macOS Mojave beta, Microsoft Surface USB-C dongle, and this week in Elon Musk

The Vergecast starts off this week in a traditional fashion with a talk about dongles — Microsoft’s $80 USB-C dongle to be exact. But there’s a whole bunch of little things that also happened this week that Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss. We’ve got Apple acknowledging the problem with its MacBook keyboards, Google demoing Duplex, and Apple releasing the Mojave public beta. Also this week, we bring you two new rotating segments on the show. First we have transportation reporter Sean O’Kane with “This Week in Elon Musk” — a rundown of the news that happened this week in the Elon Musk canon. Second, culture reporters Megan Farokhmanesh and Bijan Stephen run though their favorite “Culture Headlines” on The Verge this week. And of course we’ve got Paul’s weekly segment that he does every week, “Rhymes With What’s Poppin’,” so if you listen to the whole show, you’ve got a stew going. 02:20 - Microsoft’s Surface USB-C dongle launches on June 29th for $79.99 09:15 - Apple acknowledges faulty MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards with new repair program 15:00 - macOS Mojave is now available in public beta 20:59 - Intel now faces a fight for its future 29:06 - This week in Elon Musk with Sean O’Kane 33:41 - Google Duplex really works and testing begins this summer 42:03 - BlackBerry Key2 review: a keyboard with a phone 42:59 - LG says screw everything, we’re doing five cameras for the V40 43:57 - The Galaxy Note 9 hits the FCC, with launch of Samsung’s next flagship presumably on the horizon 45:51 - AT&T more than doubles ‘admin fee’ for every wireless customer 48:31 - Culture headlines with Megan and Bijan 52:58 - Honda retires its famed Asimo robot 53:41 - Paul’s weekly segment “Rhymes with whats poppin” 55:58 - Amazon adds voice control to its Alexa iOS app 59:19 - Sonos Beam review: living room upgrade 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 The Vergecast is brought to you by Netflix. In The Vergecast, we examine what's happening now and next in the world of tech. In the new Netflix original series Kiss Me First, a tech savvy teen named Leela discovers a virtual reality game that takes her into a secret world of thrills. She quickly realizes that nothing is as it seems in either realm. Enter a new reality on June 29th. Watch Kiss Me First, only on Netflix.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  This is very exciting.

• 0:23Nilay Patel?

  A world of thrills.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  This is news to me.

• 0:26Nilay Patel?

  Good.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Thank you for that ad.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.biz and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, an ever-expanding network of which we are still the ones in charge. It's just not true, but I'm going to keep saying it until someone tells me to stop.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I really like Casey's show. I'll just put it out there. I think we got to stop.

• 0:53Nilay Patel?

  This is horrible.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  What if we could add a laugh track?

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  I am Eli, that is Paul. Hello. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Hello, hello.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  A classic Vergecast lineup today, but I will say this. We've been experimenting with the show. I don't know if you've noticed over the past couple of weeks, we've been running some interviews. We had Kara Swisher on the show last week. We had Sonos CEO Patrick Spence on the show a couple of weeks ago. Today, no interviews. We're going to run some segments from other Verge people. So we're going to have Megan Veroc Maness and Bijan Steven do This Week in Internet Culture. We have Sean O'Kane doing This Week in Elon. We're going to run those later on in the show. I'm super excited. We're really thinking about ways to update the show, make it better. So let us know what you like, what you don't like. I'm really thinking about how to make The Vergecast bigger and better and more accessible. As I've said many times, the show is effectively 10 years of inside jokes.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  I feel like that anniversary show where we reviewed all the inside jokes was kind of a wake-up call.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was like, oh, we've been telling this joke for a decade. Dieter loves the web. All right.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Hey, if you're a Google Podcast listener, you'll never hear this, but tell your friends who are Google Podcast listeners, we are aware that the updates aren't hitting Google's app and we're not sure. I'm mad at Google. Anyway, we're working on it. We're going to figure it out. Sorry about the hassles.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Rate and review us five stars.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  That is enough housekeeping. On to the, it was a slow week with some big highs. In the world of tech. And I want to start with the biggest, the highest high of all. Microsoft announced the Surface USB-C dongle for $79.99. It is the size of a car. It is so-

• 2:31Speaker 02

  I'm so mad about this. I'm sorry, I'm so mad about this thing. I'm so pissed.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  It is such a piece of-

• 2:38Speaker 01

  This is, uh, this is social commentary as product, right?

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's like-

• 2:45Speaker 02

  They're trolling us.

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  ...comically huge.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  They're like, "We heard you like dongles. We're gonna give you the biggest, ugliest dongle ever, because this is what you deserve."

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  Here you go, assholes. It's, so it's, first of all, it's $80. It, uh, it plugs into the magnetic Surface connector on the side of a Surface. It's only new Surface devices, right, Dieter?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm too enraged by it to investigate it.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's the, the new Surface Pro and Surface laptops. Which sort of makes sense, because, you know, the older ones came out before USB-C was a thing. However, you might recall that we had Panos Panay on the Vergecast and asked him directly about this. And he was like, "Yeah, we'll have an adapter if people need it, but the world isn't ready for USB-C."

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  And to your point, I think what he's saying with this dongle is no one will ever be ready for USB-C.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Here's how unready the world is.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  He's saying, "Screw you if you want USB-C." Here's the thing that makes me the angriest about this dongle. It's not that it only, you know, it's huge. It's that it only has one port on it. Which means that if you, you can use it to power your device, um, if you've got, you know, the right, uh, thing. But if you also want to use it to do, you know, adapter stuff. If you want to plug it into a monitor. Or, I don't know, maybe you bought one of those hot shit new USB-C hard drives that are really fast. Uh, you know, Thunderbolts or whatever. Um, you can't do more, plug more than one thing into this without getting a second dongle.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not a hub.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  It's not a hub.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  It's not a hub. It's, it's basically if you forgot your Surface charger, but you packed this dongle-

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  And I'm-

• 4:20Speaker 01

  And you have your iPad's power brick with you.

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  And a USB-C cable. This solves your problem.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you have your iPad brick with you, you have a USB-A to USB-C. You're just, you're, you're so confused.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Let me just, let me just read this thing that Tom wrote and, and just, just, just sit with this for just a second. The adapter will require an external power source of minimum power output of 27 watts and 12 volts to power displays and the laptop.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that makes sense to me.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  If you want to plug a display in it, you need another adapter.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Hmm. Did we also mention that's $80?

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I have the, I have the Panos quote from the Vergecast. This is last May, Panos was on the Vergecast. And to be fair, we love Panos. We're giving them shit.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's great.

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  Except for this. He did release an $80 monolith of a dongle. He's gotta take it. Here's a quote from, uh, from last year. Panos said to us, "I love the technology in Type C. I believe in Type C. When Type C is ready for our customers to make it easy for them, we'll be there, but it'll be a dongle." And he goes, "If you love Type C, that means you love dongles. We're giving a dongle to people who love dongles." I think at that time, that was a shot at the MacBook, right?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  Because the MacBook was all USB-C, everyone's living the dongle life.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you want to replicate your horrible experience as an Apple user.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  We'll, we'll get ya.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't, oh, everything about-

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Why is this so large? Why is this so large? The power brick, uh, okay.

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  We've done 10 minutes on a dongle.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  My limited understanding of electricity is that there's DC and AC.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  And AC, you need DC for actual real-

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  I prefer to think of it as Edison and Tesla.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Okay. Edison, me, Tesla, right? Tesla's like, "What if we had small power bricks?" And Edison's like, "No. We need long-range transmission of power over power lines."

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  That's what, that's-

• 6:16Speaker 01

  And Tesla lost.

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Got curb stomped by Edison.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  And he then died.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  And that's why we have big power bricks.

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  But this, you need a power brick-

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Before you ever plug into this. So why does this have to be big?

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. That's right, there's chips in there.

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  It's a hamster on a wheel. I don't know, man.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Look at the other side of the adapter. Don't just focus on the box, the, you know, the, like, it looks like a medieval weapon. You know, those like ball and chains, but the, the ball is actually just a long, like, baseball bat looking thing with spikes on it.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the surface connector side of this is huge, too.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  It's huge. It's a giant fin.

• 6:52Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  On a regular surface connector, it's just a nice little rounded cylinder thing.

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  I hear, we have to move on from USPC dongles. This was supposed to be a hilarious joke to irritate Dieter, and we're just like, in it. We're at the point now with USPC, though, where even the Android sites, like Android Authority, like, they're all publishing scathing pieces on the disaster of USPC. Right? You can't get USPC headphones. The charging standards are all incompatible. The headphone standards are all incompatible. It, it just doesn't seem like this market is shaping up the way anybody thought it would.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  It's shaping up exactly the way that, um, the critics of USB thought it would. And I was, I was just supremely naively hopeful that, like, things could turn out better, and they didn't, and I'm sad.

• 7:40Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of Edison and Tesla, I was in my, I'm a dad now, so I was in a Home Depot.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  And, no, I was in the power outlet section.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  It is remarkably easy to buy literally power outlets for your house with USB-A connectors in them now. They're all shapes and sizes, all configurations, range of price points, like hun- literally dozens of them in, like, a random Home Depot that I was in. Zero USPC. Well, there's something here where people would want that, right? They would obviously want that because it's been years now of phones taking it. And it's just not there. And I think that, that, it's like the little stuff. It's not this one dongle or whatever. It's the fringe that enables the whole ecosystem. That's the, that's where USB-A won, like, running away.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  I think, I think USPC's problem was it's like a fast car. And you look at a fast car, it's like, that'd be great. But I look at a fast car, I'm like, the maintenance.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, I was like, I gotta put premium gas into that.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta put premium gas. You gotta take it to the mechanic all the time. You gotta be careful going over curbs.

• 8:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a fast car. It's a Lambo.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  You know, if you listen to the lyrics of Tracy Chapman's song "Fast Car," it actually applies perfectly to USB-C.

• 8:54Nilay Patel?

  All right, I leave that as an exercise to the listener. So if you want to hit pause, go ahead and listen to "Fast Car." Come back, you can write Dieter a tweet in which you see if he's right or not. He's at Backlon on Twitter. We're gonna move on to actual news. So, a bunch of Apple stuff. iOS 12 public beta's out, macOS Mojave is out. We should talk about those. But first, we should talk about the MacBook. Because Apple finally acknowledged the keyboard problem with the MacBook. All credit, by the way, to Casey Johnson, the outline. She was the first person to like publish the fact. And then she got a new computer when she went to the outline and it like immediately broke. And she, you know, did the investigation, discovered a lot of people are having problems with these keyboards, these butterfly keyboards.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  You get one speck of dust in them, they stop working. She drove this whole news cycle, so credit to her. But it took, there was class action lawsuits, which are, in my estimation, often a little bit bullshit, because lawyers are gonna lawyer. But getting Apple to actually acknowledge, okay, this is a problem, we're gonna refund the people who've had, we've paid for repairs. We're gonna do a warranty extension on the existing product. We're gonna make it easier to repair. That's a big deal. I think we've just come around to the point that these keyboards are badly designed from the jump. Apple's having to, you know, their line is always, it's a small percentage of customers. But when your keyboard stops working, it doesn't matter if you're in the small percentage of customers.

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they're gonna, they're gonna have to redesign these next time around, right? They can't just keep going with this.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  I have ignored this story because I saw the laptops as fundamentally flawed from day one.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  It's like, there's a problem with these laptops. And so I never dug into the keyboard stuff. But, I mean, yeah, it seems like, I mean, the mechanical switches are such an important aspect of the whole design, because it dictates everything about how thick it is, how it feels to type. Yeah, I don't know how they're gonna do it.

• 10:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, so here's their repair program. And the repair program is crazy. Eligible laptops, which is basically every MacBook and MacBook Pro model with butterfly switches, so virtually every new one's covered for four years.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that four years is rough.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  After the date of purchase. That's a long time.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  How long were you using your old MacBook before you upgraded, Eli? Or side graded?

• 11:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, to the same model with a faster processor. I mean, these are work laptops, so they kind of come and go over two to three years. My iMac at home has been sitting there for a decade, just chugging.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that the update cycle on computers, especially, which we're gonna get into later, in this age of Intel failing to release good processors, is very long. And I think especially for a MacBook Pro, that's the kind of computer that you use, and then when it dies, you get a new one, you might do something else with it. It might become like the office computer for the family, or it might be a workstation for doing some other ancillary task in your office, or whatever. And I just think it should be, four years is like, they had to pick a number. I would have been happier with five, I guess. Infinity would, of course, be better, but they're probably not gonna do that. But, I don't know, I feel like four years is like, right on that line of being a little

• 12:07Speaker 02

  bit mean, a little bit off.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  This has always been the problem with Apple's warranties, where they don't cover anything. They don't cover accidental damage, and they say that they cover manufacturer defects, but then they never cop to manufacturer defects.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Well, if you have Apple care, they're great.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I do not think that is true anymore.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, really?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  I've felt like that they have got away from Apple Care being great. It used to feel like it was great.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  Before, at Apple Care, you walked in the store, you're like, "I have Apple Care." And a man in a tuxedo came out to greet you. They just handed you a new product and you were on your way.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  There's a lot of stories online, obviously it's anecdotal. It's just like, Apple seems like they're try- it's like they maybe over-promised or they see it as a place where they can actually improve their margins by being less responsive and like, making it harder to get Genius Bar appointments, stuff like that. I don't know, it's anecdotal. I just, that's my vibe in the world right now is that Apple is tired of being helpful.

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  Nah, I think that's just a volume and scale thing, right? Like, they're redesigning stores and making bigger stores. They're clearly see that they've sold a billion iOS devices and they're meant to be handled by human beings who drop them, right? Like, they're, I think it's just hard, right? Like, the early days of the Apple Store and the Genius Bar were like, 50 people with Macs in your town.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:33Nilay Patel?

  And now, and now it's like, literally everybody with wildly different expectations. Anyway, they're fixing the keyboards. Literally, the keyboards now will be fixed. And the big question is, how quickly do they fix, do they redesign the keyboards to the next generation? If at all? And, as Dieter is pointing out, Intel's in this place where it just doesn't seem like you can deliver new chips, which is traditionally what would drive a new hardware generation. So, Apple's a couple generations behind on Intel's current laptop chips.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Which are vastly better than what Apple has.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  True, yeah, totally fair. But you get the feeling that they were waiting for the big bump or something, or whatever. And now it just feels like they're a little boxed in.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Like Ryzen integrated graphics stuff or something like that?

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  Who knows? I mean, like, honestly, who knows? Dieter, what do you think?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  I think that Apple was waiting for 10 nanometer and they were going to do the big bump. I think Apple's also trying to slow down the expectation of the upgrade cycle on the Macs. They want to focus on having a fast upgrade cycle on iPhone and maybe iPad, but they really don't want to have the expectation in the world that there'll be new Macs every year. I think that Intel didn't deliver on what they were hoping for, and so then they were in a real rock and a hard place. And I think that their long-term play is to bail on Intel. And I think that if you're looking for evidence of that, look no further than the Marzipan apps on Mojave.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  Yes, so are you running Mojave?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  I am.

• 15:03Nilay Patel?

  You are a bold man.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the deal with these betas, I would never recommend anybody run even a public beta on their main machine. But iOS 12, don't run it, don't install it, it's so good.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  I mean, it is better in subtler ways in terms of its stability and fluidity than iOS 11 by a mile. That's all I have to say about iOS 12. Mojave, like, the iOS apps, the Marzipan apps, the not port ports, they're good, they're fine. There's a little bit of bugginess when you, like, resize windows and things kind of jump around. You can really tell this is like, if any other company had done these apps, Apple people would be out there just railing on them, saying, "These suck, look at these stupid ports. You can tell these aren't native to the platform." Apple, they're not that bad. They're like, they actually do feel like they've got some of the Mac stuff. But there's like a, I don't know, like, I'm rubbing my fingers together, like, there's salt, a grit on them. There's like a, there's a weird sort of tangible feel that feels a little bit different.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  And I think that'll get better over time. But I really do think that we're going to just, like, next year when they open this up to developers, like, this is going to be the default way to make apps. And it, it opens up, I think, a relatively clear path for them a year later, or maybe a year after that, at the outside, to have a Mac that's running on an ARM processor that has some sort of legacy accommodation for Intel. Honestly, I can't wait. I'm back. I installed Mojave on the reunion of the like the little MacBook, the 2017. And God, I love this computer. I love this keyboard. I know everyone wants the better switches and whatever. And I had my spacebar get a piece of salt in it. It didn't work for a couple hours till I put some air in it, which is amazing.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  But if they could fix that, I actually don't mind the butterfly keyboard. Anyway, I'm rambling.

• 16:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  I think that Mojave is gonna be fine.

• 16:54Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's been alone with a new operating system for like a week and he's just like, I'm in love. I don't care who knows it.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  On the iOS beta, I installed it because I'm a developer. And instantly, just flooded with notifications because that's life.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Muted so many.

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  And I really wonder about apps whose business model seems to be luring people back in and being thirsty, where it's so easy to mute notifications and you could just forget about an app entirely.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's the point, right? I mean, that's like, why Apple and Google are giving you this control.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, it's disrupting to a certain business model.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You mean Facebook's business model?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Facebook, that liar. Facebook has lied to me so many times.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  You don't want to remember this day from five years ago.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  This person that a friend of yours was friends with in high school has a new photo about their boat. But I will say on the, on Marzipan, I, you know, I've used an iPad a lot with the keyboard. And there are a lot of edge cases. It's buggy as hell.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  It's clear that it's one of those things where Apple doesn't have any wood tables. Apple doesn't really use iPads like this.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  And, and there are just so many problems. So I, what I would really hope is that if Apple can really focus, if Apple's gonna say this pretty soon is going to be the way to make Mac apps and iOS apps, that they can like really bolster those. So I'm hoping that using an iPad with a keyboard gets a lot better. That's my, my optimism here.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because, you know, Mojave, it just, it's the reaction to the public beta seems to be breaking along two very distinct lines. One is Dieter, I can't wait until this project is complete and I get an ARM Mac that's basically running iOS apps.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  And the other one is like dark mode and I love new finder features.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  And they are sort of the same, but they're obviously wildly different. Like, some people are just very excited that their, their Mac stuff, like classic files, folders, Mac stuff is cooler and better. And then there's the people who are seeing, you know, two, three, four years down the line when there isn't a Mac the way that we currently conceive it. Or it's something else and that, that question, that big future of computing question that Dieter keeps asking, like the Mac and the iPad end up in a place where they're just very clearly two sides of the same coin. If you get all the way to an ARM Mac that's running iOS apps in Windows. You, the argument to give a windowing system to the iPad becomes overwhelming, right?

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  Because why on earth would you buy the same sort of thing that doesn't let you do as much at the same time? Especially if that's your primary creative computer.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  I kinda, I kinda, uh, what's it called? Um, there's a lot of, oh, gosh. It's a serious, serious brain fart. People who use computers.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  Go on.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  People?

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, people. Everyone.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Okay, everyone. Some people use things called Linux or stuff.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  You're not doing great, bud.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  There's

• 20:23Speaker 01

  there's like desktops for Linux that don't have Windows. They just split. They have splits.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  And they use key commands. There's like super power users.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  And they're just getting around with key commands and they can change the focus on which pane. It, but there's no window management.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  So I, iPad becomes the power user thing.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  That would be wild.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  And Mac is for scrubs. Who need windows and little traffic.

• 20:51Nilay Patel?

  It would be incredible if the future of the iPad was four pane Linux console. One of the hottest takes ever on the Vergecast. We should talk about the Intel piece as well. So the CEO of Intel, Brian Krasanich.

• 21:06Nilay Patel?

  He resigned. The circumstances of resignation are honestly a little weird. Intel announced he'd had an improper relationship. It was consensual, but it violated the company's fraternization policy where management and he's everyone's manager, so really can't do that. Hmm. He is gone. The sort of immediate response was this was an excuse because Intel has been doing so badly lately. But it's a little weird because if he's just doing badly, they could have just fired him. He would honestly save face if they just fired him. Yeah. Instead of this other thing. But anyway, he's gone. Hmm. And it feels like Apple's about to get away from Intel. They've certainly been avoiding their chips.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft has also got a bunch of ARM stuff, anyway. Yeah, Mike, you know, Windows on ARM is a thing Microsoft has been pushing towards for a long time. They're very open about it. The mobile market is obviously dwarfing the broader PC market. And even in the broader PC market, all of the actions on the GPU side. Hmm. You know, Google's making its own processors for TensorFlow, right? Like, the action has moved elsewhere from Intel and x86, and they just haven't come up with a new business. And then on the other sort of side, you know, they're selling some modems to Apple, but their wireless business has never taken off. Stephen Sinofsky actually had a great, he's the ex-head of Windows, now prolific Twitter user and partner at Anderson Horowitz, but

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  he had a great thread about sort of problems with Intel over the years and just how they work. And he was remarking that Intel is the company that pushed Wi-Fi forward, right? They branded Wi-Fi Centrino, they pushed it. For a long time, people thought you would only get Wi-Fi if you had a Centrino laptop. Oh, I didn't know that. They did like a great job of that on the Windows side. But Intel was so unhappy with Qualcomm's existence that they did not want to integrate mobile broadband modems. Oh. So. So there could have been a Centrino Plus. Yeah, they could have done it and they they just missed the business. So like just this like series of misses. It's great. Go find that thread from Steven. It's good.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  There's another, if you haven't, Ben Thompson at Strategery did a pretty good analysis and somebody at the Motley Fool too, where Intel's whole model is we design the chips and we manufacture the chips. We're fully integrated and everybody else on the planet has a separate model where like a company like Apple or Google or Samsung or whomever will design a chip and design the perfect chip they want and then they'll go to a manufacturer to make it. And those manufacturers are broadly TSMC and Samsung. And those manufacturers have done a better job of manufacturing than Intel has. Intel's been unable to make 10 nanometer chips, basically. And so the the weirdly, the model of having a fully integrated design and manufacturing business is like great and a huge advantage until one of those sides can't pull it off.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  And the manufacturing side of Intel, for whatever reason, can't pull it off, which means that all these other companies are able to design and then build much more interesting chips because they don't have those manufacturing problems.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems like you're, I'm still stoked on Risk 5. I like, I have a Risk 5 board now, but I have no idea how to do anything with. Like whatever crowd fun type thing I bought it on. Yeah, you're you're kind of, you're assuming all risk. Like, what's that?

• 24:33Nilay Patel?

  You're assuming all risk.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Because.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  You're just talking about risk.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna lead you right there, buddy.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  When you're designing and manufacturing, you're, I mean, it's, I don't see why Intel can't, it seems like Intel always skates to where the puck is right now.

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because for so long, they were so huge and dominant. That was like a winning strategy.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  They were, they had the puck.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, I'm skating to where the puck is, which is in my hands. That's not how you play hockey.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Sometimes.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  Intel is playing, Intel's doing curling when everyone else is playing hockey. They're still on the same ice. They're just doing a totally different thing.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  I've seen, I mean, TPU is a great example. There are so many chip designs coming out that are, it's basically about bespoke acceleration for specific applications. Like ASICs and, you know, like think of like AMD and Nvidia's fortunes like have been hugely bolstered by cryptocurrency. Nvidia or Intel could have come out with like a, like a crypto specific chip or something like that.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  That's, but that's not, they don't know how. I mean, this is why they had to like AMD is their hated rival and they're like, give us some graphics stuff, please. We, we like desperately need this.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  My theory on that is still patents.

• 25:55Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but that still means they can't do it.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 25:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, the, the future of these companies, Intel, Microsoft, Apple are so intertwined and it feels like what's going to happen is Apple and Microsoft are just going to move, they're just going to move on. And Intel's going to have to, that classic Intel has to figure out its new business before it just withers away. Then whoever this next CEO is, is going to have to desperately race to, to do that in a way that, you know, they've had all of this buffer of the PC market, the Intel X86 market will just continue to exist forever. And that appears to be, oh, and it's all, it's all happening on like the surface of the Mac, right? Like whatever, whichever way the Mac goes is going to be the portent for the future of Intel, at least in my opinion.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Apple has, in my opinion, no excuse not to upgrade annually to new chips.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I, I think they're missing it.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  It's the least they could do. And you're going to end up with a generation of people who are like, what's the best laptop? I'm about to go to college and they don't get a Mac.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the answer is a Windows PC for gaming or a Chromebook.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  Quartz just did a, like randomly Quartz, the business site, just put out a piece. It's like, don't buy a Mac laptop. It's like a pretty hardcore headline. All right, let's take a quick break for an ad and then we're going to have Sean O'Kane do this week in Elon and then we'll be back.

• 27:20Nilay Patel?

  So this ad's a little different because it's not an ad for like a company. It's an ad for our friends at Vox.com. They've got a new show on Netflix called Explained, which is great. It's 15-minute episodes every week. The crew of that show that makes it actually works in the office right near us. They're like scrambling around. It's like kind of wild to have a TV show get made near you. They work really hard at it. This week, the episode is about esports. Paul, you love some esports.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Are you aware of the significant meta-shift in League of Legends?

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  No. Oh, my.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  For years, you typically had an ADC and a support. And I forget what ADC stands for, but a high-end damage dealer and a support in the bottom lane. And now people are doing all sorts of stuff. They're like funneling experience to the jungler. The meta has shifted and it is rocking the world of League of Legends.

• 28:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you have no idea what that meant, like I did, I definitely, I knew what all those words were. But if you are just interested in esports and you got a Netflix account, go watch Explained on Netflix. This week's episode explores why esports are different, where they came from. There's a long history here. There's a difference, apparently, between arcade play and what we now know as esports.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  This is what they told me to say. It's just like, Explained is just really good. I'm supposed to tell you to watch the esports one, but I'm going to tell you, watch the cryptocurrency one because it's narrated by Kristen Slater. Come on. Come on. They're just doing it. It's wild to have this show get made near us. So go watch Explained on Netflix from our friends at Vox. Watch the esports episode. Watch them all. They're all good.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. Now we're going to try something new. Ready?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  Sean O'Kane is going to tell us what happened this week in Elon Musk.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  Hey, this is Sean O'Kane, a transportation reporter at The Verge, and this has been The Week in Elon Musk. Elon Musk drawn into farting unicorn dispute with Potter. Elon Musk is being accused of violating the copyright of a Colorado Potter who gained notoriety for making mugs that feature a unicorn farting electricity. Musk spotted the mug on Twitter in early 2017 and remarked that it might be his “favorite mug ever.” A month later, the drawing from the mug wound up in a promotion for a sketchpad feature that Tesla added to the touchscreens of its cars. Tesla also wound up using the unicorn drawing in other parts of its software, and so now the Potter is trying to get paid, or at least get credit. Musk said on Twitter, “He can sue for money if he wants, but that’s kind of lame.”

• 29:53Speaker 03

  If anything, this attention increased his mug sales, in a series of tweets that has since been deleted. Elon Musk races to exit Tesla’s “production hell.” It’s been almost a year since Musk told his employees that they were about to enter six months of “production hell” in order for the company to make enough Model 3s to fill the waiting list of half a million people. And the company is still struggling to get there. Musk’s latest milestone for Tesla is to make 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of the second quarter, which is just about to happen. Never mind that he originally thought that they’d be past this mark by the end of 2017. What’s important now is whether Tesla hits and sustains that rate of production. Until that happens, Tesla is losing money on every Model 3 it makes, which is not good

• 30:38Speaker 03

  for its already tenuous bottom line. In the meantime, The Wall Street Journal just interviewed Musk at the factory and found out that he’s still sleeping there some nights, recently staying three days in a row at the factory. In a sign of how all-out Tesla is going to hit that production rate, Tesla built a giant tent to expand production of the Model 3. Tesla built a fourth assembly line under a giant tent in one of the parking lots of its Fremont, California, factory. The company has been building the tent—or sprung structure—or whatever you want to call it—since late May, but just last week started assembling cars outside underneath this structure. Musk praised his workers on Twitter for doing this and rallying together to meet his goal. Now, what’s funny about this is Tesla is usually pretty secretive, but because this is happening out in the open, the tent has kicked off

• 31:24Speaker 03

  A sort of cottage industry with Twitter and Reddit spies peering through the holes in the fencing or flying drones above it, even scouring satellite imagery in order to get an idea of how much production capacity this tent has added. Stakeholders are obviously curious, but there are also a lot of people literally betting against Tesla's success in the stock market. And so every bit of information they can gather is crucial. Musk starts crowdsourcing ideas for the Tesla pickup. And we've known for a while that Musk wants to make an all-electric pickup truck in addition to all the other vehicles that Tesla's making. But earlier this week, Musk asked fans on Twitter to give him ideas for what they want to see in a Tesla pickup. He said he has a few things in mind, but he wanted to know, quote, "What do you think

• 32:09Speaker 03

  are the small but important nuances and what would seriously be next level?" In the back and forth that followed, we learned some things that might actually come true with the Tesla pickup truck, like it'll have a dual-motor all-wheel-drive system with, quote, "crazy torque." It's supposed to have a suspension system that dynamically adjusts for whatever load is being carried and up to a 300,000-pound towing capacity. Musk also said that it'll have a 400- to 500-mile range option, which is a good 100 to 200 miles than any other Tesla can do right now. Musk said, quote, "This will not be some dainty little buttercup of a truck. Driver's seat will be big enough to fit Andre the Giant. Love that guy." Layoffs hit Tesla Energy Department.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Tesla announced a workforce cut of 9%, or about 3,000 jobs a few weeks ago. And now we know that a significant number of those cuts were related to the company's energy efforts. Tesla closed about a fifth of the solar installation centers that it inherited from the acquisition of SolarCity in 2016, and the company is backing out of a deal to sell solar products at Home Depot. When it comes to Tesla, a huge amount of the focus revolves around its automotive business, but the company has a big energy generation and storage business as well. All eyes might be on the Model 3 right now, but Tesla is obviously trying to trim as much fat from the energy side of its business so that it can start pulling in money there, too. That's it for this week in Elon Musk. Obviously, there's a lot going on with this guy, so check out theverge.com. We have a really good feature up this week about Musk's most loyal fans.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  You'll hear a little bit more about that in the culture segment later this episode.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Dieter. Neelai. You got to talk to a robot this week. I did, yeah. Very excited about this. It was at Orin's Hummus Shop in Mountain View, California. A very, very good restaurant. They've got a couple of locations, opening one in San Francisco. Anyway, they brought in journalists in waves, so there were like six at a time, and they gave a little presentation that was designed to convince us that Google actually does care about disclosure and privacy and is aware of the potential for spam calls on this thing. And then we heard some calls, and we got to talk to the executives, and then they let us take a call from the system, the Duplex system, to see if we could, you know, complete a reservation with this thing, or if we could trick it.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  And of course, I tried to trick it because I'm a terrible person. So, it sounds really normal. They talked a lot about pragmatics, which is a branch of linguistics, which is about all the non-verbal, well, not necessarily, you can have verbal pragmatics, but like this fluency is like ums and ahs, and waving your hands, and, you know, all the stuff that you do to make a conversation flow and be polite and like seem like you're making a connection that aren't just like the words you're saying. See, I just did it there as a transitional moment to the next thing I was going to say. And you knew that it was still my turn to talk because I said um, stuff like that. The system does stuff like that, which is fascinating. And it's able to do like the basic stuff. It can, you know, have a range of times it accepts, it can answer some questions. It's very, very good.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  The way that they set it up is like, we told it, you know, say it's for four people, say for this, say for that. We didn't see somebody actually make the request, somebody like typed it into a computer. But then the phone rings, you answer, and it starts, and this is what's important, it's like, "Hi, I'm the Google Assistant, I'm calling on behalf of somebody, and so this call will be recorded. Can I get a table for 7:00 at, you know, 4:00 PM or whatever?" And then the restaurant worker says, "I'm a host too!"

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  Sorry. That's my dream.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  So it's going into, quote, "limited testing in the coming weeks with limited testers," whatever. And then, maybe, it'll roll out more broadly. The big question is, will people accept it? And Google basically believes, like, "Look, we're doing everything we can to be, like, good and kind and not annoying to people who work at restaurants, who, let's face it, want to take your reservation." And so if a robot calls them and they can get it over quickly and they're not annoying, then people will accept this. That's their hope.

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  What was it like when you talked to it?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, did you have it divide by zero?

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  Did you, like, fool it? Was it weird? Like, what was the experience like?

• 36:17Speaker 02

  It was, it was very polite. I almost used the word "obsequious" in my story. I think I tweeted it. Like, you know when you're talking to somebody on customer service and you're kind of like, "Hey, sorry, can I, you know, actually, can you help me with this thing?" And you're, like, a little bit submissive? It was a little bit submissive. It had this tone of voice that was, like, trying to incentivize you to be helpful, because it was, like, asking you for help. Which is really fascinating. Just in terms of the, like, pragmatics. In terms of, like, the things that it could actually do, like, it, you know, "How many people?" "No, no, I'm sorry, yeah, let me repeat myself." "Oh, hey, yeah, can you confirm this?" It's able to, you know, accept a different range of times. You can say a bunch of stuff to it and it's able to parse it and figure out what you

• 37:00Speaker 02

  mean and then reply appropriately most of the time. And if it breaks down a little bit, it kind of just goes back and goes back to that apologetic voice and starts over a little bit. But it's, it doesn't feel very robotic at all. It's not like talking to the Google Assistant on your phone, or, I don't know, like, Eliza in a chat program or something. It's way smarter than that. The way that I tricked it was I, you know, I asked for a reservation for 7:00 and I did something like, "Oh, yeah, sure, that's fine, but, by the way, our kitchen closes at 6:00 and so you can only have bar food." And it, what should have happened then is it should have recognized, "Oh, I don't know what the hell he's talking about," and then kicked me back to a human. Several other people did get kicked over to humans, and there are humans that are constantly, you know, available for the system.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  But it somehow interpreted me saying the kitchen would be closed as the restaurant would be closed, and it said, "Oh, okay, sorry, bye," and hung up.

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  That's what I would say, too. That's not like bar food. I'm here for the prefix.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  It's so funny because there's so much technology here and I should be more impressed and interested in it. But I have read so much sci-fi and never, never has a robot been ums and ahs.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  Right. Well, did you say disfluencies?

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did. I said disfluencies.

• 38:18Nilay Patel?

  I like that word a lot.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  It's a good word.

• 38:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  It's just we weren't, we're not prepared for it. We weren't ready that robots would hit us up like this. Like that our first phone call where a real robot that's ready to talk, the first time a robot that is actually going to be conversational with me is going to say ums and ahs.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Here's the thing. I think that context matters a lot with these disfluencies because, you know, some people are like, why don't they put these ums and ahs in the Google Assistant? Well, you don't need them. You know you're talking to a robot. It's, it's immediately obvious in the context that you're operating. And waiting for those ums and ahs would actually just be annoying. You'd be like, come on, computer, get your shit together. But on the phone, you've, you've had these ums and ahs even like three, four years ago and you would call into customer service lines and they were like, they'd make these little fake typing noises, beep beep, beeping, to make you know that they're working on it. Over the phone, those things, those, those little disfluencies give you really clear indication of like, I'm still talking or I'm waiting for you to talk. One of the things that the duplex does is it says, mm-hmm, a bunch, um, instead of a yes.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  So that you're like, can you hang on a second? It'll say, mm-hmm. Or if someone's talking to you and they've got their notepad out and they're trying to think and they're, they're taking a minute. And if the, the actual human is like, uh, actually, hang on, like, it'll say, mm-hmm, and it'll just sit there and wait for the human to keep talking. Whereas like without that, the robot might've been like, yes, I will wait. I am still waiting. Is it my turn to talk yet? Right? And you actually might want that if you're directly interacting with a robot that you can see or with an assistant on your phone. But over a telephone line, without that stuff, it just feels super false.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  There's a great story. This is like early nineties. It's probably just an urban legend, but there's a early nineties story. I think it was in the book Microsoft about Bill Gates and how he didn't say um or ah when he talked. Because he was just like always ready with the smartest thing to say. And it was just like, it would completely disorient Microsoft employees. And I think that's like an important, and I just like, I, just in this conversation, I've been thinking about that story. Like, it was a, it was a character trait. Of Gates, that he didn't say "Amorah", and it unsettled people to the point where like a version of the story ended up in a novel about Microsoft, right? And I think that this is, to your point about we're talking about robots now, the robot's calling you. It's like a different, usually in sci-fi or whatever,

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  you're like, you are aware that it's a robot, right? Well, lots of times you are. Well, I understand what you're saying. I've read a lot of different sci-fi. I'm saying I missed this subgenre. But like, you have some intentionality in your conversation versus this thing just calling you and being like, "Hi, I'm a robot. I will now have an unsettling conversation with you."

• 41:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm super into it. It feels like a hack in the best way. Like you're saying, there's so much technology here, and a hack they're doing is like making a restaurant reservation over the phone, because that's an unpleasant experience sometimes.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  I would be surprised if regular consumers can do this within the next year. I think they're being so careful with this after all the blowback they got after that rock dumb way that they presented it at I O, that they're gonna be really slow with this.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  The way they presented it, right, was very exciting. People were excited about it. It was the second wave of blowback that I think surprised them. They could have presented it the way they presented it, and they've put up a webpage with all of this other information at the jump, right? There's gonna be a disclosure. Yeah. We're gonna, we've thought about recording people. We've done the work here. It's not fake. Right. That was a huge meme that went by that was just like fake. But I'm, I don't know, I'm thrilled about this. All right. You wanna talk about some crazy phone news? Let's do it. I got a whole stack here. The BlackBerry Key 2 review went up. By the way, our new reviewer, Stefan Eddian, YouTube superstar. He's done two reviews for us now on the channel, gaming laptops and the BlackBerry.

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  People love that dude. So go watch his reviews of the Key 2. Wonderful meme. And his gaming laptop roundup. But he has this great headline here, "A Keyboard With A Phone."

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  I was like, when I was talking about it, I was like, oh no, no one's gonna read this review. That's literally all you need to know.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  I love reading it. It's just a very direct explanation of the cost benefit of having a keyboard on a phone.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  I try to use it. You know, people still love the Blackberry keyboard. I try to use it. I was like, I don't, all of my muscle memory for this situation is gone. I do not want this anymore.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  I want to believe that the keyboards I used back when I had keyboards on my phones were better than this keyboard. I don't think this is an amazing keyboard. It's better than the pre.

• 42:58Nilay Patel?

  All right. LG says, screw everything. We're doing five cameras on the V40. Which is amazing. I mean, this is the moment, right? There was the megapixel war. There was the ISO war. There was an HDR war, although that didn't have a great number associated with it. Now just number of sensors. When do you think Apple had a third camera to the back of the iPhone? Five years? Next year? Cause it's coming.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  It does seem like they don't have enough. Cause they have like two different cameras.

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, that's like, Sean reviewed some crazy camera that had like 15 cameras.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  The tryptophobia camera.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It was awful.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:35Nilay Patel?

  But this is how you solve the small sensor problem. Anyway, Samsung shuts down the Bixby feature that bribes you to use it. So if you use Bixby enough, you got Bixby points and you unlock custom Bixby backgrounds.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Is it my Bixby level?

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  It's horrible. What is going on?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  I can't believe I didn't know about this because I said, get on my Bixby level.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  Actually, Dieter, I want to talk to you about this. So there's a couple Galaxy rumors. S10, the Galaxy S10 might replace its iris scanner with an in-display fingerprint sensor. I think, I was honestly expecting the S9 to do this, in-display fingerprint sensors on a bunch of Chinese phones now. That'd be good. I'm into that.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, the iris scanner is bad and I don't trust any face unlock right now, except for Apple's. And maybe that's a bias. In fact, I'm sure it's a bias, but I'd like, all the previous face unlock things were totally insecure. It's, the burden of proof is on any company that wants to do a face unlock to show that it's secure. And iris scanning is secure, but God, it sucks. So yes, please replace it with anything else.

• 44:33Nilay Patel?

  It seems like there's a Note 9 coming, right? They, there's an event invite. We saw it hit the FCC.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  So the only thing I care about with the Note 9 is that it, the stylus was like a chartreuse, like a, like a, like a. Lime green, yellow kind of thing. It looks amazing. I want, I want that yellow phone real bad. But they're just gonna warm over the S9 Plus, right? They're gonna put a stylus on the S9 Plus and, you know, wipe their hands and call it a day. They'll try and do something with the camera. I don't care. I don't believe it. I don't believe it'll be that good. Maybe I'll be wrong. I just, I don't know. I don't know why it exists.

• 45:08Nilay Patel?

  Isn't the answer that the Note is like the power user phone? It's got like slots?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the one with the stylus. That's the answer. Release it with the S9, like just put all three out at once. But there's, like, the difference in the S, they should kill the S9 Plus and just have the Note. Or, I don't know. I'm very annoyed. I don't know why I'm so annoyed, because I love the, the last Note. Because it was just that, but it, there was, there was an aesthetic to it that felt right. I don't know. Maybe the Note will be the one with a notch. That'll be the thing. That'll be its differentiating feature. Ooh.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  It's so huge. Surely they can add a tiny amount of bezel and no one will notice the difference. So that's coming. And then lastly, I, this is not really phone news, but it is phone news. AT&T, a week after getting its Time Warner merger approved, it's closed, done, it's all happening. They're doubling the administrative fee that they charge to every wireless customer, both postpaid and prepaid. On your bill, you won't notice it's going from like 80 cents to a buck 60. That 80 cents across its entire customer base? $970 million in extra revenue. They just made a billion dollars. What a business model.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  They're just, they're like, everyone's gonna pay us 80 more cents and we made a billion dollars. So that's, it's horrible. The reasons for the fee are ridiculous. Let me read them to you.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  This is a standard administrative fee across the wireless industry, which helps cover costs we incur for items like cell site maintenance and internet connection between carriers.

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  That's the fee!

• 46:43Speaker 02

  That's what I pay you for!

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  That's my bill!

• 46:45Speaker 01

  What is the rest of the bill going towards?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Logo redesigns? That's the bill. That's what the money's for. I know, you know, I know exactly where the money goes.

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  I just want to let everybody know the price of the first chance is going up by 80 cents for everybody. The reason this stings in particular, the timing is, the thing is bad. That's a shitty way to make money.

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  Especially if you don't, with a statement like that, right? If you're not like, we're gonna give you something else for this money. We're just gonna like, I don't know, send a crew of power washers to our cell sites. But the promise they made to the judge was buying AT&T, buying Time Warner, will help us realize cost savings that we will then pass to the consumer. And then the immediate thing they did was raise prices. It's just like, just have a little tact, 80 cents fall.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Not subtle.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  Can you imagine being a business where just being like, everyone's gonna pay us 80 cents more?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  It's a dream.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  And that's a billion dollars.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  The real dream is getting better in a company and then set up like a little skim, skimming scam.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  It's a real dream. What, isn't that the plot of Office Space?

• 47:55Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 47:56Nilay Patel?

  I can see you, your dream being the plot of Office Space.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, now that you're appropriately outraged at the lack of competent, and also you don't, there's no other carriers to go to, right? What are you, you pay Verizon? You go Sprint? Welcome to T-Mobile, baby. It's all happening. But, you know, I can rant and rave about the lack of competition all day.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Or bust.

• 48:20Nilay Patel?

  Xfinity Mobile, yeah, that's great. Okay, now that you're appropriately outraged, let's bring it down. We're gonna run a new segment, This Week in Internet Culture with Megan Farokhmanesh and Bijan Stevens. I'm so excited about this. Listen to it now.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Megan Farokhmanesh. I'm a reporter at The Verge.

• 48:35Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Bijan Stevens. I'm an internet culture writer at The Verge.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Oh, we have the same job but different titles.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  We have the same job. What's up, Virgcast? We have some headlines for you from the Culture Desk.

• 48:46Speaker 04

  It's been a good week in culture, I think.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, what makes it good?

• 48:49Speaker 04

  Okay, so first up, we have "The Internet Can't Agree on What Big Dick Energy Means", which is possibly my favorite story of the week because I also can't agree on what that means.

• 48:57Speaker 05

  Well, what do you think it means? Let's start there.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Because this all spawns off of a joke about Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson. But the whole idea is that it's like a swagger thing, right? So, big dick energy, anybody can have. It doesn't have to be about men or the actual size of your dick. It's about how you feel and your confidence.

• 49:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I saw some tweets saying it was gender neutral and possibly communist, which I totally agree with.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, so our writer Patricia Hernandez actually wrote this piece. And a thing I really like about this is she talks about how people can't agree on what exactly it is. And so she says it's like the sexual version of Yanni or Laurel, where people are trying to figure out like, well, who has big dick energy? And what exactly does that mean?

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  No, yeah, I'm a lucky motherf-

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Elsewhere on the internet, though, things have been a little bit crazy. You wrote a very good report this week.

• 49:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I spent the last month hanging out and talking to Elon Musk fans online. And it was very informative. The fans are very active online. What I've learned is that I think Elon Musk's fans are sort of a barometer for where we are as a country in terms of like our discourse and sort of a sign of what's missing. Basically, Elon Musk is popular because to a lot of people, he represents a person who knows a lot, who can tell you what's right from wrong, and who has a very clear vision of where things are going and is like a hopeful figure through his companies. Like, the people who follow him see him as like this kind of Christ-like figure. And I'm using that as like a figure of speech, but also it's almost painfully real. One of the people I spoke to, her name is Selena Gomez. She's an illustrator in her late 30s, living in Illinois. And she's writing a book of Elon Musk's illuminated tweets.

• 50:23Speaker 05

  But she came to him because she attempted suicide following a mental event. And she found his tweets and his companies very hopeful. And that was the thing that she got her through her recovery. She really got across to me the sense that he was a very important figure in her life because he represented hope. I can see why people like Elon Musk.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  I have the other end of what happens when things go wrong in fandom. So this last week was VidCon, it was also Tanicon, which was this convention that was supposed to be not quite a rival convention, but more like kind of an F you to VidCon by a creator named Tanamogo.

• 50:57Speaker 06

  Hi guys, it's Tanamogo, welcome to my channel.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Her deal is that a couple of years in a row, she was denied a creator pass to VidCon, which allows you extra security measures. So after being denied this pass, she decides she's going to do her own convention. It starts as a joke of like, I'm going to hold a meet and greet in the parking lot, and it spawns into this thing she's calling Tanicon.

• 51:17Speaker 06

  And then to be able to make tickets free and $65, like to have my VIP.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  They were expecting, they say, under 5,000 people. So what they say happened is that 20,000 people showed up.

• 51:28Speaker 07

  Free, fun, free, fun, free, fun!

• 51:30Speaker 04

  So after the first day, the whole thing was canceled, and people are very angry. It's a lot of fans who, you know, traveled to be there, or spent all this money, and didn't really get what they expected. And so it's been kind of a disaster that people are comparing to Fire Fest. You know, that lovely Ja Rule festival that ended up being just a delicious delight for everyone to watch fall apart.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  I mean, I sort of get it, right? Like, planning a convention is very difficult. Remember DashCon?

• 51:53Speaker 04

  The ball pit, the infamous ball pit.

• 51:55Speaker 05

  Has she said anything publicly about it?

• 51:57Speaker 04

  Oh, she's said a lot of things publicly. She's done interviews. She is very apologetic. She's very sorry, she's embarrassed, she feels bad for everybody that, you know, showed up and didn't get what they wanted.

• 52:06Speaker 06

  I just want people to know, no matter what you're going to say, my intentions were pure.

• 52:09Speaker 04

  Nobody got what they wanted from this experience, is the moral of this story.

• 52:13Speaker 05

  Sounds like a convention to me.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  So that was the week in culture. That is it from us, but of course, you can still catch us on The Verge, go to the culture section, read our delicious stories. I'm also Megan underscore Nicolette on Twitter. I know it's a terrible name, but it's mine, so.

• 52:29Speaker 05

  I am Bijan Steven, at Bijan, B-I-J-A-N Steven. Also, kind of a terrible name.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  Oh, your mama gave you that name, you'd be nice.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  She's proud. But thanks for listening, and catch us online.

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  It's great. Delicious stories, I love it. Tell us if you want more of that, because I'm into it.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I, as someone who gets Slack notifications every time Jake Paul or Logan Paul are discussed, I was really surprised at the lack of, it's like, these guys got to step up their game.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  Got to get on the segment. Paul, breaking news.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  What?

• 53:00Nilay Patel?

  Honda is retiring Asimo, the robot.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it can't talk to you with ums and ahs. It just barely, they can barely walk downstairs. It seriously can barely walk. Oh, man. Well, they got completely eclipsed. Wow. Little sideways burn from Paul Miller. That's, that's what, it's like a perfect example of like, that point in time where Japan was ascendant. Mm-hmm. And it's not like they stopped doing what they were doing. Yeah. But now they're not. Yeah. There was a brief moment where like, South Korea took over robotics, and then basically Boston. It's not in Boston. The town of Boston. That's a town. Paul, every week, my friend. Yeah. You do a segment. Yeah. Same name.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's always called, rhymes with what's popping. Are you sure? Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's about WPA3. Okay. Which, if you try to pronounce it, WPA3. Which kind of rhymes, which kind of rhymes with what's popping. Yeah, yeah. Does it? Does it? I'm kind of, I'm taking a couple steps down this road and I'm interested in learning more. Go on. All right. Have you heard of WPA2?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Now there's a WPA3. Yeah. And finally, the trilogy is complete.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  And, uh, basically wifi, obviously if you are connecting to a wifi network without a password, you're basically ransoming your children to the dark web. But even WPA2 had some security flaws and WPA3 is, is shoring them up. So like, if, if your traffic gets scammed, uh, they will have a limited number of times that they can like, or like, one chance to get the password right. Uh, there's like some sort of like freshness thing. I, I don't even really, uh, some of these are security concepts I was not even aware. It's like, um,

• 55:09Speaker 01

  It's like a, it's like a used once data that somehow expires as soon as someone tries to hack it one time. So you should be more secure. I already felt pretty secure with WPA2. I don't hear a lot of like horrible things in the wild that actually happen. I think probably because there's so many people who are so much easier to hack than someone using WPA2. And obviously you should use SSL for all your browsing needs. But it's cool. It's cool. I like that we're becoming harder to spy on as a people.

• 55:41Nilay Patel?

  There was, there was one WPA2. Remember all the router managers?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  No, no, it's a whip, whipper?

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Wapah.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Wapah.

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  Wapah.

• 55:52Nilay Patel?

  Last little bit of news before we wrap it up. It's basically all Amazon news in a way. They added Alexa to the Alexa app on iOS, which is just a long time coming. Have you ever seen the, you know, there's a chat feature in Alexa, right? You can like talk to people. You can like message people. You can send each other things. Have you ever looked at the, like the preview app in the App Store for their like chat?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Wait, they have a standalone chat app?

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  No, no, in the Alexa app.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Built into Alexa.

• 56:26Nilay Patel?

  When you're like in the App Store and you're going to download the Alexa app, it's got its preview screenshots. And it shows you like what Alexa messaging looks like.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:33Nilay Patel?

  And this, the demo chat in the screenshots is, is crazy. So Paul, would you be Alexandra and I, I will be Jay?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 56:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, ready? So I'm Jay. What are you up to?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  I'm leaving work. Call me.

• 56:49Nilay Patel?

  Getting ready to leave now.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Where do you want to eat tonight? I'm almost there.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  Hurry up, I'm here. That's their idea of how you should communicate. Anyway.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  The Android one is different.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's so rude.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  What do they say to Android? What do Android people talk about?

• 57:08Speaker 02

  It's the same thing, just a little bit shorter. I'm on my way there now. I'm close to a pizza shop and that burger joint was like, where are you? Hurry up, I'm here.

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  Amazon has a famously curt corporate culture. I don't know, man. Anyway, there's Alexa Button, Alexa app. There's a new show mode for Fire tablets that turns them into Echo shows. Dieter and I are hotly in disagreement about this because I think the Echo show is great.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  I think it's the worst. That's dumb.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  I just don't want a Fire tablet in my life.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  It's too big. It doesn't justify its size and it doesn't justify its screen. But if I could have that.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  It shows you two timers at once.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  If you ask for it after it disappears after three seconds, once you set the timer. And, but if you could have the dubious benefits of that screen, but then also have a tablet to bang around in the house with, I think that would be great. My only question is like, will the speakers and the microphones on those, not the most newish Android tablets be good enough to support being your main kitchen Alexa device?

• 58:10Speaker 01

  All right, let's say this whole setup costs probably like $7.50 because of Amazon's aggressive discounts, right? So you could spend $7.50 to get a Fire tablet and this show dock. Or a screen that plays YouTube that you can talk to, but it has no other features. Which do you, which one do you get?

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it doesn't have other Alexa features?

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Zero other features and only a YouTube, an Echo show that is only YouTube, no Alexa.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  So the opposite of what it is now, which is all Alexa, no YouTube.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  I would buy a YouTube screen. I got a YouTube screen. I got like tons of YouTube screens. I'm going Alexa.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  All right. Google really needs to get their smart displays out the door. I don't know what's taking so long. It's stupid. We saw them at CES, we saw them at I/O. They need to get them out the door.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  Something's up with Assistant. I'm just throwing it out there. Right? Because we had Patrick Spence on the Vergecast last week and I was like, what's up with your Google Assistant support? And he said, it's a technical problem, not a contractual one. These displays aren't showing up, even though we saw them six months ago. Figure it out, guys. There's something up there where they're not shipping these things that they're supposed to ship. Speaking of which, I reviewed the Sonos Beam. It's great. Here's the line I didn't use. It's the one for grownups. If you have a grownup living room, it's the soundbar you should just put in it, and then it will give you Sonos. It'll give you Alexa. The mics are good. It has Echo ESP, Alexa ESP, Echo Spatial Perception. So if you have multiple Alexa devices,

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  it'll arbitrate between them, and only the right one will answer. Not every third-party Alexa device has that.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Does this do Atmos?

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  Does not do Atmos. That's like the downside. It doesn't do DTS. It just says...

• 59:53Speaker 02

  It doesn't do stereo?

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't do the things that I, speaker nerd, want them to do.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  But in your average living room, where you're not running speakers everywhere, or you're just already listening to your built-in TV speakers, which a lot of people are.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  This is the one to buy, and you get a good music experience. You get the Alexa stuff. You get the endless, in-the-distance promise of Google Assistant, so don't count on that. I mean, they're saying it's gonna happen, and they're a company that tends to do what they say, but don't buy something on a promise. So if you're an Alexa person, buy it now. If you're an Assistant person, just wait until it's real. But it's like the right... If it was $350, I'd be like, "Everyone should buy this."

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Do you want a preview of my review of the Polk Command Bar, which is a soundbar that comes with a sub that costs $100 less than the Sonos Beam?

• 1:00:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Tell me.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  It is $100 less than the Sonos Beam, and you can tell. Wait, $299? Yeah. Because the Sonos Beam is $399, right?

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  I'm $100 off on these. The $99s still get me. It's annoying.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, one's $400, the other one's $300.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. You can tell the sound difference, I think. And it also just looks ridiculous, because it looks like it has an Echo Dot slapped in the middle of it. I'm not kidding. Anyway, review coming next week.

• 1:01:10Nilay Patel?

  I have deep reservations about putting computers in things that are supposed to last for a long time. Your speakers are supposed to last for a long time. You put a computer in there, you automatically... You're looking at... It's never gonna run anything over Android 6. Anyway, we really ended on a whimper here.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  There's other great stuff to listen to. Other podcasts in the fleet. Converge with Casey Newton is going. He's got a great episode on how Twitch came to be, speaking of esports. So listen to that this week. It's great. It's going well. I'm really excited about the upside of that show. It took a long time coming, but Converge is worth it.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  So good.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  You can also listen to all of Why'd You Push That Button. We're at season three, thinking through some topics. That's gonna come back. But in the meantime, listen to all of season one and two with Caitlin and Ashley. That show is amazing. This is My Next is back on YouTube. So watch this is My Next. You can watch Processor with Mr. Dieter Bohn.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  I would like to publicly apologizing for saying command instead of control on Processor when I was talking about Windows utilities. I am so embarrassed. I don't even want to be on the internet anymore. I'm very sorry.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  I feel like every episode of Processor, there's one extremely pedantic, meaningless thing that you have to apologize for. And that's why the show is great. You can also listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. Those shows are wonderful. Ezra Klein is a guy you might know. He's got a show. It's bad. Don't. Both of his shows are good. Listen to everything. We love you all. You can talk to us. I'm Reckless on Twitter. Paul's future, Paul Dieter's at Backlon. That is it for the Vergecast this week. We'll see you not next week because it's 4th of July week, so we're off the week after that. And that's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Promo code.