggles with, like, she was telling me she's got a really strong Texas accent, and it like, like Siri does not comprehend.

• 28:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 28:58Alex Cranz?

  But then she's got, she speaks Spanish, and she has like a lovely Mexican accent in Spanish, and it understands it perfectly. So a lot of times she's just like, I'm just gonna talk to Siri in Spanish, because otherwise it's gonna be like, let's talk about elected officials.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how to say female horse in Spanish, but if I did, rest assured, I'd be doing it right now.

• 29:15Alex Cranz?

  Same, I don't know either. And I'm gonna try to keep it that way for as long as possible. Uh, don't, don't tell me, my friend will tell me, and I don't care. Uh, so. But, but there's also, there, you're gonna be, there's more options for charging too, so I guess you're gonna be able to like, change how you want your phone to charge.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right, like limits, like to save the battery.

• 29:39Alex Cranz?

  Which is nice, because we've been able to do that on.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, a lot, a lot of Android features here.

• 29:45Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Or, yeah, like, everybody, thanks, Apple, I appreciate you bringing parity. Um, so there's still a lot more, I know people are really looking into it, and if you see something, who will like, tag one of us, um, mainly David.

• 29:58David Pierce?

  There's just a lot of like, useful quality of life stuff. Like, the, now, if you, if you paste a link into messages, it'll show you the link preview before it sends the message. Which is like, it's one of those things, that's like, am I gonna send a link that is 90,000 letters long, or is it gonna do the nice preview thing, and now you know before you send it? There's just, there's just a million of those, and I think that's great. I will say the one I am most excited about is that you can make the app icons bigger, and get rid of the label underneath it. So instead of saying like, having the Safari logo, and then saying Safari under it, you can have a bigger Safari logo, and it doesn't say. Safari under it.

• 30:36Alex Cranz?

  It looks nice.

• 30:37David Pierce?

  Unbelievable. This is the stuff like I really, I cannot shake the idea that Apple had a whole two hour long WWDC planned that would have just been all this stuff and they would have told us about all of it. And it would have been a very normal WWDC. And then at the very end, they were like, we have to do a chat GPT thing and just like blew it all up. I'm sure that's not what happened, but like, we're finding out about much more of what's going on on these platforms than we typically do after the keynotes.

• 31:02Alex Cranz?

  And Apple is the last few years, they were doing kind of a thing, right? Where one year it'd be like small updates, like they're nice, but smaller. And then the next year would be like, oh, there's some really sick stuff in here. And this year was kind of going to be one of those years where it's like, okay, we had a kind of smaller year last year, really sick stuff this year. And then also Apple intelligence.

• 31:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Alex Cranz?

  So I, I think I'm, I'm totally in this like theory with you, this conspiracy, David.

• 31:29David Pierce?

  All of my productivity nerd friends are so excited that you can now see reminders inside of calendar. Uh, uh, I'm like, it's so much done. He doesn't even know.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  The installer audience is freaking out.

• 31:41David Pierce?

  They, they literally are. It's very exciting.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, what's interesting, uh, Jay Peters, Jay Peters from the verge, who's back on Prince of Leeds, congratulations, Jay. Um, he wrote that the AI upgrade cycle is here for Apple. So a lot of this stuff would have never driven an incremental upgrade.

• 31:58Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  You've got an iPhone 13, you can see reminders and calendar, you're not buying an iPhone 16. Except now maybe Apple intelligence is going to make you excited to buy a new phone and Apple's kind of banking on this.

• 32:11Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they, they need to that like, that, that cycle has gone down, right? Like people just don't upgrade as often anymore. Unless they're verge listeners, in which case they're like, who?

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we have eight gigs of RAM.

• 32:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Nilay Patel?

  Disgusting.

• 32:25Alex Cranz?

  Gross.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  I have more mares than that at home.

• 32:30Alex Cranz?

  Eric Adams? Who's there?

• 32:32Nilay Patel?

  Eric Adams does not have a gigs of RAM. I don't know exactly what kind of insult that is, but I know it to be true.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  No, but the, the idea that these features that are cool, that we're excited about, they, I think regular people are gonna experience and be happy about the theming.

• 32:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  Get ready for just a wave of just bananas themes and all the phones around you because people are excited about those things. They're not gonna, if Apple gated theming to the next generation of phones, one, that would be outrageous. Two, it would not inspire one person to buy a new phone.

• 33:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  But if they gate, you can talk to Siri naturally to the next generation of phones. And it can do all this stuff for you and we can make ads about it and market these new capabilities. That might drive the cycle. So you can see why they sort of like put all the stuff aside.

• 33:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, because they did it for that. They did it for the watch. The watch is like the new update is not going to work with the series four and the series five. So it's just like, I think iPads too are affected. If the iPad doesn't have an M1 in it, it's not going to get a lot of the, the AI features.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, they finally got me.

• 33:36Alex Cranz?

  They got you.

• 33:37Nilay Patel?

  Or did they?

• 33:38Alex Cranz?

  You go get it. It's so good. Zero regrets. Spend all of your money irresponsibly on iPads. Just.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  I've bought so many speakers this year. I can't be buying iPads too. You kidding me?

• 33:50Alex Cranz?

  Your wife's just like, no.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  It's no more stuff, please.

• 33:54Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, I like, it's very interesting that they're pushing it this way, but they also got me because I'm on an iPhone 14 Pro and I'm like, okay.

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna do it.

• 34:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I was gonna, I was gonna hold out for the folding one. I just, in my heart of hearts, I fully believe it's any day now. And I mean, any year now, not day, but instead I will get it.

• 34:14David Pierce?

  Do we think Apple is running out of things to take 30% of? And that's, that's why we're.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  I think the European Union is taking away things it can take 30% from.

• 34:24David Pierce?

  Fair. Which is, which is then it spins back to now we have to keep selling you an iPhone every year. Cause Apple has been on this. Run for good or for bad of saying, you know, hold on to your hardware longer like, you know, you know, the thing Amazon has always said, like, we don't make money when you buy your hardware, we make money when you use it. Apple has always been a hardware company, but has increasingly made money when you use it. And so I think they've always pushed you to make new stuff, but or to buy new stuff rather, but I don't think it has been as existentially important for you to upgrade your iPhone every year as long as Apple keeps getting 30% of everything you do. But

• 34:58Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they were still feeling the pressure on this. This was like something we'd see earnings after earnings after big iPhones. It'd be like, okay, they did it, but not as many people bought it this year. It is fine because you know,

• 35:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, but I don't know that I think we, everybody kind of got used to that. And it was, it was the services revenue was coming up to

• 35:13Alex Cranz?

  I think we got used to that. I think Tim Cook was always probably looking for, okay, what's that thing that can drive the next

• 35:20David Pierce?

  Well, sure. He invested $10 billion in a car and is now trying to build like home robots. Tim's got a lot of plans.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  They don't have, yeah, they don't have like post phone hardware plans.

• 35:30David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. Right. But yeah, so that's kind of my point is like, I think it does seem like Apple in a very real way is back to, we have to sell you an iPhone as often as possible. And it feels like the move for a bunch of years has been away from that. And now it is like back to that in a real way.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Alex Cranz?

  As someone who loves gadgets, I love that. Maybe there'll be like cool stuff.

• 35:47David Pierce?

  Do you think that's why Apple made the iPhone 15 Pro scratch so easily, which is why mine is scratched to bits? And now I desperately need a new one in September?

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  If they would just make a phone whose battery consistently landed lasted for a whole day, six months into it's, I'd be very happy. But my 15 Pro is like, I'm done. I'm out. You want screen time controls? What if I don't turn on?

• 36:08David Pierce?

  That's

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  Think about that. Okay. Well, we should take a break. One more thing I want to call out. Something I noticed. Then they're talking about customizing Control Center. See all this? They added one control from one app that I thought was very interesting, which was the Forepass app. And you can lock your doors and start your car, turn on the AC right from control center because Ford Pass has a thing. And then Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, tweet it. We're excited to partner with Apple and blah, blah, blah. I think there, I think there's, there's, there's GM walked away from CarPlay towards getting tighter.

• 36:45Alex Cranz?

  Are you, are you saying that they're gonna make an Apple, like Ford's making the Apple car?

• 36:52David Pierce?

  You just did the Brian Windhorst on ESPN, like, let's, let's see.

• 36:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't have it. Do you understand what I'm saying? I don't have it all the way. I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm suggesting that if somebody does know this information, they should tell me this information in a way that I can report it.

• 37:08David Pierce?

  So there's a Skunk Works team inside of Ford that is building good cars instead of stupid ones.

• 37:14Alex Cranz?

  Is this Ford red?

• 37:15David Pierce?

  What if that's just Apple?

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  There actually is the Skunk Works team inside of Ford.

• 37:19David Pierce?

  This is what I'm saying. What if all of those people are just Apple moles?

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  No, I, I'm saying GM walked away from CarPlay and the other giant American automaker is like, what if we integrate more tightly with Apple software? And that is suggestive that they might do something else. And if you are a person who might know what that something else is.

• 37:38Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna bundle a phone with a car.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're gonna buy Verizon, whatever. Look, you know.

• 37:47David Pierce?

  Buy an iPad, get a Mustang. Here we go.

• 37:50Nilay Patel?

  I would do that. As a person with a used iPad and a used Mustang, that's, there's your super cycle. You know, if you know what I'm, we gotta take a break.

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• 39:37Nilay Patel?

  We're back, The Vergecast.

• 39:40Speaker 06

  In case you missed.

• 39:41Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what you were doing. I just know that there's a button that makes you go from the end of one segment to the beginning of this segment much quicker than we think that happens.

• 39:50Speaker 06

  Welcome.

• 39:51Nilay Patel?

  Sponsored lightning round. All I'm saying is just keep us afloat.

• 39:54David Pierce?

  We're just going to start integrating ads at completely unpredictable moments of the show. There was one, we got a bunch of tweets from somebody, I think it was two weeks ago in the episode. Did you guys see this? Where the way the dynamic ads were happening was such that it, we hit a pause, and then you said, "We're back," and then the ad started. It was just a perfect, like, oh, you thought you knew when the ads were in your face. The ads are now.

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  That's the Papa Bad of broadcasting.

• 40:22David Pierce?

  It was great. I enjoyed it very much.

• 40:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, lots and lots and lots of gadget news this week. Starting with Xbox, I think, but I really want to talk about what's going on with Google and Android and Kremo West. David, you want to run us through all this?

• 40:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's start with Xbox because on Tuesday's episode, I promised we were going to talk about the stupid Xbox. And I got some questions about what the stupid Xbox is, so let's talk about it. Basically, there was a, there was an Xbox event earlier this week, got a little bit overshadowed by WWDC, but lots of interesting stuff, new games, all kinds of stuff. But I think for our purposes, the two big gadgets that were talked about were a new white discless Series X, which looks very nice and is inexplicably not shipping until the holidays. It's just like a thing that is, should be sitting there and for some reason they're not shipping it for eight months.

• 41:10Alex Cranz?

  No internal upgrades. It's just got no discs.

• 41:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, just give me, give me it.

• 41:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, cool.

• 41:16David Pierce?

  It's so weird. Anyway, but I think the way more interesting thing is Phil Spencer, who runs Xbox at Microsoft, has been, I would say like aggressively and loudly hinting that Microsoft is going to build a handheld gaming device for a long time. And then just said out loud in an interview, I believe with IGN, quote, "I think we should have a handheld too." So like, there it is. He was basically like, this is, this is a time we're doing software, we're talking about games. They also talked about bringing more games to other platforms, which made a lot of Xbox people mad in the way that it did before. But he's just, they're just making a handheld. Like, it's just coming.

• 41:55Alex Cranz?

  I think the, the big difference here is we've heard these rumors about a handheld from them for ages, right? Like when they were really pushing cloud gaming right after the Xbox Series X was launched. Everybody was like, okay, yeah, they're going to do like a cool cloud console. And then that didn't happen because the cloud gaming stuff just didn't kind of take off as they wanted, right? There was that, there was also the streaming box and it got killed. And so all this stuff got killed a couple of years ago. And it's like, okay, you're, you're going to make a handheld now. Cool. You've been saying that for like half a decade at this point. But the difference now is it sounds like it's going to run Windows and that rules. As someone who uses these little consoles, that's awesome because the current version of like Windows on one of these little game consoles sucks now.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  What makes us confident that Microsoft can overcome the nature of running Windows on a handheld?

• 42:46Alex Cranz?

  Nothing.

• 42:46David Pierce?

  Have you heard about our, our Lord and Savior ARM processors?

• 42:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, it is like, it is the ARM processor.

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  And we think the games, well, I guess you can res them down, right? You're not trying to run them at full quality.

• 42:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like the Steam Deck automatically reses this stuff down, right? And so the idea here is that it would do this. We've also, we were hearing rumors about like Nvidia getting back into the ARM stuff. They used to do the Tegra, which notably powers the Switch. There's also MediaTek, you know, everybody knows MediaTek.

• 43:15Nilay Patel?

  There's a MediaTek processor within 50 yards of you right now.

• 43:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, probably within like 50 inches.

• 43:21Nilay Patel?

  Damn, I'm just saying, everywhere you are, there's a MediaTek processor. If you're that TV right there, guarantee you there's a MediaTek processor.

• 43:29Alex Cranz?

  You guys can't see it, but there's a TV there and it definitely has MediaTek in it. But MediaTek is also like gonna be doing the processor stuff and doing ARM processors? And there's even rumors that MediaTek-

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  Just to be clear, they already are.

• 43:40Alex Cranz?

  They already do.

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  Because they're everywhere.

• 43:41Alex Cranz?

  They're, yeah.

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  They wanna make good ones.

• 43:45Alex Cranz?

  Thank you, thank you. That is an important clarification. They already make ARM processors. Now they wanna make the ones that don't suck. And there's rumors that they might be partnering with Nvidia. There's something happening there. So like, the potential for-

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  That is, the MediaTek Nvidia combo is like, oh, boy, that dude probably has a lot of money, right? Like, that's not a-

• 44:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that is Nvidia being like-

• 44:08David Pierce?

  Is The Rock in Kevin Hart? Is that what you're saying?

• 44:10Nilay Patel?

  Right. There's a movie called She's Out of My League.

• 44:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is accurate, this is accurate. But I think that's kind of all is, is what's driving some of this like hype for a new Xbox handheld console. Is there's a lot of potential that could change. But they also have to make Windows not suck visually. Like, I don't care about how it runs. It needs to not suck visually.

• 44:38David Pierce?

  Just run, run the Xbox app, like, done. It's just sitting there. Like, all that software is just sitting there.

• 44:45Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 44:45David Pierce?

  Microsoft could do it, and it just hasn't for some reason.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, theoretically, the Xbox itself is running a version of Windows, right? Remember-

• 44:53Alex Cranz?

  Right, yeah, yeah, it does.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  And they just cut it down to run one app well.

• 44:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 44:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they could do that again, and then all of these other consoles, which suck so much with full Windows on them, could suck less. That's what I really want, if you can tell. There's stuff already out there that's really sick. And the software is garbage.

• 45:15David Pierce?

  So that's the thing, right? And I think to me, the reason this is very exciting is that we really haven't had Sony or Microsoft make a really truly like first class competitive handheld.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 45:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Nilay Patel?

  In a long time.

• 45:33Alex Cranz?

  And the Vita? I mean, come on.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  The PSP was incredible.

• 45:38David Pierce?

  It was. I don't doubt it.

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  I know that Vita fans are out there.

• 45:41David Pierce?

  650 years ago.

• 45:44Alex Cranz?

  Did you watch a lot of movies on your PSP?

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no. But it had a Sony disc format, like a custom UMD, I believe.

• 45:51David Pierce?

  Those are the days.

• 45:52Nilay Patel?

  It was right up there with MegaBase.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  By the way, shout out to all the people wandering through Best Buy sending me photos of ULT speakers. There's a Sony marketing person who's like, this is off the charts. And that's because of us. The chart was flatlined below. Just to be clear, the chart is on five. But we're doing it. We're making a difference.

• 46:14David Pierce?

  Just see, they're like, that's so weird. Nobody ever presses the button. Yesterday, six people pressed the button. What's happening?

• 46:22David Pierce?

  But yeah, that was, that was all the Xbox stuff. My guess would be it's, there's, there's, I just feel like if you're Phil Spencer, you don't say that if there's not something happening.

• 46:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:32David Pierce?

  In the relatively near future. Yeah. Yeah. And he's been, he's been sort of sneaky about this. Like he's liked tweets and, and has sort of intimated that this is a thing that he thinks is interesting. But I think you look at the continued success of the Steam Deck, the fact that Nintendo has a Switch 2 coming that everybody's very excited about. Like this, this idea is not going away. Like I think handheld gaming is going to be the next big thing for a very long time. And it seems very clear that Microsoft also believes that. But they will also happily ship you a white version of the same thing they already have seven months from now, if that's what you'd rather have. Congratulations.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft Phil has been very direct, being like, we did not do well in this generation of the console wars. This is why we had to go buy Activision.

• 47:18David Pierce?

  Right.

• 47:18Nilay Patel?

  And like, figure out a way to compete. We just did an episode of Decoder with Ash Parrish about the game market and she was like, desktop PC gaming is going down. And then a million people wrote us an email to point out that it's going up if you count the Steam Deck.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  Right, like that's where the growth is that part of the market. So if you're Phil and you're like, "Okay, we're not gonna magically start a new console generation tomorrow and win against Sony and its various advantages. We are looking at Nintendo, gonna launch a Switch 2. I really hope they call it the Super Nintendo Switch, by the way."

• 47:54David Pierce?

  That'd be great.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  That will be a dominant moment. Where are we going? Where's the action? The action is in mobile. Good. We bought Candy Crush. Settled.

• 48:00David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, and then the action is in these handhelds where we're getting growth against PCs. Gaming PCs are a thing. Like, we can maybe get some action there.

• 48:08Alex Cranz?

  And also, a lot of like, the Switch's success has been on the backs of indie developers, right? And, and Microsoft actually has a pretty good relationship with indie developers. They, they put a lot of these games out on, on their, the Xbox in general. And people are like, "I would like to play that on a handheld." And maybe not the Switch.

• 48:24David Pierce?

  Right.

• 48:24Alex Cranz?

  And that would be like, "Oh, I can play big AAA Xbox games that aren't exclusive because Xbox apparently doesn't make exclusive games anymore. And you can play like, Hades 2. That would, that'd be sick."

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think the exclusive game strategy just didn't sell off Xboxes.

• 48:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Nilay Patel?

  It's like the other way around. They're like, "All right, fine. Just play our games and your PS5."

• 48:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Nilay Patel?

  Buy some stuff in this game. We'll be happy.

• 48:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because all the ones that they want to make exclusive, the FTC will be like, "I'm sorry, what?"

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Now, now they got other problems.

• 48:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I, I, and the idea that they made a white one and they just won't sell it is like, "This is your big holiday marketing push? You're gonna build demand for the white one?"

• 49:01David Pierce?

  Kills me. Kills me. Anyway, the, the next one, uh, I want to talk about while we're just rolling through gadgets here is Jabra, um, which put me on a real like emotional roller coaster this week. It launched a pair of headphones, two pairs of headphones, the Elite 10 and Elite 8 Active, new versions of it, with a very cool feature that I was very excited to talk about on this show, and then promptly announced that they're not making headphones anymore. Within a couple of hours, they were like, here's this dope new thing that we made. Never mind, we're out. Goodbye.

• 49:29Alex Cranz?

  Well, they're still making it. It's still, it's still gonna come, but that's it.

• 49:32David Pierce?

  Right.

• 49:33Alex Cranz?

  They're, they're closing the door behind them.

• 49:34David Pierce?

  We'll support these for the next few years. And on the one hand, I'm like, okay, do I need like ongoing software support from my Bluetooth headphone manufacturer? Like, not really. But on the other hand, like, the, the last death knells of a company's headphone lineup seem like a silly thing to recommend to people.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  What's the cool feature?

• 49:52David Pierce?

  So the cool feature is they, these are wireless earbuds, uh, and they come in a case and you can plug in the case to an audio source. You can, with a headphone, you can plug it into a headphone jack.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  So they're a Bluetooth transmitter?

• 50:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're a Bluetooth transmitter. And so they'll, they'll turn any wired thing into a Bluetooth thing that then streams directly to your earbuds.

• 50:12Alex Cranz?

  This would have been great.

• 50:13David Pierce?

  Unbelievable.

• 50:13Alex Cranz?

  Like years ago, when planes still had.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  No, they do.

• 50:18Alex Cranz?

  Not in it. Well, you're fancy.

• 50:21David Pierce?

  Dude, I was on a United flight yesterday and not only did they have a screen, the screens had Bluetooth and you could pair your AirPods to the screen. But if you had ever done it before on a United flight, the first thing you had to do was go in and forget it. In order to then go repair it. So the, this poor flight attendant had to give us like a four minute speech about how to connect your AirPods to the screen in front of you. But it's a thing. You could do it. It was the first time I'd ever encountered that and it was very exciting.

• 50:48Alex Cranz?

  Well, now I'm just disappointed in Alaska and American.

• 50:51David Pierce?

  United is a, is a trash airline with one good plane was, I would say my experience so far.

• 50:57Alex Cranz?

  You were just on the one plane.

• 50:58David Pierce?

  I was on the one good plane.

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I issue a very, very small complaint about Delta?

• 51:04Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  Then actually, in general, a thing that I think should be legal, cause I flew home on Delta.

• 51:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  They had Infinity War, but not Endgame. And, uh, cause you get on the plane, you're like, I gotta kill five hours. And that's sitting right there for you. You're not in and out.

• 51:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  I was on Alex, I had one too many drinks on the plane home. You know, it was one of those flights that started in the afternoon, but ended late in the evening.

• 51:24David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  And you're just like, I'm just gonna ride this way.

• 51:26Alex Cranz?

  Just go.

• 51:27Nilay Patel?

  You, you have to have both. I think Lena Con should get involved. You have to have both.

• 51:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  That is consumer protection right there.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  Even though I've seen both of these movies.

• 51:36Alex Cranz?

  I was like, do you know what happens?

• 51:39Nilay Patel?

  I, I believe, uh, you know, the Avengers do a good job.

• 51:45David Pierce?

  Eli recaps movies.

• 51:48Alex Cranz?

  New segment.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  The first one, they don't do a good job. And in the second one, they do a good job.

• 51:58Alex Cranz?

  That that was a really good spoiler free.

• 52:02Alex Cranz?

  Recap, I appreciate.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, I did spoil the first one, but if you haven't seen the first one, here's what you do. You get on Delta because that's all they got.

• 52:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I'm actually, I was talking to Chris Welch about this story yesterday and Liz Lepato was there. And she was like, I believe that taking the headphone jack away from phones led to the proliferation of people just listening to stuff out loud on their phones.

• 52:25Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 52:25David Pierce?

  Liz Lepato take.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it is.

• 52:27Alex Cranz?

  No, but she's, she's correct because the path train, people are like, no.

• 52:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, she's like, whatever. My headphones are dead. I don't want to dink around with these. I'm just listening.

• 52:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you're, you're going to enjoy whatever I'm enjoying and suck it if you don't.

• 52:39Nilay Patel?

  All right. New idea for a phone. No speakers, just headphone jacks.

• 52:43Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 52:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's your courage, Apple. Don't get rid of the headphone jack. Get rid of the speakers.

• 52:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:50David Pierce?

  Give me a power button and no speakers on my phone. Done. Let's do this. I'm ready.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  It's the opposite. It's like the Schiller nightmare. He's like wakes up in a cold sweat. He's like, what's happening? Speaking of weird phones, the, the light phone, people love talking about this phone. They do not love buying it. From what I understand, they love looking at it and talking about it. David, you saw it, the light phone three.

• 53:15David Pierce?

  I haven't seen it. I've seen it over Zoom, uh, but I, I talked to Kai Tang, the co-founder of the company. And I've talked to him a bunch over the years. Um, the weird thing about the light phone two was that it was never a huge hit, but also according to him, it has sold more units every year it has been around. This thing is five years old and it's sold more this past year than it did in its first year, which I think is fascinating and is not something you normally see from a phone. And they're in this position now of the, the sort of intellectual idea that I would like to change my relationship with my smartphone, I think is bigger than ever. We are also more invested in our smartphones than ever.

• 53:58David Pierce?

  And so what they tried to do was basically figure out, okay, how do we get away from the idea that like, what you need is a phone that doesn't do anything at all? And give you a phone that just does the right things and not the wrong things? And actually, that is like the dream of the sort of minimalist smartphone and has been forever. And there are a lot of people who say, oh, why do you need any of this stuff? Just like have more discipline and be more responsible on your phone. To which I say, that's a stupid argument.

• 54:27David Pierce?

  It's true, but it's also like if, if, if just discipline was the answer to all of our problems, like the world would be a really different place. And what it actually is, is like, the one good thing about The Social Dilemma, which is an otherwise, I think, disaster of a documentary, was that it framed the ideas like you against thousands of engineers trying to destroy you. And I think that is like a pretty correct way to think about your smartphone. And so Light Phone's idea is like, how do we just reset that balance, right? So they've, they added a camera, but gave that camera much less to do. They added NFC, but they're only going to do payments with it. They have a better screen, but it's because apparently people were having trouble with e-ink.

• 55:08David Pierce?

  Like, one of the things Kai said to me was that the single biggest issue people had with the phone, that like 50% of the reason people returned it or stopped using it was because of the refresh rate of e-ink, which I thought was really interesting. There's just something about it that just didn't work for people. So instead, they switched to a matte OLED, which should refresh much faster, should be much easier to type on, should look a lot better, but should have some of those same kind of monochrome, not-quite-so-blaring properties.

• 55:36Alex Cranz?

  And battery, like, support, right?

• 55:39David Pierce?

  We'll see about battery. The Light Phone 2 lasted forever. This thing is, it's substantially bigger, so it definitely has more battery. But it does run that screen, but it's not doing all that much with it most of the time. And since it's OLED, it should only have to power some of the pixels and not the others. So I have reasonably high hopes for this thing. But at least according to the traffic to our website, people are very interested in this thing.

• 56:03Alex Cranz?

  It looks like I don't need it and I want it. I will never use it. I know that, but I'm still like, oh.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  So I would love to get to a place where I could just take a phone out of the house, depending on my mood. Like sunglasses?

• 56:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Nilay Patel?

  And it would just like have my phone number and take my messages and like, I don't think any of the carriers or smartphone operating system vendors or smartphone makers want that to happen. And it's funny because if it did happen, I would buy like six phones.

• 56:34David Pierce?

  So the, the reason it's, it's the carriers. I, I have been like meaning to write a piece and I need to just sit down and write it. That the reason dumb phones won't work is because Verizon won't let them. I've had this moment recently, actually, where I, I got the new iPad Pro and just turned it on, logged into my iCloud account, and all of a sudden I had LTE on it. And it was like the most magical experience and it was, it was my data. It's connected to my account that it was just like, it was like, oh, because all this eSIM stuff works, I just have all of my stuff on this new device and it is connected through my account. And it's like, oh, that's how all of this should work. And it just super doesn't. And even you go to places like Europe where like physical SIM cards are much more important

• 57:18David Pierce?

  and you can just pop your SIM out and pop it into another thing and that kind of works. It's just not how it works in the U.S. and it sucks. And, and so as a result, I think what Light is trying to do is buy a phone that actually becomes your primary device. Like I think the Light Phone Plus Laptop or Light Phone Plus iPad is very much the thing that they're going for. They want you to have this sort of simple, minimal thing that goes in your pocket that has like music and podcasts and directions and that's about it. And then if you want to do more stuff, you sit down at something else. And I think in a certain way, that's actually like a much healthier way to use technology and to think about all of that. But it's probably, I mean, it's not probably, it is definitely still not realistic for most people.

• 58:01Alex Cranz?

  Did they show you, uh, like the photo app? That's, I, I just want to know, is it showing photos in color or monochrome?

• 58:08David Pierce?

  I don't know. That's a really good question. I would assume it's showing them in monochrome. Because what, and he said this very pointedly, that they don't want you spending a lot of time on your device, looking at your photos. Apparently, the thing that they heard, one of the biggest reasons they put the camera on was to have a QR code scanner and because people like to take pictures of receipts. And it's just like the little sort of toolsy things you need to do with a camera, rather than, I want a thing to take lots of beautiful photos. They're like, their ideas, again, like, you should not be looking at your screen very often. And even when you're looking at something through it, you're still looking at it, right? And so, yeah, the way he described it is like, it's about documenting, not about, like, fiddling. And so, my, again,

• 58:51David Pierce?

  I haven't seen it. This thing's not shipping till next year, which is a real bummer. But, yeah, exactly. But I think the, the idea definitely seems to be like, get in and get out as quickly as possible.

• 59:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm utterly fascinated by this, but I just am laughing at the idea that a good computing outcome is you have a pretty useless phone and then an iPad. And at some point, you're just like, none of this shit can do anything.

• 59:18David Pierce?

  I mean, iPad is probably the wrong idea.

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  I gotta sit down with this iPad and not do a whole lot.

• 59:26Alex Cranz?

  Not looking at Instagram on that.

• 59:29Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. But the idea that you like, pick up a phone, be like, push a button, it's like, this is my phone right now. Take my calls, send my messages.

• 59:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  You should be able to get there.

• 59:39Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  But you, you can switch between laptops more easily than you can switch between phones. And some of its carriers, because of phone numbers and where you're going to route calls, and some of it is RCS and iMessages and all that sort of thing.

• 59:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, even switching WhatsApp devices is a pan. It's gotten better, but it's still tough.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But that is like, ultimately, the dream. And I don't know, maybe Apple needs to make the cut down phone or just make it easier to put an iPhone into a mode like this.

• 1:00:07Alex Cranz?

  Apple will never do that unless they can figure out the apps.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  Thirty percent.

• 1:00:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Nilay Patel?

  Just thirty percent, just like Tim.

• 1:00:12David Pierce?

  For twenty dollars a month, we'll give you a chill phone inside of your phone.

• 1:00:17Nilay Patel?

  You know, given the interest in the light phone.

• 1:00:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's real.

• 1:00:21Nilay Patel?

  It might work.

• 1:00:22David Pierce?

  It's worth a shot. So, all right, yeah, we should keep going. Alex, the next thing on my list is literally, I should have just put these two links as just Ask Krantz, is any of this anything? Two different chip stories. One is basically MediaTek, our, the flower of the verge, our favorite chip company,

• 1:00:44David Pierce?

  is claiming it's out here doing Qualcomm level things and everybody is out here basically being like, we now have fast chips too. And then there was this company, Flow Computing, that just published a white paper being like, we haven't made any of these chips, but we know how to make chips that are a hundred times faster.

• 1:01:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the flow thing is interesting in that they're basically saying, we want to compete with ARM and you, you buy our engineering that we have never actually proven. And then you go and you engineer and do cool stuff.

• 1:01:17Nilay Patel?

  That's my idea too.

• 1:01:18Alex Cranz?

  So.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  Look, if you want to make a chip that's a hundred times faster, you just come and talk to me and then you do the work.

• 1:01:25Alex Cranz?

  Yep. But, but, but Neela is going to be like, yeah, that looks good.

• 1:01:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Alex Cranz?

  Good job.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  I have an idea for a building. If you bring your architect to me, I will describe that building to them in extraordinary

• 1:01:37Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's kind of like they are the architects and now they're looking for someone to go build the building.

• 1:01:42Nilay Patel?

  No, that's, that's normal. That's much more normal than I think what this is.

• 1:01:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, I guess it is in a weird spot, huh? I don't know what the comparison is.

• 1:01:50Nilay Patel?

  It's one level away from like, we've done it.

• 1:01:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  And more like, we have an idea.

• 1:01:54Alex Cranz?

  We, we.

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  For how to do it.

• 1:01:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. We know the architect firm we want to hire.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  And it's you.

• 1:02:01Alex Cranz?

  And it's you. And then also, can you find someone to build this? So, yeah, that one is very interesting. Their, their claims are really, really big. I know a lot of people are talking about it right now and trying to figure out if it is anything and I think it's a little bit of the verdict is still out there.

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  But the idea here is that they have a new thing.

• 1:02:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  Parallel processing unit.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  That it can be inside or outside the chip. And you can run parallel workloads through that much faster.

• 1:02:29Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:02:30Nilay Patel?

  Than any other chip that exists today.

• 1:02:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:02:32Nilay Patel?

  This is the core of the claim.

• 1:02:34Alex Cranz?

  Yes, but it's also weird because parallel processing is having kind of a moment right now. Or like people are rethinking it. So there's just, I want to say verdict is still a little out on this.

• 1:02:49Alex Cranz?

  Just because most of like, I know enough to be like, hmm.

• 1:02:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm going to stay in that headspace until proven otherwise.

• 1:02:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57David Pierce?

  But I think the, the media tech thing potentially exciting. Like, there's no reason everyone couldn't start making good ARM chips. Like, if this is the thing that's out there, more power to them.

• 1:03:09Alex Cranz?

  Anytime somebody is saying, hey, let's compete, that's always good, right? Even though it's media tech and they are not known for their super powerful processors. This is, it's going to be kind of cool because they're saying that they'll be as fast, they'll be capable of doing copilot PCs. And that means that they have to do, their NPU has to do at least 40 TOPS. And while we still don't fully understand what TOPS means in this context. That is still like, 40 is the number Microsoft gave everybody. And so if, if media tech can get there, like even Apple, the M4, they were claiming 38. So if media tech can do that, cool, great. Will companies put this in? We'll see.

• 1:03:53David Pierce?

  What are your thoughts on TOPS in this context, Neelai?

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  Wow, you guys.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  I know what you can do with 13 TOPS. I've been given an answer.

• 1:04:05Alex Cranz?

  You go to Fire Island.

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's the title of the episode today. No, no, I do. I actually have a real non-

• 1:04:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. What is-

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  Family friendly answer.

• 1:04:26Alex Cranz?

  What is 13 trillions operations per second?

• 1:04:29Nilay Patel?

  So, we had, we had, someone wrote to us, not about the other interpretation of what you can do with an incremental- Well, we should say lots of people wrote to us about the other interpretation.

• 1:04:39Alex Cranz?

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  Lots of people made jokes about one thing. Although I will say that regardless of context, no one has said what you can do going from 35 to 38. Just saying- That's fair. Hasn't been proven out yet. But, hey, the Raspberry Pi has 13 trillion operations per se- We're like, why? And so, we got an email from Scott.

• 1:05:01Nilay Patel?

  And he's like, "Look, there are lots of IoT applications where you have a sensor and then you have like some kind of a camera, and you want to know what happened. So, the sensor detects motion in a parking lot and you're like, is that the right car? And you can take a picture of the camera. So, the sensor fires the camera, and then you got to send a bunch of data somewhere to do image recognition. And if you can bring it down to the edge, you're only sending bytes of data instead of megabytes of data."

• 1:05:25Alex Cranz?

  Okay. That's cool.

• 1:05:26Nilay Patel?

  That's a good one. That's a good one.

• 1:05:28Alex Cranz?

  That's extremely good. Yeah.

• 1:05:30Nilay Patel?

  Good. I'll take it. There we go.

• 1:05:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Nilay Patel?

  I think the idea that there is some sort of like race to put all of, like, that's great. That's a great workload. I like, I like it.

• 1:05:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Nilay Patel?

  You can see how people can do all this stuff in all kinds of places.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  But Microsoft is like, "This is how many you need."

• 1:05:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Nilay Patel?

  And they haven't, they have not done, even that example, we can detect a car. Like, that's the, that's fundamentally the example. We, this computer can now recognize a car in a parking lot. Microsoft has not come up with one of those things on a Windows PC for consumers that matters yet.

• 1:06:07Alex Cranz?

  I can recognize a car in a parking lot, too.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  So many people can recognize a car in a parking lot.

• 1:06:12Alex Cranz?

  Yep, a lot of them. It's true.

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but Microsoft is just out there being like, "You need this many because it's going to unlock what exactly?"

• 1:06:21Alex Cranz?

  The future. Down the line. Don't, not right now. Just the future.

• 1:06:28David Pierce?

  Last thing we should talk about before we take a break is this bit of Google news that is either a small piece of news that ultimately doesn't matter that much, or the like little tiny butterfly flap of something sort of enormous. And basically, the news is Google announced that it's going to be putting a lot more of the underlying Android stack inside of Chrome OS. So essentially, slowly but surely, they're going to build Chrome OS to resemble Android in such a way that they can build stuff faster that will work on both platforms. I find this fascinating because there are lots of rumors that say essentially,

• 1:07:10David Pierce?

  well, I mean, there have been rumors for, Jesus, like a decade, saying that Google is going to merge Chrome OS and Android. Was that Fuchsia? I can't remember all the codenames. Okay, so there's Fuchsia, which was, I think even showed up on like a random Nest device or something, and then that got killed. But these things have been separate projects that should never have been separate projects. And then there have been rumors that there's going to be some combination of them that gives you like a desktop mode on your Android phone that essentially looks like Chrome OS. And it's just all these little pieces are coming together that is like, maybe we're actually going to get this cross-device, single-thing combination that we should have had a really long time ago.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  Boy, do I disagree with you.

• 1:07:50David Pierce?

  Really? Tell me.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51David Pierce?

  Fight!

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, it also comes down to like, how complicated you want a Chromebook to be in the end. Right? So like, an Android phone is a lot, right? It has like a full app model, it has a bunch of capabilities. It is just a, it has interface metaphors, galore. Right? It's more of a computer, actually, than a Chromebook, which initially was Linux running Chrome. And the whole model was like, all you need is a browser. Then I think they realized, and I think that's great. I think for a lot of people, that is actually what you need. But then you gotta add things like windowing and background apps and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you end up being like, ah shit, we made a computer.

• 1:08:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, now this thing is just Windows with the app model instead of Win32 is Chrome. And then you're like, ah, but we have this other thing, we should let it run Android apps. Oh, we need to put Google Now in here because that's what we decided to announce. Like, whatever. And you just like end up junking up Chrome OS. And so then you come to this like final place where like it's just an Android laptop.

• 1:08:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay, like, fine, but you're just, I think you're just so far afield of the initial vision for that product.

• 1:09:03Alex Cranz?

  But the initial vision for that product was kind of bad in that, not like the, just this is a browser, go forth. I think that was a great vision. Execution was bad because it was always like, oh, the idea was that it's only the browser, therefore it's super cheap. But that cheapness also meant your monitor was garbage, your keyboard was garbage, everything was garbage. And so people kept saying, well, I want a more power, like, I don't want it to be garbage. I would like a pretty display. And they're like, okay, well, that's going to cost you more money. And so it just kind of creeped up.

• 1:09:37Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then you go, oh, what, but it's only a browser. Why would I pay all that money? And then back.

• 1:09:41Alex Cranz?

  It was, it was always this, this fight back and forth. And so it was, I think for a long time, it's been like, well, just, just make it Android, guys, come on, like, stop, stop messing around. You're, you're not doing this other thing. That was a really cool idea that doesn't actually exist in a world where you have different partners who want money for the things they provide you to put into that computer.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I was one of the few people in the world who's ever run a $1,000 Chromebook Pixel. It worked really well when you threw Windows, like, high-end Windows horsepower at it.

• 1:10:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Nilay Patel?

  Like that Chromebook Pixel, I believe in I5.

• 1:10:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Nilay Patel?

  Like 16 gigs of.

• 1:10:19Alex Cranz?

  That thing was so.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  It was beast. It was, it was great for its time. It's still going. My mom still uses it, but no one's going to spend that much money because then you think you need a whole computer. But I would challenge you, I'm looking at my Mac right now. It's running Chrome and then like mostly electrodes.

• 1:10:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  You gotta.

• 1:10:35Alex Cranz?

  Your test.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  That's just screenshots. You can make them go away.

• 1:10:39Alex Cranz?

  That was, it's really upsetting. Oh, that's be, okay.

• 1:10:41Nilay Patel?

  It was just, it was just an open stack of screenshots.

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  But like the only native app really in my dock is Lightroom. And like, most people are not running Lightroom.

• 1:10:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  And you just look at that, you're like, oh, this is just a bunch of Electron apps. Fine, but I don't think Google, I mean, Google. Like, what else do I have to say? Like, they never ran the idea to completion and used the ecosystem. So now they're shuffling up all those teams, right? Dave Burke, who ran Android for a long time, is gone. Um, that's today, that news broke today. Hiroshi, who was in charge of the whole thing, left. Right? He's, he's off finding himself on some other projects at Google.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  And like, they're, they're just shuffling up those teams, and it seems like a natural outcome of that.

• 1:11:24Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  You recall, like, they, a year ago, or two years ago, they're like, Android tablets are gonna make a comeback because of folding devices.

• 1:11:32Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:11:33David Pierce?

  Hey, the Pixel tablet is cooler than people think. That's, that's my hot take for the day. But I will say, I mean, on this one, I think the Google sort of stated reason for doing this is it lets them roll out AI stuff across these two platforms faster. And I think that's fair, right? Like, you, you look at some of the stuff Google's already doing with Chromebook Plus devices, like the, it has the generative AI wallpaper and the Magic Editor in Google Photos. Like, that's stuff you wanna do on device as much as you can. And so, building that into the stack for both of those platforms makes a lot of sense. Neil, to your point, I'm, I'm very bullish about this combination for Android phones, and I'm very skeptical about it for Chromebooks. So I'm, I'm kinda with you in that, like, the idea of being able to

• 1:12:18David Pierce?

  blow up my Android phone, whether it's for Android tablets, or foldable devices, or whatever, like, a thing that gets more Chrome OS-y the bigger it gets, I find very compelling. But a Chromebook that looks more like Android is an experiment that Google has tried many times, and it has typically gone very badly.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  Right, because Android developers do not wanna put their apps on a laptop in that way.

• 1:12:38David Pierce?

  Right, and, and it's, and it requires a huge amount of work to do it well, and when you don't do it well, it kind of sucks, and it mostly doesn't get done well, and I, I, yeah, so I agree, I think this is a thing that for Chromebooks is gonna be. Complicated. If we are in fact getting the sort of big combined user interface thing that might happen here, or Google is telling the truth and this is just like the bottom of the tech stack so that they can get Gmail's Help Me Write to run 4% faster on your Chrome, which is fine.

• 1:13:10Alex Cranz?

  Love the idea that they're gonna put like full Android on a Chromebook and then just completely dumb it down. Just like, no, you only open the Chrome app. That would be hysterical.

• 1:13:19Nilay Patel?

  They've been there before.

• 1:13:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21David Pierce?

  You know what's funny about that is the Chrome app for Android is so, so, so much worse than Chrome on Chromebooks that like, what an unbelievable Chromebook downgrade that would be if they did that.

• 1:13:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they had to make Chrome on Chromebook a real browser.

• 1:13:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:13:37Nilay Patel?

  Because that is the application model.

• 1:13:39David Pierce?

  It is the best version of Chrome that exists in the world.

• 1:13:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know a lot of designers who run Figma and expensive Chromebooks.

• 1:13:45David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  And expensive is like, but they, but they just like, don't have MacBooks anymore. They're just like, we just run, we live in Figma, we might as well have a Chromebook or some of them have Chrome boxes that Chrome desktop and fancy monitors and that's just the end of that. And it's like, that's the application model. And if you bring a browser of that capability to a phone or a tablet, you can't take your 30% anymore in that. And that's why the iPad browser sucks, everybody.

• 1:14:12David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  All the way around. And that's also why Android tablets have the not great version of Chrome instead of the Chromebook version of Chrome. There's no reason a powerful Samsung tablet shouldn't run full on Chrome. Same business pressure exists. Anyway, that's totally separate.

• 1:14:28Alex Cranz?

  It's fine.

• 1:14:30Nilay Patel?

  30%. Bring me a suitcase.

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  Actually, Apple and Google, I would pay a subscription fee for a full desktop class browser on my mobile devices. That'd be one thing. You want to get me to pay a subscription fee for Apple One or Google One?

• 1:14:46Alex Cranz?

  But what if it's the same garbage?

• 1:14:48Nilay Patel?

  No, it has to be the good, it has to be the good browser.

• 1:14:51Alex Cranz?

  Alright. Arc.

• 1:14:53David Pierce?

  What if instead of a browser, it's just a chatbot that lies to you? Can I interest you in that instead?

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  Is it sexy?

• 1:15:02Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we gotta take a break, everybody. We'll be right back with Lightning Round.

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• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I will say that there was not as much hoardiness in the history of The Vergecast until AI hit the scene.

• 1:16:49Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  We've done the show for 13 years. You know, a wide variety of people. David has come and gone from the show.

• 1:16:58Alex Cranz?

  Hi, David.

• 1:16:58Nilay Patel?

  And returned. It's only until AI hit, and honestly, Cranz, that we're just like, butts.

• 1:17:07Alex Cranz?

  They're inherently funny, man. They're just, they're, people are giving me like beautiful horses.

• 1:17:12Nilay Patel?

  I saw that horse is not beautiful. There's also a shocking increase in the amount of horse talk since Alex showed up.

• 1:17:19Alex Cranz?

  It's the friend, the mayor's and the mayor's.

• 1:17:23Nilay Patel?

  It's time for the lightning round is always unsponsored. This is your shot, right? I look, I'll sell out. You just tell me what to say. You show up. No one's fired the gun. It's a problem. All right, David, what's your lightning round item?

• 1:17:37David Pierce?

  Uh, I think I want to talk about this survey that Pew did about how people get news on social media platforms. We've talked obviously a lot about this. This is like the only thing anyone on threads ever talks about is news on threads because Adam Masary like keeps saying how much he hates news, but loves news, but hates it, but doesn't want it, but loves it. And so Pew did a study basically looking at four platforms. So it was X, Tik Tok, Facebook and Instagram. And essentially asked people, do you get news on this platform? And is it like a primary reason you come here? And the numbers are sort of fascinating, like in almost every case, like I'm looking at this now.

• 1:18:19David Pierce?

  Over 80% of people on all platforms see news content on all four of those platforms. So like on, on X, uh, they call it news related content. And it's, it's sort of like news and news adjacent things. And 92% of people on X reported seeing it. It was 90 and 91 for Tik Tok and Facebook, Instagram, the lowest at 82%. All huge numbers. But in almost every case, most people said it's not the primary reason they go to the platform. X was the exception. Two thirds of people said it was either a, I think it was a major or minor reason to go. But Tik Tok, Facebook and Instagram, all somewhere between like 30 and 40% of people said that's even a reason they think about going to those platforms.

• 1:19:02Nilay Patel?

  Which I just think is very telling, right? We talk a lot about news and these companies keep telling us news is a tiny percentage of what people do and people don't actually care and they're not here for news. And the only people who care about news are the people who report on the news and everybody should just shut up about the news for once. And this was, I just thought this was a really interesting way of looking at that. And Pew has also come out and said over and over and over again, that for young people in particular, TikTok is where they're seeing a lot of their news, even if they're not seeking it out. That's how news finds them. So there's like, there's just the amount of like accidental news consumption that is happening on social media right now, just fascinates me, especially in an election year. All of this is going to get very weird. I just thought it was really interesting.

• 1:19:43Alex Cranz?

  Well, particularly because the news isn't always packaged well.

• 1:19:50Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:19:51Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like, like it's always, it's frequently packaged in to get you as upset as possible.

• 1:19:56Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I just like roll this into my lightning round item?

• 1:19:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:20:01Nilay Patel?

  So mine is a bunch of Elon stuff. So one is just a victory lap for me. Elon dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI.

• 1:20:07Alex Cranz?

  Shocking.

• 1:20:08Nilay Patel?

  Cause he didn't have a contract and I super told you so. You can't fetch a contract you don't have? Would you say that's a fair legal reason? Literally, I went back and looked at that post, hundreds of comments being like, you're gonna assemble a contract on it. And it's like, no, you can't. You just can't, you have, and if you could, you would.

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  If he wanted to, he would. Yeah.

• 1:20:29Nilay Patel?

  He didn't. So whatever. If you want to sue someone, come up with a good idea. One. But two, bunch of stuff about SpaceX this week. The culture at SpaceX, the actions towards women at SpaceX, the sexist culture at SpaceX. In two stories, one, the Wall Street Journal, big expose, talked to a number of people. And then the second one, a lawsuit from a former SpaceX employee saying it's a culture of harassment. We wrote them both up, right? What can you do? And the headline we wrote on the Wall Street Journal one was not as just aggressive as people wanted. And I got tweets about it. And it was like,

• 1:21:12Nilay Patel?

  we have to be really careful when we write these headlines, especially when it's not our reporting. Right? We're talking about a Wall Street Journal story. And if you look at the Wall Street Journal story, the journal story is very carefully reported. And it's mostly about one woman, an intern.

• 1:21:30Nilay Patel?

  Who lawyered up with the same lawyer as Elon and SpaceX to refute the story. And she sent a bunch of affidavits in, which confirmed some of the reporting of the story. But she's like, none of this is true, which is weird. Like the construction of that story is weird. And the thing you're saying, David, is like, people encounter their news. And then the thing Alex is saying is that news is not, that news is not packaged well. Right. What everyone wanted us to say was like, look at, look at how bad this is. And indeed, there's a lot of bad stuff in there. If you're rolling around your own company being like, will you have my babies? Don't do that. Retaliate against the women who say no. It's like, that is very bad.

• 1:22:11Nilay Patel?

  When the president of your company, who's a woman retaliates against a woman who was helping to plan your birthday party, because she suspected that the phone call from the husband to the woman was evidence of an affair, as opposed to the planning of a birthday party? That's bananas. Yeah. Maybe that should have been our headline. Birthday party affair situation at SpaceX, bananas. But this tendency to over read the news for maximum emotional value, or to assign some emotional value to something, even if that's not what the evidence in the news is. Like, that is the thing social media does. It is in particular, the thing that threads does, because that is how you get engagement in that algorithm. So there's no news there.

• 1:22:55Nilay Patel?

  Adam Mosseri is like, We refuse. He's like, we just want, you know, people to talk about, uh, politics. Or he's like, we don't want people to talk about politics. We just want them to talk about, you know, things that are not politics, like sports and fashion. And it's like, hmm, hmm, I don't, okay.

• 1:23:10David Pierce?

  There's no politics in sports, famously.

• 1:23:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12David Pierce?

  No politics there.

• 1:23:13Nilay Patel?

  In either of those. Nothing about the fashion industry has anything to do with the way the world works. No. Anyhow, all I'm saying is that then you look at the threads algorithm and it's like, just rage bait. Like, that is algorithmically what it will show you.

• 1:23:25David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:23:26Nilay Patel?

  It's like old rage bait lately. Yeah. And I just like that little bit where it's like, are the people that are being serviced here being careful? And maybe we're too careful and we'll accept that criticism when it's all I don't think you can that our story is written by Liz, by the way, like The Virgin Liz Lapato are too easy on Elon Musk is a very hard case to make. Based on our work, we are careful because we want our shots to land. And we're especially careful when it's other people's reporting, right? That's just the way it goes. But I would just say like what social media has done is allowed a lot of people who don't have to practice that care to participate in the media ecosystem, which is great.

• 1:24:08Nilay Patel?

  But it is also like

• 1:24:11Nilay Patel?

  weird. I think people are confused. So you accidentally encounter a lot of news. But you, you, there's not the part of the other end where it's like, I know how this was made. Or I am being careful. It's like, if you optimize for engagement, you will get engagement.

• 1:24:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And oftentimes that engagement is done to like it. It's just really explosive, right? Like it is, it's just, I see it on Tik Tok a lot because I went through and was like we see, we were hearing a bunch of different news was popping up on Tik Tok. So I went and like searched that news. So now my feed is just all of that news and the stuff, the rhetoric is really heated. The rhetoric is very different than how you would normally report on a story. Where you would be really cautious and careful without every single part of it. Instead, it's just like, yeah, these people suck. This is evidence. Let's just get into it. And I'm like, well, no, you can't. That's not how you cover this stuff. And there's a lot of reasons we cover it that way, both because we want to be accurate and honest and because we want to like, yeah, there's just a bunch of reasons to do it. And, and these people don't seem to have the same concerns.

• 1:25:10David Pierce?

  Well, and there's also, I think one of the things that really jumped out to me in this Pew study was that I think across platforms, somewhere between like half and three quarters of people said they pretty frequently see inaccurate news on those platforms. And at some point, the only response to that is just total nihilism, right? Like you just assume nothing is real. Everything is chaos. You can't trust anything. You can't believe anything. This all came to you by accident, right? Like it's, it's killing the idea of like sitting down and reading the news like that as a behavior that people do on purpose. Is dying because this stuff is just bombarding at you all the time. And so like, it's hard to be a news consumer now.

• 1:25:53David Pierce?

  And so I think all these people, especially when these things are coming up, they're used to that inflamed rhetoric, they're used to have this stuff being wrong anyway. And so you don't know the provenance, you don't know how this stuff works, you don't know the story, it's just all sort of happening around you. And it's like, how on earth are you supposed to make heads or tails of anything in that ecosystem?

• 1:26:08Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what is the, what is the source of truth, right? Like, all these platforms want to say they don't want to be arbiters of truth. Mark Zuckerberg famously, I don't want to be the arbiter of the truth. But then you need a place to go, right? And that's what media institutions are supposed to be. I'm not saying any of us do a good job of this, like, that is the thing that we have allowed to wither away in the platform era. But it's stories like this, like, if you go look at the comments of the Wall Street Journal article, the comments are full of people being like, this is just a hit piece. Right? Like, their own comment section is a disaster of people being like, I don't even, I didn't even read this, I think it's bullshit. Because we have now conditioned a bunch of people because of social media to believe that everything is overdone, or sensationalized, or just done for outrage, or just done for clicks.

• 1:26:51Nilay Patel?

  And in this case, what you're looking at is, boy, the culture at SpaceX appears to be a disaster. Like, from top to bottom, there are a whole bunch of very unhappy women, there are women who have been retaliated against by the most senior woman at the company.

• 1:27:07Alex Cranz?

  None of this is like, when I first saw this story, I was like, oh, didn't we cover this already?

• 1:27:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Alex Cranz?

  Because we've seen this story from SpaceX before. Lauren Grush used to cover it a lot for us. And, and to just see it crop up again is like, oh.

• 1:27:22Nilay Patel?

  And now there's all this additional reporting in the journal where it's like, I just like, again, if you're listening to this and you're thinking about starting a company, one thing you should not do is walk around your company asking employees if they will have your children.

• 1:27:35Alex Cranz?

  Just don't do it.

• 1:27:36Nilay Patel?

  It feels like a very basic rule that we have to lay out at this time.

• 1:27:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Nilay Patel?

  It's not a rule that appears to apply to Elon, against whom there are credible allegations, that a woman who accused him of sexual harassment, he responded to by offering her a horse. It does come back to horses a lot.

• 1:27:54Alex Cranz?

  It always does.

• 1:27:56David Pierce?

  Oh, on that note, Alex, I actually have a question for you. What's your lightning round thing?

• 1:28:01Alex Cranz?

  My lightning round thing is also related to horses. Yeah, cuz did you guys ever, did you guys go to Alamo Drafthouse, either one of you?

• 1:28:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, all the time. They just opened one like a mile from me, maybe a year ago, and it's now my go to movie theater.

• 1:28:17Alex Cranz?

  So I'm gonna be real old right now. In my twenties, I spent a lot of time in Austin, Texas, which is where Alamo Drafthouse started. I went to a lot of screenings, went to a lot of parties, went to a lot of things, sort of new Tim League.

• 1:28:31David Pierce?

  Is that the one that's also like a movie museum and they have like the most incredible collection of old stuff from movies?

• 1:28:37Alex Cranz?

  The Alamo Drafthouse there?

• 1:28:38David Pierce?

  I think it is. I could be wrong.

• 1:28:40Alex Cranz?

  One of them might be. There's a bunch of different ones. They, some have come, they've gone. It is great. Every time I go to Austin now, I'm like, oh, that Drafthouse is closed. And I once saw people run for their lives because they didn't want to talk to the audience because we were so mad at them about the movie. It was super cool. Poughkeepsie tapes. But, but so Alamo Drafthouse, famous, famous institution, one of like kind of the core movie theater franchises and very terminally online. It ran its own blog for years, Badass Digest. It really, it was famously huge friends with Harry Knowles, who is like the original movie blogger.

• 1:29:19Alex Cranz?

  We don't talk about him anymore. You can go Wikipedia Y. And, and they have been in a lot of trouble the last few years. There was allegations of labor issues there and sexual harassment and, and lots of sorts of things. And then COVID hit and they like every movie theater company got bodied really, really badly. They filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Whole new like reorg happened, got in a bunch of investors. Tim League was still in charge. Then last week, I believe, they suddenly closed a whole bunch of their theaters in Dallas. And that was a real bummer because I was planning to go to them. And it was, it's fine. I'm through it.

• 1:30:02Alex Cranz?

  And then this week they announced that Sony has purchased them. So, so yeah, Alamo is now going to be completely owned by Sony. I assume you're going to see some Sony movies there, but you should probably still see all the other ones. Cause like Disney still has the biggest market share of, of films. And I don't think Disney, like, excuse me, I don't think Alamo is going to be like, no, we're not going to screen a Star War.

• 1:30:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think the, you know, Netflix owns a bunch of theaters and they do limited theatrical runs because they got to keep the stars happy and get them some awards.

• 1:30:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's it's all for awards.

• 1:30:35Nilay Patel?

  I think Sony actually wants to like have a chain of movie theaters. I think it's very different.

• 1:30:39Alex Cranz?

  It is very different. Like Sony is just like, no, we want this to be a business again. And there was a reason it wasn't allowed to be a business and and the ramifications of the paramount decree were huge, right? Like, we got independent film, we got, we got more queer film, we got more women in films, more people of color in films. There was just like misogyny was illegal to show on film. And then the paramount decree came out and they started to soften those rules a little. It took a long time. But there's just the paramount decree was very, very important for competition in the filmmaking industry. And the fact that it is gone now has always been kind of a bummer, even though streaming has really taken a lot of that audience. And Sony's like, okay, we're just going to follow back. And it's 1938.

• 1:31:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, but just to make the argument, times have radically changed.

• 1:31:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Nilay Patel?

  There is not a booming theatrical business anymore. It seems to be declining.

• 1:31:33Nilay Patel?

  Does Alamo Drafthouse even exist unless a studio like Sony shows up? Like Sony doesn't have a streamer.

• 1:31:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Nilay Patel?

  They have Crunchyroll. They got Sony Picture Corps.

• 1:31:41Alex Cranz?

  I was like.

• 1:31:41Nilay Patel?

  Bravia Corps.

• 1:31:43Alex Cranz?

  Wow, just like

• 1:31:44Nilay Patel?

  Rise up.

• 1:31:44Alex Cranz?

  Just really hurting yourself there. But.

• 1:31:48Nilay Patel?

  They were like, do you want to watch Madame Web at 80 megabits per second? And I said, no, sir.

• 1:31:52David Pierce?

  The only way to do that is going to be at an Alamo Drafthouse.

• 1:31:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:55Alex Cranz?

  Like at 2am, a little drunk.

• 1:31:58David Pierce?

  No, I think the answer to your question, Eli, is no, it doesn't. And and I think the like, the idea that we have to, you know, protect the movie industry from the big bad studios and theaters is like such a long gone phenomenon at this point.

• 1:32:12Alex Cranz?

  No, I disagree.

• 1:32:13David Pierce?

  What we desperately need is someone with real money trying to get everyone back into movie theaters.

• 1:32:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I don't think it should be the movie theater. I don't think it should be the people making the movies.

• 1:32:24David Pierce?

  But no one else is incentivized to do it.

• 1:32:26Alex Cranz?

  Like Alamo's issues were.

• 1:32:30Alex Cranz?

  Not necessar- like, some of Alamo's issues were declining viewership. That's totally true. A lot of Alamo's issues were overextending themselves. They've got a theater in Fidai, and I can always get a ticket to see a movie there, because no one goes to see the movies in Fidai.

• 1:32:43David Pierce?

  That's all movie theaters now. That's everywhere.

• 1:32:47Alex Cranz?

  That's not true.

• 1:32:48Nilay Patel?

  It's like a handful of blockbusters that get sold out, and then no other movies.

• 1:32:52Alex Cranz?

  Like, Alamo has famously been very good at programming big events around their other movies, and, and they were really, really good at it, but they've overextended themselves. They never recover from 2021, and I don't think it necessarily needed to be Sony that went and did this, right? I don't think it should be these movie theaters, because they already control, they're already so vertically integrated, we shouldn't just add more on and give up. We should in fact say, hey, you shouldn't be able to own everything all the way down, because it does actually measurably make the entire industry worse and less creative.

• 1:33:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, they didn't buy AMC, they bought Alamo Drafthouse.

• 1:33:31Alex Cranz?

  I know, and I went there so much.

• 1:33:35Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, I'm with you, and I'm usually the one who's like, the most pro diversified competition on the show.

• 1:33:40Alex Cranz?

  Is this just me being super film nerd?

• 1:33:42David Pierce?

  We are diversified, though. Like, the idea that the movie theaters is this like gigantic business that we can't possibly let the studios back into is just not how it works anymore. Like, i- if anything, we should be saying Sony can't own a streaming service. Like, that's the, that's the scarier way to take too much control of the industry right now.

• 1:34:01Alex Cranz?

  Right, but that's what's already happening in the industry.

• 1:34:03David Pierce?

  Right, so be mad about that.

• 1:34:05Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I am mad about that.

• 1:34:06Nilay Patel?

  I just, again, I just want to remind everyone that the streaming companies Sony owns are Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures Corp., which I use.

• 1:34:14David Pierce?

  That is Crackle Erasure, and I will not stand for it.

• 1:34:17Nilay Patel?

  It streams at 80 megabits per second only to Sony televisions. No, it does not, sir. Crackle has long since gone 90.

• 1:34:26David Pierce?

  No, how dare you? I can still make a free account on crackle.com, sir.

• 1:34:30Nilay Patel?

  To do what?

• 1:34:31Alex Cranz?

  You can watch, there's, there's the Alfred from Batman prequel where like Alfred, I never watched it, but apparently he, he solves crimes.

• 1:34:40Nilay Patel?

  I swear to God, Crackle.

• 1:34:41David Pierce?

  No, Crackle still exists. I had, I'm literally on their website and I'm not positive it still exists, which is telling.

• 1:34:47Alex Cranz?

  Are any of those things real?

• 1:34:48David Pierce?

  But it's here. I can watch, I can watch.

• 1:34:51Alex Cranz?

  You have to name a movie that actually exists.

• 1:34:54David Pierce?

  Dominion, can I interest you in season one, episode one of Dominion Creek?

• 1:34:58Alex Cranz?

  That's not true. That's, that's AI. You have to give me something that doesn't sound like AI made it.

• 1:35:02David Pierce?

  Colon, Angelique's Isle. How about that?

• 1:35:07David Pierce?

  What about ICU, but it's spelled E Y E and it appears to have Celeste Stallone in it?

• 1:35:13Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that's a real person.

• 1:35:15David Pierce?

  All of this is fake. I don't believe this website is real.

• 1:35:19David Pierce?

  Sorry, I have to stop looking at crackle.com. This is too much. I'm enjoying this too much.

• 1:35:24Alex Cranz?

  Oh man.

• 1:35:25Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:35:26Alex Cranz?

  Everybody makes scripts on there.

• 1:35:27Nilay Patel?

  I just wanna point out, Sony exited Crackle and sold it to a company called Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment.

• 1:35:35David Pierce?

  Oh, which also owned Redbox and I think is also in the middle of going out of business.

• 1:35:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna, just gonna say, that house is going 90. All right.

• 1:35:46Nilay Patel?

  It's not, it is SEO honeypot now for self-help content. Fully gone 90. Although it's now David's preferred streaming service from what I understand.

• 1:35:57Alex Cranz?

  You watch Ghost Squad and something called Crossbow.

• 1:36:00David Pierce?

  Angelique's Isle is my favorite movie.

• 1:36:01Nilay Patel?

  When you click on the Crackle FAQ, this is a real thing that I did. I clicked on the FAQ, assuming that it would tell me who owned Crackle, but instead it showed me a list of trending support topics and one of them, number two on the list of trending support topics in the Crackle FAQ, how many visio devices can I add to my Crackle?

• 1:36:23Nilay Patel?

  This is real. I'm not, I'm not kidding at all. Well, the other one is how do I troubleshoot issues with my Xbox Series S? So I think we know a lot about this Yep. version of Crackle.

• 1:36:32Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. Crackle has gone 90. That's one thing we've learned about this. I'm with you that consolidation is bad. I just-

• 1:36:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. That's, yeah, I think, I'm mainly just bummed to see Amazon, or I'm mainly just bummed to see Alamo go this way. I spent a lot of time there in my twenties, seeing some of the worst movies. And like, two, I got to see Maroto's, Maroters, Maroters?

• 1:36:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Alex Cranz?

  Uh, Metropolis there at a 24 hour movie festival. Colorized, absolutely spectacular. But I also saw Poughkeepsie tapes. And again, we, we chased the filmmakers out of the theater.

• 1:37:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, when I was in law school, I got absolutely hammered with my friends and went and saw Broken Lizard's Club Dread that I only dropped that. You can have experiences at movie theaters.

• 1:37:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh my, it's great.

• 1:37:18Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. We gotta, we gotta reiterate this up. We're like 500 years over time. There's still so much to say about Crackle.

• 1:37:26Alex Cranz?

  I was like, that's, we're just doing a whole episode about it.

• 1:37:28Nilay Patel?

  We'll do that next week. By the way, one thing we didn't get to, that is, as we speak, the Tesla vote to give Elon his money or not, his money is still ongoing. It looks like he might win. We'll cover that on another show at another time when that is over. But now, we have to rest. We have to go and watch Crackle at 80 megabits per second. That's it. That's of our chest, rock and roll.

• 1:37:54David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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