Apple mysteries and Google trials

It's been a week! The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz rejoin the studio to process all the tech news and announcements. Apple had its annual hardware event where the iPhone 15 and new Apple Watch lineup were shown off. Later, senior tech and policy reporter Adi Robertson joins the show to walk us through the US v Google antitrust trial that kicked off earlier in the week. Further reading: iPhone 15 event: all the news on Apple's new phones Here's why Apple put a Thread radio in the iPhone 15 Pro Rumors of Lightning’s death are just slightly exaggerated The iPhone Mini is officially gone, long live the iPhone Mini USB-C Backbone One controllers will be ‘upgraded’ to work with the iPhone 15 lineup. The iPhone is getting new ringtones with iOS 17 Apple announces more iOS 17 features coming later this year: Apple Music updates How Google plans to win its antitrust trial What to expect from the Google Search antitrust trial US v. Google antitrust trial: updates Developers respond to Unity’s new pricing scheme Unity cancels town hall over reported death threats What happens when Google Search doesn't have the answers? Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over A storefront for robots The little search engine that couldn't Who killed Google Reader? 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of the Dynamic Island.

• 1:15David Pierce?

  Again.

• 1:16Nilay Patel?

  Again.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  It's really the same show as last time. We've just slightly changed it a little bit. And now everyone has to just, as a group, agree that it's important. Yeah, the island's so important.

• 1:31David Pierce?

  It has ever been.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm your friend, Neelai. I'm here. David Pierce is here.

• 1:35David Pierce?

  Hi, we're all in the studio.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  We're all together in the studio.

• 1:37David Pierce?

  And you're back. The rage that people have felt about how long you've been gone, Neelai, I cannot describe to you. I am not people, just to be clear.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  David's like, get out of here. Alex Franz is here.

• 1:47Alex Cranz?

  I'm OK with Neelai being back.

• 1:49David Pierce?

  OK.

• 1:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:50David Pierce?

  You're sort of whatever about it.

• 1:51Alex Cranz?

  I'm happy. Yeah, it's nice. It's nice that we're all in the studio together.

• 1:54David Pierce?

  It is nice. I agree with that.

• 1:55Alex Cranz?

  We're going to talk about some phones.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Alex Cranz?

  Talk about some stuff that happened this week that aren't, isn't phones. Like, it's good times.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited about that. I can spend hours talking about my newfound ability to crimp Ethernet cables, which is what I've been doing in my new home.

• 2:09Alex Cranz?

  That's what we're pivoting to.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  I can just talk about that the whole time. The number of YouTube channels that are, like, extremely hardcore, and they make a lot of videos that get about 40,000 views that are just about Ethernet?

• 2:23Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  And it's just a business. It's just an ecosystem over there. They're not like huge views, but it's all very passionate.

• 2:32David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, they're so earnest. It's like, you're the guy who knows everything about Ethernet, and no one has ever asked you one question about it before, and now there are people who want to know. It's like the greatest thing ever.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Every now and again, you're like, oh, the Internet's good. Like, all these people exist, they've like built a little media ecosystem together, and if you happen to need to remind yourself how to crimp an Ethernet cable, they are there for you.

• 2:54Alex Cranz?

  That's why they're so good.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  I have encrypted Ethernet cables since I was like 19 years old, working in the college computer lab.

• 2:59Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, I remember how to do this now. That's what I've been doing. That's why I have been on the show. We moved house. I don't have a podcast set up in that house yet, where it's all happening, but I now have a Cat 5e line running from my office all the way to the Verizon modem.

• 3:15David Pierce?

  That's very exciting.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  And that took a long time to figure out.

• 3:18David Pierce?

  How are your 5G speeds?

• 3:22Alex Cranz?

  Are you doing surgery?

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, I've done a number of surgeries.

• 3:25David Pierce?

  Where is the banana?

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We do have a lot to talk about today that isn't just Ethernet cables. Addie Robertson's gonna join the show in a little bit, talk about the Google antitrust trial that happened this week, and it is happening for the next nine weeks. The government is suing Google for what they claim is the illegal dominance of search, and using the dominance of search to support its other businesses in ways that are illegal, paying for default placements, killing other search products left and right. We don't know what the outcome of that will be. We don't know if the government will win. They're not doing great at winning these cases, but if they do win, you could see a breakup of Google. And this is just happening very quietly in the background.

• 4:04David Pierce?

  We'll come back to this later, but it's been very strange to be here, not at the Apple event this weekend. There's this very like Cupertino-y thing that happens at the Apple event, where Apple is very good at being the only thing in the universe, and not being there, just sitting here being like, okay, new phone that's a lot like the old phone. Biggest tech trial in 25 years. And we've just, we've talked a lot about the one and not that much about the other. So I'm glad we're gonna catch up on the phone. It takes 10 weeks, which is too long. When Microsoft wanted to buy a gaming company, they did it in five days and we were all very interested and it was fine. 10 weeks is just like, can I, how, how long can we talk about search?

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  A lot of what's happened this week is Google's chief economist has been called to account for his emails from two decades ago. And it's like, all right, this is all happening. We're covering it. Addie's gonna join the show in a little bit, talk about it in detail and talk about kind of why it's so quiet. It is hard to cover this trial.

• 5:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, it is.

• 5:04Nilay Patel?

  But we'll get to that. We're also gonna get to the Unity drama, which Alex has promised to explain to me.

• 5:08Alex Cranz?

  I swear I'm gonna do it okay. It'll be fine. It's gonna be great.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  I literally was like, and I was at Apple.

• 5:15Alex Cranz?

  And this was happening during Apple.

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  During the event.

• 5:18Alex Cranz?

  Ash was like, can someone help me do math? And we were all like, no math, only iPhones.

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  So all I know about this is that there are death threats involved in the pricing structure of a game engine.

• 5:28Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  So we're gonna, we're gonna get to that.

• 5:30Alex Cranz?

  People get mad.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  Seems very important, but let's start. It is sort of the end of iPhone week. There's a lot of what you might think of as pick up news. Like we've just asked a lot of questions and we've gotten a lot of answers. But let's start with the enduring mystery of the Thread radio. David, do you know what's going on with the Thread radio?

• 5:47David Pierce?

  No. So this is sort of my favorite part of the iPhone launch because there's that like 36 hours where it's just infinite numbers and information and videos to watch and all kinds of stuff. And then everybody kind of takes a deep breath, gets on a plane and you're like, wait, what just happened?

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:07David Pierce?

  And, and you guys were talking about this on the show on Wednesday, the like enduring mystery of the Thread radio. And Gen 2 and our team did a really good job of basically running down all of the possibilities. One is that there's a sneaky smart home play that Apple is going for here where you could use your phone as a Thread border router to connect directly to all your devices. One is that even Apple isn't really sure what it's doing. One is that it got it for free with the chip that it's doing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on. I think all of those are totally plausible. We have no idea.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:37David Pierce?

  I will say the thing that has jumped out to me is I put exactly no credence behind Apple saying, well, you don't know what's like, of course, that's what Apple's gonna say. Like, Apple is going to come out a year from now and pretend that it invented Thread and have some cool feature, right? Like, that's how this works. But the other thing that I keep thinking about is like, Apple has made very clear to us over the years that it hates Bluetooth in so, so many ways.

• 6:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:59David Pierce?

  And I think it can't replace Bluetooth for things like headphones. But it can absolutely figure out how to replace Bluetooth for connecting to your other devices. And it has the ultra wideband chip, it's doing all this stuff. But if you can use Thread as just like a free way to get rid of this awful power-hungry standard that no one really likes, that makes a lot of sense to me as a thing Apple might do. There's a long road to get there. You have to put it on all the devices, you have to put it on all the phones. But like, if you were going to start somewhere, it makes sense to start with the iPhone Pro. It makes sense to sort of slowly trickle it out. And then in two years, they're gonna have a big smart home event and tell us all the cool things they've done with Thread. Like, I can see how we get from here to there.

• 7:40Alex Cranz?

  What would the cool things be? Just like turning off bulbs?

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  Yes. What are the cool things?

• 7:46Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I like to turn, like, using Thread is nice to turn off bulbs. I enjoy it as much as you can enjoy doing that, but like...

• 7:55David Pierce?

  No, the, the, the answer is, we made the smart home work. Right? Like, if I'm Apple, I'm looking at Matter, being like, well, that's a gigantic disaster. We'll figure that out eventually. Matter is the long-term answer, it's not the short-term answer. But what Apple can do is come out and say, like, we now have a solution in which you go to your iPhone and you hit the button that says, turn my lights on, and it connects to the lights and turns them on, no other steps.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:21David Pierce?

  That's powerful and would mean things to people. You don't have to worry about your Hube Ridge, you don't have to make sure that your network is working, you don't have to like, you just, you have a device, that device is over there, you hit a button, it turns on. That's an Apple story.

• 8:32Alex Cranz?

  And it would work without needing Wi-Fi.

• 8:33David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:34Alex Cranz?

  Which is the best part of Hube.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  Again, here's my question. And I, I, I believe you that it is unlikely that Apple announced it without a plan. But it's weird that they announced it without a plan.

• 8:45Alex Cranz?

  Well, they didn't announce it though, right?

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  They did. It's on the, it's during the keynote, in the Bento box, and it's in the press release.

• 8:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but that's like-

• 8:52Nilay Patel?

  They could have just not told anybody that.

• 8:54David Pierce?

  But also, do you remember they, they upgraded the Home app and they were like, "It's for future architectural improvements." "The hell does that mean?" Like, Apple, I think, I really genuinely believe Apple thinks the smart home is for nerds. And is just like very slowly building up a thing that at three years from now, they're gonna be like, "We've invented the smart home." And it starts in that little radio.

• 9:15Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be like a slow zoom on a, a light bulb and then it just pops on.

• 9:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 9:20Alex Cranz?

  And we're gonna be like, "Wow!"

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 9:22David Pierce?

  No, this is what's gonna happen.

• 9:23Nilay Patel?

  They built that entire house that they do their announcements in at WWDC, right? They're like, "Apple's smart house, where like beautiful people are doing beautiful things all the time." And like, someone's making a pancake and a HomePod Mini is like opening a garage, like, they, they, they can't retcon not having done that.

• 9:41David Pierce?

  They absolutely can.

• 9:42Alex Cranz?

  They absolutely can. There will be a birthday party, the lights are gonna pop on and everybody's gonna go, "Wow!"

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  We've got a number of emails with Thread theories. I think the most interesting ones are all about local connectivity. A lot of people think, "Well, this could be better for connecting to smartwatches or AirPods." The answer, and you should read Jen's piece, we'll link it, it's very good. She basically ran everything down, as David said. And she's got a bunch of actual reporting from people at other companies who use Thread. Like, Google product managers are in this piece talking about what they would put Thread in a smartphone for, which is really interesting. So go read that piece. But basically, the bandwidth of Thread is not gonna let you build that like tiny personal area network that people are talking about at this moment. And then there's a lot of like, "Is it for presence detection?" And all this other stuff you can think of.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  And the problem with that is that Bluetooth low energy does exist.

• 10:35David Pierce?

  It does. It's still there.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  It is there. It, it does that job actually quite well. And so you're, you're just in this weird place where you have ultra wideband, you have Thread, you've got BLE. And everyone's like, well, maybe we'll use this one to do the thing that that one's designed for. Like, have you seen these new, uh, how do you pronounce this company? Aquara?

• 10:55Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yes.

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  They've got the presence sensors now. And so they have basically UWE presence sensors and they can tell where you are in a room. Like, you can set them up, it'll map out the room, you walk into the room and beyond just there's motion in the room, turn on the light. It's like, I'm at the desk.

• 11:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  Turn on the desk light because I'm at the desk and when I leave the desk and go to the couch, turn off that light and turn on this thing. Now, that's terrifying.

• 11:17Alex Cranz?

  I was just thinking how, I was like, I need to go get that sensor.

• 11:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a, you go watch the videos of people using it. It's so cool.

• 11:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  And like, it is a big unlock. Again, Jenna's written about all this stuff. It is a huge unlock for smart home ideas. Because knowing you're in a room is actually not that useful. Knowing where you are and what you might be doing in a room is very useful. But then you have to tell computers where you are and what you are doing in a room. And then the computers will know and store that data and.

• 11:47Alex Cranz?

  Or you can use Home Assistant and then a lot of that data and stuff is not stored.

• 11:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Alex Cranz?

  By the companies instead. It's just your data.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  You plex Home Assistant?

• 11:57Alex Cranz?

  I'm, I'm out there. I'm out there at the edge. No one's got my data.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  Literally on the edge. But anyway, so all this stuff is just all these, these kinds of radios. The blurry lines between them are ever more blurry.

• 12:12Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 12:12Nilay Patel?

  And Apple in the, in the phone has all three of them. You know, there's a second gen ultra wideband chip in these phones. And then there's just, it's like, I know they didn't announce it without a plan. I know there's a plan they're not telling us.

• 12:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  But the announcement is an announcement without a plan.

• 12:29Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna announce it like, dub dub.

• 12:30David Pierce?

  If you just got it for free with the chip, you don't put it in the bento. You let like iFixit open it up and be like, huh, weird. There's a Thread router in there and then never touch it again. And don't talk about it. Don't answer questions. Like, we've seen Apple do this before where you're like, what is this for? And Apple's like, what do you mean? Like, that's all fine. But yeah, I, I think it's right that they're like, they, they wanna put Thread in people's minds. And exactly why that is, I don't know, but I think you're right that there's, there is some kind of bet there. It's just a question of like, how big and how soon?

• 13:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:02David Pierce?

  We're gonna see something out of that.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  Then what's fun for us is that Vergecast listeners, Verge readers, are they're as interested in this mystery?

• 13:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  Like this post, like what is thread in the iPhone for is like right up there with like iPhone announced.

• 13:16David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:16Nilay Patel?

  And it's great. Like, that's why I do the thing that we do. Other stuff that we picked up, Lightning is not totally gone.

• 13:23David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  It's still around. I mean, Apple still sells the ninth gen. iPad, all the AirPods, except for the AirPods Pro still have it.

• 13:29David Pierce?

  It does seem like we're gonna, we're in for probably, I don't know, what would you say, 12 months of kind of slowly wiping those things out? Like, if we get to this time next year and there is still a single Apple device with a Lightning port, I will be very surprised.

• 13:42Alex Cranz?

  A budget iPad. And it will be there for like three more years with the, with the pencil that you plug in and then.

• 13:50David Pierce?

  No, they're gonna leave the Magic Mouse with the stupid ass Lightning port on the bottom, just to troll everybody.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, I mean, that stuff is really interesting because those are wholesale redesigns.

• 14:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  You know, Apple's view of USB-C is basically, we invented this port. It's ours. And it's, it's true.

• 14:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  With that first baby MacBook, of which, by the way, I got rid of them, very sad about them when we moved. I was like, it's time.

• 14:13David Pierce?

  Ah.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  Dieter sold me one a long time ago.

• 14:16David Pierce?

  R I P terrible, beautiful computers.

• 14:19Nilay Patel?

  The ultimate plane computer. I kept them in my house for years after they were obsolete, thinking, I will have these just for airplane rides. And then every now and again, I'd be like, go on a long flight and I would open one up and like, this is so much slower than my iPad. This is so much objectively worse than any iPad in this house, including Max's iPad, which is like lockdown kids mode.

• 14:38Alex Cranz?

  Did you put like Chrome OS on it?

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I can just purchase a Chromebook for no money.

• 14:47Alex Cranz?

  And not spend like six hours.

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  Like you walk into like any carrier retail store and you're like, I might upgrade my plan. Like Chromebook.

• 14:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Do you want one?

• 14:57Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, Apple invented the USB-C port basically because the USB IF was going down a bad direction and they wanted it for that MacBook.

• 15:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  So Apple's view is like.

• 15:07David Pierce?

  Apple invented is strong, but it's not that far off.

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like.

• 15:11Alex Cranz?

  It participated hardly.

• 15:12David Pierce?

  Apple probably deserves more credit than any other company for the existence of USB-C, but like, a lot of people made USB-C. Which is why USB-C is good, right? Because everybody sat in a room and agreed, this is the standard. We're gonna.

• 15:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:24David Pierce?

  Live with it.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like in that room, Apple had a knife.

• 15:29David Pierce?

  Sure. It's like, it's like Google and Chromium, right? Like Chromium is technically an open source browser and you can do whatever you like with it. But someone from Google will stand outside of your house.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. Like, Apple's like, we know where all of you live. You have our phones.

• 15:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  We've handed your iCloud credentials to the Chinese government. It's just the thing that we've done.

• 15:46David Pierce?

  Don't worry about it.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, so Apple in general is like happy about USB-C. I think they're not happy about losing the revenue. I think they're not happy about being forced to it because of Europeans. But you can't just switch the iPad, the ninth gen iPad to USB-C. You have to re-architect that product. So I think that just gets phased out. AirPods Max, Apple doesn't even acknowledge that this product exists. And I see more of them than anything else.

• 16:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're clearly very popular.

• 16:13Alex Cranz?

  Always on the planes.

• 16:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Alex Cranz?

  Like, I think that I need to buy them when I get on a plane. I'm like, well, everybody, everybody has them. I should have them too. They're everywhere.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever stopped to ask these people, like, so tell me about the case it came with? Do you use it?

• 16:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, never see the little purse. Never see the purse.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  But Lightning on the AirPods Max, the regular AirPods. Like, I mean, this is a lot of products that need to be updated. I don't think it's quite as simple.

• 16:38Alex Cranz?

  That mouse.

• 16:39David Pierce?

  There are a handful of them that they can just kind of get for free, right? That you just stick a new port in and it'll be fine. Like, the Magic Keyboard is a good example, right? Like, changing that to USB-C will not be hard work. I actually think the base level iPad, I think you're right, is the most interesting one because A, that thing is probably due for a bit of a redesign anyway. B, it's clearly very popular. Like, Apple talks about that thing way more than you would think it would for like a pretty cheap entry level product. It's clear it's a meaningful thing to Apple. And so I suspect that one is going to be the one that we see like look the most different and also come with USB-C.

• 17:16Alex Cranz?

  Well, and a lot of that was like... They're trying to get rid of old inventory and stuff too here, right? Like, that's why they, it still has the, the dorky pencil and everything like that. No disrespect.

• 17:27David Pierce?

  Some, some disrespect.

• 17:28Alex Cranz?

  Some disrespect. Yeah. So, so I, I do think it's gonna be a minute. I don't think they're just gonna flip a switch because they do still need to get rid of all of that stuff.

• 17:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Alex Cranz?

  And that's why they're so rich now is because they're really good at like unloading old crap. That, they're great at it.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  How'd you get rich, Tim? Well, I unloaded old crap.

• 17:46Alex Cranz?

  But they, they, they jazz it up. Like, they put some makeup on, like, they contour, like, it'd look nice.

• 17:53David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 17:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. The iPhone Mini, man. It was gorgeous.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  It was a gorgeous old phone, just like the iPhone 15.

• 18:00David Pierce?

  It's now so dead.

• 18:00Alex Cranz?

  I just saw it.

• 18:01David Pierce?

  So, so, so, so dead.

• 18:02Alex Cranz?

  Our producer has one and it's the cutest little thing in the world.

• 18:05David Pierce?

  Andrew Marino, our producer, just bought another one, like a psychopath, because it's about to be gone forever. Liam, our other producer, is holding one. God, the Fergcast, what a disaster of a show this is.

• 18:15Alex Cranz?

  It's all minis.

• 18:16David Pierce?

  There's just iPhone minis all the way down. They're the last two.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  This is like Walt Mossberg at the end of the MacBook air run. He just bought like two of them.

• 18:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  To have them in case Apple screwed it up in the future.

• 18:29Alex Cranz?

  That's smart. I, I would do that.

• 18:31Nilay Patel?

  That's good. Uh, speaking of USB-C in general, we've learned a lot about the port and what it will support. And basically the answer is everything. Like, Apple did this the right way.

• 18:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, it seems to be.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so.

• 18:43Alex Cranz?

  Cause they had a moral obligation to, David.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's what gets Apple to do things.

• 18:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Nilay Patel?

  So Backbone 1 controllers are just gonna get upgraded and they're gonna work with the iPhone. And I actually saw some Backbone folks at the event. They were excited and they were just handing out the Android Backbone controllers to, there were a lot of games reporters there.

• 19:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  So that's cool. Like, it's cool that that just works. Apparently you can plug into sort of any USB-C hub and get like Ethernet on your phone.

• 19:11David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, basically, anything that would work on the iPad Pro is gonna just happen over here.

• 19:17David Pierce?

  That's cool. That's much bigger than I expected, actually.

• 19:20Alex Cranz?

  When you're at the office and you have the crappy Wi-Fi and they're always, the IT is always like, just plug into the Ethernet. And you're like, I hate you, I'm on my phone. Now you can just be like, fine.

• 19:29David Pierce?

  Plug your phone in.

• 19:30Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how any of that's gonna work. My experience doing any of this stuff with an iPad is always a little like. You just hope the magic of the iPad magics at you. It's gonna be even weirder with a phone. And you know, iOS 17 is another bit of a wild card here. So, but theoretically.

• 19:46Alex Cranz?

  We have decks for the phone.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  It's just gonna work.

• 19:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, the backbone thing to me is like the perfect example of how this ought to be. And I think it's very exciting where they're just like, oh, this thing that used to fit on these phones now also fits on these phones. And so it's going to work like this is the point of having a universal standard. This is why the EU mandated this. This is why we were excited about this. It's like, it's gonna be good for the accessories market. It's gonna be good for users, but you're gonna be able to share stuff with people. You're gonna be able to buy things without that, like, does this work with my phone question? Which is a really complicated question for lots of people.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 20:20David Pierce?

  And yeah, the fact that Apple seems to have gone about this about the most open way possible is great. And frankly, very surprising.

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they didn't nerf any of the charging speeds or transfer speeds. I mean, except for the iPhone 15 is a USB C2.

• 20:33David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, that's, but again, that's like, it's good enough for most people. It'll be fine. I don't think there are that many people buying an iPhone 15 desperate for ultra fast data transfers.

• 20:43Alex Cranz?

  I think those people are getting a Pro if they care enough. If they know what USB 2 is, they're getting a Pro.

• 20:48David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 20:48Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the word Pro means, I just want to be clear. My contribution to iPhone reviews this year is gonna be just a little weirder because I have the code conference to deal with. And that's very distracting. But I'm like, what if my only contribution to this review is 2,000 words and the meaning of the word Pro? A word that has lost all meaning and which in this case for Apple this year means good at video games.

• 21:13Alex Cranz?

  That's what Pros mean.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  They don't have another answer for it, which is wild.

• 21:17David Pierce?

  Okay, I see it exactly the opposite. We should get to Google after this because this is enough Apple talk. But I think to me, the fact that a big part of the way Apple showed off the Pro was by showing you how you can like rig up a camera in a studio and shoot to external storage. Like, that's, that's pro. That's how you tell a story that is different about that phone than the other phones. Whether that's like, real and how people will do that, like, you were on the show on Wednesday making fun of the idea that you would like, use your iPhone in a studio to take professional pictures. People do that all the time, dude. Like, that's like, life now. Steven Soderbergh's out here just like, shooting movies on his iPhone for fun all day. Like, it's a real thing. And the idea that they're gonna take

• 22:01David Pierce?

  the pro and like, give it genuinely new things to do, especially as a camera, I think, like, if you wanna tell a pro story, that's where you do it. They're like, we are going to turn this thing-

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  Right, and I'm saying, what they're saying is, look at how good it is at video games.

• 22:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  Not that thing.

• 22:16David Pierce?

  Sort of. I mean, they did a little bit of the other story. They spent way too much time talking about games. This is like, Apple does this all the time, where they're like, they're like, we made a phone-

• 22:25Alex Cranz?

  Favorite thing in the world.

• 22:26David Pierce?

  It's, you're gonna use it for games occasionally, so we're gonna tell you about every single game that exists on the iPhone.

• 22:31Nilay Patel?

  So, two things, and then we can wrap up. As always, I've asked people to email us with their hardcore Android gamers. So, we got one from Evan. He said, "I am here to inform you that I've been gaming on Android for as long as the verge has existed, and it's a long list of all the phones you've ever gotten. LG, Optimus G, he played Need for Speed on it, LTE launch, he's got Stadia." Anyway, this email ends with, "I did just buy an iPhone 11, primarily to play games."

• 22:56David Pierce?

  There it is. There it is.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  Well done, Evan. Easily the funniest turn. It's a, it's a good, long email, easily one of the funniest turns in an email, saying you're wrong about Android games-

• 23:07Alex Cranz?

  It was a very good email.

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  And then we got an email from Colin, because we were wondering, who would buy the Lightning to USB-C dongle for 20 bucks? And we hypothesized that some people would buy them for their cars, and he emailed us to tell us, yes, his friend is buying one for his car. He has a custom setup, and he, it's apparently easier to pay 20 bucks for the dongle than to tear open his car and put in a USB-C cable.

• 23:31Alex Cranz?

  Custom setup with a built-in Lightning cable?

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, man.

• 23:35Alex Cranz?

  That's incredible. I love this guy.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  He's probably one of these people with like, an iPad in the center of the car.

• 23:39David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, Colin, we want pictures of your friend's car, so get in there. But there are some people out there who are buying the dongle, because they have basically fixed Lightning cables.

• 23:50Alex Cranz?

  A lot of like, coffee shops are gonna buy the dongle.

• 23:53David Pierce?

  I also think a lot of people are gonna buy the dongle, because the idea of buying an entirely new cable feels annoying, and I'm gonna spend a lot of time like, running around to relatives, being like, "Don't buy the dongle, buy a new cable." It costs, it's the same price. It's gonna be fine. Everything's okay. Like, I'm gonna end up with just like a giant, you know, bucket full of two-meter-long USB-C cables. And just every time I go into a room with family members, I'm just gonna start hugging them at people.

• 24:19Alex Cranz?

  Everybody's gonna have a little rat tail on the bottom of their phones. Because they always have to have that dongle.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, people did it with their headphones. And lastly, I'm just gonna say this. I have heard that not everyone at Apple pronounces heath.

• 24:33David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 24:35Alex Cranz?

  Hef?

• 24:35Nilay Patel?

  There's more diversity of pronunciations inside of Apple Inc.

• 24:41David Pierce?

  Tell me more.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, I was just like, does this whole company call it heath? And then some people contacted me and was like, not all of us say heath.

• 24:49Alex Cranz?

  You can't, you can't share, like, you don't want to disclose your sources.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  No, this is, this is some of the most sensitive reporting I've ever done.

• 24:56Alex Cranz?

  We appreciate it.

• 24:57Nilay Patel?

  And I'm just saying, heath might have been pushed out into the world.

• 25:02David Pierce?

  But it's out there now. If you're the one on, if you're the one on camera, you get to decide how it's pronounced.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  And it's heath.

• 25:07David Pierce?

  It's heath now.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. That is enough iPhone stuff for a week. Uh, we'll be back with Eddie Robertson to talk about USP Google, which is a big deal. We'll be right back.

• 25:22Speaker 00

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• 25:51Speaker 01

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• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Addie Robertson's here. Hey, Addie.

• 26:27Alex Cranz?

  Hey.

• 26:28Nilay Patel?

  So there's a big trial going on in secret. I don't know how else to describe it. It's like the government does not want us to know that the other part of the government is suing Google.

• 26:39David Pierce?

  I think that's kind of true. I mean, I just think back to like the Sam Bankman-Fried trial starts in a couple of weeks and there's tons of people talking about that. There was the Microsoft Activision Blizzard trial. There was the Elizabeth Holmes trial. Like, we've had a run of these very high-profile cases.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  Apple v. Samsung.

• 26:53David Pierce?

  Apple v. Samsung. We've had a run of these over the last few years, and this feels by far like the one that is getting the least attention, despite being potentially like the most consequential by a million miles.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:06David Pierce?

  It's very strange.

• 27:07Alex Cranz?

  I think it's because Google's just really good at like flying under the radar. Because even with the Google v. Epic.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  No, that's what I meant. I said Apple v. Samsung.

• 27:15David Pierce?

  I mean, that one happened too.

• 27:16Nilay Patel?

  I meant Apple v. Epic.

• 27:17Alex Cranz?

  Like, they all happened, right? Like, Apple v. Epic was a big deal.

• 27:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Alex Cranz?

  Google v. Epic, we were like, yep, now they're doing it.

• 27:24Speaker 05

  I mean, Google has also been trying to keep like as much of the trial under wraps as possible here.

• 27:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So just...

• 27:33Alex Cranz?

  Unlike their phones.

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. So just to lay the stage here, then I want to add to talk about what was actually happening in the trial. It is impossible to cover this trial. There's no audio stream of it.

• 27:45Speaker 05

  There was an audio stream, very briefly.

• 27:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, of just the opening arguments, but none of the witnesses. There's barely a schedule. If reporters go into the courtroom, they can't have devices to take all their notes longhand. It is just ridiculous.

• 27:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  Like, the government might get to a place where it breaks up Google, and the process by which that is happening is basically impossible and opaque, because we cannot just cover it unless we send someone to the courtroom every day for nine weeks to take notes with a pen.

• 28:18Alex Cranz?

  And a scroll.

• 28:18Nilay Patel?

  Which we are thinking about doing, and obviously other larger competitors like Bloomberg and The Times are doing. But you just contrast that with all of the other trials, and that for some reason, these decisions have been made. It's... I find it very frustrating, obviously because I think about Google all day, every day. But this is the trial where, you know, Google putting out memos to its own employees saying, "We do not use words like lock-in."

• 28:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, or scale.

• 28:45Nilay Patel?

  Or scale, right? "We don't use the word "leverage" when we talk about search." Like, they're instructing their own executives how to email each other. They're in trouble for destroying evidence in this case.

• 28:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's that amazing message where Sundar Pichai, the CEO, popped into a Google Chat group and said something to the effect of like, "We should talk about this. Can we turn off history for this chat session?" And then that's obviously the last message anyone can see. And, yeah, I mean, Addie, my impression, and this is based on very little, except just thinking about incentives here, is that Google has everything to gain from burying as much of this trial and process as possible, right?

• 29:25Speaker 05

  Yes. I mean, with the caveat that it's not going to matter if the judge is like, "We're breaking up Google, Google is still getting broken up," even if it is in secret. And again, to be clear, that's one of the less likely outcomes.

• 29:37David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  But yeah, I think that it benefits Google to not have to deal with a lot of the arguments being made here, as it would for really most plaintiffs, like as it would for Apple in Epic versus Apple. And then there's also a lot of other companies implicated here. Like, obviously, this is about Google's deals with companies like Apple, and so Apple has appeared and tried to, like, it's tried to get its executives out of testifying. So there's really just a lot of companies here and a lot of very sensitive information going around. And so on one hand, it's not really surprising that they would try to keep a lot of this secret. But on the other, it also means that you don't hear as much about what the Justice Department is saying Google is doing.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the case fundamentally turns on these deals, right? So the case was pretty wide-ranging. It's been, this has been going on for three years now?

• 30:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was 2020, the first suit was filed, yeah.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  And so it's, like, all things, as it approaches trial, it's been narrowed down to a handful of issues. The most, I think, important and relevant one is Google's deals to be the default search engine on the iPhone and other platforms. So, of course, the Justice Department wants Tim Cook to testify, and Apple's like, "No." No, no, no, no, we're not doing that. But that makes sense. They want to do that. But just, again, I'm just coming back to this. Last, this week, while Apple is announcing pretty light refreshes to iPhone, that captured all the attention. But the trial in which the Department of Justice is saying the deal in which Google pays Apple money to be

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  the default search provider on the iPhone is anti-competitive and illegal is like totally under the radar and impossible to cover. And I just think that's weird.

• 31:19Speaker 05

  I think there's also, it's also just easy to be sort of cynical because we've been seeing these cases try to make a dent in companies for years and years and years. Like, there was this entire gigantic ostensibly bipartisan tech clash, starting in really about 2016, building up 2017, 2018.

• 31:38Alex Cranz?

  And nothing happened.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just, I think it's really easy to look at this and go, it is very, very hard to win an antitrust case. The Federal Trade Commission, which is not the one bringing the suit, but is, which is part of the Biden administration's attempt to get antitrust to happen in the US, it has had a couple of really high-profile losses. Epic versus Apple, really, it means that Apple is going to maybe have to do something that Apple's been fighting tooth and nail to not do, but it's still basically determined, look, Apple can just charge these fees. I think that it's very easy to look at this and worry that just nothing's going to come of it.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I, like, that was what I was gonna say. I think, I think cynicism is, is the right word here. People are cynical. Like, we've seen this happen so many times. And not just in tech, you've seen it happen in a lot of places where it's just like, okay, so when is the government gonna actually do something? When is this gonna happen? We're just gonna continue on. And this is like a really good opportunity for the government, and even the government seems like reluctant, right? Like, they could probably make this a lot more public. They could make this more of a show. And it might be in their best interest to, like, get the public support behind it. But even the government is playing it so safe, you're like, if you're playing it that safe, are you really gonna do it?

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, there are many brashnesses, government. Three.

• 32:56Alex Cranz?

  There's three.

• 32:59Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, I don't know why the judge in this case, Judge Metta, is logging it down the way he is. Obviously, Google wants it that way, and there's requests, and there's private stuff, but like, not having audio streams of the witnesses seems, I just don't understand that at all. And then there's the DOJ, which is, you know, they're prosecutors. They're not supposed to do it that way, right? You know, it's like, there's a little bit of a gap there. The thing I would give you is, the same week, we did watch the European government successfully pressure Apple into changing the port on the iPhone. And that's a good outcome. And even in our videos, like, our hands-on video, where we're like, "Apple changed it." The comments are like, "The Europeans changed it."

• 33:38David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  Like, people understand the mechanism by which the change was made.

• 33:43David Pierce?

  Yes. Well, and that's what we've been talking about in the US for the last couple of years, right, is that, like, a clear part of the FTC, which, again, is not involved in this particular trial, but what they're trying to do is, sort of, lose in such a way that it eventually, we have to legislate answers to this. And it's like, what the EU did was make laws.

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:00David Pierce?

  They, like, there was no big court case about the Lightning port. They just made a law about common chargers. And it feels like, that's, if our system worked better, it might be different.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  But so the EU has made a lot of laws about Google Search.

• 34:14David Pierce?

  So many.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  They have done more aggressive enforcements about Google Search than would ever be contemplated in this company.

• 34:23David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  Down to designing the startup flow of an Android phone. And Addie and I have been talking about this for years. None of it has worked. Like, Google is dominant in Europe. When you open an Android phone, and it asks you if you want to use Chrome, it asks you, it has a browser ballot and a search engine ballot, right? And no, everyone's just like, "Okay, like, we're gonna pick Chrome and Google because I bought a Android phone." Like, what else do you think I'm doing here? Duck, duck, go. Addie, do you see any similarities between that version of the European enforcement, which has been unsuccessful, and what is happening in this case?

• 34:59Speaker 05

  I mean, that entire thing you've just said is kind of Google's argument, is, look, even when we don't get the default placement, even when we don't do this thing that the Justice Department is saying is illegal, we win. So clearly, we're just the best.

• 35:15David Pierce?

  I just want to say, that is my absolute favorite thing that has been happening in this trial so far, is Bing is everybody's punching pack.

• 35:23David Pierce?

  Be like, Google's argument is essentially, Microsoft makes Bing the default on Windows in the same way that we're the default in lots of places, and still overwhelmingly, people choose Google because Bing sucks. And the government's case is, well, Bing sucks, and nobody uses it, and that's Google's fault.

• 35:43David Pierce?

  It's very funny to me that like, it's a shame that there's not a better product to argue about here. Yeah. And I think it just kept coming up over and over and over. And like, in a funny way, if Google wins this case, I think Microsoft is going to have been a huge ally for Google in winning this case. Because what Google is saying, and Addy, I don't know if this was your impression, but listening to the opening arguments over an AT&T conference call, which was very funny for an antitrust trial.

• 36:11David Pierce?

  But the overwhelming thing Google kept saying was like, we are not the company with infinite resources that is able to do whatever we want and outbid everybody to do everything, because Microsoft exists. Microsoft is also a trillion dollar company with limitless money to do whatever it wants. They keep trying to put Bing in front of people. Windows exists. Microsoft has a long history of doing antitrust-y things, and Bing still sucks and nobody uses it. And I actually think, like, of all of the Google arguments I have heard so far, that is by far the most compelling to me. I don't know, Addy, did you read that differently on the first day?

• 36:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think that the Justice Department is trying to counter it by basically saying, the reason Google is so good and is so untouchable is because we all agree here, Bing, it sucks.

• 36:53Speaker 05

  They're not that strong, but they, is that Google gathers, has so much data from searches that it basically got this flywheel effect of just being able to get default placements. So then people type things into Google, and then Google learns how people search for things, and then Google could deliver better results. And then this just keeps going. And even though Microsoft has tried to do things, it's tried to set its own defaults, it has partnered with Yahoo, a thing that's come up, to do a data sharing deal in order to get more queries, that that just hasn't been enough.

• 37:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, one of the things that Judge Meta asked, I think, like, within the first hour or so of testimony on the first day was, he asked the DOJ lawyer, how long has Google been a monopoly? Which I thought was a really interesting question, and I think the answer was, it has been illegally protecting that monopoly since 2010, which, which assumes that it was a monopoly before that, right? But I think-

• 37:48Speaker 05

  I think he was saying it's been, it's had really heavy market power since about 2007.

• 37:53David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, and then, yes, it's been illegally maintaining the monopoly since 2010.

• 37:57David Pierce?

  Right, and so that's, that's the DOJ's argument, but what I think is really interesting there is like, obviously, Google came out in 1998, and no one is debating the fact that Google, at least for a long time, was vastly better than everything else, and won purely on the merits. And then, what we're debating now is, did it go from winning on the merits to buying merits? And essentially making it impossible for anyone else to do to, like, Google, what Google did to AltaVista and everybody else 25 years ago? And that turn and trying to figure out, like, where it happened and what it looks like, is, I think, why we've come down to these default deals, because ultimately, that's the question, right?

• 38:34David Pierce?

  It's like, Google's out here saying, there are a million ways to find information on the internet, and the DOJ is saying, like, general search, which they keep calling it, is this different thing from what TikTok is and what ChatGPT is. But they have to figure out, like, okay, when did Google go from just objectively being the best search engine, and so everybody uses it, which is not illegal, to being the best and making sure that no one else can be? Which is a much trickier thing than like what Microsoft did, which is just like, boot Netscape off the internet? And I don't know, it's, it just set us off down this kind of odd path where, like, it's almost not obvious what everyone is arguing at any given time, no matter what side you're on.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  This general search thing is ridiculous. Like, the FTC, what, what, they've done a bad job in many of their cases, like, they did the entire Activision trial and forgot to mention cloud gaming. And then they lost and then they were like in the background, we're going to appeal on cloud gaming. And it's like, that was the, that was the argument the whole time. Here, the DOJ, I think, is getting suckered into this, like every antitrust trial comes down to like, what is the market?

• 39:40David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  Let's have an increasingly esoteric debate about what market is being dominated. And then obviously, Google's like, the market is the use of computers. And we are but one tiny fraction of why one might compute, sir.

• 39:53David Pierce?

  Right.

• 39:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then the DOJ is like, general search, which means fucking nothing. And the answer is like, no, it's searching the web.

• 40:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  There are a handful of products that search the web.

• 40:02David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  People use them all day long. And there's one search engine that matters in the web.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  To be fair, that is what their definition of general search is, is a thing that searches sources that is not, sources beyond one site.

• 40:15David Pierce?

  On the web.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  Right. But that, even that definition is like, it just, it's so not the, like, if you tried to explain that to a normal person, you'd be like, all right, so there's, there are sources beyond one site. Right? Like, I'm not even going to say the word web to you. And I would just say, if you just look at the web today, we've talked about this so many times. It is so obviously influenced by Google's wants and needs that you can't not say this thing is dominant. It is, the only incentive structure that exists on the web really is Google's wants and needs. Cause that's how people get traffic to their websites. Okay, like, just start, and the DOJ has been suckered into this conversation about general search and whether the kids are using TikTok.

• 40:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  And like, that's totally different.

• 41:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if Apple changes the default search on the iPhone to be TikTok.

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Horrible experience.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it's like, but that's so just generally nonsensical to think about.

• 41:11David Pierce?

  The kids love iPhones. The kids love TikTok.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  Munge them together. All these other searches that we're talking about in the category of general search that Google wants you to consider. I would just say, come back to the thing at issue, which is the default deals on these platforms. And say, can you replace them? Could you replace the default search on the iPhone with a YouTube search?

• 41:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Nilay Patel?

  And like, no, basically, you need web search. And I, Google's protection of that web search, what, yeah, there's the data argument that they've been making for a long time. Like, everyone's making, Google has the most data, they can do it. But next to it, Addie, are these like vertical search engines like Yelp and these other companies that are like, we're much better in these very specific domains and we can barely even get to a customer because of Google's deals.

• 41:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, which was a bigger part of the case originally and then got trimmed out of it. And so is not coming up in this as much.

• 42:05Alex Cranz?

  Do you think it'll come up later in these 10 weeks?

• 42:08Speaker 05

  So the Department of Justice is making its case first and that claim was part of the state attorney general suit that's gonna come up later, but it also got cut mostly from that suit. So I think we're not actually going to hear nearly as much about it as we could have, even though those search engines come up.

• 42:24Alex Cranz?

  Which is a bummer because that feels like the real issue, right? Like, the fact that they're doing these exclusivity deals is on its face totally like monopoly behavior. But also, in this case, Google is actually really good at search. So of course, like, it makes sense.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like, let's say you ask Siri to find you a plumber.

• 42:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  Right? In a competitive world, Apple goes and makes a deal with Yelp or Angie's List or whatever, right? And they're running that search on a specialized service. Google's deal means like, that's all going through Google.

• 42:58Alex Cranz?

  Okay, okay. Then yeah, no, they're a monopoly. Get rid of them.

• 43:02Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, I don't know if that's good or bad. Right? I'm just saying, but that's, that's sort of the, the shape of it. And Addie's right, it's been trimmed out of the suit, although.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  Well, no, this part that got trimmed out of the suit was not the thing you're describing. It was the idea that when you go to Google itself.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  And you're trying to find a thing on Google, Google makes it hard to find these places like Yelp or TripAdvisor or whatever through Google specifically. So that got mostly cut out of the suit.

• 43:25Nilay Patel?

  And the judge sort of rightfully was like, well, Google is allowed to do whatever it wants on Google. But there is that vertical search thing, from what I read of the decision, the judge is basically like, I need to see more evidence. We'll get more evidence at trial and I will decide how big of a deal that is. And so we'll see what hap- what the states do. But you just look at all of the things Google does. And again, it's instructions to its own people to not talk about doing those things.

• 43:50Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, that seems illegal. I mean, I don't think that it is necessarily illegal, but it is certainly the kind of thing you can bring up to, to say it's shady.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, that we don't, we don't leverage anything is like a very funny thing to say. So Addie, what's been going on this week? It's just been Google's chief economist, Hal Varian. Have we learned anything in particular?

• 44:09Speaker 05

  So the first day was after opening statements Hal Varian, where they really honed in on the idea that we're going to go to the metaphorical tape and look at all of these emails that Google execs have sent about how important scale is and how important data is. And then there were these internal arguments where Varian wrote this, did this interview with CNET where he says, "Look, the argument that data is like the be all and end all and that Microsoft has to make this deal with Yahoo to get data, that's bogus." And then there was this internal fight where people were just saying, "Look, that's ridiculous. No, data, obviously, if they have the data we did, they would be incredible. Like, they would be much better than they are now." So there's that. And then this was also

• 44:51Speaker 05

  where we got a lot of the, "We at Google, we do not say market share, we say query share. We do not bundle, we do not tie." And then beyond that, we've also, there's been a behavioral economist that they've brought, that the Department of Justice has brought up to emphasize the, quote, "sort of power of defaults." That's been their first expert witness. He spent a bunch of time on the stand. And so that's been a lot of presentations, both about stuff Google has said internally, which echoes sort of the Varian testimony, and just experiments and other data that has been collected elsewhere that just says, "In general, people choose defaults."

• 45:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I do think if you wanted to boil this case all the way down to one question, it's the power of defaults. Like, do defaults matter is, in a big way, it seems like what a lot of this is going to hinge on. Because Google's argument is, they matter a little, right? It's why we pay for the defaults. Like, Google cannot, in any kind of reasonable way, say defaults don't matter at all because it pays tens of billions of dollars a year to be the default. So it's, it's like, all that is fine and good. But the two arguments it makes is that defaults don't matter that much because people choose Google even when it's hard to, or even when there is a fairly level playing field. Because Bing sucks. Because Bing sucks. And also that we only pay to be the default because we're the good,

• 46:10David Pierce?

  we're the best product. Everybody tells us we're the best product. That's the only thing that matters. The end. There and then the DOJ is out here saying, no, you are the default. You pay to be the default. So we can't even reasonably start to answer the rest of these questions.

• 46:23Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 46:24David Pierce?

  And that's what all the like little search engines will tell you. That's what all the failed competitors will tell you is that like, we don't even know if we could have beaten Google or tried or caught up. We just, there's no runway. There's no way to even get into this space.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. You just wrote the obituary of Nilay.

• 46:39David Pierce?

  Yeah. And Nilay has already come up a bunch in this trial and Sridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO of Nilay, who used to run the whole ad business at Google is going to take the stand during this trial. Like, that is a key part of the argument is like defaults are so important that because Google pays all this money to be the default, we don't exist. And that's like, if the DOJ can prove that, it might win. And it's very hard to prove that, it seems to me.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  There's also the argument that it's, that specifically it's not just small search engines. It is Apple, that one of the things that hasn't come up really in testimony as much, but was part of the opening statements is that Google has been basically paying Apple to not build a search engine.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, every year at W W C, Apple does something that hints an interest in doing more searches.

• 47:24David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. And every year, you know, we get the new version of iOS and it's like, pull down and I can type this and this will come up automatically or.

• 47:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. You can do image search in Spotlight now. It's like, it's right there if you wanted to do it.

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  It's right there. And then every year we get some notes from some Googlers like, Apple's coming for us. And it's like, no, they're not. Right. I'm very curious, you know, if they do put Tim Cook and Eddie Q and the rest on the stand.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  We're going to get Eddie Q. We're, as far as I know, not getting Tim Cook.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  Full Hawaiian shirt Eddie Q on the stand. Right. The question I would ask is, look at all this marketing about privacy. Look at all this marketing about not tracking you. And look at the billions of dollars you take from the largest ad tracking thing that has ever existed in human history. How do you square that circle beyond just taking the money? Cause I don't think Apple's ever been held to account for this. Certainly people have tried asking and they're like, people love Google. And that's the end of it. Like, Google's available on the App Store. The App Store has created more economic opportunity for people than ever. And it's like, where did you go?

• 48:27David Pierce?

  One place that has already kind of come up is with Mozilla. And Mozilla is another company that says a lot of things about privacy and the open web and believing in the internet, and also takes a lot of money from Google every year to be the default search engine in Firefox. And Google's case, and this has actually worked in Google's favor fairly well so far, it seems, is that Mozilla at one point stopped using Google as its search engine provider, signed a deal with, Eddie, was it Yahoo, I think?

• 48:52Speaker 05

  It was Yahoo.

• 48:53David Pierce?

  Okay. And then went back to Google for exactly that reason. Because that's the face everybody makes when they have to use Yahoo Search. And so Google is like, they had choices and they picked Google.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  Hilariously, the Department of Justice's counter to this is that Yahoo could have been viable, but it was so expensive to beat Google that they had to lard down their service with ads that suddenly made Yahoo Search awful. And that's why Yahoo Search was crushed.

• 49:16David Pierce?

  It's the Bing sucks argument, right? Like, are all other search engines bad because of Google? It's such a weird question, but is like, kind of core to a lot of this case.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:26David Pierce?

  Like, there are no other good search engines. Is it because Google is great, or because Google has so aggressively defeated everyone? It probably is both, right? Like, I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, which is why it's going to be very hard for Google to lose this case, it seems.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, even if they do, you just have to look at Europe, where for over a decade now, the princes and princesses of Europe have shaken their pitchforks at Google and said, "We will undo this dominance." And the people of Europe have said, "Down with the king." "Nay, good sir."

• 50:01David Pierce?

  They have Googled for news about that happening.

• 50:04Nilay Patel?

  "We shall continue Googling." No, absolutely not. French Revolution, the whole thing.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  This is, uh, it's, it's very complicated over in Europe. They're still kings, I'm told.

• 50:17Alex Cranz?

  Princesses and princesses everywhere, just everywhere.

• 50:20Nilay Patel?

  No one knows why. My people have run away from them twice. I'm Indian American. Anyway, we're gonna cover the hell out of this trial. We're gonna figure out how to get into that courtroom, basically, every day with a series of quill pens, uh, and parchment, because that's how the government wants us to cover USV Google.

• 50:36Alex Cranz?

  David, could you take the parchment and have it so it like goes out of the room as you write?

• 50:42David Pierce?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's good.

• 50:43Alex Cranz?

  And then Addie can just be on the other side.

• 50:45David Pierce?

  Oh, I like that.

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  OCR-ing the parchment.

• 50:48David Pierce?

  My thing is, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring in increasingly less technologically advanced devices every day until it's okay.

• 50:53Nilay Patel?

  Totally, John is like, fine, bring a Chromebook.

• 50:56David Pierce?

  If I come in with like an e-ink notebook that I can write on, is that electronics? Like, what are we doing? Are we good? If, if, if I'm not touching the screen, it's not drawing any power.

• 51:03Alex Cranz?

  Bring in a Remarkable 2 and just be like, what?

• 51:05David Pierce?

  This is what I'm saying, yeah.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  Okay, so fun detail, when you go through the metal detector in the courtroom, you have to take out all your cables.

• 51:11Alex Cranz?

  This is not a fun place to be if you have as many cables as I do. I was like, Neel, I can never go there.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm not allowed in there. It's not gonna happen. Uh, we are, again, we're covering the hell out of this trial. There's gonna be a bunch of big witnesses on the stand. We're gonna get as much coverage to you as we can. I think it's a big deal just because no one pays attention to Google Search. Like, we have been running this series about Google Search and what it means and Google turning 25 all year. We'll link it in the show notes. David's Neva pieces in there are Google Reader pieces in there. We have a bunch of SEO stories coming, uh, about the culture of SEO. I think they're gonna be really good. And what has been apparent in doing those stories is that Google hates it. When you talk about search as anything other than like water. Yep. They're like, what? Search is just the oxygen of the internet, it's just around you at all times. It keeps us all, and it's like, no, this is a business.

• 52:01Nilay Patel?

  A business that you ruthlessly protect and instruct your people to never discuss in words that sound ruthless. And I, that gap, I think, is what this trial, even if the government loses, the trial will narrow the gap in the perception of Google Search as just a benign thing that happens.

• 52:20David Pierce?

  Right.

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  In a very, very ruthlessly run business. And I say ruthless, I don't mean that in a negative way. I think Google does a good job of running its business and making a lot of cash on Google Search and then funding a bunch of shit, it shuts down two months later.

• 52:33David Pierce?

  Right.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, that's the engine of Google. It's basically its only business. And then a little bit of YouTube and then a little bit of Google Cloud. But like, it's search that funds a whole bunch of stuff.

• 52:43David Pierce?

  Yeah. And Google wants you to think about it as this like inevitable thing that just sort of has to exist the way that it does in order for the internet to work. Like, like you're saying, it's, they want you to think it's water and it is like a series of very specific choices that people made in how this thing works. And if nothing else, we're going to learn a lot about the choices.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, and we'll do it with quill pens and parchment if we have to. Okay, we gotta take a break. Addy, stick around. We're gonna take a break. When we come back, I need you and Alex to explain what is going on with the NBA team. We'll be right back.

• 53:17Speaker 00

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• 53:45Speaker 01

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• 54:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. The show is way over. There is gigantic drama with Unity, though. It has gone completely off the rails. They changed the pricing structure in the middle of the Apple event.

• 54:29Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  Developers are very mad. It's escalated to inappropriate levels or...

• 54:34Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  They canceled events. What is going on here?

• 54:37Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so Unity is one of the biggest game engines out there. It's really interesting because Unity is used in most mobile games, a ton of mobile games out there. So Apple's up there saying, "We love gaming."

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, they hate Unreal.

• 54:50Alex Cranz?

  And meanwhile, this is happening with Unity, which is a big developer, like, big game engine for iOS. They are raising their prices specifically if you reach... If you sell enough product, then you're gonna have to start paying them for every download. Every install. Yeah, every install. So Monica and Allison are just gonna bankrupt companies every time they review new products.

• 55:14Nilay Patel?

  Because they install the games on all these phones that they review.

• 55:16Alex Cranz?

  Right, so basically, they've walked some of it back. But if you're making, I think, if you're a smaller developer and you're making over $200,000 a year from your game, you're gonna have to start paying these fees. And if you're a larger developer, and I think it's over $1 million a year, you're gonna have to start paying these fees. And these fees are fairly small.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  What is the argument for per-install fees?

• 55:38Alex Cranz?

  Money?

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  But certainly, has Unity made any argument?

• 55:41Alex Cranz?

  No, that's part of the frustration here. The frustration is less about the money being asked for because a lot of the developers are like, "Yeah, if this is the cost of doing business, that's the cost of doing business. This was communicated to us in the worst way possible." In the middle of a big Apple event, it gets communicated. There was no prep. Usually, they'll go to bigger developers and be like, "Hey, we're thinking about charging you more money." None of that happened in this case. And Unity is really like... Digging in on this. Every single time we'd get another thing, we'd get another report from a game developer saying, oh, we're going to just delete our game rather than have to pay this, which is what the Cult of Lamb developers said. I think they're still going to keep their game up, but.

• 56:22Speaker 05

  And there are a couple of really specific big problems, too. The first being that it's not even necessarily clear how they track installs, that they're basically saying, yeah, we have this model. It's totally data compliant with data regulations, totally not privacy invading, also totally accurate, and also it totally won't if somebody decides they hate you and they want to run a giant like install bombing campaign to drive up your costs. It will also totally not include that. But no one has really figured out exactly what that means. And second, that installs are just not a thing that inherently makes developers money. So they're charging for this thing that doesn't actually tie directly to revenue.

• 56:55Alex Cranz?

  Right. And that's what's got people pissed is this thing is just feels really, really egregious to them. It feels like it came on really, really quickly. And there's zero communication. Unity is just saying, yeah, we know you pay us every year to use our engine. Now you have to pay us more. Oh, you've had this game you developed on this engine for the last 10 years. Well, either learn a new engine or cough up the cash. And that just feels like extortion. It's not legally extortion, but it sure feels like it to developers.

• 57:25David Pierce?

  How real do you think the threat is from all these developers who are saying, basically, we'll leave Unity instead of pay these fees?

• 57:31Alex Cranz?

  Ash is looking into that. I think it's for a lot of them, it's not realistic. If you've.

• 57:35David Pierce?

  I mean, it's got to be a gigantic amount of work, right?

• 57:37Alex Cranz?

  It's a huge amount of work. So for most of them, it's probably not realistic. But a lot of them are saying, well, I'm never going to develop in Unity again. And I'll probably pull those games, right?

• 57:47David Pierce?

  Life is long.

• 57:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. If you're a big developer, you can afford to pull a game that's made you a little money and you don't want to pay anymore and go off and do something else. So it's kind of wild that Unity did this. And the theories are, everybody's got a theory on why they did it. The most common one is they like money, which is fair. A lot of people think it might be because of engine impact, which is huge on mobile and makes a lot of money. And Unity would like some of that.

• 58:14David Pierce?

  And has been established, Allison Johnson downloads 650 times a year.

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, very true. So here's a question I have. So you mentioned the iPhone. Addy, Apple's pushing into spatial computing with the Vision Pro. They basically need game engines to make a bunch of Vision Pro stuff.

• 58:30Alex Cranz?

  And Unity is core to that.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Right. Unity is a big deal in that world.

• 58:34Alex Cranz?

  It's big.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  And Apple hates Epic, which makes the big competitor. Right, like Unreal is not going to show up on Apple platforms as the alternative to Unity.

• 58:44Speaker 05

  Right.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  Anytime soon.

• 58:46Speaker 05

  They're different engines, like Unity is better for Monument and Valley and smaller games like that. It's graphically intensive, but it's not like that photorealism. You don't see that as often in Unity games as you do in Unreal, which makes sense because that's also less like taxing to the processor, which is one of the reasons Unity is so popular with Meta, also because deals were made and stuff like that. But it's still one of the relatively, you have fewer options for developing 3D and spatial games than you do for developing 2D games. And Unity is definitely one of the huge 3D options because there are plenty of games that are 3D but not photorealistic, including a lot of like VR games.

• 59:24Nilay Patel?

  Right. So I'm just wondering, is, in the midst of all of this, just turning the screw one time, you've covered VR more than anybody that I've ever met. This has some huge impact on how Apple's relationship to developers is going to go as they roll out the Vision Pro, right? Like, if all the developers are mad at the main engine, where else are they going to go?

• 59:44Speaker 05

  It's a very good question, and it's partly a question Ash is actually doing reporting on right now. Like, there are alternatives that you can use. One of them is Godot, which is an open source engine, which is very tiny and is very hard. But yeah, it's, it's a good question whether that's a thing that makes Unity feel like it can flex.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's what I'm wondering, where is this leverage coming from? Like, if you're like, we're going to piss off everyone, usually it's because you can't, like, you're Reddit.

• 1:00:11Speaker 05

  I was just going to say, this is what Reddit did.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  Reddit's like, we need more money, we're going to piss off everyone.

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

  But where are you going to go?

• 1:00:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And they just waited, and it's, some parts of Reddit are still just a mess, but they just waited and it's fine. Because where are you going to go? Who's the competitor? And it, there's just an echo of that in this Unity conversation, especially as it relates to iOS, because the thing that is the natural competitor is at such odds with Apple at the corporate level.

• 1:00:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm going to be really curious to see how Apple responds to this over the next few weeks because.

• 1:00:43Alex Cranz?

  It happened in the middle of their event. Yeah.

• 1:00:45Nilay Patel?

  I wonder if Apple even knew. As Apple was talking so much about mobile gaming.

• 1:00:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's just, it feels like, like, I don't think Apple knew, or that probably wouldn't have happened that way.

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  It's also not particularly good for Apple. Like, it's not great for Apple if one of the bottlenecks for their platform is suddenly taking a big fee from developers that Apple doesn't see part of.

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, only Apple gets to take fees. Yeah, Apple doesn't like money changing hands if it doesn't take 30% out of that money. All right, well, we're gonna keep covering it. It sounds like Ash has a lot of reporting in the works. We'll put that on the site. It's a big deal, like, Unity canceled events. There were death threats over this.

• 1:01:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  Which, again, I will point out, is inappropriate.

• 1:01:22Alex Cranz?

  Don't do that.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  So it goes. That's, that's life on the internet for you. There's a bunch of stuff on the site that isn't Apple or the Google trial. Bose just overhauled its entire lineup of headphones. The Spectre Fold is out, which is a foldable 17-inch PC, which is a very cool moniker.

• 1:01:35Alex Cranz?

  Weird laptops.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  I love a weird laptop. And, uh, the workers of the big three automakers are on strike this week, which Andy wrote about. And a million new video games. And a million new video games. Nintendo Direct and the Sony State of Play were this week as well. On top of that, it continues to be September. Just relentlessly September. That's the name of my new album. Relentlessly September by Anya Patel. It's, uh, it's avant-garde, but I think you'll like it. We've got a bunch of events coming up. The Code Conference is at the end of this month. Here's the news. Virtual tickets for the Code Conference are now on sale. All the main tickets are sold out. So you can, if you want to watch the Code Conference, go to voxunited.com code. And you can sign up for virtual ticket and stream the thing. Mike Krieger from Artifact is coming. He's ex-CTO of Instagram, now the co-founder of Artifact, the news app.

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  David just wrote about it. They, they rolled out links. Yeah, they want to be like the, the place to share cool stuff on the internet. Cause Twitter used to be that and now Twitter's dead. And we, we love that. So, uh, Casey's gonna talk to Mike about that. And then, I don't know if you've even paid attention, a little company called Disney.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  Lots of weirdness in Disney World. And, what's Liz? Disney World.

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  Lots of weirdness in- Mickey Mouse is coming to Code.

• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  Disney, Bob Iger has been hinting that he might sell ABC, get rid of a bunch of stuff, partner with ESPN, all this stuff. Byron Allen, who is the owner of the company that owns the Weather Channel, we invited him because they're doing a bunch of AI stuff on the Weather Channel, climate change, AI, whole thing. Turns out he wants to buy ABC for $10 billion.

• 1:03:05Alex Cranz?

  It's like him and Next Star. So both of them are smaller companies. They're less known for, for

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Alex Cranz?

  being Disney. They're not Disney, but it's a big deal.

• 1:03:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Julia Wersten is going to interview Byron Allen about, well, what we thought was going to be about using AI.

• 1:03:22Alex Cranz?

  And now it's all ABC.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  Help people, local communities deal with climate change. But now we're going to talk about whether or not he's going to buy ABC. There's a bunch of other great speakers. I'm excited about it. Also, next week, we have Microsoft event and an Amazon event. Because this just does not stop. And there's a YouTube event. And a YouTube event.

• 1:03:36Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  The Made by YouTube. There's a calendar. We'll put it in the show notes. We made a calendar so you can just subscribe to it. And then you can follow the events with us. It's going to be a crazy month. We're excited about it. Okay, that's it. That's the Vergecast. We've gone far over. You're looking at me expectantly. No, we're, we're just

• 1:03:52Alex Cranz?

  We're just vibing.

• 1:03:53Nilay Patel?

  Liam is looking at me expectantly. Oh, I see. You're, you're, it's like a tetraprism of glares. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:04:04Speaker 06

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:04:35Speaker 07

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• 1:05:06Speaker 08

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.