Code Conference, Essential Phone, and Chromebook Pro

This week’s Vergecast is recorded out of the studio. Nilay heads to the West Coast to reunite with Dieter, Lauren, and Casey at this year’s Code Conference. The gang discusses the speakers (in more than one way) at the event including Andy Rubin, Hillary Clinton, and Reed Hastings. They also chat a little about the news outside of the conference. Back in New York, Paul reports on gadget week with his weekly segment “Let me hug your robot heart.” There’s a whole lot more in between, so listen to get it all! 01:29 - The case for editing tweets 06:01 - The Essential Phone: a first look at the hardware 30:11 - Paul’s weekly segment “Let me hug your robot heart” 32:49 - Netflix CEO says net neutrality is ‘not our primary battle’ 42:41 - Clinton says the Russians had to be ‘guided by Americans’ in how they weaponized information 55:37 - Don’t buy the Chromebook Pro until Google fixes a critical bug 59:11 - Verizon says the Droid brand isn’t dead, but it sure looks like it 1:01:30 - Microsoft's new Skype redesign is a radical change that looks like Snapchat 1:04:55 - Samsung's Bixby voice assistant is reportedly still weeks away from US launch 1:07:11 - Apple’s ‘Siri speaker’ reportedly enters manufacturing as announcement nears Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. You might detect a slight echo in the room.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  A frisson.

• 0:10Nilay Patel?

  The sound of money, if you will.

• 0:14Nilay Patel?

  The Vergecast is going to be recording in an extraordinarily fancy ballroom at the Tarranea Resort, because we are at the Code Conference. So I'm here, I'm Neelam Patel. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, this room is making us very chill and like...

• 0:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna order some people to be killed in this room.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Casey Newton is here.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  It is so nice to be here with so much money around us.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  Lauren Good is here.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  It is so nice to be here with the sound of crashing waves outside of the door.

• 0:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, let me just describe this room to you. We're on the top floor of the Tarranea Resort, and we're literally gazing its two walls of windows. We're on like the corner boardroom, and it's just the ocean spreading out in front of us. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to be talking about technology, culture, power, those who wield it, those who want it.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  But certainly if you have questions about the boardroom, then you should get at us on Twitter.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Or the ocean.

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  There's a Sharp Aquos TV in the corner. It's a beautiful room. But if it sounds a little different, that's actually why I'm explaining this to you. If it sounds a little different or echoey, it's because we're on the road this week in this opulent room, at this opulent conference. It's been a great Code Conference.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  A lot of things happened. We should just get into the news. The biggest news of the week, I think.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  For us, anyway.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  For us, personally, is that Casey asked the CFO of Twitter when the hell he's gonna be able to edit tweets.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Listen, Neelam, there's a movement in this country.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  There is not a movement.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  You can hear it on the streets. Listen, you know, after the election...

• 1:45Speaker 01

  You can hear it in these tweets.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  After the election, everyone was like, "Where were all these Trump voters? We've never heard from them." After they introduced editing tweets into Twitter, it's gonna be the same thing. People are gonna be like, "We didn't realize we wanted this as much as we actually did."

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  No one says that about Trump.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  And I think you can just look forward to some changes. But let me tell you what I did.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  So as you may know, I have been on a years-long campaign to let us be able to edit tweets. I've made the case for editing tweets. Tweets on the verge.com where I've sort of laid out my case. I won't repeat it here. Also, it's self evident why we should be able to edit any text that we write. But also, I had a real opportunity.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Casey, if he were born in like, you know, 1600, just railing against ink on vellum and why somebody must invent the pencil. We must be able to edit the words.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  Usually the words self evident are like preceded by we hold these truths.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Followed by all men are created equal, not we should be able to edit all text.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Listen, if you saw the faves I get on my tweets about editing tweets, you'd be telling a different story. But here's what I can tell you. Anthony Noto, the CFO of Twitter was the penultimate speaker at the code conference. And one of the cool things about the conference is that the random straggler, audience randos like me can just get up and ask questions. And so I strolled to the microphone. I was the first questioner.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  You didn't stroll.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  He ran. He tripped over my feet and diders.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  You definitely sprinted. What might even say like you traipsed. You just, you just went.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  I went for it.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  His hair got there like 17 seconds before the rest of him did.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  But the good news is I was able to say, you know, Anthony, there's this growing movement to let us be able to edit our tweets. You know, can I count you as a supporter? And then he talked for three minutes about essentially that Twitter continually evolves its product and it appreciates its passionate users. And then he sort of stopped talking.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  That was a prepared text because he knew it would come to this space where they know that you are.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  They monitor twitter.com. You've been tweeting from here. They know your location.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  I got back channel afterwards that Noto had been prepared for this exact question and that it would be coming from me.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Because they know that you're here.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so anyway, so he gave me a non-answer and then I said, thank you. I'm going to go ahead and mark you down as a supporter. And then he laughed and said nothing more. So I think that tells us something. That within Twitter, there's a growing acceptance of the inevitability of editable tweets.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The biggest news of the week.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  By far.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  And that was the Roachcast. Nothing else happening here. I don't think Noto said anything else really of import. He said a bunch of stuff about live TV.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  Wants to fill the space.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  He made the claim that the reason Twitter is getting into video is because it increases like viewership and engagement with tweets. That people tweet more and read more tweets when they're watching video. And so they just put it right there on the platform. But at the same time, he also made like another claim that like the, you know, even a huge increase in like that is like, doesn't affect their like overall numbers on the bottom line. So like, I don't know, they've got this whole story that they're telling now that for the first however many years of Twitter's existence, we didn't know what it was. And we decided, we know what it is now. We'd figured it out last year. We know what Twitter is.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  An uneditable text.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  We have a four point description of what Twitter is for.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  That's better.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Anybody wants us to do anything, we decide whether or not it'll help one of those four things and then we say yes or no.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  What's better than Dick Costola's like inception style bubbles upon bubbles chart? What was that? It was crazy.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Oh, like the four quadrants of doom.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was, it was a bad moment in Twitter history. I do think that they are closer to arriving at what they want it to be. I think the question will just be, is there actually a good business here?

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  Look, there's a whole conversation we could have about the number of people who stood on stage here at Code and talked about video and phones. But that conversation is boring because it's just like, it's interesting a little bit, but like, it was definitely an underlying current, right? Like the shift in media, but whatever.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, video in general.

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  I want to talk.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Video is a thing, guys.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  Video is a whole thing.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  You've heard it here.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  And that's why you're listening to this internet radio.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  But the biggest news here for us.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:04Nilay Patel?

  Was the essential phone.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  The essential phone.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  And I gotta tell you, Dieter Bone.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Just call it phone.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna call it the e-phone. Is that not kosher? Its actual name is PH dash one.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Really?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  PH dash one.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  I thought that he said on stage it's just called the phone.

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's like model.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  But like PH dash one, spell out one.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, now I just wanna jump off this balcony. Beautiful ocean.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  But I wanna hear the story. So, so Andy Rubin's on stage the other night and he reveals this phone.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  To Walt Mossberg, who was interviewing him. But then afterwards, Dieter Bone, executive editor of The Verge, who's sitting right across from me. Chase is, it's, tell, tell us how you got your hands on this phone because it, we think you're the only person in the industry who's had, in the press industry. And Walt, who's actually played with the phone.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  But Walt's retiring, so he's out. So you're the only one left.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Just the old school gadget hustle. Like, if you look at the pictures, they're real bad, because I'm not a good photographer. They're like in literally a hotel hallway. It was like, you know, talking to the people at Rubin's company and like, where are you at? We should, we should hang out.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Following him around a hotel.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Following him around a hotel room, having, like, he's literally like trying to pack his bags to leave, to fly away from this place. And I'm like, no, no, let me take some pictures. Like, okay. And then like, okay, I gotta find someplace to take good pictures. Well, I can't. So here it is in my hand. There's some hotel carpet behind it. Click, click, click, click, click.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  Which is a thing we used to do all the time.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  Literally all the time.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  I am Mr. Blurry Cam.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  I thought the photos were wonderfully evocative of a time and a place. I instinctively texted Joanna Stern to tell her to fix her white balance.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Wait, wait. Dieter took the photos and you texted Joanna?

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  Whenever there were bad white balance photos on Gadget, it was always Joanna.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  That feels like a weird form of referral anger. Like, Dieter, you did the photos. Joanna, fix your white balance.

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  I would just see photos with like off-white balance and it would always be Joanna. I'd be like, fix your white balance. So I saw that. Anyway. It was just a referral burn. That's all that was.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I don't know. It's his phone?

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Like.

• 8:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, go through it.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so. The, the, the thing that everybody sees on the phone right away is that the screen is bezelless, except for the bottom, there's a strip and then the top, it literally wraps around the front facing cam. So it looks like a little one eyed minion. It's very confusing.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  When you hold it and look at it, like your eyes just go straight to that dead zone on the screen. Really? Ah, nah, constantly. But then after like literally a minute, you do stop doing that and it doesn't feel weird to have a weird gap in the middle of the top of the screen. And I do think it's smart, like when you look at an Android phone, there's never anything there. It's always like notifications on the left, status crap on the right, and there's like an empty space there. So sure, yeah, that makes sense. So that's fine. It doesn't wrap around the edges, you know, it's whatever. The titanium, I don't know, like it feels like metal. It's But then there's all those ceramic in it? Yeah, so the back, the back is ceramic and there's a OnePlus ceramic phone that's ceramic.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Ceramic is really good at like resisting scratches. It's really hard. It just feels like glossy glass, basically. And you don't need antenna lines. And you don't need antenna lines, although there are antenna lines on the titanium. There's like a couple of lines on the, on the edge.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Interesting. I thought he said that you didn't need any type of Band-Aid.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this was like a, this was literally like, it was a, what's it called? DVT unit? So like, one of the photos I like blurred out, like the code number, like there were, there were numbers all along this thing. Every piece of the phone had some code on it to like, tell you, identify it for you and whatever. I will just say, like, we should get into like the, why the phone is interesting or not interesting, but just having held the hardware, it feels, um, like, imagine if you took a iPhone and put like a perfectly square case on it. Yeah. Like it, the edges aren't like sharp, but the thing just feels kind of like blocky. And people may hate it, I don't know. It's not like super thin.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  And that's not because it was a prototype that this is what it's all, everyone's sponsored to look like this.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Aesthetic of like, I am kind of blocky. Yeah. I am not trying to be curved and rounded and smooth and whatever. It's just like, nope, I'm, I am a, I am a rectangle and I am perfectly happy being a rectangle. Yeah. That's The essential shape of a phone. Yeah.

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a hole.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  But essentially, what was, I'm just kidding. I'm gonna say that as many times as I possibly can in the segment. What was the UI like?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  It's Android. It's just Android.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  So you swipe through, everything looks like Android. There was no skin. There was nothing.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Nothing. I mean, there's also nothing on it. It was like, like they, the thing booted and like had Android. I didn't, I only had a couple of minutes to be like, here it is. It's Android. But I like, couldn't like hunt for software. I couldn't like, you know.

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  Attach any pogo.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  See if there were crapless.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I was, I saw the pogo pen 360 camera.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Um, and I said, let me do that. It's like, we're leaving now.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So let's talk about, so that, that's like the phone. There's the hardware. You're literally, we think it's Dieter and Walt who have held it.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Well.

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  Aren't, who don't work at Essential. Um, and you know, presumably like random carrier people.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  Like some mid-level marketing manager at Sprint is listening to this being like, I've held it.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I know. Well, we asked all the carriers, are you going to support the phone? And Verizon was like, it'll work, whatever. And T-Mobile's like, everything works with T-Mobile. We're the best.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Um, and AT&T was like.

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  T-Mobile did another shot of tequila, continued screaming into the night.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  AT&T, uh, asked us why we thought that we were allowed to talk to them at all because they're AT&T. I don't know. They just, it'll work there. And Sprint was like, yeah, it'll totally work on our network and we'll have more to say later.

• 11:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Which I just want to point out that it has become obvious to me that I have a soft spot for phones that are probably going to fail.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Right?

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Also maybe Chromebooks.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  And yeah, also Chromebooks. Uh, and if you want like the definitive, like example of a phone that is very cool and interesting and exciting and innovative and like just everything seems great. Uh, it would, I'm gonna say it'd be the WebOS, you know, Palm Pre and it launched on Sprint.

• 12:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  And, uh, there's a little bit of deja vu in my head right now.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was like, who is going to buy this thing?

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  We need to just go through all of this stuff.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  There's like.

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  I wanted to start with Dieter holding it because that's like exclusive.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  In theory, the phone should be the least interesting thing that Andy Rubin is trying to do with this company.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  Right. So he's got the phone.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  And that's $700.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  And it's $700 and it's, comes in colors, all the colors of the rainbow.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Four colors.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  Four colors of the rainbow.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  One of which is matte. The rest are glass.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  Favorite color of the rainbow, matte. Also like bronze.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Color?

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't think bronze.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Like a dude.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  This is my friend Matt. Now available as a color.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  I'm gonna put Matt as like the color of my eyes on my driver's license. My color, Matt.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  Look, it's been a really long three days.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  I remember last time we did this was like at night.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Like you know how every phone, every company, when they like release the colors of their gadget, the colors all have ridiculous names?

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And like, Google made their jokes with like, this one's really blue or whatever, like, but they're always like, ice this, you know?

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  I don't know, charcoal that, whatever.

• 13:33Nilay Patel?

  Space gray.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  What if we, they just gave the colors names? This is Matt. He's white.

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  Jenny.

• 13:43Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so there's the phone.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  Jenny's.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Tito's really enjoying this.

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  There's, we have to stop. Well, the names, the names of colors are inherently arbitrary.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, blue could just.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Be George.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't matter. Anyway, what is truth? The Vergecast, everybody. So there's the phone.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:06Nilay Patel?

  Then there is, and it's, the phone is, like you said, among the least interesting. Then there's a home device.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  Called the Essential Home.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  Which is a round puck with a huge round display, which we think might be the biggest round display available in consumer electronics.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 14:24Nilay Patel?

  That runs Ambient OS.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:27Nilay Patel?

  Which Andy and Walt clearly had some sort of like mind meld, because Walt's last column was about ambient technology, and then Andy Rubin came here and released Ambient OS.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  So he was very happy to latch on to that. Ambient OS, sound, I'm just gonna say this, sounds very promising. It also sounds like the ravings of a fucking madman.

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, like the way it's described.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Read the description of it.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the way it's described on the website, it's like, it's an API to your home. It turns your home into an application. Your home is an API and you are an application. You are but one feature of the API that is the application of the universe. Like, it's just everything.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  And this is exactly how normal people talk to each other in the middle of America. When they, when they walk into Home Depot or Best Buy, they're like, what's gonna make me feel like an API today?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Give it to me immediately. Well, here's a bad sign. Essential.com is not loading.

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  That's great. But the point of the Essential home device in the Ambient OS is near as we can tell, because there's no demos, there's just one screenshot

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  of the device running Ambient OS. And all that screenshot is, is a huge modal dialogue box that says, "Leave now." Because it's like a proactive reminder for you to go to the airport.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  We have a picture of a music interface. There's a picture of a music interface. It's got like a volume thing around the circle in the middle for some reason.

• 15:53Nilay Patel?

  But Ambient OS, it's fundamentally supposed to, and I don't know how they're going to do this, tie into every other smart home device that you own.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  And then somehow tie into all of the other smart platforms that exist, like HomeKit and SmartThings and Alexa. And that mechanism is completely unclear.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, on stage, when Walt was interviewing him, he, he basically said, like, there's too many UIs. There's too many standards, so I'm making another one.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  But he, he wants to be the, the person who like, abstracts all of the crap that you have to deal with at a smart home and like, make the layer that just has them all talk to each other. You know, it's like, it's like synergy in WebOS.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  It's gonna fit.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Back to the WebOS comparisons. It's also, wasn't there an emphasis on privacy as well?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the, what exactly he means by being more private is super unclear.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  It's really, really unclear. Like, there was something, I don't know if we wrote this, to be honest, or this is in the language somewhere on the site, I'm not remembering at the moment, but something about keeping more of the data on device rather than in the cloud. But I don't see how that's, I just don't see how that's possible. And I also don't see how it's total, it's going to be possible to do this.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  He's also going to open source the Ambient OS.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  So the, the third piece of this, or fourth piece of this, so we've got the phone, we've got Ambient OS, we've got the, what do we call this thing? Does this smart speaker? Is it a?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  It's like a puck.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  A smart speaker.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  But it's got a display. We need a new word for this, these things that have displays.

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  Because there's smart circles.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Well, there's the Amazon one, that's a square.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Intelligent ellipses.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  I think we should just, I'll call him Matt.

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  Matt. Jenny.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Jenny.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  Seinfeld characters, Elaine, just get in there.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Thinking like speaking of like things that like prove that this is actually going to work is he's trying to create an ecosystem of modules that will attach to the phone and possibly the speaker or like your wall.

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And the, the, the linchpin of this is he, he did two things, um, both of which are like very pragmatic. The first thing that he did is, uh, for wireless communication, he's using basically wireless USB. So everybody knows how to code to USB to communicate. So that's simple. So that's better than like what Google was doing with like their early versions of project aura. Those like these like insane magical future whatevers, uh, for wireless, you know, data. And then the second thing he's doing is like, they don't, you don't have to stick a battery in every single one of these things, because that sucks. You have to charge it. So he's using pogo pins.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  And then magnets to like, hold them on. So yeah, there's, there's like, we're entering a world of pogo pins.

• 18:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They're little, if you don't know the pogo pin, and they're just little spring loaded guys.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  There's little dudes. Two on the back, there's two receptacles in the back and the pins are on the thing and they clip in.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  And they give power to the device. And he went on this whole speech about how I don't need to put a wifi chip in here. I don't need a battery in here. So my 360 camera only costs 50 bucks and it worked. It worked pretty well.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  He's also being very careful not to call it mods or wasn't really saying modular. It was more, they call that part of the phone, the accessory bus, the wireless accessory bus. Um, and it was you that asked actually, Dieter, um, about modular, someone got up and asked him, it was you about modularity and how it hasn't really taken off. Um, and he, and Ruben did say that he plans to make the first five or six, they plan to make the first five or six accessories to get people started on it.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Cause I think it's like, I can't think of more than two mods. I can think of like camera and speaker.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  And that, and extra battery is usually, yeah. But otherwise, I mean, once you start getting into like, and this can also be a projector and your friends will come over and you'll project from your phone to.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Here's a hook to mix your dough.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  You guys.

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  Pasta maker. Pasta extruder.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I know. Waffle iron. The, the only consumer product that built a successful ecosystem of external modules that you clicked onto the thing, and you're just gonna frickin hate me for saying this, but it was the Handspring Visor.

• 19:50Nilay Patel?

  That's because one of the mods was a cellular radio.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Yes, all of the mods.

• 19:55Nilay Patel?

  It was kind of essential.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  And that's literally what the first trio was, was a Handspring Visor with a mod you couldn't take off. But all of the mods on the Visor were cellphone, MP3 player, storage.

• 20:07Nilay Patel?

  They were apps.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Modem, right? They were, they're things that just became apps on a phone. I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff that's like coming for like Moto mod, but like that's like, you know, physical key.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  Actually, I put this on a rundown. It's funny because he announced the essential phone. He announced a modular phone with this thing. And he announced his ambient OS, which the phone is real. Like it's a thing Dieter held it. It runs Android. We know what Android phones are. An Android phone with a funky screen design and a modular accessory ecosystem is not, like he'll ship the phone.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:44Nilay Patel?

  He said he was gonna ship it within 30 days.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 20:47Nilay Patel?

  Everyone at Code was gonna get a free one. Like he's that confident about it. Then there's this ambient OS thing, which seems like insane vapor to me. That's just me. Then there's like an assistant that he's doing that runs an ambient OS.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Assistant out of nowhere.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  And so the reason that he's making the phone is because he wants to put his assistant in people's pockets, basically. And that was fundamentally his reason to make the phone. But at the same time, today, we reviewed the Moto, what is it? Z2 Play?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Z2, yeah.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  That's a terrible name. It's just awful. But that's a phone with a modular accessory ecosystem that people quite like. Like Dan really liked the first one. And then Samsung today announced a new Smart Things hub that is actually a mesh Wi-Fi router, which is the combination of things that everybody's always wanted.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  And Smart Things purports to interface with everything in your home.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  And be the bridge on top of all of it. What is new? What is he bringing to the table here that Motorola and Samsung are on like generation two and three of these products already?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Well, and like, and one of the things I've been wondering is why announce all of these things at the same time, right? Like, if you were just excited about the phone, why not announce the phone? Because I think when you unveil all of these things simultaneously, it just sort of raises the question of how baked is all this stuff? Like, it just seems incredibly ambitious for a relatively small company that hasn't been working on it for all that long.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  See, I actually disagree with that a little bit, because I think the way that Ruben presented it was, he went through like, a little bit of the progression of computing over the past few decades, and then ended up, you know, as he was talking to the crowd at Code Conference the other night, ended up at, okay, so what's post-mobile? And I think if he had just showed up with a mobile phone at that point, it would have been sort of like, okay, so what's post-mobile is another mobile phone, and it's on Android. Got it?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then also, why make the phone the centerpiece of your announcement? You know, like-

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  Because it's the thing that's done? But why not wait? Like, what's the point of shipping this phone? Why not ship the other device?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  So, anyway, I think the reason that he introduced five things at once was that even if any individual, one of them, didn't have any real innovation, you sort of present them all together, and it kind of seems like this complete thought. But as you know, Neel I, it just seems like a lot of stuff other people have done.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. But what he's saying, actually, Josh Palkowski is like, why are you doing this? And he's like, we want to be a big consumer electronics company that puts the user first. That's kind of where the privacy thing comes from. And he was like, we've raised multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. And then, while he was saying that, he was making a three with his hand. Oh, really? He was holding up three fingers, and like, he was like, multiple, and like, winking.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  Well, I think he explicitly said at one point that his fund, the Playground Global Fund, had raised $300 million.

• 23:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, but his fund is an investor in Essential. There's a whole thing where like- Right. He just said Essential had multiple hundreds of millions of dollars, and he's like, waving his hand around. Who knows what signal he was, maybe he was just trying to get his people to like, get him off the stage. He's like, if I flash three, like, anyway, but he's like, we've raised, they've raised, obviously, a lot of money, and they want to be a big player, and they think they're going to ramp over time, and- So sure, announce all the things. I just, the vibe afterwards, just from talking to the code attendees, was, what was the point of this?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  People were very down on it in a way that I, that I actually thought was surprising.

• 24:05Nilay Patel?

  Which is interesting, it's like weird, because the attention on our site, the traffic to these posts on our site was like skyrocketing.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, the man that, like, he invented Android. The most popular post of the month.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  And, and people love Android, right? And so the idea that the founder of Android has a big new idea, like, there are very few Verge stories that are going to be more interesting to our audience, right? Uh, but I ju, I think we're just still kind of, still waiting.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  He also had some choice words to say about Android.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Right. Which is that the phones are all bad.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Which was an amazing thing to hear the co-founder of Android say, and say basically in those words.

• 24:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he's like, I don't like any of them. I have them all, and I don't like any of them. Uh, and then he was like, technology is like too complicated, and it's my fault because I made Android.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna make a great iPhone commercial this fall.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  Just a clip.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Of Andy Rubin talking about what he unleashed on the world.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  And then just an Apple logo.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's, I think he was trying to indict iOS in that as well, right? He's like, there's not a lot of choice in the market, there's not a lot of innovation, and when there is, it's too complicated.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  And he talked about overload too, like this, fatigue is the word he used, actually, just there being too many devices in general.

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but he, if, he thinks that, like, there were unintended knock-on consequences to the mobile revolution that he helped start by creating Android. Sure. What has he actually presented in this phone, I would say, very little, or in his overall vision that solves that problem?

• 25:29Speaker 02

  I mean, it sounds like what he wants is to build an AI that talks to everything for you.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  It's just a very tall order, and he, like, Apple is not gonna give him HomeKit and Siri access.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They're just not. That's not how they operate. It sounds, Amazon will give Alexa access to virtually anyone. And he brought up that the Alexa team had already been talking to him and they're very supportive of him. So like, maybe that will happen. Yeah. Pretty, pretty good shot. He'll get the Google Assistant. Yeah, he knows a guy. Yeah. Over there. Like, that'll be fine. But like, it's just a lot of the same.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I think like the more interesting, an interesting comparison to make here is Tony Fadell, who also wanted to start a big consumer brand. And what did he do? Did he come in and be like, well, I helped invent the iPhone and so here's my next phone? No, he's like, I'm going to reinvent the thermostat. And then all of us were like, huh? And then we looked at it and we realized that thermostats are terrible. He winds up inventing this whole new category. Nest is a big success.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  Is it?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Well, until, until Google bought it. I'm just saying, like, sort of within the first two years, right? Everybody was pretty excited about Nest. If, if Ruben had gone out and sort of found some other gadget that either needed to be reinvented or hadn't been invented yet and showed up with that, even if it seemed like it was in a niche category, I think we'd all be sitting around the table saying, you know, this might not seem like the most exciting thing, but you know, if it takes off, it's going to give him the runway he needs to sort of develop this full suite of consumer products. Like, I think that's a more tried and tested approach to building a consumer brand. Then I'm going to reinvent five categories simultaneously in ways that don't actually look like reinventions.

• 27:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  What if he had come out and presented a TV? I keep thinking about what Reed Hastings said about, like, someone asked if he was going to ever make a Netflix or ever, excuse me, ever launch a Netflix line of movie theater chains. And he said, no, I, you know, and that's a, TVs are getting so good, right? Which is sort of in conflict with what he said earlier about how people will still go to the movie theaters for whatever reason. But, but like, imagine if Andy, anyway, imagine if Andy Rubin had just like got on stage and was like, here's the essential TV.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  I'm kind of into that. Like, everybody will tell you, you can't make monies in money in TVs, but like, I would be, I would be really interested to see Andy Rubin's take on a TV, just because there's so little innovation in that category.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  I have watched so many TV devices get launched on Sage Code that have all died. Yeah. You don't do that. If you're listening to this and you're like, oh, that sounds like a good idea, just stop. Just stop listening. I want you to keep listening to Vergecast. I, we appreciate your support, but I'm saying, if that sounds like a good idea, turn this show off. Take a fucking break. Take a cold shower. Come back to us. We'll be, we'll be waiting. It's on demand. Savage.

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta read an ad. We got other stuff to talk about, but we're presumably getting the phones soon. Presumably because they're supposed to ship them in 30 days. We're presumably going to see much more of this ambient OS. I got the branding is great, right? Like, we had a story stream on the site that was like, "All of the essential phone news." And I was like, "Well, at least they got that." And it's interesting. Andy was not like a super charismatic presenter of this stuff, but just the interest from our audience. It was like a, it was a delightful break from like, Trump news on Twitter. For like, a little bit, all anyone was talking about was a new cellphone, and it was because

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  Dieter took medium to bad photos in the hotel hallway. And I was like, "This is 2010." Like, I'm, I'm back. Anyway, let me read this ad. It is unsurprisingly for Squarespace. "Who are great?" This episode of The Verge Has is brought to you by Squarespace. Whatever your next big idea might be, count on Squarespace to help you create an eye-catching online platform that brings it to life. Whether you need a portfolio to showcase your work, a store to sell your products and services, or a blog to share your ideas, Squarespace gives you everything you need to look at an expert right from the start. You even get a unique domain, which strengthens your brand and makes it easier for visitors to find you. Plus, with Squarespace's award-winning templates, creating a beautiful website is simple and intuitive. You can add and arrange your content in features with the click of

• 29:27Nilay Patel?

  a mouse. There's nothing to install, patch, or upgrade ever. But if you do have a question, Squarespace has award-winning 24/7 customer support that can help you with any problem, no matter how technical or trivial. It's like your very own IT department. So, make your next move. Start your free trial at Squarespace.com today. You enter offer code VERGE, you get 10% off. That's VERGE, V-E-R-G-E. So, go to Squarespace.com, enter offer code VERGE, and you get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace, you're in a hotel barroom.

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's their tagline.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Interesting new direction for their, their marketing.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  It's like a VR play.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Squarespace, where are you now? Look around.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  On the web with templates.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Hello, this is Paul Miller coming at you live with gadget hot takes. There is so much going on in the gadget world and you know, I'm happy for everybody who got to listen to a very smart, intelligent executives talk about the future. But the present is gadgets and there's so much happening. Computex was this week. There's all these crazy laptops and video cards and motherboards, all the new motherboards that support the new Intel processors are out, the X299 motherboards. So exciting. You have to go to theverge.com/circuitbreak. I don't normally tell you to do this, but it's really important this week because it's,

• 30:56Speaker 04

  it's gadget week, let me tell you. But every week I do a segment and it's called, let me hug your robot heart. And this week on let me hug your robot heart is, I don't know, it's, it's maybe the pinnacle of Indiegogo. You know, it's, it's that classic couldn't cut it on Kickstarter, had to put it on Indiegogo so we get the money no matter what because we're kind of scammy. But maybe we're just really passionate about this and we wanted to succeed. I don't even know. I really don't know. This, this company called Kalium, Kalium Labs, it's with a K.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  They made the Sound Heroes Bluetooth speaker, which is a Bluetooth speaker that is a statue of a robot that looks like it's from out of a video game. They're basically trying to make their own, like, imagine they tried to license like the Silver Surfer. Or Thor or something, you know, like a real, a real IP and put Bluetooth speakers in the chest and then have them stand on a, on a plate that is a subwoofer. And by the way, this figurine is like three feet high, but they couldn't get the IP. So they're like making their own IP. They've got like a video game tie in. They're like making a comic book about this robot. Uh, yeah, sound heroes, but there's only one hero and it's this

• 32:21Speaker 04

  large polygonal robot like thing that doesn't do anything except to have like laser eyes. The big, there's a big and small version. The big version is like 280 bucks. It's probably the best way to spend your money on Indiegogo right now. It's funded, of course. Uh, it's very exciting. And yeah, that's let me, let me hug your robot heart. Segment I do every week without fail. Have, have a good time and on the west coast, touch the ocean.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  So you were talking about Netflix. Uh, Reed Hastings was here. Uh, he said some interesting things about Netflix. There's actually a bunch of like policy news, right? Uh, Hillary Clinton was here at Code. We should talk about that. She talked a lot about how content had been weaponized on the, by the internet, which is interesting. Um, and then Lauren Paul Jobs is here with Senator, Harris talked about education, but let's start with Reed. Lauren, do you want to go through what he, he talked about movie theaters? He talked about-

• 33:16Speaker 03

  He did. He talked about, uh, windowing, which, um, you know, is something that Netflix has talked about a bunch before. Netflix essentially believes that movies should be available on Netflix for streaming the same day that they are released in theaters and has advocated for that. Um, a lot of you probably know this, but if not, there's a, you know, there's a kind of a dark zone in the movie industry, uh, where there's a window of generally 90 days. It's getting a little bit shorter in some cases, but 90 days where between the time that a movie is released in theaters and that it becomes available for first DVD and then home rental. And so Netflix deals with that, right? And even though Netflix has all this great original content that they're making and stuff like that, they still of course would like faster access to, uh, to movies, but it's hard to crack sort of the traditional distribution standards. So, uh, he spoke a lot about that.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  He said this interesting thing where- He believes, I'm not sure he actually believes this. I think maybe he was being diplomatic, but he believes that if the window is shortened and Netflix gets movies right away, that people will still go to theaters because he likened it to, well, I mean, people know how to cook. I'm paraphrasing a little bit. People know how to cook, but they still like go out to dinner with friends because it's like this communal experience, which, I mean, personally, if I had access to a brand new movie like John Wick 3, the moment that it came out on Netflix, I'm pretty positive I would never go to a movie theater.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  And especially for people with kids who for them, like going to the movie theaters involves like either getting a sitter or buying four or five tickets and like it becomes this very sort of complicated and expensive proposition. It's hard to like imagine, but.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  Also, when you go to a restaurant, someone else makes the fucking food for you.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Right. Like the comparison is not really apt because the convenience actually is going out to dinner with friends as opposed to like doing the dishes at home. But so we talked about that and then he did get into net neutrality, which was sort of what we were waiting for. And then Dieter, you wrote about that, specifically how he's, he's kind of deprioritizing. He's explicitly deprioritizing.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  He's basically like, look, when we were small and scrappy, it was an existential problem for us. And so we were big warriors to save net neutrality. Now that we're big and powerful and we can get all the deals we want, it's not my problem. Somebody else carry that water.

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  I think he literally used the phrase, carry the water.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  He said, carry the water. He said, we're big enough so that we can get the deals that we want.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  We wrote a piece ages ago, Jake wrote it for us, where they, he just charted Netflix' public statements against, on net neutrality against its subscriber count.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  And it's just like, they just got cooler. And by the end, they're like really big and they're like, yeah, whatever, whatever you idiots want to do. It's fine by us. We're Netflix. To me, that's the whole argument of why you want net neutrality because Netflix is basically saying, we can do whatever we want.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Cause we're big.

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  Cause we're big.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Little guys, you're on your own. The, the last.

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  The crackle team is like, well, we still need it.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  We're crackle.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  So the last interview at Code here was with Steve Casey.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  By the way, crackle burn will always get Casey.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  I love a good crack of bird. Although Netflix's argument for doing some of the zero, what is it called? The zero rating schemes is that those opportunities are available to everyone. The small video producers and the crackers of the world and stuff like that. Because they have dabbled in that a little bit, but Dieter, continue. You're about to say something.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  No, I was just like, the, the, one of the vibes at this whole conference is like, everybody knows that we are not going to get reasonable, like debates about regulation in our current political climate.

• 36:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  There's, there's just going to be, all regulation is evil. And if you ask for regulation, you're a communist. And then everybody else is going, ah, no, please regulate. No, you're evil. Ah, no, I mean, you must regulate or else. And like, it gets polarized really bad, badly. But Steve Case, who founded AOL, is doing this thing where he is trying to get like money and entrepreneurs out of Silicon Valley and like out into the, you know, middle America, into the rest of the country. And that's very admirable, but he said this thing where he was like, look, the government isn't going to go away. We should have some kind of like reasonable solution and we're not anywhere near it. And in the meantime, like, if you want to start a little company out in the middle

• 37:26Speaker 01

  of the country, that you don't know what's going to happen. I mean, he didn't explicitly say that, but like Netflix piecing out of fighting for net neutrality. All the other big companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, they're not piecing out, but they're like, everybody basically knows that Title II is going to go away and nobody knows if anything's going to replace it. And everybody's just sort of assuming that it's gone. Guy from Time Warner. Jeff Bukez basically said that.

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  What's her name from CBS?

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Sherri Redstone. Yeah, I listen to every single session.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  They all basically said the same thing, which is like, yeah, no, we're just gonna, like, we're not gonna have any of this stuff.

• 38:03Nilay Patel?

  Masters of the universe.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to underplay, like, the code lineup is not.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  Mid-level people, these, like, Sherri Redstone is the primary shareholder of Viacom and CBS.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, she runs them.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  Jeff Bukez is the CEO of Time Warner. He's selling his company in AT&T.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:21Nilay Patel?

  Because he's like, the timing is right. For me to just like, he sold everything. He took over Time Warner and he literally sold every part of it. He sold Time Warner Cable, he sold AOL. He's like, well, I got one thing left.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, they weren't even strenuously arguing, oh, no, get rid of these regulations are bad for us. And we'll be, we're going to be good when they go away. We really need them to go away to save us. And don't worry when they're gone, we're gonna be, we're gonna like, do the right thing. They're basically saying, yeah, they're gone. They're gonna be gone in a minute and it'll be fine.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  There's a lot of shrugging going on.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  There's a lot of shrugging and a lot of like.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Who make the decisions that.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  They either have nefarious plans or they're like, you know, like, everybody is so like, losing their minds over like, how fast technology is changing and what Trump is doing that like, the idea that anybody's gonna like, be able to pay enough attention to do anything nefarious in the next six months when regulations go away.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think there's also a sense that if you are one of these masters of the universe, like, part of your responsibility is to just be calm.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:22Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, you, there was, I got a lot of that sense, like, look, there's not even incentives for us to do the bad thing. You know, full disclosure, Comcast and NBC Universal, big investor in Vox Media, they're a big sponsor of code. A bunch of their people are here.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  They left a bag full of minion.

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  I ate the Skittles that Comcast left in my room. Fine, gamer gate, come at me.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  And a Fast and Furious toy car.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  Eli ate that too.

• 39:51Nilay Patel?

  It was delicious.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. But, you know, they're, they're here and I was just talking to some of them, I won't name names or whatever, but the, the, the the foundation of that conversation was, look, we're not doing it now, we don't want to do it in the future, it doesn't make sense. And we, we're happy to like, go to Congress and pass a law. That says the things that you want, that says no blocking, no throttling, no whatever. The mobile guys have a little bit of a different. I was talking to somebody who runs a small wireless access company. And he's like, it doesn't even, it's not even in anyone's best interest to do this. Like, we want you to use more data. That's how we all make our money. That's the, that's the game we're playing. And the wireless carriers in particular, the big danger is actually not the net neutrality stuff.

• 40:37Nilay Patel?

  It's the caps and the cap system that they're imposing. Because they know as cord cutting goes down and people stream more and more 4K, they can predict to some reasonable level of accuracy, exactly when you're going to start maximizing your cap in your house. And they're going to move you on to another more expensive payment structure. And he's like, pay attention to that. It was, that was like a wild conversation. I mean, that sounds totally true to me. Yeah, but it was one of those like they're hiding the ball, like 12 dimensional chess conversations. Yeah. But like, there is that sense of just calm, like it's gonna, you're gonna hate it and it's gonna be bad. But we promise we're not gonna do this stuff.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's, to me, like, you're right. It's a sense of calm, but it's also just a sense of inevitability. Like, we have been at the verge, like, sort of like, I don't know, psyching ourselves up for like, all right, time to call the FCC and fight this thing and see if we can stop this from happening. And like, literally nobody here is like, they're already, they've already assumed that fight is over. And they're like, moving on to the next thing. And the next thing for them is like, nah, shrug. But like, they, nobody was trying to convince anybody to like, have a debate about whether or not the FCC should change the rules around net neutrality. They're just assuming they're.

• 41:45Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's interesting, and this is really wonky, and we don't have to like, spend a lot of time on it. But Ajit Pai legally has to not have his mind made up right now. Right, right, right. Right, he's got to ask for comment on his proposals, accept the comments, deliberate, and then like pass a thing. And like, ideally, the FCC passed like unanimous thing. But everyone here is like, well, they're gonna do it. Yeah. So like, it's, the legal challenge that is coming in part will be a lot of evidence that the industry believes that their regulator is, already has his mind made up. And this process is a sham. So that's a weird opening that he's left open. A weird opening that he's left open.

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  It's very, it's very, it's early in the day here, but it's been a long few days. I want to segue that actually into Clinton because. It's obviously the verge. We're not. She talked about a lot of things.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  But this sense of we're the masters of the universe and we have to remain calm was bookended by Hillary Clinton on stage here. And whatever you think of Trump, just their styles are radically different. And Hillary's style is like, complete mastery of the issues. Like, she just knows the information inside and out. She speaks very carefully and very forcefully. And then Trump is like, kofifi.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  She comes across as very competent.

• 43:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  Then like, I talked to a bunch of people here, and they're like, we don't like her, but she seems so smart.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  And there's like, that yearning for someone who you can have like, a very principled intellectual argument with. But she talked about some things here that I think are like, major Verge stories, actually. One, she said the Russians had to be guided by Americans and how they quote unquote, weaponized information.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when she was, like, she has this whole, like, explanation of what her take is on the email leaks.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And like, there's a whole, like, chain of logic.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a timeline, essentially.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's basically got a timeline.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  When, I'm sorry, I'm like, I'm really quite tired.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  Go on some diet.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  I know. And it's funny, I'm pretty sure if you went back and listened to last year's Vergecast episode, the night we did the Code Conference one, I was like, not making any sense of that either. But she, she did, she went through, for example, she said, within an hour after the Access Hollywood tapes were leaked, that's when the Podesta emails were dropped.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  And so she points out a couple of.

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  She sounded like a prosecutor laying out her theory of the case.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, her core contention, sort of the thing that was new, is her saying, look, the Russians, there's no way that they could be, like, smart enough on their own, and be plugged in enough on their own, to know when it would be most effective to dump some of these leaks that they dumped.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, it was, it's like, one little more tech and culture turn past it, right? She's like, She said some crazy things about the Democratic National Committee being bankrupt. But she was like, we built this operation for Obama.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  That was all about voter turnout.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  I need to get into that, but I want to, one last thing on the Russia thing. She pointed out that the, there was nothing really interesting in the emails.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  And she called them, Lauren?

• 45:04Speaker 03

  She called them anodyne and what was it?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Nothing burger.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  She called it a nothing burger. That was one of the first things she said when she came out on stage. And it was, they got right into it and she said, really, you know, the emails were.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  The biggest nothing burger of all time.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  There was the biggest nothing burger of all time. And ultimately it was what made her, you know, start to, what made her start to lose ground in the end after one of, there was another release at the end of October.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  And yeah, but I just love that she used that word.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Lauren lost her mind.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  It was great.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  It's Lauren's word. Anyway, sorry.

• 45:34Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, but no, she had this whole theory that was, you know, the email, she called it, the press covered it like Pearl Harbor. But what was more interesting to me was she talked about, the Democrats had this whole data operation. She basically threw it on the bus and was like, it was garbage and no one invested in it and I had to fund it myself. And I wrote the PHP by hand.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  They're using a Packard bell.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was like real.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  386 computer. What was going on?

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  I got in there and fixed it.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Everything that Obama did on the internet was garbage.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  But then her, she's like, in contrast, the Republican Party, because they have a lot of billionaires who own media companies. All like their operation was also like right wing content farms.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  And like spamming fake news out in the world and like local, like Sinclair buying local news operations and like managing content as well as like voter registration data, which is what the Democrats are really up to.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like her, her basic like narrative was like, we came in and used technology to like, get out the vote and like, you know, send our message and like get flyers and blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, not defensive, but like essentially like get out the vote. And the Republican machine used it like explicitly for like attack in a way that nobody on the Democratic side had thought to do.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Right. Targeted false news.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  Or just like, I mean, I, yeah, it's, it's, it's a whole range of things, right? But there's like this media operation, which is fundamentally interesting to me because it's a media operation enabled by the internet and.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  hilariously enabled to enormous degree by open platforms and net neutrality. Right? Because if you're Comcast, you could just throttle the fake news and make it go away. But they can't because of the rules. So like, it all comes around full circle. Like, we build the world's biggest open information system. We can't assume like, it won't be used in this way. So her, her whole thing was this machine existed. And then these Russian hacks happened and the machine was ready and waiting to quote unquote weaponize information. I thought that was just, is a theory of the case. Like, I'm pretty sure she was just like, reading the first few chapters of her book on stage. Like, she was prepped. I talked to some people who had dinner with her, like, earlier and they're like, this was basically the same thing she said at dinner.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  So like, she's obviously like, this is an argument that she's going to be making repeatedly. And, you know, there's, I'm sure, deep into politics, there's all kinds of other podcasts that will answer the question or endlessly dissect whether she should have apologized more, like, whatever. But her thing was, this is an unprecedented combination of like, foreign hacking into our country. And then how the media structure of our country has developed.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Technological forces and social.

• 48:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And those things are, to me, are just like, ultimately fascinating. Because you could make the argument, right now in this country, that we should get rid of net neutrality and all of our internet providers should do a better job of like, locking down the flow of information. She actually, she explicitly asked Facebook and Twitter to do that. Yep. Yeah. That was her thing. She's like, they need to figure out how to moderate these platforms better.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Which seems super unlikely, but it does, I mean, not that they can't do it any better, but that they can get a handle on this right now. I mean, they're, it's a very difficult problem. I mean, the thing that I just thought about, sitting there, listening to her describe what you just described, Neela, was like, how does any of this get better?

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Like, it, it seems just so tricky. And, you know, while I'm sure there will be, you know, new defenses that candidates put up in the next elections, the Russians have learned a ton from this election. And, and so it really is going to be this kind of new information arms race, and it's terrifying to me.

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's why we should get rid of net neutrality. I mean, like, I don't believe that, but it's, it's part of the argument, right? Like, if you really want whatever company to be more accountable for the information that it delivers, you could make them do that. Yeah. And that is terrifying, but it's, it's kind of like, Should she have spent more? That was my question. Should she have spent more time in Wisconsin? Like, probably yes, too, right? Like, acknowledge this other thing. But I thought it was really interesting. And it, to me, it's part of the story of this election that will just continue growing and growing and growing. Because she is obviously going to be making that case really loudly for a long time.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  But the, the, part of the answer to why wasn't she in Wisconsin is also like enmeshed in technology. Like, their data told them, don't need to do it. And their data was wrong. And they also, like, she also had a whole, you know, a bunch of other stuff. But, but like fundamentally, like, looking at the intersection of tech and politics, the, the sort of like advantages and disadvantages that Republicans and Democrats have right now are fascinating. So Republicans, there's a, there's a book called Rat Fucked, that's about gerrymandering. After they lost, if Republicans lost big, and I think 08, they were like, oh, wait, but the census is coming. And so they took the census and used, used

• 50:39Speaker 01

  the data from the census, and they aggressively like fought to get into state houses. And then they won state houses, which meant that they could draw the districts, which gave them an entrenched advantage in Congress. And the Democrats are just nowhere on that right now. And so like, that's one Republican, literally, it's a technology advantage. They have like, specific software that was designed to learn how to draw districts better to like, give the incumbent advantage. The Democrats like, ah, ah. And so like, how, like, it's, I don't know, we talk about machine learning all the time, and like, how like, the computers are getting smarter, and they can win an AlphaGo, and blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, the computers are getting smarter, and there's algorithms that can take data that's complicated, and it will do like, the number crunching and the synthesis to like, give you the real

• 51:24Speaker 01

  world results you want. Like, it is happening all around us in ways that we're not like, acknowledging enough. Like, specifically with like, drawing district lines. And call gerrymandering if you want, because that's like, that's the word.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  But like the idea that like the methodology that you apply tech to is different across these two parties and like they're trying to learn from each other or whatever, but like one is applying it to like content and drawing district lines and the other one is applying it to like get out the vote and like organizing protests, right? Like, yeah, those are radically different strategies and they have radically different real world effects and it's simply like knowing and thinking of what a clever use of applying an algorithm it would be.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  There's a lot to learn right now from this blueprint that she she's making essentially, and maybe her book will get more into it. And Neil, I, you know, you mentioned earlier, like, I'm sure there are plenty of people and podcasts who will dissect like her demeanor or how she seems right now in the six months after the election. But at the end of the day, she has information that can be incredibly valuable to her party going forward. And so she's putting it out there. And, you know, it's like Marc Andreessen was also on stage at one point and made a really good point and said, you know, like, why would the people who voted for Donald Trump in this election at this point suddenly think, oh, yeah, next time, I should vote for Democratic president again, because right now everyone's paying attention to the problems that have surfaced throughout the country, you know? And so it's

• 52:49Speaker 03

  going to be like for the Democratic Party, it will be an uphill battle and especially battling these like sort of weaponized technological forces.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  Solutions was like, this is a room full of billionaires. All of you should buy local TV stations.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. She said it out loud.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  There's a lot of talk of that, like, like, will Lori Powell jobs by the New York Times? Like, hey, you all have money. Go, go buy the media.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Recode is

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  Straight up. That came up like several times at the conference.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Recode.net has a running list of everybody who said they're not running for president here, which is hilarious.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  Pretty great.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  It's a big topic.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's enough politics, except for the next segment.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna read an ad and then we're gonna have a little lightning round and we'll wrap this thing up.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Verge Cast also brought to you by Tile. Look at that. If you've lost Wisconsin, for example, just put a Tile on it. It's a little Bluetooth tracker. It'll tell you where it is and you can go to it. It's great. Now, let's stop the ad. What if you could find anything in seconds? Now with Tile, the tiny Bluetooth tracker that makes finding things easier than ever, you just attach Tile to your keys, wallet, laptop, even your bike, anything you don't want to lose and finding things becomes super easy. Just open the free Tile app on your phone to see your lost item on the map, then quickly find your item by making your Tile ring. It'll be back in your hands in seconds. And if it's your phone that's gone missing, just double press the Tile to make the phone ring, even if the phone's in silent. Tile finds 2 million lost items every single day. So join the million who's used Tile to help find their lost stuff.

• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  You can get one today at gettile.com. That's gettile.com/verge. You save up to 30% per Tile if you buy a multi-pack and you get free shipping. And because Tile makes the perfect gift, for a limited time, you get a free gift box with a multi-pack order. So, go to gettile.com/verge. Buy Tile, find everything. Also, visit Wisconsin, so.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Side note about Wisconsin. So Neelai did stand up and ask Hillary Clinton a question about Wisconsin, campaign in Wisconsin. And after that, I witnessed multiple people just walk by Neelai in the hallway and go, "Wisconsin!" Because he prefaced it by saying, "I'm from Wisconsin."

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  Cool badgers.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  So I think, yeah.

• 54:59Nilay Patel?

  I got another note from Lockhart Steele. Because Hillary answered the question. It was a long answer, very detailed. And she prefaced one of the parts of her answer with, "Since you're from Wisconsin, you'll find this interesting." And Lockhart Steele, our company, sent me a Slack and he said, "From now on, I will literally begin every time I address you by saying, 'Since you're from Wisconsin, you might find this interesting.'"

• 55:22Speaker 03

  And yes, Lockhart Steele is a real person. That is his name. Locksteel.

• 55:26Nilay Patel?

  He's an AI. He's just a very dapper AI.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  He's the caller of a phone.

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, Lockhart's a good phone caller.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:34Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, a bunch of stuff, odds and ends to wrap up. Dieter, you are gonna review the Chromebook Pro. You had one.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  I have it. I have it with me right now.

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  So I'll tell you.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  And I try to use it.

• 55:43Nilay Patel?

  We, Dieter and I are staying in the same villa. We have a villa. Casey is staying in the, in the tower. Her villa, in the monks cabin. It's amazing. The princess suite, as we call it. Uh, it's like the tower. Um, but I watched Dieter come into our villa. We were like sitting in the living room. He opens his Chromebook Pro. He's like, I really like this. I won't say the score. He was like about to publish a review with a score.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole thing was written. We were putting the score in, we're getting.

• 56:09Nilay Patel?

  He was like, I think I'm gonna give it a higher score. Like, a day later, what you've actually published are the words, "Don't buy the Chromebook Pro."

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  What happened there?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Uh, so the story with Chrome OS is that they're trying to get Android apps running on it. If you listen to the Vergecast, I'm sure you've heard me complain about this. But the Android apps are in beta. And the way that the Android apps run on Chrome OS, it's not like there's like an embedded Android phone inside the thing. They like, are like tied into the OS. And that can make the OS a little bit unstable. And so the, the solution is don't do that. Don't use them. Just use it as a Chromebook, because you can do Chromebook stuff. You can open web apps and it's great. And so I had some crashes in the first couple of days I was using it. But I was like, oh, it's because Android. So I'm gonna stop using Android apps, reboot the thing. And then I won't crash, it'll be fine. So I did that and everything seemed fine. And then it super wasn't.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  It was just like, you know, when Chrome runs out of memory, it's like, oh, snap! Like, every single app window and tab was like, oh, snap! All the time, once I hit more than like 10 or 12 tabs. Um, so I asked Google, what, what's the story? Like, we're gonna fix it. Like, when? They're like, soon. I was like, well, the thing is being sold to people right now, so... Yeah, I'm gonna tell them that it's broken. Uh, and that's what I did. Uh, but like, the, the problem with like, the advice to don't use Android apps on a Chromebook is like, this Chromebook comes with a stylus. And when you pull the stylus out, a little thing pops up that's like, "Draw on the screen." And that like, brings you to an Android app. It brings you to Google Keep.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  And so like, the core feature of the thing involves a thing that makes it unstable. But it's also unstable on its own. So anyway, I do intend on reviewing this thing. I also intend on reviewing it when Android apps come out of beta in like three months. Like, I'm gonna have reviewed this thing like eight times, but by the time it's all over. But for right now, until I tell you, or somebody tells you that they have issued a update to Chrome OS to resolve these stability issues, I would not buy it.

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, thanks for ruining Father's Day, Dieter.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you could buy it if you trust that they're gonna do it. Dads and grads are pissed off.

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  Dads and grads have a bone to it.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I trust that Google will fix it, and I trust that when they fix it, this thing will be good. But I don't trust it so far that I would recommend that people go out and spend $550 on, based on that assumption.

• 58:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's miserable timing, because next week is WWDC.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  And suddenly, the whispers have increased that something is happening to the iPad to make it more computer-like. We obviously don't know what that is.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  And there's also Windows 10S.

• 58:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Right. Like, there's a, I wrote this article like, I don't know, a month ago. There's a confluence of like, take these managed operating systems that you can't mess around with, and that way they're more secure and they're updated more often, and like, level them up just enough that they could actually replace a Mac or a PC. Like, that's what, that's what these three companies are trying to do.

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Uh, and Google was, was first, and they just fell on their face.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, we'll see. Um, Z2 Play came out.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  I just wanted to do a little pour one out moment. The Droid brand at Verizon appears to be gone.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  That's fine.

• 59:22Nilay Patel?

  Is it fine?

• 59:23Speaker 01

  It's great. I, I'd never liked the Droid brand after they released those incredibly misogynistic commercials at the launch of the original Droid.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  It's like, "You're a man. You like, you like manly things. You should get a Droid, because the iPhone is for girls."

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  It was, they hired like a fake Dennis Leary.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  Just a dude like Dennis Leary bit.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  They, they literally had, they had this like, you know, flashing, like, give you a seizure commercial, or like, just crazy scenes happening all the time. And like, it was like a fighter plane shooting off into the sky, and then an explosion, and like, just bam bam bam, and then the Droid appears. But if you slow it down and watch it, one of the scenes in this crazy seizure-inducing, you know, commercial, was literally, um, a banana hitting a female mannequin in the face. Like, what?

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was a different

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:00:12Nilay Patel?

  Very recent time.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Good God.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  All of that marketing.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  There's symbolism, but then there's like, come on.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  We used to tear apart those commercials on this show.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  R I P droid.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Droid. Droid. I do miss that sound.

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  But for a long time, that was the dominant Android.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  That's what people called Android. Oh, you got a droid.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32Nilay Patel?

  It's weird that that has just phased in and out of our culture and it's just over.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  What do Android phone owners call their phones these days if not droids? Just Androids?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  They call, I have a Samsung, I have a Galaxy, maybe.

• 1:00:42Nilay Patel?

  No one says I have a Galaxy.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  I have a, I have an Android.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right. So you never say it.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  We're talking to Engineer Austin, by the way.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Thank you. You proved my point.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. Well, if you, here's what I want you to do. If you have an Android phone, think in your head what you say, and then tweet that at Backline.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Oh, god damn it. Do it. Just do it.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  If it's a Google phone, they just say they have an Nexus or a Pixel.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  But it's, I guess it's all the other ones that get a little bit, people don't say like, I have a Mate 8.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  When somebody who knows nothing, when somebody who knows nothing about phones walks up to you and says, what kind of phone is that? What do you say?

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Right? You don't want to get in a whole conversation with them. You don't want to, you know, agitate or whatever.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Cause you don't like them very much.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. You just want to be like, oh, I have a blah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  I think people say Samsung. I have a Samsung.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Say Android. Anyway, tweet it all back on. Casey, this one's for you.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  This is just your moment.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:33Nilay Patel?

  Skype has been redesigned.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. And it's getting stories. As you know, if you've downloaded any app that has any social feature in 2017, stories are the new thing. Ephemeral collections of pictures and videos that disappear 24 hours after you posted them. Of course pioneered by Snapchat, gloriously ripped off by Instagram, and then the rest of Facebook's product suite. And it's now just started to pop up everywhere. Medium sort of has a version of Stories, believe it or not, if you haven't seen those. But so, yeah, so Skype has now announced today in a blog post that they are redesigning the app, rebuilt it from the ground up. It's now going to be a way to share every part of your day. And so, of course, that is going to include Stories. Skype Stories.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  I really love when there's a utility that everyone uses for just one thing, which is very easy, fast video chatting. And the company decides, you know what this really needs? Stories. This needs something that is completely, I'm gonna use the word again, non-essential to the core functionality of what this thing does.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  I literally think of Skype, I don't even think of it for video chat. It's how we call people for podcasts.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's like the default calling service on the internet. Like it's, it's achieved that level where I can just ask virtually anyone, you want to be on a podcast, what's your Skype? And there's always an answer. When I go on other people's podcasts, when you have people on your podcast, Lauren, I'm sure, you just say, what's your Skype? And every, it's not like a question, it's not like install it, you're not saying instructions.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  It's that or international calls.

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Pretty much.

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  But now it's, you gotta look at this UI. The UI looks insanity.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  It's pretty wild. I'm actually disappointed that I can't just use it right now. Like apparently the, the new iOS app isn't going to come out for a month or more. But yeah, it does look pretty wild. I think it's, if you're looking at it strategically, I think you would do this for the same reason that WhatsApp introduced Stories, which is, it's popular internationally, places where Snapchat does not have a big user base. So I actually do think for a lot of Skype users, this probably will be their first introduction to Stories. I think the question is, are any of them going to use it? And results have been very mixed. WhatsApp says that actually already more people are using WhatsApp every day than are using Snapchat, just for the Stories feature alone. But then you can look inside the Facebook app and almost nobody is using Stories.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  So you just kind of never know.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't know if this is like empirically true. The main Facebook app has gotten incredibly slow lately. Have you noticed? It's like they've, they've definitely taken their eye off the ball of just the core, literally the core product that they make.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  Well, like, look at the size of the updates. I mean, they're like 300, 400 megabytes each. They're packed full of AR filters and God knows what kind of advertising spyware. So yeah, they're big juicy apps.

• 1:04:23Nilay Patel?

  Squeeze them. Just squeeze those apps and they just drip. They're just dripping with social.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  I really, I really want this to stop. I can't, I can't communicate enough how uncomfortable this makes me and how much I want to stop.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  I hope in their next app release notes, they say, you know, bug fixes and juicier. Just for Casey.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Pumped full of juice.

• 1:04:45Nilay Patel?

  It's still going.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  They're very, they're very moist. They're full of juice.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Oh, no, you did not just use the M word.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 1:04:54Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, Bixby, everyone's favorite. Andy Rubin had a nice burn. What was it?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  It was a Bixby Cortana.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  A Bixby. Walt was like talking about assistants on stage and he was like, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, I didn't mention Bixby or Cortana. And Andy Rubin goes, thank you for not mentioning that.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but Bixby is delayed.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Cause it can't understand English.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  Which is, yeah, I mean, they're presumably, they made it understand Korean first because they're a Korean company.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Um, my whole thing is like-

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  But they're shipping the phone with a button that launches the thing that doesn't work.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  The button. Like, yeah, exactly. Duh.

• 1:05:31Speaker 03

  Dedicate button.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Shouldn't have put a button on it.

• 1:05:32Nilay Patel?

  Or just release something that lets you remap the button.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. All the, all the apps that let you remap the button now, they're basically Bixby hacks. So it launches Bixby and then, and then it launches the thing you want. And some of them are pretty quick, but like every now and then you'll hit it and be like, but like-

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  You're using an SA.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I would say one out of 10 times I pull my phone out of pocket, I accidentally hit the Bixby button and I look at the Bixby screen and like, it hasn't updated. And so like, I just look at my phone and it's like, ah, how do I get out of this? Oh, look, Steve Bannon is trending.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Bixby, the dog that makes you feel bad.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Like, literally what I-

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  Negative emotion puppy is like a weird, it was like a dog butler. And now it's just this like, bad news. Bad news. Anyway, it's stopping. I was just trying to come up with other words for dogs, but I'm not classically improv trained like Casey.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Leave this to the professionals.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Bixby would like to recommend that I install a, um, a moon theme. It would like me to know that today's weather is loading.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Paris agreement is trending right now, of course. Um, and-

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  That's happening in real time as we're recording this, right?

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  I have never, ever in my entire life, either in person or on the internet, indicated any sort of interest in hockey, despite the fact that I live in Minnesota. But they really want me to know that there's a dude who plays for the Penguins that's really quiet.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Thanks, Bixby.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  Bixby.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Bixby.

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  Bixby. All right, last one. Lauren, this one's for you.

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  Mark Gurman had his little, like a one-sentence scoop, that Apple's Siri speaker is in production.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  In production.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  Someone at this conference told me that Apple's been working on this idea in fits and starts for no fewer than six years.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  Can't verify it. It's one of those bar-type conversations. But in production, they're in the market. Do you think they're gonna, you think we're gonna see a WABC? You think they're gonna make a big splash? Are they gonna have it under, I don't know, what do you think?

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  Side note to that, Siri has been around for six years. So that means, right, because it launched in 2011. So that means that if this speaker has been in production for six years, that like, the moment Siri launched, Apple was thinking about it in hardware form other than like, an iOS device.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, it was fits and starts. I don't think they've been working on whatever they're gonna do. I don't think Johnny Ive has been chiseling away at a block of luna for six years.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  Maybe he has been. Maybe it's going to be the most perfect speaker yet. But, or most amazing, that's what I'm looking for. Unapologetically.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  Speaker.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Speaker.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  So here's my thing. Do I think that if Apple introduces a speaker that, like, people will run out and buy it? Absolutely. I think they will. I mean, I think there are a lot of Apple fans and iPhone users, obviously, out there in the world, and enough so that people would be willing to get this a chance, especially people that maybe haven't invested yet in an Amazon Echo or a Google Home. But I do think, more so maybe than with other, and this is just my opinion right now, and it could morph, like, many times in the next few years as voice control becomes even more prevalent. But I do think that voice, more than devices that we, like, other devices that we use in our everyday life, our everyday lives, is something that, like, once you're sort of hooked into one system, it's very

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  hard to also hook into another. So, you know, in my apartment right now, because I'm a nerd, I have, you know, Amazon Echo, I have Google Home, I'm guessing those are only, the only really voice-controlled things. But then the lights I have are a Lutron kit that is compatible with HomeKit, right? So I've got, like, a few different, like, voice things going on at home. And I tell, it's just a pain. Like, you just kind of wanna talk to one. Once you start saying, okay, set a timer, okay, turn off the lights, okay, change the, you know, I wanna watch this programming on the TV. You want, I don't know, it just seems like it's, you just want it to be unified. You don't want that kind of fragmentation when it comes to voice. So I think the one challenge that Apple may have is just if there are people who are really already sort of hooked into

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Amazon's Alexa and that seems to be doing the job for them, then I'm not sure what the value proposition is for them to add another speaker to that setup.

• 1:09:53Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  At this time. I mean, it would have to be really good.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  I mean, look, Siri in this moment cannot play Spotify, right? So like unless this speaker comes along with much better third-party integrations than they have historically been willing to let Siri make, I think it's dead on arrival.

• 1:10:11Nilay Patel?

  Interesting. That's like, that's a, I don't know.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  I think that it, they, they're gonna have a minute that like, they'll have a few more integrations that'll be fine. But what they're gonna do is they're gonna get on stage and say, you can get an Alexa that is made by Amazon. Who knows what Amazon is doing? They're trying to sell you stuff. You can get a Google Home and nobody trusts Google, or you can get the Siri speaker, we protect your privacy.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Here's our magical system that like, doesn't even connect it to the internet till the microphone recognizes your voice, you know, whatever the hell it is. Like, just, just saying, we are the speaker that protects your privacy. They're just gonna say that over and over and over again.

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  And the thing will be beautiful.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  No matter what, if the thing can tell you the weather and set an alarm, they'll sell it.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  And not for nothing, the Echo is not like a beautiful device by any stretch of the imagination.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  No, and it's not a good speaker.

• 1:11:00Nilay Patel?

  It's not a good speaker.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's the other thing is this, apparently they're gonna do the thing that Sonos does where like, you like, put it in a room and it like, makes a bunch of noise and listens for the, the sound bouncing around the room and then it tunes itself to the room.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  That's cool. That's the most annoying process I go through with any audio device in my house. Like, literally, my wife is like, are you gonna do the thing? Because I need to leave. Because it just makes a lot of chirping sounds at you.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  They said it was gonna have seven speakers in it or something. That was in the Bloomberg report, but. When Apple has done these other platforms, you know what like can play Spotify is like the iPhone, like it's there. When you plug an iPhone into CarPlay, Spotify is there, right? So they're not completely blind to the fact that these other things exist.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  Right. I just think like Siri has traditionally been underpowered. I think Apple is coming in a little bit late. I mean, I'm probably being a little bit too negative. I agree with you guys. I think that yes, it will have a certain base and yes, privacy will help them sell a decent number of them. But like, let's also look at the broader market. Like, Alexa is really on a tear. It has a lot of developer support already. It's probably going to be a lot cheaper than the than the Apple device, right?

• 1:12:10Nilay Patel?

  It's the dot is like they're selling for $40.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So these are all good things.

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. WC is next week.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  It is.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  Go to your party. Lauren and Dieter are gonna be there. Jack Cashman is gonna be there. I'm gonna be live logging from New York. Yep. Glad to be in New York for a variety of reasons. Walt might show up.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, Walt's gonna be there.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  He'll probably make some jokes in the live blog.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  Yes, stay tuned. And Casey Doohan, will you be cracking jokes in the live blog as well?

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  I will absolutely be cracking jokes.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:12:37Nilay Patel?

  It's Casey's only job. Is there a live blog?

• 1:12:40Speaker 03

  Will you be offering your Siri insights?

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Yes, and then responding to people on Twitter saying, why are there so many bad jokes in this?

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  Just give me the facts.

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  It's because you can watch the fucking stream yourself. That's why.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  That's what I tell them.

• 1:12:52Nilay Patel?

  No, we love you and we want you to join a live blog. I didn't mean to swear at you.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  The feeling is mutual.

• 1:12:57Nilay Patel?

  Twitter person. Also, June 9th, which is next week, I believe. Walt Mossberg. Yep. Last episode of Control Alt Delete. Live. Live. In New York. From the School of Visual Arts with Dieter Bohn is gonna be there. It's gonna be great. Walt had, look, here's the thing. Walt had his send off here. There was an emotional moment. Dick Costolo interviewed Walt, which was amazing. I encourage everybody to go watch that video. It was really fun. There's a really wild story about Steve Jobs and iTunes for Windows that was told. Yeah. A wild story about, I'm gonna say all four of these words, Bill Gates Taco Bell. Just like, go listen to that. It was great. But that was Walt's send off to like his

• 1:13:39Nilay Patel?

  audience of billionaires and tech CEOs. I am very happy that the last thing that he's doing with us is a room full of his readers and listeners, because that's, those are his people. So that's June 9th. Well, obviously have it out afterwards, but if you're in New York, there's still some tickets left. Somewhere under 100 tickets left, I want to say. Yeah. It might be under 50 at this point. I think it's like 50 or so left. But come out, we'd love to see you. You can hang out with Walt, there's a whole thing. So, June 9th, Lauren has a podcast, you want to plug your podcast?

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  Yes, it's called Too Embarrassed to Ask, and it's in the same place as you found this podcast. It's with Kara Swisher, the executive editor of Recode, and the person who, I don't know, just kind of hounds Silicon Valley tech executives the most of anybody that I know. And it's really fun, and we try to answer all the questions you have about tech. This week, we have a very special episode. So, when is the Vergecast airing? It's tomorrow?

• 1:14:32Nilay Patel?

  Tomorrow.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  Tomorrow, okay, great, so I'm going to spoil the surprise right now.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  Tomorrow's episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, Friday's episode, is with the one and only Walt Mossberg. It's kind of a send-off episode. And, you know, usually we take questions from people online who just ask, you know, "Hey Walt, what laptop should I buy?" and that sort of thing, or whatever it might be. In this case, we got questions from, oh, I don't know, you know, Sheryl Sandberg, and Mark Cuban, Jack Dorsey, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube, Bill Gates, and a few others who sent in their questions to Walt. And he was very surprised, and he has some really great answers.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  So, you'll definitely want to listen.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  I love that.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  It was really fun, and actually, he does tell the Taco Bell story there as well.

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  It's never gonna... Walt's legacy, Taco Bell. Kara Swisher, speaking of which, host Recode Decode, which is wonderful. And my favorite, the nerdiest of the podcasts, Peter Kafka's Recode Media. And if you have a chance to go and watch all the videos, the interviews onstage from the Code Conference, I really encourage you to do it. Peter and Kara are just incredible interviewers, and the whole show was great. So, if you want to watch the CEO of Time Warner squirm in his chair, Peter Kafka can deliver that experience to you. But that's it for us. I love doing the show with you guys here, as tired and loopy as we are in this opulent ballroom. It was a great week here, and we'll be back next week. That's right, with WWDC stuff.

• 1:15:53Nilay Patel?

  With WWDC news, and then obviously the live Control-Alt-Delete. And that's it, that's Vergecast, rock and roll. Snip, snip. Paul.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 1:16:02Nilay Patel?

  Bye.