Apple's chip bumps, big and small

Apple's new gadgets this week were pretty minor updates, so of course we talk about them for a long time. Nilay and David are joined by The Verge's Jake Kastrenakes, and the three hosts discuss the latest iPad, iPad Air, MacBook Air, and Mac Studio. All three have... a lot of thoughts. After that, they run through some more tech news, including the Digg reboot, the end of Skype, VW's cheap new EV, and more. Finally, in the lightning round, they talk about the latest from DOGE and the Trump administration, Brendan Carr's latest assaults on free speech, and a smartphone that is mostly (but not entirely) a camera. Further reading: Apple iPad Air 2025: launch, price, and specs Apple refreshes the iPad but doesn’t add Apple Intelligence Apple announces MacBook Air with M4 chip and a price cut Our first look at Apple’s sky blue MacBook Air Apple launches new Mac Studios with M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips Behold the maxed out Mac Studio. Digg is coming back, with founder Kevin Rose and Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian Discord is reportedly exploring an IPO. Nothing’s Phone 3A and 3A Pro use AI to organize all your stuff The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses Volkswagen’s cheapest EV ever is the first to use Rivian software Microsoft is shutting down Skype in favor of Teams The Verge remembers Skype Big Tech is now slightly less silent on Trump’s tariffs Trump imposes tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China Car prices expected to increase by as much as $12,000 thanks to Trump’s tariffs Best Buy and Target CEOs say prices are about to go up because of tariffs What’s an import? Trump to Cabinet: Musk has no authority to fire workers FAA staff reportedly ordered to find funding for deal with Musk’s Starlink Trump’s USCIS wants to review all prospective citizens’ social media accounts Senate votes to strip the CFPB of its power to regulate X MWC: FCC chair says U. S. will defend interests of its tech giants FCC’s Carr defends broadcast probes, slams social media ‘threat’ A camera for your cameraphone: Sony Cyber-shot QX10 and QX100 review Xiaomi 15 Ultra is a small update with a big periscope lens  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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• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Rich Cast, the flagship podcast with minor updates that do not support Apple Intelligence.

• 1:39Nilay Patel?

  If you think we can't make an hour and a half show about the new iPad Air, I don't know what show you think you're listening to right now. Because we're going to do it. We're going to find a way.

• 1:50David Pierce?

  I'm ready.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  It's going to be emotional, some winding road. Some of you will cry. I think some of you will cheer. It's up to you to decide who you are.

• 1:58David Pierce?

  But you have to choose right now, before we start.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  It's half of the show. You're going to laugh, or you're going to cry. What kind of, what kind of person you be? I'm your friend, Neil, I David Pierce is here.

• 2:06David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  Jake Kastrenakes is here.

• 2:09Speaker 06

  Hey, good to be here. In the actually very, very real control room, as all of our video viewers can tell.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what? Did you pick this background? What?

• 2:18Speaker 06

  I don't want to give away the charade here, but this might be a controllable screen behind.

• 2:24David Pierce?

  I love this.

• 2:25Speaker 06

  This might not be real.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  Can I tell you something? So one of the first times I ever did a like cable TV hit, and you guys have both done this, you know how they work. What, what, what happens is they usher you into a teeny tiny room with a screen behind you and a camera and a light in front of you. And it is either zero or 700 degrees in that room, depending on the day. And then you sit there and you do your thing and you go home. To discover that I was not sitting in front of a window with like the beautiful New York City skyline behind me was like genuinely upsetting. The first time this ever happened to me. And I have, I have had angry feelings about virtual backgrounds ever since.

• 3:00Speaker 06

  Listen, you guys, next week, we're going to Times Square. We're recording this thing live. All of the backgrounds will be real.

• 3:06David Pierce?

  This is what I'm saying.

• 3:07Speaker 06

  Elmo will come and harass us.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna do TRL live, like in the 90s. The first time I ever did a cable news, you're kind of describing CNN, I'm guessing, because that was.

• 3:15David Pierce?

  It was CNN, in fact, yeah.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  Because the tiny hot room, that's very much CNN.

• 3:20David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  I was, I was surprised, not by the fact it was a green screen, which David, I truly.

• 3:26David Pierce?

  What? I knew green screens existed, but that one. These are fancy studios, they should have windows.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  You walk through the fancy studio where all the people are working. Because the anchors, like, you know, their shows look over the fancy studio, a lot of people working. And you're like, oh, my God, I did, I may, I'm going to be on cable news, which over time fades in terms of excitement. And then you are led into this like hot windowless room where no one else is there and you can't see them. And that was a thing that blew my mind.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  Jake is sitting in some sort of, you know, wireless network command center. That's what that looks like to me.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  And Nilay, by the way, recorded all of this dialogue hours ago. I'm just responding to it.

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  Um, the first time I went and visited AT&T's Network Operations Center, the NOC, which is here in New York, they have one in New York. Uh, I will never forget this. It's just a room of charts and graphs. I don't know why they need a command center. Like, it was never actually made clear to me why they needed to build like NASA Mission Control for the wireless network, but they have it. It's cool. I think it's there for like partners to like look at stuff like they need a place that's like not a server rack, you know? Uh, but I will never forget. One of the engineers just pointed to this huge chunk of traffic on the graph and was like, that's porn.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  And it was just like, oh yeah, that's, you're probably, you're probably right.

• 4:52David Pierce?

  That's awesome.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  So Jake, if you could just wheel around and show us where the porn is on the screen behind you there.

• 4:57David Pierce?

  Uh, somewhere over here, I think.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  All right. We got a lot to talk about today, not just Jake's wall of porn. Uh, there's new Apple products. There's a new iPad Air. There's a new MacBook Air. There's a new Mac Studio, which is very compelling. I gotta say, I have a lot to say about the new Mac Studio. Uh, then we got like two lightning rounds. Uh, Dig is back. David reported on the 15th return of Dig. And then of course, we're gonna end by just talking shit about Brendan Carr. That's what we do here on the Verchast. I guess it's gonna be a good one.

• 5:28David Pierce?

  I will say it is, it's a real bummer how popular that segment has become. And I've gotten a bunch of people who are like, please never kill Brendan Carr as a dummy because it's great. And I keep being like, look, I would love to stop doing Brendan Carr as a dummy, but it requires a certain thing that is not going to happen, which is Brendan Carr ceasing to be a dummy. So this, this segment will be alive and well for a very long time, I suspect.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  We're at the point where we're getting fine-grained criticism of the name of the segment. We'll come to, I'll explain. Can I start with a gadget reveal, though? One of the silliest gadgets I've ever purchased in my entire life. So we were on vacation, which many people conspiratorially believed meant that I was either cloning my body or dead. Um,

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  Tunes. So we're on vacation. We go to the beach. I have a crap underwater camera that I bought a million years ago. That is now quite fun to take because I can just like give it to the six year old and she like have it at the beach and it won't ever break in. It takes horrible photos. It's just a real thing. And then you see other people have like the iPhone cases. You know, and like, that's not great either because they get foggy and cloudy and whatever. So I was like, I'm going to buy a new underwater camera. And I went and I looked and the one that everybody buys is the Olympus TG six or the TG seven now, which is basically the same thing with the USB C port. Doesn't matter. It's like orange. It looks cool. And then you look at the photos like this is not actually better than my iPhone. I've now come all the way back around to I'm going to buy this horrible case for my iPhone. And then I thought to myself, what if I order from Japan Sony's underwater case from RX one hundred?

• 6:54Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is just one of the silliest goddamn things in the entire world. Uh, if you buy it in the States, it's like $350. So you buy it on eBay from Japan. It's like $200. I don't understand how that works at all.

• 7:06Speaker 06

  Wait, you're, you're saying this is your RX one hundred?

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, it's the RX.

• 7:10Speaker 06

  Isn't it a tiny point and shoot?

• 7:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the RX one hundred is a tiny point and shoot. I'm sorry if you're listening to this.

• 7:14Speaker 06

  This is the size of your camera.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  A giant plastic bubble that goes, I can't even figure out how to open it right now. It's basically, you can hear all the slots. It, the camera fits into this giant plastic bubble. Here's the best part about it.

• 7:27Speaker 06

  This looks legit. This looks like it would survive like, you know, depths.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  It's for scuba divers. So the RX one hundred to control it, you turn the ring around the lens. If you're familiar with your RX one hundred, like that's how you change the aperture. Uh, so you gotta do that. So it came with a gear, like a rubber gear that you slip around the front of the RX one hundred. And then that rubber gear is geared to a big knob on the side.

• 7:52Speaker 06

  Oh, wow. Incredible.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  Easily the best gadget I've bought in a hundred years. I've been taking pictures in the house, which is not underwater. And then this big silly white thing on the front is the flash diffuser. So you can pop up the flash in RX one hundred and take flash photos underwater. So I've been taking flash photos.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  Is flash useful underwater? Do you get the same like party effect?

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  Once you like fall down the rabbit hole of like, I'm going to take photos underwater, you get into like it. It is as gadgety and nerdy and like supportive a space as any hobby, you know? Uh, I just wanted to have a camera that can get wet at the pool. So. I don't think I don't think I'll need the flash, you know, but it is easily one of the funniest gadgets I've ever purchased.

• 8:35David Pierce?

  I feel like the thing that that reminds me of is like, like really, really knockoff James Bond gadgets.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:42David Pierce?

  Like if James Bond had no budget because of tariffs, like all of a sudden he's getting these like large plastic cameras, but that thing is secretly like a gun and a, and a voice recorder in addition to being a way to take underwater photos. I'm very into this thing.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  The, I mean, it's just the fact that it was, first of all, it showed up, it's from Japan, so all the instructions are in Japanese.

• 9:04David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  And like, it's, it's basically just like a series of rubber gaskets and then affordances to turn the knobs and buttons on the RX 100. So there's, there's a wheel on the back and then there's a mod dial on top. And so you have to like line everything up so that this knob right here can gear itself to turn the mode wheel on top of the camera. And I'm just like looking at these like IKEA pictures and all this Japanese text. And I was like, I'm a pretty smart guy.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to horsepower my way through this. And eventually I gave up and I downloaded the manual in English from the internet.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  So, but it's, I had a lot of fun with it and it was sitting on this desk when I started recording and I was like, you know what, you know what the show needs before we do Brendan Carr? This needs an honest to goodness ridiculous gadget and there's nothing I love more than a ridiculous Sony gadget.

• 9:52David Pierce?

  True.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  By the way, there are many third party cases that are vastly cheaper. There are many third party cases vastly more expensive. This one was just, I Googled it on eBay and I was like, I, I kind of want to buy a silly gadget from Japan today. So I did.

• 10:06David Pierce?

  Anything that attaches to a button to move that button somewhere else and turn it into a wheel that presses the button, like you are the verge now. Welcome, you've done it.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  It's so good.

• 10:17David Pierce?

  This is what we do here.

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's funny because we don't have another beach vacation planned. It's like, I don't even know what I'm going to use.

• 10:23David Pierce?

  You need to find reasons to get underwater. It's just going to be in the bathtub on like a Wednesday.

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  It's like cold in New York. Like I'm not getting a pool anytime soon.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, I encourage you to send in your silly gadget purchases because I think we all need that to keep us grounded as a community during these times. Speaking of silly gadgets, let's talk about all the new Apple stuff. Tim Cook teased, you know, there's gonna be an Air and then they started with the iPad Air, which I both understand and B, I think, deflated everything that came after it. David, you, you wrote the story. Try.

• 11:00David Pierce?

  So we kind of knew there were going to be iPads. I think my operating assumption was that we were going to get a base iPad refresh because that thing hasn't been updated since I think the fall of 2022.

• 11:14Nilay Patel?

  We did.

• 11:15David Pierce?

  We did, and we'll get to that. But my, what my point is, my assumption was, okay, there's like, there, there was a lot of smoke around there being an Apple announcement this week. And I was like, I said to Jake, I was like, my, my betting thesis is it's going to be the base iPad. Feels like it's time. And then Tim Cook does this thing and we're like, okay, maybe it's, maybe it's the MacBook Air. Because again, the iPad Air got revved less than 12 months ago. Like the, the, this iPad Air that I have right here on my desk is less than a year old. And so I was like, well, why on earth would there be a new iPad Air? And yet, lo and behold, there's a new iPad Air. So Apple announced, I would say with, with interest and excitement on iPad Air and then tried to absolutely bury out of existence that it was also updating the base iPad.

• 12:00David Pierce?

  And we should talk about that because I think it's really fascinating. But the, the, the story of this iPad Air is precisely one thing. It's that it now has an M3 chip instead of an M2 chip. That's it.

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  Actually, I think the story is ever so slightly different. And I mean, the Air, this new Air has Apple Intelligence, right? They've added it to that. It's not in the base model.

• 12:21David Pierce?

  Right. Which is funny because before these were announced, David and I were messaging each other on Slack and we're like, they've got to just put Apple Intelligence on this and call it a day. It's the only thing, only thing to do here. And it's the only thing they didn't do. That's also the only thing Apple has been doing with its gadgets for the last 12 months.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  That's what I mean. And I think they know the, the base is like a huge volume seller. Like they're just selling base model iPads.

• 12:41David Pierce?

  And so is the Air, I think. Like, I think pretty clearly the Air is a hit. I keep telling people not to buy it, but it seems to still be one a lot of people land on.

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  And I just think it's, I think we're at the point with Apple Intelligence in particular where the, you know, the bloom is just off that rose. Like, it just doesn't matter to people. And so like,

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  Adding Apple Intelligence to any Apple gadget right now is really just a conversation about how much RAM it has. And I think they just didn't want to put enough RAM in the base model iPad.

• 13:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's basically right. And there's, there's some weirdness happening where like, there has been a pretty clean cutoff in terms of chips that can get Apple Intelligence, but now Apple is starting to roll some of those features, but not all of them back to like the iPhone 15 line. And so it's like, this line is just getting blurry in a way that I find very confusing. But also, I think you're right that the overwhelming fact is no one cares. Apple, Apple cares a great deal about you caring about Apple Intelligence, and it just isn't working.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  The top comment on our news story, which was, you know, Apple announced a new iPad, but doesn't have Apple Intelligence. Top comment was, no, Apple Intelligence, sounds like an upgrade. Or something to that effect. It's like, yeah, like, like, this is not, it's a, it's an annoying little button that gets in the way right now. The extra RAM seems great.

• 14:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, we talked about Alexa for ages last week. My feeling is that Apple Intelligence will not be a thing that anyone understands until the new Siri comes out.

• 14:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  Expressed as a bunch of weird text tools and genmoji, who cares? I can talk to Siri like it's actually intelligent. That's the thing. And I think that's why they added the color and the animation to the existing Siri, but it doesn't do it. I think they should have held off on that, actually.

• 14:28David Pierce?

  I agree. I mean, and I think the, the response to the Alexa stuff from last week has been really interesting because on the one hand, again, whether Amazon will actually deliver any of the product it claims to have made, TBD, all the signs are bad for how that is going for Amazon. But they're saying the right things about what they're trying to do, right? And they've like, announced the thing. And like, all of the people in the Apple universe that I know have spent this week being like, holy God, is Siri far behind? Like, further behind than anybody does. At least it was like, okay, this is actually really hard. And if you have like a mainstream product and use case, just flipping that to LLM is tricky. And then Google has done it. Amazon

• 15:12David Pierce?

  Has done it. Siri sucks. And there was some reporting this week from Mark German at Bloomberg saying that it's possible that the better Siri is actually like two years away. Like we're it's not close. And I think it this this thing Apple is trying to do just gets uglier. Because of your exact point, Apple is like hanging up billboards being like Apple intelligence. And people like what that just means bad summaries of my text messages right now that everyone should turn off like. It's it's actually a problem.

• 15:41Speaker 06

  Every single one of their commercials, they're like aggressively saying like it comes with Apple intelligence. And it's as though this is the thing that people are excited about. And it's funny that they're getting excited about buzzwords, which is like not a very Apple like thing to do traditionally. Particularly when they haven't delivered.

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's also when chat GPT horrible name that no one can pronounce.

• 16:03Speaker 06

  If yeah, if they had just said like iPhone now with chat GPT, which it is, I think people have been like, hmm.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  That would have been way more compelling.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 16:11David Pierce?

  We knew Siri and now it just goes straight to chat GPT would have worked for people.

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  Apple one now includes, you know, two hours of advanced voice mode and chat GPT would have been fine. I like sure. But it's it's a bad brand like I I know so many people who call it chat GPT. And it's like, we're just like past the point of correcting your friends, you know, like whatever. It's fine.

• 16:33David Pierce?

  You just kind of say it.

• 16:34Nilay Patel?

  We all know what we're talking about here, right? Like, yeah, you didn't buy it on Canal Street like it's fine.

• 16:39David Pierce?

  It's like it's like singing a Michael Jackson song. You just like try to say the syllables kind of right and really fast and you just get through it. It's fine.

• 16:45Nilay Patel?

  And then Rihanna samples it years later.

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  The real ones know exactly what I'm talking about. But the Apple intelligence you have now, like you light up an iPhone. It's like, it's not in your face.

• 16:55David Pierce?

  No.

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  But chat GPT is a bad brand that people are using because it's useful. And like advanced voice mode is very compelling no matter what, like you don't need to think about what's happening. You're like, oh, I can just talk to this thing. And if they just given that to Siri. I think it would have been fine. I think you would have ended up in weird spots where people tried to jailbreak it or you had privacy issues or Kevin Bruce fell in love with it.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  Siri tried to bang me again, Kevin. I don't want to give the New York Times headlines. It's right there for you. That should be a front page story.

• 17:25David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  But they haven't done any of that stuff. Anyway, I just think it's really fascinating that the base model iPad, which is just the thing that sells like forever and ever sells, doesn't have this feature because they don't need it. Because the thing is like a Disney plus machine, you know, like for so many people or it's deployed in enterprise and the enterprises don't want Apple intelligence. Or it's in schools and they don't want like whatever that base model iPad represents is not improved by Apple intelligence. And I think that says something very important.

• 17:53David Pierce?

  Well, and, and what it super clearly communicates is that however, Apple wants to feel about Apple intelligence, it knows for absolute certain that it is not a thing it can raise the price for. Right. Because if you're, if you're Apple, you, it's the, the base iPad now has the A16 chip, which is a two chip bump from before, which is great, but is still below the technical requirements to do what you need with Apple intelligence. And they could have added that chip, but then it would have made the thing more expensive. And for A, for Apple, I think having a $349 iPad is actually really important for a bunch of reasons.

• 18:35David Pierce?

  But also I think this iPad now has Apple intelligence and is $50 more expensive is not a winning sentence. And I think Apple knows that very, very clearly.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I threatened you with 90 minutes on inconsequential iPad bumps. Do you feel it? Do you feel it? Is it coming?

• 18:52David Pierce?

  Can I speak to some slightly also inconsequential iPad Air things that went a little under the radar? So they added the function row keys to the magic keyboard for the iPad Air, not inconsequential.

• 19:08David Pierce?

  That's the biggest upgrade here by a mile.

• 19:10Speaker 06

  And they dropped the price on those by 30 bucks each. They're still crazy expensive. It's still like 250 or 300 bucks or something insane.

• 19:18David Pierce?

  They went from most expensive keyboard ever to most expensive keyboard ever minus $30.

• 19:22Speaker 06

  You can still like buy another iPad for the price of a Magic Keyboard, which actually would kind of rule. But the function keys are great.

• 19:33David Pierce?

  Yes, yes.

• 19:33Speaker 06

  That's an important improvement. The iPad Air feels like it's getting ever so slightly closer to being the tablet version of the MacBook Air. Like, you're supposed to spend roughly $1,000 on it. You buy the 13-inch version, you spend 300 bucks or whatever on the Magic Keyboard and the stylus. And, you know, you don't get the fanciest stuff. You don't get the high refresh rate display.

• 19:57Speaker 06

  But you haven't spent all of your money on this thing. It gets most of the stuff done that you needed to get done. It's not exciting in that way. I think it's really interesting. I was just looking over David's, like, recent iPad reviews. The Air is the only iPad that David says not to get.

• 20:15David Pierce?

  And it's the one everybody buys.

• 20:16Speaker 06

  It's right in the middle. It's really tough.

• 20:19David Pierce?

  The Air has at times gotten it right. And I think they're like, the thing it's trying to do is the right thing, right? Because like, the iPad Pro is incredible and three times what anybody needs, both in price and in performance, right? Like, it's massive, massive overkill. The thing the iPad Air has to do is convince you that you need more than the base iPad. And I think that case from Apple, more for software reasons than for anything else, has gotten weaker over time. And I think what Apple will tell you is that the thing that makes people step up is either the accessories, which it clearly gates to this device because, oh, I want a keyboard so I can send email. Now I have to get the Air because that's how I get the good keyboard attachment. Or same with the pencil, right?

• 21:03David Pierce?

  Like, those things are gated not for technical reasons, but because Apple is trying to get you to upgrade. Like, that's just real.

• 21:11David Pierce?

  Or because people want the extra performance because they're doing the kinds of creative tasks that Apple always shows you on stage, right? It's like... If you're using Final Cut Pro and Logic on your iPad, yes, you should get an Air and not a base iPad. I cannot prove this, but I'm willing to bet that that is a teeny tiny sliver of iPad people. And, and to me, the, the thing that I find myself saying a lot, and I, I wrote this, I recently updated our iPad buying guide and was basically like, there are two types of iPad users. There are people who want to just like, send emails and browse the web and do the crossword puzzle and like, look at photos, right? That is like, they're sort of the basic iPad tasks.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  You've described grandparents.

• 21:54David Pierce?

  Sure. Yeah. There are a lot of those out there and a lot of them have iPads. I can tell you confidently. And then there are the people who are like, I want a creative machine, right? And that's where like, the pencil is really useful, whether you're drawing or you're editing videos or whatever. But it is like, you are doing hardcore creative tasks and that's when you show up. And I think many, many, many people have convinced themselves that they are the second kind of iPad user, when in reality, they are actually the first kind of iPad user.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  You're, you're just describing Apple as a community. People who are like, what I do is 3D graphics. And you're like, what you do is emails.

• 22:30David Pierce?

  Right. What you do is watch Netflix. And like, that's fine. And the $349 iPad is a kick ass Netflix machine and it's going to be an even better one now.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't mean to say that pejoratively because we're going to talk about the Mac Studio in a minute. And I'm basically convincing myself to buy a Mac Studio and my job is 1,000% emails.

• 22:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I'm just describing myself.

• 22:51David Pierce?

  Oh, same.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  We can all be that person together. I'm just.

• 22:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Every now and again, I look at the Photoshop icon on my computer.

• 22:58David Pierce?

  Right.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  Huh? Does that count?

• 22:59David Pierce?

  Right. And, and Apple.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  I need, I need 30 GPUs.

• 23:05David Pierce?

  And Jake, I think to your point about the MacBook Air, I think one of the things that has worked really well for Apple is upselling on that with your laptop or your desktop or whatever. Because that like, by definition, needs to be your most powerful machine. So if you're ever going to overkill on something, it should be a Mac. And on the iPad, I think the thing to do is actually just be honest with yourself about like, what is this thing really for in my life? And to me, it's. Been a while since the air has made a case above and beyond what most people are actually going to do on their iPad.

• 23:35Speaker 06

  If you could do high frame rate subway surfers, that would be a game changer, but you gotta upgrade to the pro for that.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  All right. I said we were going to talk about the iPad Air for 90 minutes as a joke and it is just threatening to become real. We have to move on to actual products that are worth talking about. Sorry to the iPad team, you know, change the software, maybe. You know, allow, allow real multitasking. I'll, I'll give you, I'll give you three episodes of the show if you allow real multitasking.

• 24:00David Pierce?

  Can I just throw a trivia question at both of you before we move on?

• 24:03Nilay Patel?

  Let it run Mac OS. The whole verge for a month will be about the new iPad.

• 24:07David Pierce?

  Yes, 100%. How long would you guys think the like average lifespan of an iPad is? Like if I, if I'm shopping for this one, how old is my current iPad?

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  It, it's gotta be over five. That's my, my heartfelt belief.

• 24:22David Pierce?

  Jake, what do you think?

• 24:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like seven years.

• 24:25David Pierce?

  Okay. Almost every number I've seen, this is a hard thing to measure, but almost every number I've seen says somewhere between five and seven years.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:32David Pierce?

  Which is interesting, right? Because then it's like, okay, if you bought, if you bought something in 2020, you bought the fourth gen iPad Air in like a COVID haze, which had an A14 chip and it had Touch ID, that thing is still getting software updates. I, I don't know that there's anything about these new devices that is like so vastly better that you need to go get it right now. Which is both the incredible success of the iPad and also a very weird thing about these devices like.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  To Apple's credit, this has been their business for a long time, right? They, they are committed to their products.

• 25:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  So they're just like, we're just gonna make another one on a cadence and they're gonna last a long time. And their money now is not in selling the hardware, it's in taking a cut of every button that you push in our operating systems. Right? It's in the App Store fees, it's in Apple One service fees, it's sending you to ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence and taking a cut of that subscription if you buy it. Like all of that is their money. It's giving Apple TV plus away for free if you merely blink at a number of partners. And that's all their money. And so I think the hardware lasting a long time is actually, you can complain a lot about that business model, the services business model. Cause it feels like using the devices is increasingly monetized. But on the other end of it is the devices last a long time and they give them software updates for a long time.

• 25:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Could they be, does that model suggest the devices could be cheaper?

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  It sure does, but Apple's never gonna make the device cheap.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  No, but, but I do think you're right. And I think the more I look at these announcements, and I think there's some truth to this with the Macs too. Like, Apple is a software company in a very real way. Like, Apple is more interested in just putting a thing in your hands that you will use software on. Than it is on, like, reinventing its hardware all the time. And that's fine.

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's been true. We, we, we should talk about the air because I actually did lower prices in there and that was intended, once again, to be a segue away from these inconsequential. But Apple's software company has been true since the days of Steve Jobs. He was very fond, I think it's Alan Kay, famous computer scientist from back in the day. The, his quote was, if people who are really serious about software build their own hardware. And that's like a motivating Steve Jobs quote, like he talked about from the beginning. So I think that's still there and real for Apple. It's now expressed all the way into like, they design their own modems for the iPhone. Like, they're very serious about building their own hardware in a very different kind of way.

• 26:58David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  But it's the services component of that, where they don't care if you have the device for 10 years. As long as you are paying that iCloud storage fee for each and every one of those 10 years. And I, that has a lot of effects. Like, it changes your relationship to the device. It changes what Apple tries to sell you. It changes what applications get built and deployed on those devices. It changes, you know, like free to play games exist because of this model and Apple has to not, Apple has to studiously avoid pointing out that a huge portion of its revenue comes from like five Candy Crush whales.

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, yeah, there's all these weird outcomes there, but one of them that's very concrete is, oh, iPads last for 100 years. Like, that's fine.

• 27:40Speaker 06

  Which in a vacuum is awesome.

• 27:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. MacBook Air. They did lower the price, which is shocking in the context of tariffs because we just assume prices will go up, but Apple actually lowered price on the air. They added the sky blue color, which is very pale. It's very beautiful, but it's very pale.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  I'm kind of into it. I didn't like it. I have a, I have a blue iPad mini from last year that I didn't really like, but there's something about the like, larger size of it and the sort of open screen on a table that I'm actually kind of into in the blue.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it looks, it looks good in the videos we've made.

• 28:09Speaker 06

  And space gray is dead now.

• 28:12Nilay Patel?

  Space gray, which was not a color. Space gray was always a concept. It was 15, it was 15 different colors over the years.

• 28:18Speaker 06

  Is that, I guess that is true.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  It was never like a pantone color. Like Apple would be like, I don't know. This is like the gray. We can make the aluminum today. Space gray it is.

• 28:25Speaker 06

  It's the dark one.

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. So it's gone, but hopefully it will come back. Or a black will come back. That would be tight. The 13 inch, $9.99, the 15 inch, $11.99, so cheaper. And then they revved up. So this is very much just a spec bump, but I think it's a pretty good spec bump, especially at a lower price.

• 28:44Speaker 06

  Well, especially they, they bumped the base RAM last year mid-cycle. And so now

• 28:50Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's your Apple intelligence.

• 28:52Speaker 06

  Hey, you know what? I, I've totally changed my tune. Apple intelligence is the greatest thing that's happened to mankind. Right. But for, for a grand, you now get a, I think a very serviceable MacBook. That's great. That, that's like a huge upgrade, actually, even though this is otherwise pretty quiet.

• 29:09David Pierce?

  What if the legacy of the whole AI craze is just that Chrome runs better on everybody's computers because we all got more RAM?

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that has been the legacy of virtually every major hardware revision is like, oh, Chrome will now eat these resources as well. But no, it's true. You buy a new MacBook, you turn off Apple intelligence, you got yourself a 16 gig RAM upgrade for no money. It's like amazing. You turn it on and maybe that AI model starts to eat some of that RAM, which is, that's the trade off, right?

• 29:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, we think, nobody's actually sure what Apple intelligence can do.

• 29:44Speaker 06

  We have to figure out.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  It just counts gigabytes of RAM.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  We're told that it is running on the computer, changing all of the things we write to be smarter.

• 29:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it revved the webcam to match the MacBook Pro's webcam. I'm, I, I don't know, but I feel like Apple keeps promising us better webcams and they're all still kind of bad.

• 30:06David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's a webcam, like it's fine. I, I actually think somewhat to Apple's credit, it has hit a point where its webcams are fine.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:15David Pierce?

  They're fine. They were not fine for a very long time, but they're fine now.

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  So that's the rev of the Air, which is interesting. And I think a great computer. I think for $9.99, it's very hard to compete with a MacBook Air as it is currently configured and presented. It, but it's also true that we were like at MWC this week and like, we saw a giant, like tri-fold laptops. We, the framework laptops were out, like there's all kinds of, there's all kinds of action in the laptop space. And it, it's all still revolving around a thousand dollar MacBook Air that is deeply hard to compete with.

• 30:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Nilay Patel?

  What do we think is going on there? Like I see, it was like Lenovo one, like they demoed a giant calculator, like a huge portrait.

• 30:56Speaker 06

  Oh my God, it's incredible.

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  Screen with a big calculator on it. I love this thing. Like, I mean, I'm here with a giant underwater camera bubble. Like, give me a gadget, right?

• 31:03Speaker 06

  Lenovo now has two different versions of basically this exact same laptop where they're like, what if the screen was twice as much screen? And one, the screen just like rolls out from inside the laptop.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 06

  That was like a month ago. And now they're like, wait a second, the screen's always out. It just folds back. So one, it's always outside. One, it's inside. It doesn't matter. Either way, it's still just a giant, super tall screen. And it looks just genuinely utterly insane to like have this little thing in front of you that you type on with a enormous screen. But it also looks amazing and I want it more than anything.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  So Lenovo, I believe.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Has been the like foremost proponent of tent mode for laptops.

• 31:52Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  For years now, like a full decade, Lenovo is like, look, the way you want to use a computer is in tent mode. Remember the yogas, the foldable? The two in one tablets they're making, like the service competitors? If you will recall, like the, the thing that they wanted you to do with a Lenovo Yoga was tent mode.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  It was so flippy. I loved it.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  It was so flippy. And so this new concept that Jake is talking about, you can fold it back and put it in tent mode. So you have a, what looks like a laptop, but then the screen is folded back over at an angle. So it's a tent and someone sitting across from you on a table can see what's on that screen. I love, I love the brain that whoever you are, like show yourself, I want to hug you. That thought, okay, here's how people should use laptops with other people.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I need you to do. I need you to sit across from me while I look at my laptop, but then I'm going to fold the screen back over in tent mode. And then you will look at this screen while I look at this screen and we're going to make eye contact.

• 32:51Speaker 06

  The, uh, I saw you, their product guy told Antonio on our team. He said that the thing they compromised on was that they wanted to put an entire smartphone screen to replace the trackpad. But, uh, that was too far.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Oh, that was too, yeah, that's just outlandish. They couldn't make that happen. A screen.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  If you're out there regularly using tent mode, it, it, you know, maybe you've got a 10 year old Lenovo Yoga. Like, well, whoever you are, if you're out there and you are either regularly using tent mode or you heard me describe this and you were like thinking, I gotta, I gotta get a laptop that can tent. Let us know. Yeah. The, the email address is open. The, the phone lines are, are always ringing.

• 33:35Speaker 06

  This is the funny thing about this space to me. Like I.

• 33:39David Pierce?

  Don't want more innovation in laptops.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  Which is part of my question, right?

• 33:43David Pierce?

  Maybe an insane thing to say, but, but I think the thing I've come around to is like, I think laptops are just to solve the problem. Like, I think we've, because we've been at this for a while and there have been a lot of ideas. There was this time, I think it was, it was either Acer or Asus, I think it was Acer flipped the trackpad and the keyboard. Do you remember this? When they had, they made a thing where the-

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  Keyboard in the front club. We used, we did, this was our recurring segment on the show.

• 34:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was a whole thing.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  Would be like, keyboard in the front club, here's another one of these.

• 34:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was like, there was a moment-

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  That was the closest to success this concept has ever gotten.

• 34:12David Pierce?

  And then everything got really flippy and then every, the razor was like, what if they folded out? And Lenovo was like, what if it rises up out of nowhere? And, and everybody is like, no, actually, what if the battery lasted longer? Like, what if it was just laptop, but battery? And then like, and I think that's fine. Like, we're, we're what? We're 30 years into laptops now? Like, I think, I think we can look at those and be like, okay, this is, we know what this thing is supposed to be. Let's leave it alone and go do something else. And where I am with tablets is like, I just don't think we're there yet. So I push harder on that because I'm like, we can't, we have not finished what this thing is supposed to be. But with laptops, I'm like, I think the MacBook Air is probably my longest held, like, default recommendation.

• 34:54David Pierce?

  That is like, if you just want a laptop and I don't want to have any more questions for you, I'm going to tell you to buy a MacBook Air. And that's been true for 10 years. I can't think of any other device.

• 35:02Nilay Patel?

  I can't say you're saying that with affection or disdain. Like, if you want to get the fuck out of my face, buy a MacBook Air.

• 35:08David Pierce?

  I have a MacBook Air that I love to pieces. Like, it's, it's, it's affection, like, and it has been, I think it's, it's frankly kind of damning of the rest of the PC industry that nobody else has figured out that what people actually want is a laptop that is like light and thin and lasts a really long time.

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  No, wait, to be, to be fair, they have, they just have horrible branding problems. Right? Like, what is the default Windows laptop that competes for the MacBook Air is a rich topic of discussion.

• 35:32David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  And the problem is-

• 35:33David Pierce?

  It's the Dell XPS 13, which they killed.

• 35:35Nilay Patel?

  Which is gone, right? They just won't like stick to a brand that makes sense. Now they're like, here's what it's called. It's called the Double Dell Pro and it comes with a side of fries. You know, I don't- Want that. Like, I don't understand what this is. You know, HP had a line of computers that we thought would be the, they changed the logo and they're like, now that's gone. And Apple, to his credit, radically changes the product over time, but it does just slowly iterate the products in the same names. And you can argue about whether there's too many products or too, whatever. But like, they've just built brand equity in the name, so much so that Johnny and I have tried to kill the MacBook Air and he couldn't. Right? If you will recall.

• 36:10David Pierce?

  Because and again, they tried to make huge changes to how a laptop works and it sucked. They're like, what if your laptop didn't have any ports and the keyboard was bad so that we can make it thinner? And everybody said, no, thank you. Like, we just figured it out. We know what this thing is supposed to be.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  Again, this, this was kind of my question about all this. For a thousand dollars, a 13 inch MacBook Air, it, it seems virtually impossible to compete with unless you need Windows. Unless, unless there's something driving you to use Windows and then you have a huge menu of options. But there's not like all, even like, should Apple put a touchscreen on this thing? It's like, I, yes, I think, I think they should merge iPadOS and macOS and they won't. They're just not going to. Uh, they're going to sell you a weird iPad Air and they're going to sell you a MacBook Air and that's fine. And I, there's something about this one in particular where they, they revved it a little and they brought the price down and they added some RAM, which I think you should turn off Apple Intelligence and take advantage of that. It just makes this MacBook Air like a particularly

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  strong expression of it, of Apple's dominance of this particular price point. I think it's very hard to compete at this price point with, with this new Air.

• 37:17David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's as a, as a thousand dollar computer, it's about as compelling as I think is possible to do at this moment in time.

• 37:24Nilay Patel?

  And that's why I think as a $2,200 computer, the new M3 Mac Studio is the one I'm going to buy for no reason whatsoever. This thing is a deal.

• 37:34David Pierce?

  I'm willing to have this conversation with you, but only if you can explain to me what the hell is going on with the chips in the new Mac Studios.

• 37:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they can make an M4 Ultra. I think that's what's going on with the chips. The new, the new, right? Like, I think the way, the way these chips work early, and I think their names are getting a little confusing.

• 37:53David Pierce?

  Just a little. Yeah.

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because I what's what's the difference between M1 Pro and M1 Max and M1 Ultra like are now M4 M3 like? What they are really, what they really mean is we have fused two or four chips together. And so there's something there that is too confusing for people to understand because the way that's expressed is in core counts. To like, I will configure an M3 Ultra Mac Studio. And your choices are 28 core CPU, 60 core GPU, 32 core neural engine, or 32 core CPU, 80 core GPU, 32 core neural engine. And you're just like, I don't know what any of that means. That it's just like a meaningless set of numbers. Obviously, one is more than the other.

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  But then you step back and you're like, the cheaper model is the M4 Max, which has a 14 core CPU and a 32 core GPU. And a 16 core neural engine. You're like, oh, is this just half? But it's a totally different chip family.

• 38:51David Pierce?

  So I stopped listening so I'm really sorry.

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  It's like, yeah, none of this makes sense anymore. They should change these names. Because what you have is a chip family and you're taking the core chip. And then you're literally fusing another one onto it, or then or you're fusing two, three more onto it. And I don't think that tracks. That's not how people think of anything. No. Like, what are the core capabilities of a single chip in the new M line versus three of the old one? Yeah, that's literally no one outside of Apple's chip team thinks this way.

• 39:24David Pierce?

  It also like, we've, we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the sort of internal math of Apple's naming system. And the fact that, the fact that Ultra is more than Max. Got it. Good on that. But the fact that Ultra is so much more than Max, that Ultra on the last gen outweighs Max on this gen. So that a M3 Ultra is more than an M4 Max. Complicated. I don't know.

• 39:44Nilay Patel?

  I just tuned you out too. Okay, here's what I, here's what I'm saying to you. As, as, as everyone knows, uh, everyone in America is aware, I'm thinking about buying a new computer.

• 39:58David Pierce?

  As was announced to you cores, are you in the market?

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  Breaking news across every cable news station. I have often considered buying a new computer.

• 40:08David Pierce?

  I think that was on 60 Minutes this weekend, right?

• 40:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they did. They did that great John Oliver segment and then I sat down and was like, I don't know, you guys, it's a 2017 iMac. The fan runs all the time. What do you guys think? So I've been, I've been thinking about it. I, I, I've solved a monitor problem, which is I'm going to buy a cheap monitor while I wait for the new studio display. And in the meantime, I might break one or more iMacs trying to convert it into a monitor.

• 40:32David Pierce?

  We got a couple of emails from people with, uh, non-scary sounding solutions to that. By the way, we're going to have to, we have some stuff to try.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, well, that, that's a whole other show. So I'm like, I'm going to buy this new Mac Mini. So you open the configurator and what's the first thing you're going to do? You're going to, you're going to upgrade to the M4 Pro because obviously my Photoshop needs are intense.

• 40:52David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 40:54David Pierce?

  It's a lot of filters.

• 40:55Nilay Patel?

  I, I,

• 40:56David Pierce?

  Photoshop and Patel, they call you.

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  I take screenshots of David and I draw mustaches on his face every night. Um, and I need 20 GPU cores to do that. Sure. So then you're like, I'm, I'll stick with a base M4 Pro. I'm not going to upgrade for $200 the next step up. That's too much. But you're like, I can't sit here with 24 gigs of RAM. So I'm going to spend $400 on 48 gigs of RAM because 36 is not offered for some bananas reason. And then you can't, 512 gigs of storage is not acceptable. So you have to go to at least a terabyte. And then I'm not going to sit here with a gigabit ethernet port. I'm going to get 10 gigs of ethernet. My home network is 2.5, right? So like, at the very least, I need that. And then one day I'm going to get one of those crazy fiber connections. I gotta be ready for the future.

• 41:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm at $2,100, $2,099. I've configured a Mac Mini to $2,100 instantly.

• 41:51David Pierce?

  Checking really quick, what was your starting budget?

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the starting budget for the Mac Mini is $599. So you can like blink at the Mac Mini configurator and get it to be very expensive. Or you can open the Mac Studio page and the base model Mac Studio is $2,000. You're like, it already has 36 gigs of RAM. I'll upgrade to a terabyte of storage. It already has a 10, 10 gigabit ethernet card. I don't need to upgrade this processor because I don't know what any of these numbers mean. $2,200.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think this is an obvious choice. And I think America needs to know. If the, I don't know. Look, CBS is in a lot of trouble with Brendan Carr already. So I don't think they're gonna allow me to come on and configure a Mac, but I'm open to it.

• 42:34David Pierce?

  There's like a whole biz ops team at Apple that just got a raise listening to this podcast. Like, just that thing that you just said, they're like, well, we did it.

• 42:43David Pierce?

  We have one.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  I do tend to keep computers for a long time. Like, I they, they sit on the, I mean, this is why I'm thinking about. I mean, I'm gonna find a way to justify this Mac Studio.

• 42:55Nilay Patel?

  But I think this is a staggering deal for the Mac Studio.

• 42:58David Pierce?

  Which version was the staggering deal?

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  The M4 Max.

• 43:00David Pierce?

  With 10 gigabyte.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the M4 Max is basically already configured. The only upgrade you really should do is to a terabyte of storage. Because 512 is like, it's almost like we're getting to the point where if you do enough stuff on a computer, just the system and then like swap to the internal drive and a bunch of applications will eat up 512.

• 43:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  So you should go to a terabyte.

• 43:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I mostly do emails in Slack. Just saying. I'm gonna convince myself about this computer. It's like truly, I think, like compared to specking up a Mac Mini, which a lot of people love to do, or, I mean, the Mac Pro at this point is just like completely off. Like, I don't, I don't know what the point of that thing is right now. They need to update it, seriously. I'm impressed with the Studio.

• 43:45David Pierce?

  The approval rating on the Studio in general seems to be like through the roof. Like, I don't, I don't know. I've never heard of anyone who bought a Studio and is like bummed with the experience that they got from it. Yeah, Apple appears to have like really gotten this thing right.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I should just buy one here on the show.

• 43:59David Pierce?

  I think you can expense it if you buy it live on the Vergecast, right? And that's how that works?

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  It is strange that they rev the Mac Studio so deeply and they haven't touched the Mac Pro, which is now just running an M2 Ultra. But I guess it's if you need PCI slots.

• 44:13David Pierce?

  That thing is eventually, it's just, it's gonna be a Studio with more slots. Like, it kind of already is a Studio with more slots.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  That's basically what it is.

• 44:18David Pierce?

  And that's fine. There will be a few people who need that.

• 44:21Nilay Patel?

  A cooling system designed for Intel chips that required nuclear power.

• 44:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, sure.

• 44:26Nilay Patel?

  It is very funny, and by the way, in all of this, that, you know, we've talked about Apple and college and so much. Like, the entire AI revolution is running on giant Nvidia cards. And Apple and Nvidia hate each other. And there's a very obvious thing for the Mac Pro to be able to do. And they will never do it. Like, there's just a personality conflict that will prevent the one Mac that can accept PCI cards from plugging in Nvidia card into it. And they will, it will never happen. Like, they will add touchscreens to Mac and put macOS on an iPad two decades before they allow Nvidia hardware to run their computer. Like, it's just never, everyone has to be dead. Like, generations of people have to be dead before Apple and Nvidia can mend their fences.

• 45:08David Pierce?

  I kind of think you're right. I like, I want to find some, like, would DraftKings take that bet on which one happens first? Because I would, I would very much enjoy being involved in that wager. But I think you're right.

• 45:19Nilay Patel?

  It's not small. There's a long version, a short version. The short version is there were some MacBook Pros that had Nvidia chips ages ago, and Nvidia screwed up the thermals so that they would basically come unglued, unsoldered inside the computers.

• 45:31David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 45:31Nilay Patel?

  And I think Nvidia wanted Apple to pay for it, and Apple, obviously, and now, never. Generations of people have to be dead. That's what I'm saying. Like, your children's children may see an Apple computer or Nvidia chip.

• 45:42David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I should just find one right now. By the way, the maxed out Mac Studio is $14,000.

• 45:48David Pierce?

  That feels low. Like, I'm, that's fine.

• 45:50Nilay Patel?

  You're like, let's do it.

• 45:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  That, that and the new MacBook Air. They're deals.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  They're deals. Nothing but a deal.

• 45:56David Pierce?

  512 gigs of unified memory on the Mac Studio.

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 46:02David Pierce?

  For $14,000.

• 46:03Speaker 06

  Got to upgrade that.

• 46:04David Pierce?

  Price per gigabyte. That's off the charts, man. That's so good.

• 46:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with a tech lightning round. We'll be right back.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 46:43Speaker 02

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• 47:14Speaker 07

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• 47:46Speaker 06

  I think on a tablet, 64K is actually basically fine. Like, what are you downloading onto your fucking iPad?

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  Movies.

• 47:53Speaker 06

  No, no, you're wrong.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  Wait until your kid needs to take a plane with an iPad.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, but she doesn't need 4K.

• 48:01Speaker 06

  Louis is A-OK at 480.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  Do you know how many episodes of Louis there are? Do you know how many episodes of Paw Patrol there are? Have you ever sat with a six-year-old and argued about which episodes of Paw Patrol to put on their iPad before a 90-minute flight?

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  You're just like, "All of them." Just all, just give me the library. I'm done with this conversation.

• 48:19Speaker 06

  All the kids, they're supposed to get the $350 iPad. They end up getting one terabyte of storage. It's real. Preloaded Paw Patrol.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  We're back, everybody. We're back. We're just, it just rolled right in. That's, people wonder what happens between the segments while someone else reads the ads. That's what happens.

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got a tech lightning round. There's actually quite a lot of small tech news. I want to start with this one because David, I feel like we've run the dig is backstory 50 times.

• 48:49David Pierce?

  Probably right. Yeah.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  It's been back several times. If you recall, dig was one of the early sort of news aggregators. When I worked at Engadget a million years ago, we would argue about what story should get a dig badge. So if we saw that like traffic was like going up on a story, we put the dig badge on it. And the reason we'd argue about it was I believe the dig badge at the time was a flash object. So it would slow down the entire website.

• 49:13David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  We'd be like, we're getting a lot of dig traffic, like it's work.

• 49:16David Pierce?

  Dig did send a lot of traffic, like it was a real, it had a pretty long run there of if you were at the top of the dig homepage, like it crashed websites.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  And you'd want to game it. So if you saw that you're getting some traction, you'd be like, we should put the dig badge on this story. So people go click, I, you know, I dig it. There are some of you listening that have no idea what we're talking about, but like it was like Reddit. It was a meaningful competitor Reddit at one point in time, and then it went away. And now Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, maybe going to bring it back with founder Kevin Rose. And David, you talked to them.

• 49:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. So the, the one difference between the many comebacks of dig and this comeback of dig is that this is the first one that Kevin Rose, who created dig is actually doing. So there's something meaningful there and he's doing it with Alexis Ohanian, who was the co-founder of Reddit. And it's really interesting because talking to them about it, it's basically like Kevin in particular has been, has had many opportunities to do dig again. And I think for a variety of reasons chose not to, but they are all all in on AI and, and the idea that it can be a tool for helping moderators do stuff and helping sort content and helping like summarize stuff and help people build stuff within these communities.

• 50:32David Pierce?

  Like the, the next turn for social networking is basically like, what if we were nice to our users, which is a surprisingly rare thing in the social world right now. And what if we were able to build the tools that moderators in particular actually need? I think the theory is super interesting and there are definitely a lot of people out there who have fond memories of digs. So they're going to get to trade on that for a minute.

• 50:57David Pierce?

  But they're also like, the thing they're trying to build is pretty unformed at the moment. It's very new. They're very early in trying to figure out what it is. But I like, I don't know. I'm curious about this in a way I didn't expect to be.

• 51:09Speaker 06

  I was a huge Dig user back in the day. Loved it. It was a really important website. And I think really early to those sort of social news aggregation ideas. I think one of the big reasons that it failed was that it wasn't Reddit. It didn't figure out the community element.

• 51:28David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 51:28Speaker 06

  And Reddit did. And I think the problem that they're about to encounter is that what they're basically describing doing now is making it Reddit, but with some AI. And the cool, maybe like, I love, I have very, very fond memories of Dig.

• 51:47Speaker 06

  But it definitely sounds a little like you're saying, unformed right now in terms of exactly how that pans out. But it is true, like Reddit moderators have a lot of challenges and it is a lot of work to keep those communities together and not breaking rules and happy. And I think if you are able to take some of the friction away from that, maybe there is something they can do that makes it a little bit better and smarter. And obviously Alexis's involvement here, you know, gives a little bit of sheen to it.

• 52:14David Pierce?

  Do we think Reddit's good? This is the thing I think a lot about. And I'm sort of serious. I think a real thing Reddit has going for it is that it is the only game in town in a pretty meaningful way. If you want to do things like you can do on Reddit, there's really nowhere else to go.

• 52:28Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I disagree.

• 52:30David Pierce?

  Really?

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  There's still a giant ecosystem of like old school forums that exists. And there are like weird companies that run the underlying software. So like every car in the world has a forum.

• 52:41David Pierce?

  That's fair, but like if you want to, if you want to do a bunch of that in one place, I suppose. Yeah, like if you want to talk about cars, there are other places to go. But I think part of the appeal of Reddit is that it is both a bunch of individual communities, but it kind of puts them together in a meaningful way.

• 52:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, though I do wonder like, I'm not, listen, there was a Dig Reddit rivalry back in the day and I chose my side and my side lost. And so I've still got a grudge there. I do wonder like, how much Reddit users are using the Reddit homepage, the r slash all feed.

• 53:15Speaker 06

  Whereas Dig, Dig was a homepage. You visited the homepage. You know, if they lean into that again, that is a different type of product than Reddit, where you're going to specific communities or curating a very specific subset of communities that speak to you. And I do think, you know, they have proven, you know, phenomenally strong at that. I think Reddit has like, kind of come and gone time and again over the past like decade. And I feel like it's, you know, maybe stronger than ever right now. So I don't know. I would say that Reddit is good, is very good at what it is doing. And I think it's kind of hard to beat. Like, Neil is right. There are these super nerdy forums for specific niches, but a lot of those forums now just take place on Reddit.

• 53:57Speaker 06

  And I think for a mainstream audience, like, there is nowhere else you can go.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  All right. So here's the company I'm obsessed with. It's called Vertical Scope. They're in Canada. They seem very sweet. I should get them on Decoder in some way. They own AVS Forum, which is why I think about them all the time, because AVS Forum is the real thing. Reddit has not even bit into one ounce of what AVS Forum represents. If you're like a home theater nerd, you're listening to the show, you know what AVS Forum is. They also own toyotanation.com, bensworld.org, guitars101, and something called ifish.net, which is...

• 54:32Speaker 06

  It's like a two truths and a lie kind of situation. Like, one of these is not real.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  Also, something called Dog Forums. It's real. They have 101 million monthly active users across the thing. They're not, right? Like, they're big. It's 1,200 sites that they run their forums. But you're right. If you go to AVS Forum, there's not some connectivity to ifish.net. There's not this like overarching, I'm on a social platform that has subreddits. There's just this big software. And then obviously what they do is they want ads across all of that stuff. I think that's really fascinating. And I think that really interesting thing about Dig, and Jake, you were a Dig user, so I wanted... Like DIG was about sending you away, right? It was about curating the internet. And there's a quote in David's piece where they're like, we don't want to be just like an RSS reader with a like button.

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  Reddit is about the content on Reddit. Like, yes, there are links on Reddit. Yes, they embed YouTube videos, all this stuff. But Reddit is really about the stuff that is happening on Reddit.

• 55:32Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  And a big problem for almost every sort of like curator of links on the internet now, including us, is that all of the action is on social platforms. There are not as many cool things on the web to link to as there used to be.

• 55:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  Which is just a weird thing that is currently happening. And so like, I wonder, is the new DIG, Jake, as you think about why you picked DIG in the first place, was it because it was aggregating the web? It was like showing all this stuff? Or is it because there was a community on there?

• 55:58Speaker 06

  No, it was because it was aggregating the web, right? Like, if you were a tech nerd, if you went to DIG.com, you would get everything you needed to know. It was the place to be. And, you know, it was, it was a light touch website, super fun to be on there. But it was not about community, not at all. And I think, again, like ultimately, I think that was one of the reasons that they lost, right? Like, AMAs could not have evolved on DIG in the way that they did on Reddit. And I think Reddit's ability to create those communities and to have homegrown content is what empowered it to, you know, become so valuable and become such a special place. And so this new DIG is, you know, we should say, we have not seen it, right? Right now, they just have like a landing page that says, coming soon.

• 56:42Speaker 06

  There's supposed to be invites going out in the next few weeks or something like that. But, you know, we fundamentally don't know exactly where it's going to land on that spectrum between just being a news aggregator and being a more community centric, you know, Reddit type of thing. And I think just looking at the internet that exists today, it seems very unlikely that they would create something that is just, you know, the original version of DIG where it is just collecting a bunch of links and sending you out. Right? You sort of need that community element. And at that point, it's like, okay, well, where's the daylight between this and Reddit?

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  It's AI tools for moderators, yeah. David, did they tell you anything about Federation or Social Web or anything like that?

• 57:23David Pierce?

  I asked about that and the response was basically it's a thing that they're interested in, but it's so unsettled that it didn't make sense to buy into any particular system right now, which I actually think is a pretty reasonable argument. Like, should you at some point want to be part of this federated system if you are DIG and want to like, build tools for communities? Yes.

• 57:49David Pierce?

  If you're a tiny team trying to get a product off the ground, should you be making giant bets on Activity Pub or AT Proto right now? Probably not.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Um, did you see that Tapbots, which made Tweetbot, which was great, and then they made Ivory from Aston. They have a new one for Blue Sky called Phoenix that they just announced.

• 58:05David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:06Nilay Patel?

  And it's fascinating and they should. But they're a small team and basically your entire announcement for their Blue Sky app is like an apology. They're like, we know you want us to keep doing Ivory, but they were small, so we're gonna just like, try this one and we don't know which one's gonna win, but we promise we're not abandoning this one. And I was reading, I felt really bad for them. I was like, you don't have to apologize. Like, no one knows what's gonna win. There's even a line in their post that's like, we think Activity Pub is probably gonna win like over the long term, but like all the actions on Blue Sky right now, so we should probably make an app for that. And like, it's like, guys, everybody gets it. No one knows how this is gonna shake out. Like, it, it seems like it's, it will be the future in some way. But it is true that all the users are using

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  app protocol and all of the engineers like Activity Pub to win. Then that, that's just gonna take a while for it to play out.

• 58:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's tough. And I think it's, the, the thing I'm hearing from a lot of developers right now is, is that same kind of thing where it's like, okay, I don't want to build myself out of the possibility of doing either of these things. But I also don't want to spend a lot of resources supporting them, which I think right now is probably like the prudent way to think about the internet.

• 59:18Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, I'm just investigating what's on ifish.com.

• 59:22Nilay Patel?

  It's just closing tabs. It's the iFish forums.

• 59:26David Pierce?

  Like if Apple made a fish, it would be called the iFish? That's, this is what we're talking about here?

• 59:30Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a ifish.net. I'm sorry. Ifish.net is the world's biggest fishing forum.

• 59:36David Pierce?

  Fantastic.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  I thought it was about keeping fishes as pets, but uh.

• 59:41David Pierce?

  That's a completely different community. It's not allowed on iFish.

• 59:48David Pierce?

  That's my fish.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Some of, there's a, on the ifish.net forums, um, there's, there's a subforum called Life in General. Uh, it has 1.3 million posts.

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  Just saying.

• 1:00:02David Pierce?

  People just wanna hang out. Like, it turns out, people just wanna hang out.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  They didn't need any AI to do that.

• 1:00:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. Uh, one more piece of news on this before we leave the, the social stuff behind. There was some news this week that, uh, Discord is potentially starting to think about an IPO, which is kind of fascinating. Uh, Discord has been through some weird ups and downs as a company over the years. Almost got a, was like, kind of, maybe, sort of getting acquired by Microsoft at one point. That didn't happen. Uh, has been, has had lots of ups and downs for content reasons. Uh, it's a weird time to go public.

• 1:00:35Speaker 06

  Uh, strange, I feel like, end result for Discord, given that like, if you just look at the trajectory of Slack, Slack went public, was public for like 30 seconds, didn't really go great, and now they're owned by Salesforce. And it's like, it's fine. Um, so I don't know. Like Discord is fundamentally the same thing, but like for gamers.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  They, just, wait, neither Discord nor Slack enjoy that comparison.

• 1:00:59Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  They hate it. And you're like, guys, have you opened your apps?

• 1:01:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so what Slack will tell you is, yes, we, yes, but we, enterprise authentication is, uh...

• 1:01:09David Pierce?

  Ri- right. And so is, is the, the gamer market bigger than the enterprise market? Like, I'm...

• 1:01:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think there's, there's the consumer market. So like Discord, you're, you know, it's just a big consumer market that might pay them directly.

• 1:01:24David Pierce?

  Right. That's true.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, I, I think we're, we're in the age of all of these social platforms being like, we're companies, or there's space here. Like, everyone is pretty frustrated with the four billionaires who run all communications in America. What if, what if we tried? And it helps if you have a billionaire of your own, like Alexis.

• 1:01:42David Pierce?

  Couple of them, in fact, yeah. Yeah. And I think that one of the things that Kevin said about Dig, which I thought was really interesting is like, I kept pressing on like, how big do you want this thing to be? And they seem really interested in not trying to like deliberately not trying to go out and build another, you know, many billion dollar gigantic company, which is like a thing you can say when you're already fabulously wealthy from other means. Like this is the kind of thing that they're like, maybe without the pressures of being a public company to go, you know, screw over our users to please our shareholders. We can actually do more interesting stuff. And so I think there is a real like boutiquey nature to a lot of these projects that I think are really exciting. And I think if the, if this dig thing goes well, it'll look like that, too, would be my guess.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  Once you go IPO, then you have shareholders who want money. Right. And I wonder how Discord will respond to that. Other stuff, nothing has new phones, phone 3A and 3A Pro.

• 1:02:37David Pierce?

  Have you seen the AI button on the side?

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  Of course. Yeah, that's necessary.

• 1:02:41David Pierce?

  That's, that's the big new feature is I think it's called the essential button.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  That's not confusing at all. I feel like we put the nothing phone on the list, but actually the phone I want to talk about is this weird Korean prototype that Allison saw at Mobile World Congress. Well, that's right. Like nothing made another phone, you know?

• 1:02:56David Pierce?

  It does AI things. No, that's fair. I do think I, I left it off the list for today because Allison and Don Preston, who are at MWC, are going to come on the show on Tuesday to talk about all of this stuff. But I do agree, the AI phone is maybe the single most interesting gadget of the entire week.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just, I mean, it's nuts. Like it makes a 3D avatar of you and watches everything you do. And then it fills out forms in the air for you, which is whatever it apparently wants. Like people look at forms of the internet and they freak out, apparently just every day panic in the streets. Throw in their hands in the air. I don't know how to fill out these forms. We have to collect all of society's information. To make an avatar of myself that can do this. But it's wild because the screen on the front is bifurcated and the top of the screen is an avatar of yourself.

• 1:03:40David Pierce?

  I don't understand it. I'm looking at this picture now. And the more I look at it, the less it makes sense to me. Actually, does this, yo, is there a second screen?

• 1:03:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna read you this.

• 1:03:51David Pierce?

  Like, what is happening?

• 1:03:51Nilay Patel?

  The idea is that you go around downloading your personal data history from websites like Meta and Google. Also, your medical records and financial data. This is encrypted into a quote, "personal knowledge graph" that is broken up and stored across multiple third-party cloud servers that theoretically only the owner of data can access. And then all of this is used to make an AI avatar that acts as a virtual assistant.

• 1:04:14David Pierce?

  It also looks like it's running Android 6.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's part of the charm of MWC is like, what version of Android is this really?

• 1:04:26David Pierce?

  I'm so excited for this.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  You should talk to Alison about all this on the show when she's on, but the company claims that in order to do the demo where they had the phone buy car insurance, they actually bought a car.

• 1:04:41Nilay Patel?

  I guess they keep buying the car insurance.

• 1:04:43David Pierce?

  Okay, I actually respect the hell out of that. It is like the most insured car in the world now.

• 1:04:47Nilay Patel?

  It all looks very silly and then, you know, as with everything, there's a too good to be true element. They say this phone will be sold globally on May 1st for $375. I don't know, man.

• 1:05:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying to hear what Alison has to say when they're on the show, but it truly may be the most interesting gadget of the week.

• 1:05:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. I guarantee we will never see it again, but I'm glad we saw it once. And that counts for something.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  The best part of the whole thing is that, I guess, in Korea, they did a blockchain-based vaccine record system. But crypto is so toxic that they apologized for it in the briefing.

• 1:05:25David Pierce?

  Good lord.

• 1:05:26Nilay Patel?

  And they were like, "It's not a cryptocurrency. It's just a database. It's really slow."

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Volkswagen id dot everyone, which is one of the worst names ever. Volkswagen's new EV, it's super cheap and Sean O'Kane, former Verge Transportation reporter, says it's going to be the first Volkswagen to run Rivian software. If you remember Volkswagen invested a ton of money in Rivian, they spun off some weird middle company that makes software for both companies. And here we are, the first, it's 20,000 euros, 2100 dollars. It's cute. And I think the idea that it's running Rivian software is super fascinating.

• 1:06:03David Pierce?

  You've used it. How is Rivian software?

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't enough to get me to buy Rivian.

• 1:06:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  You know, like, I'm like a fancy car person. I'm older now.

• 1:06:13David Pierce?

  What about a Rivian for a fifth of the price, though? Like, that to me is the whole story of this thing, right? It's, it's, it's the $20,000 of it all that makes this thing interesting.

• 1:06:20Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Like a Rivian, right now, you buy an R1, it's like $100,000. And it's like, there's no software that will get me to spend that much money on a car.

• 1:06:28David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:06:28Nilay Patel?

  But on a much cheaper car, like the R3X, like I, I basically have convinced myself that I will buy an R3X when it comes out because it's cute and it'll be cheaper.

• 1:06:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:36Nilay Patel?

  This is very much in the same mode. You know, Rivian's whole thing is the same as Tesla's whole thing or whatever. Instead of having tons and tons of subsystems in the car, they just have one or I think it's that they're down to some small, single digit number of compute units. So they basically have built a computer in the car. They've re-architected how the cars work, which is the point of all that software. So that's what Volkswagen is really investing in because their attempts to this were a disaster, like famous in corporate history level disaster Volkswagen trying to do its own software.

• 1:07:04David Pierce?

  What I can't figure out about the, the id dot everyone, which again, like you undersold how stupid a name that is for a car.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  It's in all caps and one is a number.

• 1:07:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's awful. What, what is the thing?

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  By the way, there's another one called the id dot to all. But all is in lowercase.

• 1:07:20David Pierce?

  Something about-

• 1:07:21Nilay Patel?

  So id is in uppercase, dot, two, number, lowercase, all.

• 1:07:25David Pierce?

  Something about EVs has made everyone at auto companies lose their minds. They're like, what if all the designs were insane, as if they were from thousands of years from now, and they were named completely incomprehensible things?

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  So I understand it on the design front. I really do. Because if you are building an EV, you really want a low coefficient of drag. So you get all these weird Tylenol capsules just floating down the highways. Um, and then you don't have to build an engine or you don't need an engine bay the way you needed to before. You don't need a transmission tunnel down the center of the car. Like you just get to, you have a skateboard and you're like, what crazy stuff can we do? And the designers at Hyundai were like, a lot of crazy stuff. Yeah, actually. The names are, I don't, there's no logical reason for the names to be this bad across the board. Uh, and they're, they are very bad.

• 1:08:18David Pierce?

  But is there, is there something magical and repeatable about this that it is $20,000? Like it, it feels to me like it should be a bigger deal that somebody is actually able to make this thing at this price.

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  I think the real story here, and I'm, I'm just taking a shot is Rivian already built the software. And Volkswagen, like they have a big business in China and the Chinese EV market is super mature. And I think that has allowed them to build a car some more costs. And I think there's a reason we're talking about this car coming to Europe and not to the United States right now. So like a lot of the investment has been paid for, which is really what, why so many first generation EVs are so expensive, right? You're right. You're paying off a huge initial investment, but if you're Volkswagen, you know, you paid a bunch of money for your Rivian investment. They're like, here it is. Like here's our CD ROM, make the car good. Uh, and then there's huge investments across the entire Chinese ecosystem. Actually, one of the, we should do a story on this.

• 1:09:13Nilay Patel?

  Somehow I will sign this story on this office workshop. Uh, one of the most fascinating things that's happening right now is that car YouTubers are discovering that Chinese EVs are sick.

• 1:09:21David Pierce?

  I've been noticing this. There's like a run of these videos.

• 1:09:24Nilay Patel?

  Is like one of the best TikTokers around, like one of my favorite TikTok channels. Um, he just did a bunch on Chinese cars. Like he opens one, I think it's the L1 and he's like, if this car was in America, Tesla would be cooked. Like that's the opening to the video.

• 1:09:38David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  And then you, he goes through it and the car is sick and it's $53,000. And like, yes, is there a massive Chinese government subsidy to develop those cars, produce those cars to do the EV? Yes, there is. The economic system that developed that car is vastly different than the economic system in the United States. But the car is done. Like it exists and the market is huge. And Chinese automakers are, they're, they're, they're like branching down a different evolutionary path now. Like here in the United States, we have a lot of hybrids. Like I have a very cranky Jeep hybrid. In China, they're all doing range extenders. So they have gas engines that run at fixed RPMs that just charge the batteries. We need more range, which is that's how like a diesel electric locomotive works, right? Like they're just like headed off down different roads because the core EV power

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  train is like done. And like, we're not, we're nowhere close. We have Tesla and it's like, well, someone will throw in, I get your car. Like, it's not a choice. But I think it's like, one of the most interesting stories is, you know, like, for a car and driver to do a big package on Chinese cars, you know, they, it would just be different. Like a traditional magazine like that just has to like, attack that problem differently. Car YouTubers just need content, right? And they're kind of like, out. Like, here it is. Like, here's, here's another weird Cadillac. It's 50,000 pounds, like, whatever. They're like, look at these other cars. Look at, look at, these are weird.

• 1:11:04Nilay Patel?

  And there's an entire universe of cars that are weird, like, have like buttons that American cars don't have in them. And they're kind of like drawn to them.

• 1:11:11David Pierce?

  The, the Chinese companies have done a good job of making cars that look like the future in a cool way, and not, like you said, Tylenol capsules. Like, some lessons to be learned from that.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Look, I, I don't know. The economics of social platforms are weird. The economics of the creator economy are weird. I don't know if Chinese car companies are paying all the car YouTubers to, like, I don't know. Like, I don't want junkets they're taking. I just know that you watch the reaction to these videos, and it is astounding. Right? Like, the, the one I'm describing from Forrest went viral. Like, Kara Swisher shared a car video. Like, what are we doing? Like, my, cousin and my uncle sent it to me. Like, it went viral in a different way. Right? Because a car inside of that video is compelling. And his point is, we can't have this car. Like, we don't have access to Chinese cars this way. And everyone, because of tariffs, because all this stuff, they're like, oh, American manufacturers can't compete. That's not what you want to, that's not

• 1:12:04Nilay Patel?

  what you want the comment section to be filled with. Right? Like, you want the comment section to be filled with, you know, like, fuck you, GM forever, or whatever. Like, just, it was just not present there. And the part where it's like, what you normally see in an EV comment section, it's like, I'll never buy an EV. The range extender solved that problem. Ters are like, oh, you can just fill this thing. You like gas? Just put gas in this part of the car. It'll be fine. Uh, we're far away from the Volkswagen. We, we started now. Now I'm just ranting about tariffs. A preview of what's to come, my friend. All right. Last item in this lightning round. And then I, I promise you 90 more minutes of iPad air conversation. Microsoft shut down Skype. I'm sad.

• 1:12:45Speaker 06

  Jake, are you surprised by this?

• 1:12:48Speaker 06

  No, no, I mean, I, I, I would love to know when the last time people used Skype was. I, I was looking back at some of the retrospectives. There were like five Skype redesigns I didn't even know happened. There, there was one that was like so experimental, it like didn't even have an interface. Like it was like some weird like Neo Snapchat thing. It was cra- nobody even knew this happened because nobody was opening up Skype. And, um, you know, it's really sad. Skype was, uh, you know, a very foundational pioneer in, uh, you know, voice calling in the VoIP space.

• 1:13:26Speaker 06

  I, I remember like using it very early on and you would pay like, you know, cents and be able to make a phone call. Ooh, like crazy from your computer to a real phone and it felt incredible. It was like the coolest thing ever. People used to call real phones back then. This was, don't worry about that. But like, you know, Skype, Skype was, was kind of mind blowing and it really had this incredible life as, um, you know, a chat app too, and a, a, you know, a voice calling app of its own. And, uh, you know, Tom Warren has a piece up on our site right now, looking back at sort of what went wrong. It was sold to eBay for a while. eBay sold it to Microsoft. Microsoft paid eight and a half billion. I think it was in 2011. And, um, that was right around the time things started going wrong.

• 1:14:11Speaker 06

  Which is not to say it was Microsoft's fault so much as, um, mobile was exploding and Skype was a desktop service. And, um, this sort of ultimately, and I'm just stealing Tom's remarks here, led to this situation where, okay, the pandemic comes around and everybody needs to do voice calling and video chatting and nobody went. To Skype and everybody went to enterprise software.

• 1:14:36Speaker 06

  Because it just like it never quite made that leap.

• 1:14:38David Pierce?

  Okay, so I think I think the all the facts you just said are correct. And I think the story you just told is dead wrong. I I honestly believe I've spent a lot of time the last few days thinking about this. I think Skype might be one of the most bottled, botched acquisitions in the history of the tech industry. Like, I think you could make a case right now that Skype is still the best loved brand name in its space. Like, people, I think, still have better feelings about Skype right now than they do about just about anything else.

• 1:15:09Nilay Patel?

  Because they stopped using it.

• 1:15:11David Pierce?

  Sure, but like.

• 1:15:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, looking back, I mean, yeah, like, I stopped using my creative Rio MP3 player and now I love it, but.

• 1:15:18David Pierce?

  No, you don't.

• 1:15:20Nilay Patel?

  I love the memories associated with it.

• 1:15:23David Pierce?

  But that's the thing, Skype was a decade ahead of its competition on almost everything and had a bunch of like complicated tech debt and foundational stuff and.

• 1:15:31Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, it was a diamond Rio. I apologize.

• 1:15:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, there you go. Which is, yeah, you're not, you're not not helping my point here. This is great for me. Okay, I think Microsoft bought a thing that, to your point, Jake, had some tech debt, had some problems, had was was behind, but also like the mobile revolution was the VoIP revolution, right? Like, mobile made WhatsApp happen. There's nothing that WhatsApp has that Skype didn't sit on for a long time. Skype had a bunch of like technical problems. It did peer to peer stuff because of the way that it was architected early on and it would have had to.

• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  But Microsoft done did that.

• 1:16:08David Pierce?

  Right. This is the thing, right? It's all just, there's no reason this didn't work, except that Microsoft screwed it up. And Skype had a bunch of correct ideas about not only what Zoom and Teams and Meet would eventually do, but what like the whole messaging ecosystem was going to become, that it could have been Skype could have been Zoom and WhatsApp simultaneously. It was just sitting right there for it. And it just absolutely threw it away because of, as far as I can understand, just total corporate disasters. I am also determined to get to the bottom of what actually happened here inside of Microsoft. If you know and want to talk to me about it, [email protected].

• 1:16:50David Pierce?

  I have I have until May 5th to actually figure out the answer to this story before no one will ever care anymore. And I am desperate to figure out what actually happened here because like. Something stupid happened inside of Microsoft that made all of this fall apart. And I cannot figure out what it is. And also, just the fact-

• 1:17:07Nilay Patel?

  Sachin Adella was like, we own Skype?

• 1:17:09David Pierce?

  Honestly, that might have been part of it, right? There's like a big leadership change and like, we're gonna do something else. But even at the beginning of the pandemic, the fact that Microsoft decided to build a thing called Teams and turn that into its product instead of just doubling down on Skype?

• 1:17:26David Pierce?

  Weird. Like, you know what's a crappy brand for talking to your friends? Teams. I feel the same way about Google Meet. It's like, I get on for like, my fantasy football draft and like, oh, should we jump on Meet? And I'm like, no, I don't want to go to work. Like, this sucks. We just ruined this. And like, I don't know, Skype, Skype had all the ingredients of being like, an actually central thing to the internet for a really long time. And Microsoft just let it die.

• 1:17:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This reminds me that in the middle of the pandemic, Verizon bought BlueJeans. And they tried to make everyone think BlueJeans would be a thing.

• 1:17:58David Pierce?

  For so much money.

• 1:18:01Nilay Patel?

  I, I think Skype had some technical problems that made it easier to start with Teams. Or to start again with Teams. And I will never forget, you know, Teams basically killed Slack, right? That the introduction of Teams and the bumbling of Teams in Office is what drove Slack into the arms of Salesforce.

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  And I will never forget, someone at Microsoft was like, you have to understand, everyone thinks we're making some like, work chat product. Teams is a video conferencing product. Like, that's what it is. And that's why people are using it. That's why. And you're like, but that's Skype, you're Skype.

• 1:18:33David Pierce?

  You did that already. Yeah.

• 1:18:35Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and they were just very convinced that fundamentally, they were, they were initiating people to use Microsoft video chatting services with Teams because people thought it was Slack. And Slack was all the rage. But they were actually competing with Zoom the entire time. I don't know, man. I, I'm sad. I, we made a lot of podcasts on Skype over the years. I still think, by the way, Skype has the best, to this day, the best audio and video quality of all the services.

• 1:19:01Nilay Patel?

  But I haven't touched it in forever. Like-

• 1:19:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, because why would you?

• 1:19:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06David Pierce?

  There's not like-

• 1:19:08Nilay Patel?

  Whenever, whenever I appeared on CNBC for Cable News Hits, I would always tell them to use Skype because they supported Skype. And their engineers would be like, what?

• 1:19:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, you don't want to just, you don't want me on Zoom? And I'm like, Zoom looks bad. And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah. And they would, later, they'd all be like, you're right. We can't get anyone else to use Skype. You're the only one.

• 1:19:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, we should take a break. We're gonna come back. There's politics in America you might have heard with a little lightning round to wrap things up. We'll be right back.

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• 1:21:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. The lightning round. Un-sponsored, extra spicy.

• 1:21:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna figure out what that means when I hear those. David, are there tariffs? I don't know. Don't ask me impossible questions.

• 1:21:22David Pierce?

  Can we talk about iPads?

• 1:21:24Nilay Patel?

  Schrödinger tariffs.

• 1:21:25David Pierce?

  I can explain the iPad so much better than I can explain tariffs. I think the answer, well, the answer is yes, and also no. It is very much Schrödinger tariffs. So China tariffs are real. That's, that's a thing. But then there were gonna be tariffs on Mexico and Canada, but not for automakers, but now not for Mexico.

• 1:21:52David Pierce?

  And I think that's where we are. Unless there's been news since we started recording, but I think that's.

• 1:21:56Nilay Patel?

  But all these are on one month delays.

• 1:21:58David Pierce?

  Right, so April 2nd is now the date that is apparently like circled on the tariff calendar.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  They were already, by the way, delayed for a month. I just want to point that out. TikTok is illegal.

• 1:22:07David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:08Nilay Patel?

  That deadline is coming up in one month.

• 1:22:10David Pierce?

  That's also gonna be that week. Oh, man, the first week of April is gonna suck.

• 1:22:14Nilay Patel?

  But rubber's hitting the road for the Trump administration, right?

• 1:22:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Nilay Patel?

  They have all these ideas.

• 1:22:19David Pierce?

  They can't possibly delay these again.

• 1:22:22Nilay Patel?

  Laws are just a concept, concepts of a law. The tariff lawsuits have to be coming. To terrorists, a big deal, you know, you might be wondering, why is the worst time in terrorists? The CEO of Best Buy is like, the prices are gonna go up on everything we sell. Cause everything is manufactured abroad or, you know, the, Apple loves to say this with the iPhone. Like the Corning makes the glass in America and they ship it over here and the chips are made over here. And that, that all comes to China to for final assembly and it's shipped back to America. And by the way, we're hiring 500 billion people in Houston to build Apple intelligence servers because everyone loves Apple intelligence. And you're like, oh, they're trying to point out that their supply chain is global. And so every product we cover has, is just deeply and meaningfully implicated by tariffs.

• 1:23:06Nilay Patel?

  It's a point where we've been asking these companies now for over a month, like, what are you gonna do? And they're starting, I think the chaos is starting to, I think for initially, they didn't want to say anything. Like Jake, I mean, you've been running the story, basically. Initially, they were just like, no, nothing like.

• 1:23:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, just nobody would respond to us at all. And we just kept sending emails. And then, yeah, finally, people have been starting to just be like, well, yeah, the prices are going up. My favorite, and we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but like, I think it was Acer's CEO was just like, well, yeah, it's, there's like a 10% tariff, the price will go up 10%. Like, there's just, just math. And it's, yeah, it's sort of unavoidable. If they actually do, if, if they go into effect, which I think like, the big question is knowing whether or not they're ineffective at any given time.

• 1:23:53David Pierce?

  Right. I think what's been really interesting the last few days even has been that I think this time, those folks thought it was real. And so, cause like, if you rewind to like, the campaign, nobody believed Trump about tariffs, right? Like, this is the thing all the banks have been saying since is like, oh, we didn't think he'd actually do it. And then he was like, oh, I'm actually gonna do it. And everybody was like, well, we'll see what happens. And then it, it, then it got paused. And I was like, haha, we told you this is never gonna happen. It's gonna be fine. And, cause everybody was like, well, why isn't the stock market tanking? Tariffs are gonna be a disaster. And then it didn't, because nobody thought it was gonna happen. But then this time, it started, it felt real enough to people that A, they started talking to us,

• 1:24:38David Pierce?

  and B, things started to change. Like, the Best Buy CEO, one of the most interesting things I thought he said was not just our prices are gonna go up. He said, they're gonna go up in the next couple of days. Like, they were, they were, they were ready for it. Like, they were going to start making these changes quickly, because this stuff happens quickly. And I, then you get this pause again, based on, as far as I can tell, nothing. Like, it's, it's just the same, we had a perfect phone call, and now I'm pausing tariffs for a month thing every time. And it's just, now I wonder what all of these companies and people think again is like, okay, is this now just what we're gonna do? This, this threat is going to loom for four years, but never actually become real in a meaningful way?

• 1:25:21David Pierce?

  Or does it get more real and more scary each time? And they are continuing to like, batten down the hatches even more.

• 1:25:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then there's other ancillary components of this, like, the de minimis rule that allows Shein and Timu and a bunch of other companies to ship packages from China under a certain dollar amount with no customs or tariffs. And that- Already off the books, but delayed again because there was no infrastructure to actually check those packages and make people pay for anything like.

• 1:25:55Nilay Patel?

  Look, you can argue with the policy of any of this, right? Like, sure. Maybe we shouldn't have a diminished rule. Maybe we shouldn't undercut American retailers by allowing she into. I don't know. There's a lot you could say about that. You need an infrastructure, you need to execute, right? Like, plans are great. It's all in the execution and they are not ready to execute any of this over and over again. We see that. And then, you know, the various leaders of Canada and Mexico are like, we made a graph that says criminals down and Trump is like, pause for a month and like, I just don't.

• 1:26:26Nilay Patel?

  What are we doing?

• 1:26:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Nilay Patel?

  Uh, car prices are supposed to go up by as much as $12,000. I have no idea what's going to happen to the EV market. That thing about the Chinese EVs, that's a tariff story, right? They don't, they don't exist here because like we've just made it impossible to trade in those vehicles here. You start tariffing regular cars at these rates, like maybe you actually do end up with a bunch of Chinese carmakers being like, yeah, we can compete now.

• 1:26:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Nilay Patel?

  By accident.

• 1:26:49David Pierce?

  Cheap Chinese cars plus tariffs end up being cheaper than expensive Canadian cars plus tariffs. I had not realized until I read a story Andy Hawkins wrote about this, that cars are already at record high prices. Like, however this shakes out on, on this front, it seems like we might be due for some weird upheaval in the car market here.

• 1:27:07Nilay Patel?

  Look, if not for the other baggage, the only car anyone should buy is a two-year-old Model 3. Like the most appreciated, cheapest car in the world that like won't break down because.

• 1:27:17David Pierce?

  There is a, there is a sign in my neighbor's yard, two doors down that just says, sell your Tesla.

• 1:27:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23David Pierce?

  And I'm starting to see those pop up all over my neighborhood.

• 1:27:25Nilay Patel?

  They're all, they're all over the place.

• 1:27:26David Pierce?

  And the bumper stickers that say, I bought this before Elon was crazy. Like it's a real, it's a really fascinating thing happening in the Tesla universe right now.

• 1:27:34Nilay Patel?

  Uh, have you seen, there was the great four or four media story this week about the Cybertruck owners club forum? Just like breaking down over how many, how many, how much people hate their Cybertrucks.

• 1:27:46Nilay Patel?

  Because you don't get to put the I bought this before he was crazy on a cyber truck.

• 1:27:49David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:27:50Nilay Patel?

  You're like, no, he was.

• 1:27:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. He was doing a lot of this stuff.

• 1:27:57Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of Trump and Musk, uh, some, just some weirdness around Doge. The reality of what Doge is and the lawsuits are all kind of colliding. So I think last time we talked about this, they officially named an administrator of Doge. This woman named Amy Gleason that no one has ever heard from.

• 1:28:17David Pierce?

  Who was, I think, wasn't the story that she was on vacation in Mexico.

• 1:28:20Nilay Patel?

  When she was named.

• 1:28:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, when she was named, yeah.

• 1:28:22Nilay Patel?

  And then Trump gave the State of the Union and he pointed at Elon, who didn't know what to do with his hands. Like, he didn't do a Nazi salute, so that's a win. Yeah, low bar, we hit it.

• 1:28:33David Pierce?

  He just sort of was weird with a water bottle for a while.

• 1:28:35Nilay Patel?

  He was just like, what should I do it?

• 1:28:38Nilay Patel?

  Weird dude. And he said Elon is in charge of Doge. Elon is the head of Doge. It's being run by Elon. The amount of seconds between that statement and it appearing in court filings about Doge being illegal. Zero seconds. Like, literally in real time, filings were updated and submissions were made, being like, the government is lying to the court about who the administrator of Doge is. It's Elon Musk. Look at President Trump telling Congress that Elon runs Doge. So then today, Trump had a cabinet meeting with Elon present, reported in Politico, where he told the cabinet that they were in charge of their agencies and Elon had no authority to fire anyone. And it's like, guys, the judges aren't stupid.

• 1:29:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, they, they are getting the letters. I don't know if people really recognize this. The letters, the emails he's sending out, being like, what'd you do this week? They're hitting the judicial branch.

• 1:29:36David Pierce?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:29:37Nilay Patel?

  Like, federal judges are getting the what did you do this week emails. They're not dumb. Uh, so I don't know if this is gonna work, but I, the, the sort of like legal reality, well, the lawsuits are starting to catch up is basically what I'm saying. And now we're at the point where, you know, Musk had a meeting with the, like, Republican senators where they're like, let us pass some laws to do this for real.

• 1:30:04Nilay Patel?

  And Trump has to like, do the charade where he's like, Elon doesn't have a job and everyone knows that he's in charge of Doge. I, I think, I think some of these lawsuits are gonna break against Elon and Trump in a big way soon.

• 1:30:15David Pierce?

  It's, it sure seems like it. And I think the, the, the bet they've been making all along is that they can just be two, three, 12 steps ahead and it won't matter, right? That, that what they've done will be hard to undo and they'll be on to the next thing anyway. And

• 1:30:31David Pierce?

  that one kind of seems to still be working.

• 1:30:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35David Pierce?

  Like, if, if the, if the judicial system is gonna remain four crises behind Doge, Doge is gonna keep getting what it wants. And that, that continues to be the playbook, as far as I can tell.

• 1:30:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Um, on that same playbook, uh, you know, there's all this reporting about the FAA being ordered to cancel this Verizon contract for connectivity and work with Starlink instead because SpaceX is gonna fix everything. We just did a long decoder with Andy Hawkins about what's going on with the FAA. So SpaceX denied this, they posted on X, uh, quote, "Recent media reports about SpaceX and the FAA are false. SpaceX is working in coordination with L3 Harris Tech." Uh, that's the main contractor. That's the one that Elon said was single-digit months away from catastrophic failure. And the FAA to test the use of Starlink is one piece of the infrastructure upgrades so badly needed, along with fiber, wireless and other technologies.

• 1:31:26Nilay Patel?

  Starlink is a possible partial fix to an aging system. There is no effort or intent for Starlink to take over any existing contract. That's just fear of uncertainty. They've signed a loan agreement with L3 Harris. They've provided Starlink. So basically they've gone all the way from Trump saying, I've asked Elon to fix air traffic control after a plane crash. And Elon being like, I'll do it. They're single-digit months away from catastrophic failure. Here's some Starlinks to fix it. Verizon being like, that was our job.

• 1:31:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're already fixing it.

• 1:31:56Nilay Patel?

  And now SpaceX being like, we didn't, we didn't do anything. We, we gave them, we bought some Starlinks at Best Buy.

• 1:32:02Nilay Patel?

  Deeply confusing stuff.

• 1:32:05Nilay Patel?

  Again, you need a plan. These are all great ideas. You need to execute. And they, they have not laid out how to execute.

• 1:32:10David Pierce?

  Also, is L3 Harris's system actually like months away from failure? Or is that just the thing that Elon is telling us?

• 1:32:16Nilay Patel?

  Andy has been asking Pete Buttigieg this question because if they're single-digit months away from failure today,

• 1:32:25Nilay Patel?

  that means they were only a little over a year away from failure when he was the Secretary of Transportation. And he has not answered our questions. But you would think we would know if the entire United States air traffic control system was a year away from catastrophic failure. You'd think we would know.

• 1:32:41David Pierce?

  It does seem worth saying that the only evidence we have in either direction so far is what Elon Musk says. And that should be taken with the requisite grains of salt.

• 1:32:53Nilay Patel?

  I honestly wonder why SpaceX put out this statement. I think maybe a lot of people assumed that they were going to fix air traffic control and they don't want that responsibility.

• 1:33:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't think that's a super fun job.

• 1:33:07David Pierce?

  SpaceX also has like quite a bit going on at this particular moment in time.

• 1:33:10Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Uh, there's more here. Trump wants to screen everybody applying for citizenship. He wants to screen all their social media.

• 1:33:20Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I mean, it just, it's more incursion into speech like that. This is a thing that Trump administration is very fond of doing is like saying some speeches good and some speeches bad, and then saying they support free speech. And then the Senate has stripped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It's enforcement powers over what its general enforcement powers that would have covered X turning into a payment service, which, well, you know, a little light corruption is like, you know, it's the stuff that life is made of, you know?

• 1:33:53David Pierce?

  A little light corruption. It's my favorite Broadway musical.

• 1:33:56Nilay Patel?

  That's what keeps it exciting out there in these United States. Speaking of speech, it's, I think it's time, David. Is it not time?

• 1:34:02David Pierce?

  Oh my God. America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:34:06Nilay Patel?

  I will say I got some notes last week saying it, we're minimizing Brendan Carr by calling him a dummy. Cause he's not stupid. He's evil. And my point was that he's too dumb to make his evil seem fun.

• 1:34:21David Pierce?

  I also think being a dummy and being stupid are not the same thing. Yeah, I feel very strongly that Brendan Carr is not stupid, but I do feel very strongly that he's a dummy.

• 1:34:29Nilay Patel?

  Let me make a comparison for you. Ted Cruz, very smart man, some very bad ideas. You listen to Ted Cruz talk, he's like, he makes it sound compelling, like, no one likes, you know what I mean? Like, he's like, let me weave you a story about Supreme Court precedent. And at the end of it, you're like, huh, that's right. And then you're like, wait, I thought about it. Now all that was lies.

• 1:34:51Nilay Patel?

  You know? Brendan can't do it. Like, he's not smart enough to do it. He just says whatever nonsensical censorship idea that he has. And I'll give you this example. He was on stage last week after we taped. He was on stage with Ben Smith, who's the editor in chief of Cinefore, an event. I know Ben, Ben's a smart journalist. In the middle of this interview, Ben Smith looked at Brendan Carr and said, I think, I think I'm being trolled here. Because Brendan talks in such stupid circles.

• 1:35:22Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, no matter what the question is, his idea is that he's so smart that he can just like weave his way through it. And Ben was like, you're just trolling me. Because you're, nothing you say makes sense. Like, all of it isn't inherently contradictory and kind of like you're just justifying government censorship. And specifically, what he was responding to was Ben was saying, aren't you just attacking these broadcast stations? For speech you don't like by holding back their licenses or threatening these investigations? And Brendan's response to this, this is one of the most value free, like, like principles free, just naked, like, I am a corrupt piece of shit comments you can make. So the FCC is built on precedent and, you know, legal principles.

• 1:36:06Nilay Patel?

  And if you look at what the Democrats did, I now have the, you know, they did bad stuff too. So now I have the precedent to do bad stuff.

• 1:36:14Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, no, you should not do bad stuff. Right? If, if your big worry is that under the Biden administration, the FCC was doing all kinds of weird censorship and you're a free speech warrior, the answer is not for you to show up and do more censorship because they set a bad precedent.

• 1:36:32Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, that makes you a bad person. Just straightforwardly, if you're like, they abused the law. So now I am the punisher. You should not be in charge of speech in America. And that, that is Brendan's worldview. I promise you, that is his worldview, is that he has been given a permission slip to censor speech across the board because of the power he pursues to have. And when I say across the board, I also mean across the ocean.

• 1:37:00Nilay Patel?

  Because this week, you know, his big thing this week, he said, the United States will defend the interest of our tech giants against the EU's Digital Services Act. We've covered the Digital Services Act a bunch on the show. I've made Jake write about it, like, the entire Verge team had to write about the DSA. DSA is a big deal. It covers the big platforms. It says some platforms are gatekeepers. There's Digital Markets Act, which is right next to it. Then the speech platforms have certain rules, what they can keep up and take down. The EU is like, we're gonna have some laws around platforms. You have a different, we don't, they don't have the First Amendment. They have different speech laws in the EU. Famously, Elon Musk, Mr. Free Speech Absolutist, lie, but he says it all the time. He's like, if you don't like what's on our platform, pass a law.

• 1:37:43Nilay Patel?

  And then we'll comply with the law. Like, that's his vision. The EU passed some laws. They made some laws. JD Vance is like, your laws are incompatible to First Amendment. And the EU is like, yeah, we don't, we don't have one of those. They have a different speech tradition. I think they're very proud of some of their free speech traditions. I get notes from our European listeners all the time. They're like, we have free speech. This is different than yours. And their criticism of our First Amendment is that our First Amendment is so absolute, like, we, and I believe this, like, I think this is a good thing, but their criticism of it is, it doesn't allow us to do common sense things.

• 1:38:19Nilay Patel?

  Right there. We should not just allow hate speech the way that we allow it, but our first amendment jurisprudence allows it. We should like deep fakes. We'll get to it, but like the EU can just like make some speech loss in a way that I, I think is inappropriate, but their, their criticism of our first amendment is you don't have to be this crazy about it. Like you can just make some policies and see if they worked and you can change the policies. Brendan Carr is like, I will defend Facebook against EU regulation. Dude, you run the FCC. Like you are powerless against the European Union. You have, there's nothing for you to say that has anything to do with them. You can just wield some enforcement authority corruptly, which you now said that you want to do and punish European companies that operate here or issue

• 1:39:03Nilay Patel?

  statements of law that make no sense and basically just interfere with business because you're on a power trip. And everything he does and says indicates that he's on a power trip. Even the stuff that I think is intended to be like mysterious and fun. It's like, oh, you're just on a power trip. For example, this is the last piece of Brendan Carr. The FCC has these open meetings, right? And the open meetings are supposed to be like, here's all stuff on our agenda. They're usually pretty unanimous. Like they don't argue at the open meetings. So they've got one coming up and they're going to explore at the March open meeting, they're going to explore alternatives to GPS to, you know, provide some redundancy to the system and also improvements to the 911 system. They're going to next generation 911. Great. This is like normal FCC stuff. This is what you want the FCC

• 1:39:46Nilay Patel?

  doing. They're like, should 911 work better? Like, yeah, you don't have to pay attention to this.

• 1:39:52David Pierce?

  I didn't know GPS was a problem, but we can come back to that some other time.

• 1:39:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's just like, in a bipartisan way, you're like, we all depend on this one system that could be disrupted. We should have, we should have other.

• 1:40:02David Pierce?

  Let's have more systems. Yeah, sure. I buy that.

• 1:40:04Nilay Patel?

  This is some like basic stuff.

• 1:40:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Nilay Patel?

  Final paragraph of this. He says, wait, there's more. Finally, we will consider an adjudicatory item from the media bureau. I can't preview the details of an item like this one in advance. I'm sure inquiring minds will want to know, does it fit with public safety, our theme? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is no, but that's just how life in open meetings go. Sometimes this vote will be part of our broader efforts to clean house and clear up some backlog. So we'll be closing out with a good government win. What's an adjudicatory item from the media bureau?

• 1:40:34David Pierce?

  What?

• 1:40:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? He, that, that means adjudicatory means he's gonna issue a judgment, right? The media bureaus recovers all the broadcasters.

• 1:40:44Nilay Patel?

  He's gonna do some goofy shit and he's like hyping himself for it.

• 1:40:49David Pierce?

  Could this be like the 60 Minutes-y kind of stuff that we've been talking about? Like yet another, you were mean to Donald Trump on your news show kind of things?

• 1:40:58Nilay Patel?

  I, I have no idea. I'm just saying like, he is drunk with power and in it, sitting in a chair that should not afford him any power whatsoever.

• 1:41:07David Pierce?

  And he is having the time of his damn life and we know that because he keeps saying it out loud.

• 1:41:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he keeps, I mean, and I'm just saying, we should not have government censors. I know, I know that's controversial here in America in 2025. We should have government censors, we should have government censors who think they can just make law any, any way they want, which is what Brendan is doing. We should have government censors who go to events and tell journalists that they're empowered to be corrupt because they think their predecessors were corrupt. That is exactly the opposite of how you clean up a corrupt government. And you should not have government censors who think that doing censorship is worth like a hype reel in a press release. Like, all this is wrong.

• 1:41:49David Pierce?

  It's real like bad guy with a gun, good guy with a gun energy. Like, the only way to stop the bad stuff is for me to do it and then it's not bad because I'm doing it.

• 1:42:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00David Pierce?

  It's like, it's kind of a, like, there's like a, a little tiny part of me that admires that way of like thinking about your life, but it also just seems insane to me.

• 1:42:10Nilay Patel?

  When Trump was elected, our European reporters, Thomas Hucker, Tom Warren, all those folks, they're like, oh, we're in for it because the EU is all about regulating tech giants. And there's a reason that all of the tech CEOs were at the inauguration. They want Trump to fight a war over the DSA, in particular the DSA Digital Service Act. And you can see that the war is starting. It's not that Brendan Carr loves the tech giants, right? He wants to reopen Section 230 because he's just gonna write a law to reinterpret a law that exists. Not something an agency can do.

• 1:42:44Nilay Patel?

  The, very specifically, not something an agency can do anymore. Because of a recent Supreme Court ruling.

• 1:42:51Nilay Patel?

  But it's like you see that there's no logical coherency to this man, except the abuse of power. On the one hand, he's going to protect the Czech giants against Europe. On the other hand, he's going to beat them over the head with his interpretation of 230. So that they censor the way he wants them to. And it's like, just, anyway, Brendan, as always, I know you listen. I know you get readouts. I honestly, I know you do. You're, you're welcome to come on Decoder and face some real questions. I'm going to invite you every week. If people want to tweet at Brendan, you can. He's, he's available. He loves to tweet. He doesn't do anything to, you know, tweet at people and think about how to abuse his power. So, so Brendan, he's welcome on Decoder.

• 1:43:29Speaker 06

  What if, what if the adjudicatory item from the media bureau is Brendan Carr is coming on Decoder?

• 1:43:34Nilay Patel?

  That would be amazing. Brendan Carr is putting the iPad on jail. Uh, I think he's a coward. I don't think he'll ever show up. So, there's that, but he's welcome anytime he wants.

• 1:43:44Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 1:43:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to wrap up with like a gadget just to clear the air. Jake, what do you got?

• 1:43:49Speaker 06

  Did you see the phones that you can just attach an entire camera lens on the back of?

• 1:43:53Nilay Patel?

  I did, and I got a note from Dieter being like, how do you, you think these pogo pins work? Um, which is just very good.

• 1:43:59Speaker 06

  Wait, I missed this entirely. They don't have, they don't have to work. This is, I'm sure you should ask Dom more, because this was at MWC. So when you talk to him on Tuesday, but, um, it's their concepts. So I don't like, do they work? Like, that's a very big question mark. Do they look insane and ridiculous? And do I like absolutely want this 100%? It's just like, you know, and you could put a pancake, like pancake lenses exist, right? There are small camera lenses. No, no, no, no. These are full on telephoto lenses strapped to the back of what is essentially an iPhone. So they just like made a phone with an e-mount on it? And it, it rules. There's just a full sensor just in the center, like open and exposed on the back of this camera. It rules.

• 1:44:43David Pierce?

  Do you have to put a body cap on your phone when you're not using it?

• 1:44:46Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, it's not a bad idea. I mean,

• 1:44:52David Pierce?

  I love, I unironically love that idea.

• 1:44:55Speaker 06

  This is great.

• 1:44:56David Pierce?

  Fabulous. Like, we're, we're doing weird camera bump things all over the place anyway. Like, just go after it.

• 1:45:03Speaker 06

  Exactly. The, the cameras have sort of peaked. We've just been doing multiple cameras. The ultimate trajectory of smartphones is just to turn them back into DSLRs that can make phone calls.

• 1:45:15David Pierce?

  All I'm hearing is the Lumias had this right, like 12 years ago.

• 1:45:18Speaker 06

  The Lumias were correct.

• 1:45:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, because there's two approaches here. The one is the, what if the main sensor was just a full-on sensor? Right? Sure. And then there's what Xiaomi is doing, I think? Which is, what if we made a whole ass camera? And just like mag saved it to the back of a phone?

• 1:45:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:39Nilay Patel?

  That's the one where it's like, there's pogo pins. They're saying that it communicates with like a laser communication system.

• 1:45:46Speaker 06

  Think about how convenient it would be if, in order to have the quality of a DSLR on you at all times, all you had to do is carry an entire additional lens that you could strap to your phone.

• 1:45:58Speaker 06

  I, I want this to be great, and this doesn't make any sense.

• 1:46:01Nilay Patel?

  So like, it's a whole camera. It's got the sensor, the optics, all in a lens module. And you just kind of like snap it on the back of a phone.

• 1:46:08Speaker 06

  Oh, I didn't realize the, the sensor is in, in Xiaomi's lens. Okay, that's pretty good, actually.

• 1:46:13Nilay Patel?

  Right, so the one, there's two of them. One of them is like-

• 1:46:15Speaker 06

  One of them is the exposed sensor.

• 1:46:16Nilay Patel?

  One of them is the exposed sensor. And then the lenses just go on it with a regular mount. And that's like, one idea, you know? Like, that's if you just had the idea, that's the idea you would have. And then there's Xiaomi being like, ah, it's not quite ludicrous enough. What if the sensor was in the lens? And then every time you changed lenses, you were also changing sensors.

• 1:46:39David Pierce?

  My, my worst tech take has always been that there is some very good idea in all of this. Like, do you remember the Samsung Galaxy camera? That was literally just a, a Samsung phone strapped to a camera?

• 1:46:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52David Pierce?

  That was a good idea. I remain 100% certain that a point and shoot that runs full Android is a thing that should exist.

• 1:47:00Speaker 06

  If you could watch Netflix on that thing, I, I really think you would find an audience.

• 1:47:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just like, the, the creator economy is huge. Everybody is just out here doing, like, you're telling me the people who like buy a second phone just to make TikToks wouldn't buy a second phone with a kick-ass lens on it?

• 1:47:14Nilay Patel?

  So David, the funniest part of this story is that deep, deep in the story, there is a link to Sony having this idea. In 2013 with something called the Cyber shot QX 10 and QX 100.

• 1:47:25David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:47:26Nilay Patel?

  That story was written by David Pierce for the verge.com.

• 1:47:31David Pierce?

  10 out of 10.

• 1:47:32Nilay Patel?

  And so you have a review of the QX 10 and your, your conclusion was that the QX 10 was bad and the QX 100 was great.

• 1:47:42David Pierce?

  I was right. Can I get a readout on what the review scores were here?

• 1:47:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 1:47:50David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. This was the review I wrote about seeing Paul Rudd on the streets of New York City.

• 1:47:54Nilay Patel?

  The, the layouts are so broken after over a decade, like 12 years later, these layouts are broken. One of the pictures is just captioned with the word fire twice.

• 1:48:05David Pierce?

  Fun fact.

• 1:48:06Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why.

• 1:48:07David Pierce?

  I literally, I have a picture of Paul Rudd in cargo shorts that I took on this camera when I ran into him.

• 1:48:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The, the specific broken pull quote in this story is the QX 10 is slightly better than your phone. The QX 100 blows it away.

• 1:48:21David Pierce?

  Hell yeah.

• 1:48:22Nilay Patel?

  Then I think we all know what a huge hit the Sony Cyber shot.

• 1:48:25David Pierce?

  All I'm hearing is.

• 1:48:26Nilay Patel?

  Also, by the way, this score, I got to the score. The score is 6.3.

• 1:48:32David Pierce?

  Uh, seven.

• 1:48:35David Pierce?

  The, yeah, I, I remember debating between the point two and the point three for a really long time. All I'm hearing is history is proving David right and this makes me really happy.

• 1:48:45Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's, it's very good. It was $500. Anyway, this idea is back with, by Jamie and I'm very excited for it. All right. Good. We've cleared the air. Gadgets are back, everybody. Here's my waterproof.

• 1:48:57David Pierce?

  Jake has to go like direct the Superbowl from his control room now.

• 1:49:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. That's it. That's our chat. Thank you, Jake.

• 1:49:05David Pierce?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:49:11Nilay Patel?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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