Waymo v Uber, another iOS bug, and AMP Stories

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul welcome senior writer Sarah Jeong to the show for the first time. Sarah was at the federal court in San Francisco for Waymo v. Uber trial and has been reporting on it for The Verge, so she lends us her expertise to explain what was going on between the two companies. Also, Dieter explains why so much software is broken and also checks the pulse of the open web with this week’s tech headlines. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like the segment Paul does every week “Fingers are round if you think about it” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 01:06 - HomePods are staining wooden tables with a white ring 06:28 - Tesla Model 3 first impressions feat. MKBHD 07:34 - The Uber-Waymo trial with Sarah Jeong 25:21 - Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages 32:52 - Samsung halts Android Oreo rollout on Galaxy S8 due to ‘unexpected’ restarts 35:21 - Fiat Chrysler sent an over-the-air update that is causing Uconnect to endlessly reboot 39:27 - Paul’s weekly segment “Fingers are round if you think about it” 41:56 - Microsoft is turning Progressive Web Apps into Windows apps 45:42 - The ‘Stories’ format is coming to Google search next 57:36 - Caavo review 1:04:56 - Boston Dynamics robots can now hold the door for its friends 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Cyber Systems. That's cyber with an S, S I B E R. They make a product called RoboForm.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  What is RoboForm?

• 0:06Nilay Patel?

  It's a password manager, Peter. Look, it's dangerous to reuse or same passwords and let browsers auto-save your login information. It's a hassle to remember all your strong passwords for every site. RoboForm lets you instantly generate stronger passwords. It saves those passwords automatically. It logs you in with a single click. It shares logins. So, simplify and secure online journey today with a RoboForm password manager. It did. I read the ad well. Let's start the show.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Good job.

• 0:34Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of everything.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Here's the problem with this metaphor.

• 0:43Nilay Patel?

  It's not a metaphor.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  We don't have a flag.

• 0:46Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. I can fix that problem.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I've been out of boat. We don't have a Verge flag.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  How much are custom flag, custom flag screen printing? Ooh, this best, this bestflag.com.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  You've fallen into Google AdSense hole. Well, look, this is the Vergecast.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  Thank you for joining us. I just want, I want to start right away. I don't want to let this go. The hottest news of the week, the best news of the week, the most important news of the week. The HomePod, when you put it on a table, turns the table white and the ring it leaves on the table just looks like a pile of cocaine. And it is, I have just been laughing at it. Like every, every, every time I see it, I just crack into a huge smile.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  This, this news broke yesterday. We're recording it on Thursday. So, we like made a whole bunch of amusing jokes about it yesterday. And then it was literally the first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning. And I just started laughing all over again.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not, okay, okay. Let's just say facts and then we can say all the jokes.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  Here are the facts. The bottom of the HomePod is, is, is like a rubbery material.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Silicone.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Silicone.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a special kind of silicone. According to Apple's.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  It's obviously a circle.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  It's vibration dampening silicone.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  If you put it on a certain kind of wooden surface. Like if, if, when we were reviewing it, all the wooden surfaces we had on our coated in polyurethane, they were all fine. Like a wooden, a natural wooden surface that you like treat with oil or like, you know?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  One that you love.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  One that you love.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  One that's maybe a precious family air loop.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Something about that, the silicone, the vibration from the speaker and the oil in the wood.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  Just turns that into like a glowing white ring.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Now, before you yell at us about bias, we have since learned that the Sonos one also can leave little white marks on wood, but they have like four little feet thingy buggers. So it's a different, it leaves a different kind of mark, which maybe isn't as bad, but it's nevertheless still a mark, but it doesn't look like a ring of cocaine.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  What's? Yeah, it doesn't look like you're like a 1980s, like Wall Street or like a preference for having a good time in geometry.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  I am no cocaine expert.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  I was under the impression that you make little straight lines of cocaine, but so like a.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  Next level.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Ring of cocaine.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  It's just, it's like, it's just the one picture that's like particularly white. It's just very fun.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  This so, this plays really well into your whole theory of Apple, like one person listening to it at a time and being very secretive and like the Beats people weren't allowed to touch it, like clearly.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  The Beats people are.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Clearly they tested it on every material that they had around, which was all glass.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  It's all mirrors. Brush metal and there's some brush metal left in the corner somewhere.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and those weird black toilets or, I don't like those. It's very 80s.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  So Apple updated their support page.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  I tweeted the quote that we included, um, and I made a joke about it. And then a person whom I will not name, sent me the following unicorn emoji.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Um, let me try this. It is not unusual for any speaker with a vibration, damn big silicone base base to leave. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

• 3:56Nilay Patel?

  That was their statement.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Couldn't quite get through it there.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  So the statement is, "It is not unusual for any speaker with a vibration dampening silicone base to leave mild marks someplace on a wooden surface." Surface. But it's not unusual, it's just a Tom Jones song. And so, you can't not read the statement and think, "It's not unusual for any speaker with a vibration dampening silicone base to leave mild marks someplace on some wooden surfaces."

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  I went to dinner.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Da-da-da-da-da-da.

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  We went to dinner last night and he just wouldn't stop singing this. The whole time, the waitress was like, "Do you want dessert?" He started singing the statement at her. It was horrible. Anyway, it's a very funny-

• 4:34Speaker 02

  It's not unusual for a hungry boy to get more desserts?

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  It's awful. Anyway, uh...

• 4:40Speaker 01

  It's just so funny.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  It's just ridiculous. Here is the last turn of the knife.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  So you got a Sonos, it's making little marks, like, "Okay, I'm gonna put a little something under my Sonos."

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  The HomePod, and this is true, you're not supposed to put it on a soft surface.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  Because the tweeter's fired down.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  So if you're just like, "I'm gonna put a cloth underneath it," you will interfere with the sound of the HomePod.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  You have to put a special kind of cloth that is like, the right size, so it doesn't interfere with the sound. You probably want that cloth to like, I don't know, like, it's gotta be pretty thin and you want it to look nice. So, what I'm saying is, we need custom HomePod doilies.

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Please visit my new website, homepoddoilies.com.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Someone has already released a leather coaster to solve this problem?

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Of course, someone has, yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  My question is, the Google Home Max-

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  How do you sell doilies?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  The Google Home Max comes with a silicone pad that's not attached to it. You place the Max on the pad. Can you take that pad and put it on your precious heirloom furniture and then put a HomePod on top of that?

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  This is everyone's strategy.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  HomePodDoilies.com, available.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Nice. Okay, so Flags, what kind of size are we thinking?

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, so that is the set of jokes to start the show. Just put it on a mirror. Make it the 80s experience that you have always been waiting for. I don't think this is a critical problem for Apple. They should have just told people, don't put this on naturally finished wood. It would have been fine. Just like they should have told people.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  That they slow down their batteries. There's no, slow down their phones.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how to do that, but it sounds bad.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  That's why Craig Federighi's hair is so big. It's full of secrets.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  What you got in there, Craig? All right, so we did a bunch of stuff this week. Real quick, I want to say I drove a Model 3, a Tesla Model 3 this week.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  What?

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  That video should be up as you're listening to this. So go to the YouTube page, go to the site, watch me tour around the Model 3. Here's what we did, because we only had it for a few hours. Paul and I started Circuit Breaker Live in it, which was really fun.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Saw that.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  But then after the show, I literally just did laps of New York and picked up cool people and talked to them about the Model 3. So Marques Brownlee.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  What?

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  And I rolled around the Model 3 for a while. That was super fun. Thank you for doing that video with us.

• 7:00Nilay Patel?

  Ashley Carmen, we did a series of challenges, because you know, the whole car, the interface of the car is 17-inch touchscreen.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  So we, I was like, can you turn on the wipers? And we had to like figure it out. So that was fun. And then Lauren Grush and I drove around and we talked about Elon Musk and SpaceX and Tesla and how the different companies are covered. And then I just floored it on the West Side Highway and we both yelled because the car's really fast.

• 7:22Nilay Patel?

  That was really fun. And then she drove and she was like, wait, this is really fast. And she floored it and I yelled. It was great.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  Good times all around. So check out that video. It should be up at the same time as this. But really, the first segment of the show, even though we've like burned 10 minutes of nonsense. Sarah Jeong, welcome.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  So Sarah, you covered Uber and Waymo last week. And I just want to tell this story and then I want to ask you about the trial in a case. While you were covering, you were filing daily dispatches from the trial. It's like this overheated trial. Waymo is obviously a division of Alphabet, the self-driving car division. They're suing Uber for a long thing that boils down to you stole trade secrets from us about self-driving cars, particularly LIDAR. And Sarah was covering the trial every day. And I, this is a true thing. A major like PR person called me from Uber and said, is Sarah going to be covering the trial every day?

• 8:21Nilay Patel?

  This is a fact. And then, email me, not call me. And then, was it Thursday that you published, "I'm not sure if Waymo has a case"? It was Thursday, right?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  On Friday...

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Well, so actually, my favorite part of this progression was the day before, "Nobody likes Uber", and they can't play the underdogs because they're too underhanded. "Uber's too evil, nobody likes them", and then, "Waymo doesn't have a case", and then...

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  On Friday morning, like, very, very early, they just said, they're like, "Whatever, we're done", "We settled", and they just like walked away. So Sarah, tell me, or tell the listener, about the case and like what you saw there? Because it's so complicated, what was actually happening, but from the outside, it just looks like two big companies fighting it out. And it just seemed like they got to, they accomplished nothing.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's one way of looking at it, for sure. I mean, what it boils down to is some guy who was, I guess, really overpaid and considered sort of this genius in the self-driving car market, got poached. Like, he left Google because he was mad, and he went and founded his own startup, and that startup got acquired by Uber, and Google was really, really mad about it. And in the meantime, he pulled some really shady things. Like, he recruited people for that startup while he was still at Google, and he downloaded 14,000 documents and walked away with them, and was really shady about it. Like, he, well, not only is it really weird to download 14,000 documents from your work and then suddenly quit,

• 9:55Speaker 04

  but it's also pretty shady to then move them on to like backup disks and put them into your closet, and then like suddenly find them when it's like, you know, when you're about to get acquired by a competitor and be like, "Oh, hey, guys, by the way, I have these documents, what should I do with them"? And then also to delete all of your text messages about the documents, and also to delete the text messages about deleting the text messages. There was, there was a whole thing, right? So basically, the core of this case is this guy did something super shady. And from there, you have this thing where... Google, for whatever reason, uh, got a forwarded email from like a hardware parts like manufacturer that sent them a, uh, like a chip 2D model. And they're like, wait a second, this chip looks familiar.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  And, uh, and then from there, the lawsuit proceeds where they go, wait, he downloaded how many documents? What happened here? And then they, they sue, um, and it, it just turns into this huge thing. Um, in the middle of them suing, like Travis gets ousted from Uber. Um, Anthony, that's the, the guy who downloaded the 14,000 documents, um, allegedly. He, he gets ousted from Uber too. Um, this, the startup that they acquired that was supposed to solve all of their self-driving car problems. They blow all of their benchmarks. They just don't meet any of their benchmarks. Uh, it's just, it's like, yeah, it's just one thing after another. There's a new CEO like, and then meanwhile, like basically

• 11:25Speaker 04

  it's one of the funniest cases I've ever seen because everything points towards Uber looking super guilty. Right? And then it turns out that there might not actually be a case. Like when with the, like the case sort of narrowed down, like they threw in all of these patent claims. They threw in a bunch of like, you know, unfair competition, like all of this stuff. But it really boiled down to trade secrets, like eight trade secrets. So we have no idea what the trade secrets are. They probably have something to do with circuit boards and chips. And in order to prove trade secret misappropriation, you have to prove that the trade secrets made it over from Google to Uber. Like there has to be like a cause and effect kind of deal, right? When you have patents, you don't have to prove cause and effect. Like it's enough that it's, it violates the patent.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  Um, but in this case, you do have to prove this sort of, yeah, the documents made it over from there to the other place. And there just isn't really that proof. Like all you have is like, well, they could have, there's no like slam dunk. They definitely didn't, but there's no affirmative case, like that's for certain either. So it, it is a really funny, funny, uh, like you just have all of these suspicious circumstances and they're all bundled around like kind of a hollow shell. It's very strange.

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  So your, your argument like sort of midway through the trial was?

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  There's these eight trade secrets that can't be made public because then they lose their trade secret status.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Right, so they're central to the case, they get talked about by the judge, does the jury get to see the trade secrets presumably?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, the jury gets to see it.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  But the public, yeah. But the public does not.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  So there, when that was happening, they would go under seal and only the jury would see it, and you noticed that they'd only spent like a really small amount of time under seal, right? Was that the thing that teed you off, there's nothing here, or was there something else?

• 13:17Speaker 04

  Well, the judge did keep saying things, like sort of very ominous things during pretrial, like you're gonna be in big trouble if you can't like prove that those secrets never made it over, right? And that I thought was like, well, he could just be trolling them, right? Because this judge else, he's kind of known for having, having a tough love demeanor with attorneys. But that, that seemed interesting, so I like sort of kept an eye on that, and from there, I was like, well, if the heart of this case is trade secrets and we have no idea what the heart of the case is, like, right now, it just really seems like all we're doing is speculating on suspicious circumstances. We don't actually seem to know what this case actually is about.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  So I'm like really curious to find out how much we're gonna hear about the actual lasers and the actual circuit boards and the actual technology. And I was told like, yeah, they will be discussing this technology in broad terms, but every time they started talking about the technology, it just never became very clear what they were talking about, even in broad terms. And so I started watching for how long they were spending under seal, and I began to think, like, the jury can't possibly know what's going on in this case either. If like, if I don't know, and they've only spent like 45 minutes or so under seal, then there's no way that the jury knows what's, what's up either.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it seemed like Waymo's case was really based on, hey, you've heard of Travis Kalanick, right? He's shady.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  He's a jerk.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  Here's this other shady dude, like, well, was this, was this actually about them trying to win the trial, get a settlement, or was it just about, well, Uber's down, we hate them, we're going to embarrass them by like dunking on them and like showing off their embarrassing text messages?

• 15:02Speaker 04

  Why, why not all of the above? Like, I mean, like...

• 15:08Speaker 04

  It's not just Travis, like they they settled before Anthony could get on the stand.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Um, and he was largely expected to to uh take the fifth in the courtroom in front of the jury, which uh

• 15:21Speaker 04

  that would have been very interesting. Um, and that that, you know, in in a civil trial, you're allowed to make a negative inference based on that. In short, like the jury can judge the hell out of this case.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Based on how suspicious it is that this guy is taking the fifth. Like in criminal trials, if someone takes the fifth, they get a whole lecture about how it's their constitutional right and they can't make any negative inference based on taking the fifth. Right? But i- in a civil trial, you totally can't. Like you just totally can like, oh, yeah. All right. If this guy's taking the fifth, something's up. Like you're allowed. So, yeah, like this settlement like basically skated right to the edge of what would have been sort of the most disastrous moment for Uber, I think. So who knows? I think that Waymo did probably get what they wanted out of the settlement, which is the promise of non-use.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  But yeah, it's a it's an interesting one. We don't really have very many details on what that promise of non-use actually entails. Like they they promised Uber has promised them that they're not going to use the Google intellectual property in their self-driving car technology. Um, so I heard someone describe it as like a um a UN nuclear weapons inspector sort of deal. But I I don't know. Like, I don't know what the actual details of that are or what how they hashed out what it meant that they were going to not use their intellectual property since Uber still, you know, has maintained that they don't use Google's intellectual property anyways.

• 16:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, then it's a good deal for Uber, right?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 16:53Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna keep not doing the thing that they're not doing.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Is is Google gonna be like ripping open future Uber self-driving cars and trying to find their secrets inside of them?

• 17:02Speaker 04

  I mean, that's what, like, you're free to do that is the thing. Like, once these cars are out on the market, like, you're free to, like, buy one and rip it open and try to reverse engineer it. That's why these trade secrets just they don't keep trade secret status for very long. Like, yeah, it's like some recipes and stuff, like the Coca-Cola recipe. You could probably reverse engineer it to some extent, but like the exact recipe is still considered a trade secret, right? But um, yeah, it's

• 17:30Speaker 04

  A lot of things, you're just, it's gonna lose trade secret protection because you can reverse engineer it through legal means.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think what's, there's this moment, who, who said laser is the sauce? Was that Travis to Anthony or Anthony to Travis?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  It was Travis to somebody else about Anthony, I thought.

• 17:49Speaker 04

  I think it was an Uber executive. I think it was in like Uber meeting notes, like, yeah, in like actual meeting notes.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, so that's an amazing phrase, laser is the sauce.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  The laser is the sauce.

• 18:00Nilay Patel?

  And the, the, that's in, first of all, it's just a ridiculous thing to say. Don't say that.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  But, uh, it was in reference to the idea that LiDAR is the core technology that's gonna enable self-driving.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  So this, this whole case is going on, all of us are just like whispering the phrase laser is the sauce to one another and like cracking up. And at the same time, Elon Musk is at like a Tesla shareholders meeting and he's like, LiDAR is a dead end and we're not gonna use it and the people who are using it are gonna find, I think the, the phrase he used was, they're gonna find themselves trapped in a local mac, maximum and they're not gonna be able to get out of it.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  So it's funny, there's this whole case about LiDAR and I think, didn't Alsa say, like admonish both parties for claiming to have invented LiDAR? Cause it's not really about LiDAR.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  He admonished Waymo, yeah, he's like, you're making it sound like you invented LiDAR. He said, you're making it sound like this case is about LiDAR, you're making it sound like you invented LiDAR, you did not invent LiDAR, this case is not about LiDAR. And if you keep doing this, I'm gonna have to like take the jury aside and tell them exactly that.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, like a little bit later, they were very careful to be like, uh, like, Google didn't invent LiDAR, did they? Like, to their, to their witness and that was, oh, no, no, but, like, right, like, it was, yeah.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  But it's funny, this case is about this like very narrow subset of how LiDAR is used or implemented. And at the same time, Elon is like, actually, this is all nonsense and it's gonna, it's not the right approach.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  But this case is also about Waymo feeling pissed and like betrayed and angry. It was about, quote, uh, Sergey being, quote, "super unpumped."

• 19:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  It was, it was, it was Larry.

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  It was Larry, damn it.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Larry was, Larry was unpumped. It was, uh...

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it just, it seems like Waymo put Uber on trial just to, just to quote them. And then they're like, well, we done and done. But Uber has like a new CEO, his, his tone is really apologetic and his statement, we're sorry, this was a distraction. We're going to keep moving. What's your read now that it's over? What's your read on sort of what happens next for both of these parties?

• 20:10Speaker 04

  It's kind of almost a, a business as usual kind of thing, right? Like we've, we've gone back to sort of the normal state of affairs. We don't know why it is that Automata missed all of their benchmarks. Right? Like that might've actually been because of this lawsuit. Like it's possible that Alphabet just put Uber back like years. In developing their LIDAR because of the lawsuit, like it's possible. It's also possible that that acquisition was not all it was going to, it was cracked up to be and that it was a garbage acquisition. And that they were going to miss all of those benchmarks anyways. But yeah, it's a, I think we're sort of back to both, both companies are, are back to doing the thing.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  And um, since we don't know what the trade secrets were, maybe they were really important and valuable. Or maybe they were just, you know, not quite the sauce that everyone thought that they were.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  And then, uh, lastly, you were mentioning to me the other day that there were some patents involved, that some of the patents had been invalidated?

• 21:11Speaker 04

  No, they are not invalidated yet. So I believe, how many was it? Like four patents were involved and then three dropped because it turned out that they were not implicated in the case at all. Like they were just not being used in the tech. And then the last, the fourth patent, there's, there was an ex parte proceeding. So like a third party came in and went like, hey, I think this patent might be invalid. And then, so we've gotten a non-final office action that's like, yeah, we think this patent might also like might be invalid too. Um, and now Waymo is supposed to respond. Um, and I've been told that there are a lot of these where like, you know, they come back and like, hey, we think this patent might be invalid.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  And then you get something like, you know, the patent language gets adjusted or you get some kind of response from the owner. And then the, the patent is upheld, albeit tweaked a bit. So that, that could be the end result of this, but yeah, throughout this whole thing, that patent has been just sort of hanging out in the background. The one, the one patent that's relevant.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Sarah. I completely enjoyed your coverage of this trial. It was, I, you don't usually get amused at IP litigation, but it was such a circus from start to finish. And it was amazing to have you actually there, actually covering it and pointing out how, I mean, I credit you for making them settle, basically. I don't know if that's true, but I think the four of us and the Vergecast listeners, we're all just gonna believe it's true. Yeah. Because you definitely shamed them into being like, we should just stop this.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  It's a good fanfiction universe.

• 22:49Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. All right. Thank you so much, Sarah.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  All right. Thank you. Bye.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'm gonna read a quick, Sarah's great. Yeah. She's just, she, I've been such a fan of her, her coverage for so long. It's so cool that she works here. Do you think the next time we have her on, she can talk about how we should get rid of all patents? You, y'all can have that fight. I'm gonna go have fun with my new laptop that has a GPU. Play some of those great Mac games. Tux Racer. Tux Racer. I got a new laptop. Well, I got a old laptop. Chromag Rally. I needed, my laptop was dying in Vox Media IT. I put it in there across ages ago, and they were just waiting for someone to turn back in a 2015 MacBook Pro. Riven.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  No touch bar, GPU. I have it now. It is perfect. It has all kinds of ports. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? I will say that I've had it on for approximately an hour and a half now. The battery's down to 71%. Ooh. Anyway, I'm gonna read an ad, and then we're gonna keep going. Ready? Playmaker football. Go. No, it's for mattresses. Who doesn't love mattresses? From a company called Mattress Firm. One question for all the, I'm gonna go to, I'm gonna listen to a podcast, let me fall asleep, people. Are you struggling to get some shut eye? If you answered yes, you are in luck, because we have a great tip for how you can fall asleep more easily. It's Mattress Firm.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

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• 24:23Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm not sure how the figurative covering works. Anyway, go to mattressfirm.com/podcast, see what the deals are. They even offer you 120 night sleep trial to ensure perfection, 120 night low price guarantee, so you know the perfect price. Go to mattressfirm.com/podcast, learn how your sleeping could be monumentally improved. And if you are still awake, it's too late for you. No, the podcast is starting now. No, get some sleep. We'll be here in the morning. The end of the ad.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Look, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life, but maybe, maybe there's something else to listen to when you're trying to fall asleep.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  It's not us just goofing.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Listen to like a Vox podcast.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Yeah, Weeds is real boring. Listen to that. Sorry. No, they're great. I love them. They're starting a new podcast, Today Explained, every day. They explain the day to you.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  They're explained. Today is Tuesday.

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  All right. Dieter, you have written the heading of this segment. It's in all capital letters. It's bold. It's bigger than usual.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  It's an H2 header.

• 25:29Nilay Patel?

  It says, "All software is broken."

• 25:31Speaker 01

  It is super broken. I am super tired of companies shipping betas and bad betas and then just like bugs are fine, but it just, I don't know, this week, you look at the scope of crap that was broken and it just feels like too much. We had yet another instance where you could send a special character to an iPhone and it would crash whatever app received that character. Not just iMessage, but any messaging app. We've seen this script before. I don't know why it keeps happening. Just like stick to Unicode. I don't know. So that, that's gonna get fixed before iOS 11.3, but they're gonna fix that problem.

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  Something is going on with Apple's text handling. Across the board.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  Right? They had the weird bug where it was replacing characters.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  Right? The iOS keyboard still just capitalizes words at random all of the time. Uh, the two that are most annoying for me personally are the word news and team, which are words that I use all of the time at work. And it constantly sounds like I'm addressing like the local news bureau of a TV station. Like, where's the news team? Like, I don't need that to happen.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Can I explain something about, about, so, so there's a, a fundamental element of computing. It's called strings, right? So, old timey days, when there was, let's say, only 256 characters usable, right? You represent a string by using a series of numbers. So, so like they're ASCII codes, right? So whatever, five, seven, 29, 29 and, and eight spells. What? Whatever that spells, right? You just put those into an array, right?

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  And then you, you, the, the, the computer renders those as the, the letters.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  As Unicode has, can, the, the Unicode standard extends obviously greatly beyond just, uh, Western alphabet and numbers. It includes emojis and all sorts of other languages.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Wingdings.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Those aren't all represented.

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  I think it includes wingdings.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  I think it does include wingdings. I'm pretty sure.

• 27:47Nilay Patel?

  When did wingdings go from a font to a situation?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  I super miss wingdings.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  Please continue.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  They're not all represented by a single number at a time. Uh, so like think of, think of even like an E with the little accent, whatever that's called. An accent? But you know what I'm talking about. In Spanish, you have the E, but you got the little apostrophe over the E.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  That in Unicode, that's represented by like the E thing and then like a modifier thing.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  But how's it rendered? It's rendered as a single character.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  And so when you are making the fundamental software that all developers use to build, build their software, you have all this machinery to handle these very complicated strings because developers just want to say, I want the third character. But down underneath, well, that third character is represented by two different codes.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm sad that we missed the opportunity to use the word umlaut in this podcast.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  This is really, it's a really interesting theory about strings. You might say it's a really good.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  String theory?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  But I don't know if that's what the problem is here. The problem here might just be that Apple's bad.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Well, so is Samsung.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, let's just wrap the Apple thing for one second because the Samsung thing is equally bad.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  So the, the, the bug, and this is like the second time it's happened.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  Where just sending a character to an iPhone.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Just.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  It will crash Springboard.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  So you get, in this bug in particular, you send a character in an in language called Belugu. It, you get the notification.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 29:22Nilay Patel?

  You click on the notification, it opens the app. It will crash Springboard, back you out of the app, restart it all. And then when you go to open that messaging app, it tries to render the character again and it instantly closes the app. So you're locked out of your messaging app.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  So it works in WhatsApp, it works in iMessage. It, I mean, this is like, to your point, this is happening at a deep system level. We're just trying to render this character is destroying the phone.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  My guess is it's a buffer overflow, right? If you think, you think the buffer, you think your word is four characters long, but it's actually five.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  But I don't think, it's just a single character. I don't think there's an accent.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  But it might be represented in Unicode by multiple things.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  But I don't know. That's just a theory. I just like strings.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's just like, this keeps seems to ha-

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you'd think after it happens one time, like, well, we definitely need to rethink the fundamentals of how this works.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  But it's also like, it's iOS 11. Like, they've made 11 versions of this software.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, how did we get here? The iPhone has been out for 10 years.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  So, here's my theory. Uh, I think that because it's 10 years old and because they launched it in an age when, like, iOS launched in an age when, like, you really couldn't, like, you, there's like, full computer, running iOS 10 underneath, sort of. It's like their original pitch for it. Um, but it took them a while to, like, do proper multitasking. They never did full-on, you can do whatever the hell you want multitasking, which, uh, Android people used to give, um, Apple crap about, but now it looks kind of savvy because it, the thing lasts longer and gets a little bit less, uh, buggy and does, has a little bit less battery drain. Android's moving that direction. I just, like, I'm not surprised that iOS has, like, a fundamental thing, because I think that it is fundamentally, on top of Unix,

• 31:08Speaker 01

  whatever iOS is doing is like, you know, they've, like, just built and built and built and built. They haven't re-architected the thing from scratch.

• 31:16Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  And so it's not a total shock to me.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Which is a little addendum to my theory.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Strings are everywhere. Text is everywhere.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  And text rendering is a thing that you're doing constantly.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  So, as a software developer-

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  You try to optimize the hell out of it. So, Apple probably has tried to optimize, and its optimizations miss corner cases on occasion. And we found another one.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  And I, part of the problem, Stephen Snobsky had a very long Twitter storm about this, where he's like, "Apple ships more software at scale than anyone." They were very, they were out there last week. We talked about this. They're, like, refocusing their efforts on quality instead of new features.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Right, and in theory, they're also maybe gonna try and decouple app updates from the OS release, and this is one of the reasons when I talk about iOS feeling rickety, and, like, based on old, an old conception, old architecture for the OS, like, of course Unix is old, fine, whatever, but the fact that they can't ship-

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Iterative, iterative updates to core apps that are built into the OS without shipping a whole new OS, or they either can, or they refuse to. Either way, it just makes the whole thing feel like, ah. Core Android apps that Google makes that are like, pre-installed in the OS. I get updates for that every day. Gmail just gets updated all the time.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  All the time. And mail gets updated on the cycle, or when there's like, a critical bug, and they've gotta do like, a full-on OS flash for it. Well, they can do iterative, but you know what I'm saying.

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  It's bonkers. Sorry, continue.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  No, I was gonna say, speaking of rickety OSs.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  Samsung

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:58Nilay Patel?

  Had to pause their Oreo rollout.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was so excited, because it actually has, you know, new emoji.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  What'd they have to do?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Uh, it was causing, uh, Galaxy S8s to unexpectedly reboot. Which is a thing that you don't want.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  I would say the unexpected reboot loop with phones is not, not the problem that would, you would expect to surface like this.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, 'cause that's the battery issue for the iPhone.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  Restart themselves.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Um, the other, there's also a little bit of angst because, uh, Samsung opted not to treble-ize, uh, Oreo on, uh, the Galaxy S8.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  We kinda knew they wouldn't.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we knew, we figured they wouldn't. It was too much work.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  Treble-ization is with the increasing modularity of the system, right?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so all your customizations are separate from the core OS, so that if Google wants to issue an update, they just can, and then your customizations have to be done in a standardized way, so that they can update the OS underneath your, your customizations, and they don't have to wait for you to get the updates out. Um, in theory, it also makes it possible to more easily flash ROMs on phones, because you can just create the ROM, and then like, since all the modular, all the ways that customizations get done are standardized, then you, a ROM that gets made for one phone could theoretically work on another phone if they both, uh, use treble, to create that underlying layer.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  So theoretically, if Samsung had done the work to use treble, this wouldn't have happened?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Well, if, theoretically, if Samsung had done the work to use treble, and Samsung, and then you could just be like, "Well, Samsung, your OS sucks, I'm gonna go to XDA developers, and I'm gonna download, you know, something else, lineage, whatever, and I'm gonna, or, what's, is that what they're called now? What, what replaced Cyanogen? Was it lineage?

• 34:40Nilay Patel?

  You're deeper in this hole than I am in.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Remember Cyanogen had the whole drama?

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  I remember Cyanogen.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's lineage. I'm right, I'm right.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  I knew you were right. I trusted you. I just wanted you to believe in yourself.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  I don't know. Essential just has put out a beta for 8.1, which finally fixes, they couldn't get 8.0 working. They're like, "Oh, 8.0 is so easy and we're gonna do trouble and like, we'll get this done in a couple of weeks." But they like introduced a whole bunch of jank.

• 35:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  A bunch of scroll jank. They call it scroll jitter, but we all know it's jank. They got their camera software, they got HDR auto working finally a little bit. It's like a little bit better. They got new colors. Anyway, like, just another example of software is hard and it's annoying.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I, can I do my favorite one?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  Favorite one of the week?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Yes, please.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  So I mean, I have, I have a Jeep with Uconnect.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:25Nilay Patel?

  And like a big issue with Uconnect was that it didn't have support for CarPlay and Android Auto and my car has a resistive touchscreen.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Would you say that sometimes you don't connect?

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  You can, anyway, there's a new version in new cars, in new Fiat Chrysler cars. They made a big deal about it, capacitive touchscreen, CarPlay, Android, Auto, whole thing. People are so excited about it. This is true. There are third parties that will, that will sell a retrofit kit to you for like $1,200 so you can take out the whole screen of your car and if you have a Fiat Chrysler vehicle and replace it, you gotta replace the USB hub too. It's like a whole thing. Anyway, Fiat Chrysler issued a software update to that system and it's just causing the cars, the whole stack to just reboot randomly whenever it wants.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:09Nilay Patel?

  Over the air update for the car. So it just started happening to people. It's been happening for weeks now. Dieter, what is the suggested fix?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Sean O'Kane has been calling customers tweeting about it. Apparently Chrysler is calling their customers and they call, says,

• 36:24Speaker 01

  "Start your cars and leave them running in open spaces for 15 to 20 minutes." And then maybe they'll get OTA update pushed down to them.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's no way to request, again, I have the system. There's no way to request the update for your car.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  That's the way, like it's like the Android update button up on Pixels up until, you know, a couple of weeks ago. The pushing the button didn't do anything.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Like, pretty soon, the recommendation is that you draw like a pentagram in the dirt with your blood.

• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, it's funny. So I drove the Model 3. Yeah. And, you know, the whole thing with Teslas are constantly updating the software. So I got in the Model 3, the Tesla PR person was in there. She showed me the screen and she's like, "We're actually gonna change this interface." I think it was for the wipers. I think she's like, "We're gonna change this wiper UI like very soon." Like, that update's like going out today or tomorrow. And that's like Tesla's thing. People love Tesla. Because the cars are constantly getting updated, the software's changing, it's getting easier to use, it's getting more features. And like, all their car makers are like, "Oh, we gotta get in on that. We gotta..." People want that. There are computers, we should update that. And Fiat's like, "We're bad at this." "We're not. You shouldn't do that." I mean, it's just, like, these computers, man.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  I don't even have like an angle or a deep thought. I've just... Everything was broken this week.

• 37:37Nilay Patel?

  This is why you gotta get a 2015 laptop with real ports and GPU.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  I have an idea.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  It's that microkernels are the answer. So Google's next...

• 37:50Nilay Patel?

  Fuchsia. We're going down a Fuchsia hole?

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Well, one of the big problems with the... especially when you're trying to update an operating system, is that there's so much in the kernel and it touches so many things and a lot of the drivers are kernel level.

• 38:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  And there's a different way to design an operating system. It's called a microkernel and there's not exactly precise definition of a microkernel. It's basically a kernel that does as little as possible to just get you booted and to hand out capabilities. But then you have a very small, stable core. And then when things go bad, they don't kill everything because they weren't deeply tied deep into the operating system. It also makes it easier to create drivers for different hardware without having to be like committing to like literally adding code to Linux to support your stuff.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  I think, I think Google sees the writing on the wall and Fuchsia is, is definitely like the right direction to go. There's also a great open source project called, uh, Read, what is it called? Redux? There's a Rust operating system that's a microkernel. It's very, it's very interesting. That's the other thing. Everything should be written in the Rust programming language.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Other recommendation.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  I like this. I like that you're just sort of everyone's CTO.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Paul Miller, CTO.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Buffer overflows? No, thank you.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  Watch out for those texturing optimizations, everyone. This has been your CTO.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Optimize safely.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the segment should just be called Paul Miller, CTO, but every week you do a segment. It has the same name.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  What's it, what's it, what's it called this week?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  It is always called Fingers Are Round If You Think About It.

• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. I've not thought about it before.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  But now that you think about it, fingers are round.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Panasonic still makes laptops.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  Hey.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  They.

• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  They're tough books, right?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Oh, I know what you're talking about. They put out a new Let's Know laptop and it's just like, I, I think I'm looking at a, it says the verge of the top, but I'm pretty sure I'm looking at an InGadget post from 2006. And the Let's Know laptops, if you're not familiar with, are distinctive for their circular touchpad.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  And, uh, yeah, so there's some, some new Let's Knows. I mean, they're just for Japan.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  They got Ethernet ports. Uh, Vio just put out a new, a new laptop. It's got Ethernet, it's got VGA.

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  Hey.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Like, if you're living in Japan, you've got all sorts of cool plugs.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  Does it have regular USBAs?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, of course.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 40:44Nilay Patel?

  You know, on Circuit Breaker this week, Paul and I had a heated argument that caused Time Gartenberg to basically explode.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Oh, I watched this.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  When I suggested that the, the prevalence and attention paid to USB-C adapters.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  Is actually a repudiation of all USB-C.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  Because the most interesting thing you can do with a USB port is plug in an adapter that gives you USB ports.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. 2015 laptop with a GPU. That's where I live now.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  But the hub idea is still powerful. The hub that both charges your laptop and also gives you access to plugging into other things. The ideal is that you have a hub plugged into your monitor and plugged into the wall and plugged into your SD card reader and a few other cool accessories.

• 41:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  And when you show up to work, you pull out your laptop, plug in one USB-C into your laptop. That charges your laptop, also powers the display. It also connects you to everything in that hub. That's the dream. That's how life should be.

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna get there. If you'd like to see this argument happen while Heim slowly explodes, you should watch Circuit Breaker Live this week.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  It's a good show.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Dieter, you've written another H2.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  This one's ironic.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this one isn't true. You've written "The Web Lives."

• 41:57Speaker 01

  So, okay. Couple, uh, uh, one, one very heartwarming web story. Uh, Microsoft is enabling progressive web apps in the Windows Store. They're just gonna start tossing them in.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  That's cool.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  When they find them on the web. Progressive web apps are pretty cool. I think that, uh,

• 42:12Speaker 01

  the idea of progressive web apps being built into a platform, working native to a platform, is better than random ass Electron apps or fluid apps, uh, that you see. Electron's great and fine, but it's not, it's a different runtime than maybe yours optimized for your operating system. Progressive web apps, if they're coded well, will work on Firefox or Edge or Chrome or Safari. And like, and actually Safari's like gonna be fully supporting them. And so, instead of having to like, download a random Electron app that is basically just a whole other damn web browser, runtime running, and that's where your app lives, like progressive web apps that are built into your platform, seems like a much more elegant solution. And so, I'm very happy that that is happening.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  There's like Twitter Lite is an example.

• 42:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Uh, if you haven't used a progressive web app, like, there, there's sites that list them.

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  They feel amazing, because it's like, it's like using a website. But all the links that you'd wanna click on, like the navigation of that website, everything is already pre-cached typically, is how they typically work.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  So it's like using-

• 43:17Speaker 01

  It progressively loads the stuff in the background.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  So every time you click something, it's just, oh, it's so quick.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Speaking of things that are pre-cached, accelerated mobile pages-

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Are pre-cached. Uh, they're webby, web-esque, web-like.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Web-adjacent.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  They're web-adjacent. They're built with web technologies.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Controlled by Google.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  You can, well, sort of.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Distributed by Google.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  So we could get into AMP deeply at some point. I'm like, I could make the case for AMP if I wanted to.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Um, I'm not gonna do that right now. We're just gonna shit, we're just gonna swear and, um, we're just gonna crap.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Do you want me to make the case that Google is slowly turning-

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Earlier in this podcast.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  We did?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  When the fuck did we do that?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  By playing an emoji.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Oh, I just, see, see what I did? Anyway, make the case that AMP is good in one sentence.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  It solves many of the web, mobile web's problems.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Comma. By seeding control to Google. Semi-colon.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  It's only controlled by Google because everybody else is ignoring it.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Close parentheses. Fair. Are you gonna talk about the AMP stories?

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Somebody else rolled up and just started like submitting more code to GitHub.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Facebook was like, instant articles, what a terrible idea. Let's join forces with Google and work on AMP together.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  If Facebook wanted to roll up and just kinda take over the project, Google wouldn't be able to stop them.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  This implies Facebook can make a plan and execute it in a way that doesn't hurt everyone.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Two things. One, I thought was like, meh, it's not that interesting. One, as a person who's like, cares about the future of digital media, I thought was very interesting. Turns out- I had it exactly wrong. People cared way more about the fact that AMP is gonna be able to work in Gmail soon.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  So that you can put a web, full-on webpage or web, progressive web app, inside an email.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  So when you get an email and it's from Pinterest and you can just, Pinterest is right there in your email. The whole thing.

• 45:24Nilay Patel?

  Huh.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Just sitting there.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  That sounds like it will be used for evil.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  But it, but it can't be used for evil because AMP doesn't allow you to do evil things.

• 45:32Nilay Patel?

  And because Dr. Google is watching every link that goes through AMP.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Um.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  That's his name.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Dr. Google.

• 45:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  It's like Dr. Mario. Same music plays too when he's watching Gmail. They're like, the pills.

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  AMP stories. That's where we're going.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's stories. You know Instagram stories. You know Snapchat stories. You know, other kinds of stories.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Google, uh, is building AMP stories. And so right now, if you wanna find them, you gotta search for a publisher. You could search for our friends at SB Nation. You could search for Mashable. Um, maybe some point in your future you'll be able to search for Verge. You could search for Wired.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  Vox.com.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Search for Vox.com. And you will see this carousel. You have to do that from a phone, uh, for it to really, truly work. Um, and you'll see a carousel of these story formats where you open it up, it takes up your whole screen. There's cute little moving images and the text slides around and then you tap on them. You can't slide. You tap and it like pages through, you know, a story, just like an Instagram story, a Snapchat story. And like, there's a little timer on it and a little progress bar at the top. And at the end, there's a link. And, uh, the same way that there's like a carousel of, you know, AMP stories, the top stories thing in a Google search, I imagine Google thinks eventually there'll be a carousel of these stories.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And there will be, they'll show up, uh, on your Android phone on the left. They're just another thing. Everything is a slideshow.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think this is very bad.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  Here are my reasons.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  So Instagram stories are very good. Love an Instagram story. They are super native to the platform.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  Even though they were wholly stolen from Snapchat.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  But it's a camera.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  App, it's a photography app.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  Stories are generally made of photography. It's a simpler, cheaper way to do photo-driven storytelling, although now there's like a text mode. But you understand what I'm saying.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  It's like a very visual app. And you like push this button and people, you can like blast through a bunch of photos and videos. It's just really fun, it's native, and you're like, okay, I want something more curated, you just like scroll through the feed. Makes a lot of sense.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  It's all, it's all just, James Varum wrote this piece for us ages ago, 2013. Where he was like, he's been a, he was, he's a pro photographer, has been for years. He's like, the smartphone radically changed my conception of photography. Because the device used to capture the imagery and the device used to view it, process it and view it are all the same. Instagram is the perfect example of that. Google search is not where you capture and edit images. And I get it, it's on a phone and it, you know, the interaction is native.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  You could reasonably create an AMP story from a phone either.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just this other thing, and it's basically that they've just, when you search for something, if you're like, oh, I don't want a whole webpage, I'll just click through a slideshow. That is what it has given people the ability to do in this like select group of publishers.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's what people actually want when they search. The utility of search.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Right, but it does, it may show up in the Google feed, which is the thing that's like on, on an Android phone on the left, or in the Android app on an iPhone, where it just like shows you the latest news, right? And because it's AMP, it gets pre-cached, right? The AMP is, especially like on a web browser, it's like a glorified iframe, or on Twitter. It's basically like, it like, oh, there's an AMP page, I'm gonna load this in the background, then you click it and it opens up in a special viewer. So if you think about it, what Google is doing is they are now planning on pre-loading slideshows on everybody's phone. Just all the time.

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  It's bad.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  What if you like slideshows?

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  I just, I don't think that what people want, I get the feed is like a different experience, it's like a, whatever. I just don't think, I think when you open Instagram, you're looking for photos and videos.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  Instagram stories, Snapchat stories.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  Make it easier to create photos and videos and share them with an audience of people who are looking for photos and videos.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:14Nilay Patel?

  This is a very simple, it's a, it's a democratic tool.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  Right, it just lowers the cost of production to nothing, so you can like tell this story very quickly.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:23Nilay Patel?

  For regular people. We use it too as a publisher, I think that it's like some of the funnest stuff we make.

• 49:28Nilay Patel?

  Normal people cannot make an AMP story. Normal people cannot make a website. It's like this weird-

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Anybody can make an AMP story, but Google is only showing the developer previews. But anybody can go and make one and you could link to it. And if you link to it from a desktop, it's like this weird carousel looking thing. If you click the link on the phone, it takes up your full screen. If you rotate your phone on the landscape, it breaks and tells you to go back into portrait mode. It's a real thing that happens.

• 49:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what need they were serving with this. And I don't know what, if, I don't know what-

• 49:59Speaker 01

  The need they're serving is that slideshows make a lot of money because you can put an ad every third slide.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  And they're sticky.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  And people click on them. This was like, do you remember back in the late 2000s? Everybody was making slideshows for everything and you had to reload an entire page and everybody got real mad at slideshows?

• 50:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Now it's 2018 and we're just, we're making them again, except now they're fast, native and pre-cashed on your phone.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  How do you feel about-

• 50:27Speaker 01

  You're welcome.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Twitter's slideshow presentation of information? Like Twitter's moment type thing?

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I deeply love it.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  See, I'm fine with Twitter doing it. I feel like it's very easy to ignore when I want to and I can get it when I need it. Google doing it though, feels a little bit like Google gobbled up the world's information and is presenting it back to me in a information for babies kind of format.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  And I go to Google to win debates with my friends.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, if we're talking about relationships of giant companies, publishers, Code Media Conference is wrapping up as you're listening to this, or maybe it just finished. Facebook got up on stage and basically told all of us news publishers, "Yeah, no, you know, we did a bunch of stuff and so it didn't work out so well and we don't really know what we're doing either and it's all an experiment, so if you want to come and experiment with us, go for it. Otherwise, fine, you can leave it, doesn't matter." Which, that's honest and true. And my wife works for Oculus, which is a divina Facebook, there's your disclosure. But it's also like-

• 51:40Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of people that got hooked on that Facebook sauce, a bunch of publishers that need it. And Facebook is now like saying, "Yeah, come on in, play another round of the Hunger Games."

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't, I don't know what that company is doing.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  I think they are bad.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  There's an amazing post on Buzzfeed by

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Katie.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Katie Nautopoulos, who basically posted a video that she knew all her friends would hate. And so that because they comment on it, telling her that they hate it.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Facebook sees that as engagement.

• 52:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  And so it keeps on popping up to the top of everybody's feed. It's great. It's really good.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  I just

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. I just think, I think companies like Google and Facebook really shoot themselves in the foot when they try to get, make their algorithms a little too clever.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think Facebook should shut itself down. That's my answer.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we've made big bets on Facebook. We launched Circuit Breaker as a Facebook page. It did very well. A lot of people like Facebook. Uh, we launched Verge Science on Facebook to distribute better kinds of science videos because we saw a huge opportunity.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:45Nilay Patel?

  Great. Right? We, we, we, we took the ride with Facebook. Things are still doing well. Circuit Breaker is one of my favorite things. We have a whole live show called Circuit Breaker Live.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  We did, we did all the things. But every time I think about how they assess their, their responsibility to their customers, they, they either say, "We don't have any." Or they say some words that I think they like programmed to sound like the right answer. Like they ask a computer for like, "What is the right answer?" And the computer like spits out keywords and they just like say the keywords. And I, I just

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  Look, I don't trust Google, right? They're like a big company. We cover them. They screw up. They mess up.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  Apple's a big company. We cover them. They screw up. They mess up. Their interests are generally aligned with the people, with the consumer. Like Google's mission is like, "We want to organize information." And they're like, "What if we hoover up all of the information? Trust us, it'll be fine." But then you're like, ask Google a question and they try to give you an answer.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  Makes sense. Apple's like, "What if we lock you into a gorgeous prison with the best messaging experience possible?" And you're like, "Well, I'm in this prison, but at least the bubbles are blue." Like, it's fine. Like you, you understand the exchanges you're making there. I don't understand the exchange people make with Facebook.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  I feel like Facebook realized

• 54:01Speaker 02

  How off base they were and and are actually working on it. I just think it's gonna take some time for them to figure out what they should be. But obviously, they should be good for people's lives. They they Facebook ideally helps people connect with each other. It's how I talk to my relatives. It's how people stay in touch with people from high school. You know, it's there's a lot of of very valuable stuff that Facebook has done for people to allow them to share their lives with each other. And Facebook kinda got caught up in like being people's whole world and got really off track. And I think they realize that now and it's

• 54:42Speaker 02

  gonna take them all probably a long time. Maybe they'll never get there to get back to what their core value is for people.

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think they need to align that value with how they make money. Right? Like, so a thing Googled, they they do it, but they don't do a lot of it. Like, Google's algorithm, when it shows you the search results, like, you can't really buy your way into it. You can try really hard to get to the top of the list. But if you wanna pay for you wanna pay Google to get in that list, you got you're in a different spot. Right? And there's all kinds of politics around that. And that is definitely changed over time. And Google's like, really? But that's like their business. Like, here's this list that it's not page rank anymore. But here's this list that the search algorithm gives you. And we're protective of that. And people, we do it. We try to get higher on that list.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  And then here's the place where the advertiser goes. And those those things are like aligned.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Facebook makes business with pleasure.

• 55:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like they there's not a

• 55:43Speaker 02

  People could pay.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's just looking very thoughtful over there.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Just just to be clear, in case you've never like managed a Facebook page like a publisher does, or a big personality does. When you have a Facebook page, you post stuff on Facebook and none of your audience that likes it sees it unless you

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  Pay money.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Pay money or it goes extremely viral.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  Right. So a piece of my Facebook experience, I'm an admin for the Verge page, I'm admin for the Circuit Breaker page. Every now and again, I get a Facebook notification just asking me for money.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Hey, the Circuit Breaker post is doing well.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  And then

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  Add some money to the pot and we'll boost up the results.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  And they're saying, "Nilay, if you pay money, you can control what your audience sees."

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I don't know, there's just something there.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Sick.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  There's a misalignment in there where everybody understands the trade with Apple, right? You pay them money, you get a beautiful piece of hardware. Great. Like, interaction complete. Everybody sort of understands what you get out of Google. It's not nearly as simple with Google. And I do not mean to suggest that Google is in any way innocent, right? Like, Google collects a lot of data. YouTube's, the whole YouTube situation is like very messy and complicated.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  They're blocking ads in Chrome now.

• 56:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're taking over the web by literally restricting what ads and like potentially favoring their own ad network because the web is their revenue platform. They're building AMP and AMP store. Like, there's no innocence. They're not like naive. But I think people understand the transaction that they're in with Google. Right? And like, I would personally like people to care more about their privacy and data collection. They don't because they're getting a ton of value back out of Google.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  Facebook should focus on its core money-making opportunity, which is using the fact that it listens to what everybody says to make targeted advertising.

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god. Anyway, I don't know how we digressed on the Facebook this hard.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  The web lives, is what the answer is.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  Should I talk about Cabo for five minutes?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  You got, you get three.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  I got three. So I've been really excited about this product.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:42Nilay Patel?

  Called the Cabo. If you don't remember what it is, because why would you pay attention to me when I ramble about this? It is the world's most complicated, over-engineered universal remote control, which is a dream. Paul, I think on the NGadget podcast, I started complaining about universal remotes like a decade ago.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  IR blasters.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  IR, it has IR blasters. But all of that is in server, like The IR blaster, the HDMI CC, it can control your stuff over IP. But you plug everything into it and it watches the HDMI outputs with machine vision to make sure that when you click down on the remote, it actually got the command. It can type into search fields for you. So you can be like, "Search for altered carbon," and you can search on the Apple TV. It'll switch the Apple TV, open the Apple TV search interface, type in the phrase "altered carbon" and deliver to the Apple TV search. It's like, cool.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Ridiculous.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  It's so over-engineered.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Is there a but?

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  Uh, well, it's $400.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  It is a but. It works.

• 58:39Nilay Patel?

  It works.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Like a but.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  So I got one, reviewed it. I gave it a seven. In a world of no sevens, I would have given it a six. But I gave it a seven.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  Because it does work.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Okay, but...

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  That is the main thing. The idea of machine vision control, it's like a butler for your TV.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  You're like, "Turn this on," and then you sit back and you literally watch it operate your device.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  By the way, can I just point out that, um, uh, butler for your TV, a little artificial intelligent sort of thing that handles like complicated UIs for you so you don't have to?

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  You know that's the original pitch for Bixby, right?

• 59:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  This is, I'm going there.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  Just wait a second.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  All right.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  So, it works.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It actually works.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  The tiny, the tiny little dog just goes jumping around.

• 59:30Nilay Patel?

  But it works.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  That's cool.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. That is cool.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  It is, doesn't support 4K, or it doesn't support HDR, it supports 4K but no HDR.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  It can't control the apps on smart TVs because it can't see the TV screen.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't support Atmos.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and my, I asked Becky to use it. I was like, "Hey, when you use the TV tonight, just like, use this." I tweeted it, I got a string of increasingly frustrated texts. It was like, "What is this? Where's the TV screen? I just want the TV. Screw this, I'm using the normal remote." And then she said, "I don't want you to ask me to use the computer remote again ever."

• 1:00:12Nilay Patel?

  So I think that is a little bit problematic. It's super expensive and I think, I hope this isn't the endgame for this company because they just raised money. And they do have this technology that does actually work.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  And it's a bunch of people from audio backgrounds and they kind of told me like their next product would be a soundbar, which like makes a lot of sense for this kind of technology integrated. I'm really worried that Samsung buys this company.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Oh, that's what's gonna happen.

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  And it's called like Bixby Home.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Bixby.

• 1:00:37Nilay Patel?

  And it like clicks around your Apple TV for you with like, and it's actually a dog butler like walking from icon to icon.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  I mean, they, they already have smart things. They haven't, they haven't ruined smart things, so maybe this'll be okay.

• 1:00:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm just really worried about this.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, the Cabo.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Cabo.

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  It does work.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  That's an accomplishment.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Well, they've sold out of their initial run, right?

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  They only made 5,000 for this.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  They, they were not, never trying to be a mainstream consumer product.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:01:02Nilay Patel?

  They're trying to, they were trying to launch the technology, prove that it worked.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  They raised another round of funding. Their founders, when they were here a few months ago, told me the goal is actually just to get it out in the world, then make cheaper products. Like you don't really need HDMI ports. It has eight HDMI ports. You don't need that, right?

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  How many do you think the average person needs?

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  Three.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Three?

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Three.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Hmm. I was gonna go with four. I'd say four.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay, here, my three were like Roku or Apple TV, cable box, game console.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go two game consoles because everyone's gonna get a Switch. You're gonna have some kind of box. It's probably gonna be an Apple TV. Uh, and then like you never know. You want an open one all the time. Maybe you're gonna plug a Chromecast in. Maybe somebody will come by and want to give you a PowerPoint presentation.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  You always want that one extra.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  The Chromecast thing is really cool.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  That fourth one, by the way, could just be your cable box. So like, Switch, X, PS4, Apple TV, or whatever, cable box, and so maybe you need five.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. Uh, the Chromecast thing is cool because you know Chromecast don't have remotes.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but you plug a Chromecast into it and it just sits there and then whenever you send a cast stream, it'll automatically switch the Chromecast, instantly remap the remote, and you got play, pause, and then. It's like, it's the best Chromecast experience. I don't know if you should have a $400 machine learning system to enhance your Chromecast.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  To make Chromecast actually work?

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  But it was nice. But it, it's messy. If you're a, if you're just like, you have to be a big nerd, but if you're a big nerd, this thing is like a delight. But it, no, those 5,000 people are gonna have fun.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  But doesn't it also, you have to watch it navigate the UI when you know you could do it faster yourself?

• 1:02:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a thing that does. But it's like really fun to watch.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  You know what? I would buy this thing to navigate the hot garbage that is the YouTube app on the Apple TV. They updated it so that it's the same UI that they have on other consoles. But they don't know that the Apple TV remote is a swiping remote. And so it just treats every single thing as a click. And so you're better off just tapping the edges of it to click around like it's a five-way. It is.

• 1:03:04Nilay Patel?

  Uh oh.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  It's, I'm like, there are a lot of people that are mad that they're not like matching the Apple's human interface guidelines. It doesn't match, doesn't feel like an Apple TV app. And like, I get that. And like, I am not happy about that either. The last YouTube app was much more, felt much more native to the Apple TV.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  But you want it to be consistent across platforms. Netflix is doing a similar thing. So is Hulu. But those apps aren't garbage.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  The YouTube app on the Apple TV? I'm sorry. No, I'm not. It's just bad. It's super duper bad. The YouTube TV app is actually slightly better than the YouTube, main YouTube app.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  My feeling is that Google is just trying to crush Apple out of the TV space.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  With, with, with the Chromecast? That's, that's?

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  With whatever, but they're not gonna, you know, they're not doing the codec support that Apple wants for 4K. So there's no 4K in the Apple TV, 4K in YouTube. The app is way jankier now.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  They're just using, like, people want YouTube.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:58Nilay Patel?

  If you love YouTube, you should not buy an Apple TV. That's their leverage.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:03Nilay Patel?

  If you want YouTube, you should not buy an Apple Amazon Echo Show.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  If you want YouTube, what should you buy?

• 1:04:07Nilay Patel?

  YouTube is a cudgel.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  What should you buy?

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  A Shield.

• 1:04:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, you should buy a TV, an Android TV with a good YouTube app built in.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  An Android TV?

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  No one does that.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  I know no one does that, but I think they're using YouTube as this cudgel to get what they want out of these companies in terms of deals.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  I paid for.

• 1:04:27Nilay Patel?

  A Roku.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  YouTube TV to watch the Olympics. And I was using a web browser that I like to use sometimes called Firefox. And Google said, "That's not cool. You gotta use Chrome to watch YouTube TV." So the web is doing very well.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  YouTube TV is not on the web. Like I said, Google's not an innocent. But Facebook is worse.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:04:49Nilay Patel?

  Except for Instagram, which is a true delight. All right, that's our show. Uh, I wanna tell-

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Wait, wait. Paul gets, Paul gets 60 seconds to talk about robots.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  You talked about your stupid TV thing.

• 1:05:00Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  60 seconds, go.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  The, the dog robot from Boston Dynamics can open doors now. Opening doors is a difficult problem for robots because you're not just controlling your own weight and momentum. You're interacting with a, a large object external to you that has its own weight, movement, momentum. And the robot dog opens the door now. It's cute, it's not terrifying, it's a good progress for technology.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  You think it's not terrifying?

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  They should have put a big, like, rubber velociraptor head on the top of it. So it's like the scene from Jurassic Park when they learn how to use a door handle.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  I, I mean, if people wanna keep on anthropomorphizing all these-

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  I'm no, it's not anthropomorphizing, it's, it's dynopromorphizing.

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  That's the show, everybody.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Okay, good point. Well played, Dieter, well played, I'll see you next week.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  That's all we got, we can't possibly do more. We will unfortunately be at South by Southwest, we'll be unfortunately inflicting this experience on you. So if you're coming to South by, come, the Vox Media has, we'll be at the Belmont. They're naming it the Deep End, it's our, it's our activation, it's true. Uh, Ezra will be there doing some podcasts. Why'd you push that button? We'll be live there, Caitlin Asher, live, coming back for season two.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Lot of pressure on, uh, producer Andrew Marino to get that right.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  Andrew will be sweating bullets. Versus is back, the Lauren Good review show where she argues with herself in the service of journalism. That's excellent, you should watch that. Paul and I are doing Circuit Breaker Live YouTube, 4pm Eastern. I, my favorite part of this is people talking to us in the chat, it's just a good time.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  YouTube chat's a thing.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a thing, it's a lot of fun. Uh, people are watching it, it beat our goals already. So keep watching that. Dieter's got a new show on the Youtubes.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Soon.

• 1:06:48Nilay Patel?

  Soon.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Soonish.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  He just keeps threatening us with it.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Soonish.

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  What's gonna happen?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  There's a really good teaser about it. It's called Optimism.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It just that sound over and over again. Uh, and that's it for us. You can tweet at us. I'm Reckless, Dieter's Backlon, Paul's Future Paul, and we'll be back next week. It's funny, the week before I was like, super slow.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  Now we're just like, back in it.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  There's all kinds of stuff going on.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  Rock and roll.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 1:07:12Nilay Patel?

  Promo code.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Laser sauce.

• 1:07:32Speaker 05

  I'm Sean Ramisverum. I'm the host of Today Explained, a new show from Vox. It's an all-killer, no-filler, daily news explainer that'll drop every afternoon. Our show's gonna explain the news every way we know how. Clips, radio drama, maybe even a song.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  Subscribe now in Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.