Spotify’s big audio play, plus a Palm tiny phone review

Spotify acquires Gimlet Media and Anchor in a play to further expand into audio beyond music streaming. Later, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller review the tiny new Palm phone, address Samsung Galaxy S10 rumors and finally, some Apple updates. Links: - Spotify gets serious about podcasts with two acquisitions - Latest leaks confirm cheaper and smaller Samsung Galaxy S10e - Samsung’s Galaxy S10 will be one of the first Wi-Fi 6 phones - New Samsung true wireless earbuds appear in leaked promotional … - Samsung Galaxy Sport leak shows a sleek bezel-less smartwatch … - Palm phone review: it won’t save you from your phone - Apple releases iOS 12.1.4 to fix Group FaceTime security flaw - Apple is compensating the 14-year-old who discovered major FaceTime security bug - Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts is leaving in April - Apple just endorsed AT&T’s fake 5G E network - Fine, here’s a $100 Lightning to Ethernet dongle for iPads - Net neutrality takes center stage at congressional hearing Check out: Azure.com/trial to sign up for a trial today! 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?

  Hey everybody. On this episode of the Vergecast, we're going to talk about Spotify buying Gimlet. That's huge news. Dieter is going to talk about his Palm phone review and some Samsung rumors. And we're going to go through all the little updates that Apple put out this week. It's all happening right now.

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• 1:16Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Armada. I am Neelai Patel, your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Hello, hello.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller is here.

• 1:26Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  Are you here, Paul?

• 1:28Speaker 04

  Yes, I am.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  Good.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  I said hi.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  It's very exciting. No, it's true. Spotify bought Gimlet. It's a huge deal. We got to talk about what's going on in podcasts with big tech streaming companies. Dieter reviewed the Palm phone. We got to talk about that. There's a bunch of Samsung leaks. I have here just Dieter rants about Wear OS. I don't know if you're aware of what that is. And there's some Apple stuff to talk about, and then there's some net neutrality news to talk about. So a lot going on, but let's start with like, I think, the tech news of the week, which is Spotify and Gimlet.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  So Peter Kafka got the story. They were going to buy Gimlet for 200 million. And then the news came out. Spotify bought Gimlet for somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million. And also Anchor, which is a very clever little app ecosystem where you can both

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Record and receive audio. It's the podcast stuff, but you can do other interesting things with it. And so the question, there's so many things going on with this whole deal, but Neelai, like just tell me why Spotify spent this much money on, you know, like Gimlet's good. I love Gimlet podcast. I listen to Reply all the time. Listen to Startup when they started, but $200 million is a lot of money.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  For a podcast.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  It is true. I think everyone loves Gimlet. We had Trudy Penaminini, who did that Great Reply episode on Fox on our show. We're just like very friendly. I think Gimlet makes a bunch of beloved stuff. They made Homecoming, which is now like a Julia Roberts show out in the world. Like they're a force in podcasting. I think that everyone kind of knew that they needed to take the next step. They needed to exit in some way. $230 million from Spotify. That's a good exit. Fundamentally though, it seems like Spotify is taking a big step towards consolidating like the podcast world. So look, you're listening to a podcast. You're probably in your car right now. You just pull over and then send me a text.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  It's like tweet what podcast app you're using and I would bet, well, the Vergecast audience, I bet we have a lot of Overcast fans, but.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Well, I, I bet you we've got also a lot of Pocket Cast fans who, by the way, also got purchased by NPR. So there's a lot of stuff moving around in the podcast space.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. So I bet Vergecast listeners, I bet you're all different, but yeah, pull on over and just send it. Let us know. I'm at Reckless. Tweet at me. But most people I suspect are using Apple Podcasts or they're using Spotify. Spotify is increasing their share of the podcast market. And if you're a podcaster, there's a bunch of stuff you want. There's a big debate in the industry about whether you want targeted ads that could be on the video side, whether you want metrics about when people are dropping off, when they're listing, when they're picking back up, where they're going to next. This is all stuff that's like been on the web for a very long time and just has not been a part of podcasts. Some people will tell you that that is great, that you don't want all that intrusive tracking and ad targeting to happen in podcasts. But fundamentally, if you're Spotify, you've got this weird problem in your business model,

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  which is you license a bunch of music from the record labels. It's music that mostly everyone else has.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  You stream that music to your audience, whether you're ad-supported or they're paying you in no ads. And then you pay the money back to the record labels. Right? So like, literally, the more money Spotify makes, the more popular it gets, the more money they owe to their supplier. And I think that's like a really, that's just a reality of streaming music. It's really like, the streaming music companies all tried to do exclusives for a really long time.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Didn't work.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  It didn't work. The labels didn't like it. You know, the idea that a consumer is going to shift a library from Apple Music to Tidal to get a Kanye record is like nonsense. I think everybody figured it out. So if you're Spotify, like, how do you build another thing that you can use attention for, or you can get attention for, from a consumer that is sticky, that is useful? They actually tried to do a bunch of video stuff last year, and it fizzled, because I don't think anybody wants to open Spotify and watch videos. And so podcasts are like this burgeoning market, it's like $300 million total revenue in the world right now, but it's this growing market, everybody loves them. So why wouldn't you buy a great podcast house, like Gimlet? Say, this is where they live, we're going to start to attract not only your music listening time, but your podcast listening time.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, put out a letter being like, we're an audio company, we want all of your audio time, audio, audio, audio, that's what we do. And then, this is kind of like, I think we talk about Ben Thompson in the show, like...

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Oh, actually, hey, before you get there, I just, like, you pulled over, you're allowed to drive now, get back, get back in the road. Most podcast apps, they're great, but they're basically like, really, really, really nice, bespoke, custom versions of the iTunes model of managing songs. Right? You, I'm a web guy, you get an RSS feed, an XML feed of episodes, you download them to your device, when you listen to them, they go away. But you've got to do a lot of like, management of like, files, basically. There's a... Nice interface for it, whatever, but it's like old school iTunes kind of model. And that's like, you know, podcasts started from the iPod and like actually iTunes in the first place. That's how most people had their first introduction to it way back in the day.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  But a bunch of companies have tried to change that and bring it closer to some sort of new, more modern model of getting audio. So Stitcher really made a go at this. There's the NPR One app, which sort of does something similar where they don't, in the same way that you don't manage your music library anymore, you just let Spotify or Apple Music handle it. There's like a sense that there's going to be a model of podcasts where you're not managing your library anymore. You're letting your app handle it. I think that's what, that's one of the opportunities Spotify sees here. And I think the other opportunity and maybe the more interesting opportunity is the thing that bugged people about that RSS model of podcasts is once you

• 7:09Speaker 03

  download the file, I have no idea if you've listened to it. I barely know if you've heard the ad. It's you've literally just downloaded a file to your phone, done whatever you want with it, and then it went away. And all I know is that like you hit the download server. And so a bunch of like, moving to this new thing lets them do more ad tracking and improve ads. And there's a whole ad thing that Spotify can get into here, which is sort of related to like this like corporate dream of like changing the podcast model away from RSS. But it's also like, this is where we get into the Ben Thompson area, I think. I'm trying to tee you up here because like the way Spotify wants to make money off podcasts is fundamentally different than the way that podcasts make money today.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So thank you. Ad tracking on podcasts right now is very simple. It's very obvious. I read an ad, I do it every week on the show, and I'm like, go to this website and type in this promo code. The promo code, by the way, for store.theverge.com is a promo code.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  And if you type that in, we'll not track it, actually.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  We actually don't know how.

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  We're not great at this, but you know, like I read an ad and I say the promo code is Verge. And then, you know, whoever, Microsoft Azure knows that they came to you from our podcast. Right. And they're like, that's how they do whatever ad tracking. And that's actually a pretty fiddly system. You gotta like build all that logic. And it also means that if you're not trying to enter into that kind of transaction, the ad isn't worthwhile to you. Right. So most of our advertisers, I think, you know, like they're trying to get you to buy a subscription to something. They're trying to charge you per month. Like it's super valuable to go through all the pain of, of like these weird ads. The other thing that's true is that once you've downloaded the file from us, you know, a year from now, on a second listen,

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  we can't change the ads. So our entire back catalog is not valuable to us from that perspective. We get one shot at monetizing it. So if you're doing, if they do what YouTube does, which is dynamically stream the content to you in this app, well, that, you know, YouTube changes the ads. Hulu changes the ads, right? And you can target the ads. So if you go back, you make the horrible mistake of listening like a Verge cast from a year ago, because just because you love us, it means Spotify might be able to dynamically target ads, or it might be able to segment audiences. So there's a lot of like business stuff in there that you get when you dynamically stream the content instead of downloading files to devices. That's a, that's like a big one. And I think NPR one has like moved in that direction.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  You know, our platform provider right now does dynamic ad insertion. So when you, when you request the file over RSS, we can change it. That's basically a hack. Spotify just gets to do it on the front end. But the other thing that I think is super interesting, and this is the kind of the Ben Thompson piece, his whole, and this is all credit to Ben. I'm just like lifting his analysis, but it's interesting to talk about. You know, his whole, the hammer he has is like analysis hammer is aggregation theory and everything in the world is a nail. So this news came out yesterday and I said, Ben Thompson is going to write about Spotify trying to be an aggregator. And sure enough, his newsletter came out today and it did. But the simplest version of, of his aggregation theory is that the old economy worked by putting all of the

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  supply in one place. Right. So you literally would drive to the mall, all the clothes and Radio Shack gadgets. And I don't know what our, what our Cinnabon's are in the mall and the consumer like goes to supply. Right, so I want to buy something, I go there and whoever controls supply controls a whole part of the value chain. Ben's whole theory is that the internet has like radically shifted that and Google and Facebook, actually what they control is demand because they have better user experiences. So the consumers are all at Google and Facebook and we're a supplier of tech news and we have to go to Google and Facebook to get routed to a consumer. And that literally is flipped over the thing and those new kinds of platforms are called aggregators. Right now in podcasting, that doesn't exist. It exists all over the place.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  So Google and Facebook are good examples of they've aggregated all the demand for, I don't know, text on the internet. And so we, as suppliers, we have to go through them to get to the consumer. Uber and Lyft have aggregated all the supply of like people who want a taxi. So drivers have to like go to them to get customers for the taxis. Netflix has aggregated a bunch of demand for like people who just like want to watch some video. So if you're like a video provider, you have to do that. YouTube is the same idea. Like it's very hard to start a competitor YouTube because you can't peel off any customers. Right? But as a YouTube creator, you can go immediately find customers on YouTube. So you see Spotify, like they already have a bunch of customers sitting there demanding audio experiences for music. They can just say, well now podcasts live here too.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  And if you're a podcast creator, you will have to go make a deal with Spotify to get on the platform on their terms and that business scales because now you're going to pay them a cut to get to your customer instead of what they have to do with the music labels, which is pay them a cut to get the supply. And that's a big shift, right?

• 11:58Speaker 03

  And the

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  I encourage you to go read Ben's analysis, like it's, it's, it's, it's very much a better B-school version of that. But the main thing is the big platforms don't want to control supply, they want to control demand. And I think this is Spotify definitely trying to make that move.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  But if you can control demand, you get the thing that have made Google and Facebook fabulously wealthy, which is it is much easier to buy an ad on Google and Facebook than it is to like go to a thousand different websites directly, right? Or a thousand different whatevers directly and like make ads for each of those things. Because if you want to do an ad on a podcast, there's, you have two problems. You gotta come talk to us, you gotta go, you know, come talk to the business people at Vox Media or, you know, our some other like middle man, man ad supplier and then Can you imagine the people who grew up to be like, I want to be a middleman ad supplier one day? I mean, it happens.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  It's got a brown car, brown suit, brown suitcase.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  But if Spotify pulls off what it wants to pull off, one, it can have ads that aren't just making you remember a promo code because it could like, it could dynamically insert them and it can do more, you know, evil ad tracking. And so you'll, they'll, they'll know who's listening to what and you'll be able to do different kinds of ads. And then two, like, it's just, you can give better ads from the advertiser's perspective and it's way easier. And so if they're successful, they could theoretically do to like podcast advertising, what Google did to web advertising and Facebook did to web advertising, which is take, take all of it.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, and I think that that is an enormous sort of like outcome that could happen. Like, it's a very real statistical probability that Spotify will just capture all this demand.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  That, I think, is a little like in the abstract, though. So I said this to Ashley Carmen, who covers podcasts for us, who's also a great podcaster. She does Y2% Button with Caitlin Tiffany. And she's like, yeah, but listening to podcasts on Spotify sucks.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  That's actually the first problem is like, the experience is bad. And I think the, you know, the people who listen to the Verchass, who are choosing Overcast or Pocket Casts, they've gone to a third-party solution because it's a better podcasting experience, it's a better consumption experience. So Spotify has like, some competition there, right? Just in terms of end-user experience. And then Spotify has to actually convince people who are on Spotify to listen to music, that what they want to also do is listen to podcasts. So that, you know, they're doing a reasonably good job of that. I think that the one thing that I think puts this in check, that doesn't make this a Google like automatic win, or Facebook like automatic win, is that there's a lot of people using that Apple Podcasts

• 14:31Nilay Patel?

  app on iOS. And Apple is, does not seem particularly interested in doing dynamic ad serving and tracking. They do some metrics, and, you know, that's fine. But they can tell you when you drop off. And I've actually looked at these metrics, I don't know. I'm just confident that our, you know, our many, many listeners are happy with us all the time, and I just live in that confidence.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  They always stay with us all the way through the end until we say the word Paul.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, great. Now they're gone. Thanks, Dieter.

• 14:56Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, so like, there's this other competitor in the market, whereas, you know, Bing was not like a, a serious rival to Google in that way. So there's, there's some dynamics for Spotify to like navigate, but you can, you can just clearly see if they start streaming podcasts to people and they make the ads better for the advertisers, which they are currently pretty difficult, then there's a lot of money to be made there. Now, the Gimlet people did say, our podcasts are not going to be exclusive. The existing library of Gimlet shows will still be available on every platform. But you can see that, you know, their next big splashy homecoming, whatever, could very well be exclusive to Spotify.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna ask. Why do they need to own the producers of the content to, because there's multiple things here. You're talking about inventing something that's better than an RSS reader for podcasts. And then there's the mixing in the ads part dynamically, so you can track everybody. Great. And then, and then there's the, um, now they own some of the content, uh, you know, which is, I don't know, what, what, what's the incentive there to own the content?

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think it's the same incentive as to buy Anchor, which is literally right now, every time Spotify streams a song, they've got to pay a bunch of people, right? They gotta, you gotta pay Taylor Swift half a cent every time you stream a Taylor Swift song. And you gotta pay your label. And like, like this whole litany of people. By the way, we had Meredith Rose on to explain the Music Modernization Act on The Verge Cast like several months ago. Like, you can listen to that episode. It's great. She explains everybody you gotta pay. If you own the content, you're not gonna pay anybody. You, you pay for it once upfront, you pay some salaries, but then every time you stream it, it's just additional margin, right? It's, it's additional profit. If you are YouTube and you've got YouTube creators putting your stuff on your platform for free, well, sure, you gotta pay them a cut of the ad revenue, but you, you're not paying this like marginal licensing

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  fee every single time. And you get to do things like demonetize them.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  I could understand that maybe with, with Anchor. Gimlet is, is like Netflix bought Adam Sandler not so that they could, you know, Netflix doesn't make a margin every time you stream an Adam Sandler movie. They own Adam Sandler so that they get more subscribers.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, but Spotify has subscribers too. I mean, they have this very clear hybrid model, right? Some of it's advertising and some of it's subscription and. Maybe if you subscribe to Spotify Premium Plus, now there's not podcast ads anymore.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  So Gimlet makes money, Gimlet makes good podcast ads. Number one, they've got a whole like creative studio. Fox Media has one too. Gimlet also makes stories that are audio that get turned into TV shows later. And that's another revenue stream. And they make podcasts that people, that make money because people listen to the ads on those podcasts. And so it's possible that they wanted to get a bunch of expertise and just like, some of this is aquahair. But I think it may just be that like Gimlet was actually a pretty good business and that's just what it was worth.

• 17:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, every indication is Gimlet had been like looking for a way forward.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:59Nilay Patel?

  Our producer Zach is reminding me, Zach is our podcast producer and he knows a lot about podcasts. He's like, they make, Gimlet makes podcast, branded podcasts. They make branded content, which are ads too. So there's like a huge number of revenue models for Gimlet. But I think Paul, your point is they bought a content. When they make Homecoming 2, or whatever they're gonna make, whatever their next big flashy, you gotta listen to it podcast is, that will be exclusive and you'll either have to pay Spotify, be a subscriber to get it, or you know, they'll be able to monetize it directly through these ads.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  This bothers me because this is my least favorite part about like Netflix and YouTube, especially on YouTube. I mean, you kind of understand that Netflix is about like original content to get new subscribers. Amazon has obviously gone down that road as well. But when YouTube does it, it's especially egregious because I was paying YouTube money so that they would give money to the actual creators. Instead YouTube uses that money to buy Logan Paul movies.

• 19:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, he's one of their creators.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  Weird, original content that I didn't ever ask for, you know?

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  We're seeing YouTube like split it out now, right? Well, God only knows what their names are. But there's YouTube Premium.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Oh my God.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  Plus or Red or whatever.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  You're gonna get this wrong. It's impossible to get it right.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna change it. Look, last week, we had a whole discussion on enterprise certificates and five minutes after we went off the air, Apple reinstated everyone's enterprise certificates. This week, I'll be like, there's YouTube Premium and they're gonna change it to like YouTube purple.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Funny story, yesterday, I canceled Google Play Music because I was like, I don't use this. And then I realized an hour later that it was tied to YouTube Premium, which is how you don't get ads on YouTube.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  So I had to re-subscribe. But now I've subscribed to YouTube Premium and getting Google Play Music for free instead of subscribing to Google Play Music and getting YouTube Premium for free. So.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  I figured out what Google Play Music is good for. It, uh, I finally figured it out.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 19:58Nilay Patel?

  I gave my sister's kids my Spotify password.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  And I wanted to have, I wanted them kids' accounts, but they were using mine somehow. And so I kept, we kept on having a Spotify fight where our devices were pausing. So I used Google Play Music instead that day. That's what it's good for.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:16Nilay Patel?

  But, uh, so there's YouTube Premium, which turns off the ads and then it might get you some weird other content that they're doing. But then now there's like YouTube membership program. Like they're finding ways for you to pay them directly.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  Here's my fear. Spotify will approach podcasts and say, hey, go on our platform. You don't have to do ad reads every week. You can just, you know, leave a little blank spot in between your segments and we'll pay you a lot of money. Meanwhile, me, innocent Spotify subscriber, which I literally am, I pay Spotify money already, right now ostensibly to listen to music. Spotify is going to use that money that I pay them and they're going to create some new original show where some cool, really hip person interviews turtles on the beach.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  And it's great. And I'm sure it's like premium, high end, well, it's audio experience. But.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Damn it.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  I'm sure it's really good, but that's not what I was doing. You know what I mean? Like, I just feel like I'm out of control of, of the, the money that I.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  It's like, why, why am I paying you money? You, you're not, you're not delivering me the product that I signed up for. So why am I paying you anymore?

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  And then what you quickly discover is that antitrust law in this company, in this country is not doing great. So there's just a handful of tiny monopolies and you have any choice in the market as a consumer. Which leads me to my next point. Thank you, Paul, for that segue.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  That's exactly where I was going with that. That's weird.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  But no, so this is like a real put your money where your mouth is moment for the antitrust people. We have bizarrely on our tech show been talking about antitrust law for weeks now. I interviewed Lena Kahn on our interview show this week. We talked about. Amazon and Facebook and how you might want to break them up. And there's this theme, and I'll freely admit, I'm like struggling with this. But there's this like feeling that we all screwed up, that the United States screwed up, that the EU screwed up by allowing Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. That if those three companies had been, had been forced to stay independent, we would have had better competition in these markets. That, you know, the WhatsApp founders who are very privacy focused would have built a more privacy focused business. But instead we let Facebook suck everything up.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  And now there's just this monopoly and what are you going to do? And we should break it back up. There's a lot like, the EU is out there saying, we don't want Facebook to co-mingle data between its products right now. There's all, there's editorial in New York Times this week saying Facebook should not be allowed to combine the technical infrastructure of Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, which is something they announced they wanted to do. Okay, well, the Open Markets Institute put out a letter today saying the FCC and EU should prevent Spotify from buying Gimlet and Anchor. Just me personally, if I'm going to be the guy who's like, we should break up Facebook or we should have never let them buy Instagram. Well, okay, it's, it really is to me feels like, am I going to put my money where my mouth is? Am I going to say, you should actually prevent this? Because this is going to lead to concentration market, which is exactly what Paul was just describing.

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  Or are you going to make some distinction and say, well, Gimlet is a content company. They don't own a distribution platform like Spotify. That makes sense. Oh, but I really didn't want AT&T to buy Time Warner, which was a distribution company, buying a content company. And you see where it gets messy very fast. And I, the one thing that we haven't talked about here is Anchor, which is their like consumer oriented production software, which I think turns them into like sort of a YouTube of podcasts where now it's very easy to make podcasts. It's very easy to get massive distribution across the Spotify platform. It's very easy for them to monetize if they do all this other stuff. You quickly see like, okay, you add all this stuff up and you end up with a podcasting behemoth.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Like a YouTube of podcasts, a Facebook of podcasts. But you gotta make that jump. Like they have to not screw it up. That's like one jump that you have to make, like they won't blow it. Is that guaranteed? Well, I don't know, I've been asking Spotify to do better organized by album and artist for like five years. You can't get that right. So my instinct is this one isn't quite on the scale of Facebook buying Instagram.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Like, like.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  But you can see, that argument's gonna happen.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Saying that you should stop this, this acquisition because of antitrust, like, it's like saying that you, you should invade a tiny Axis country because Hitler, right? It's like Nazis are bad, therefore, we'll deal with that later, but right now, we're gonna invade, you know, this tiny little country that happened to like be allied with them, right?

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  Weren't there only like three?

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that country was bad, you should get them.

• 24:41Nilay Patel?

  Which, there's only like three of them.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Well, there's, there's.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  Your choices are Japan or Italy.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Germany, Japan, and Italy, but then there's also like, I've, I've got the Wikipedia page up here.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, I can't believe we're doing this. How did we end up here? Is this, is this Godwin's Law? I think it is.

• 24:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm so unclear about what's happening. Deers got the Axis Powers Wikipedia page open right now? Alright, go ahead.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, yeah, they're, they're siding, they're siding with the Nazis, you should definitely invade them, but also maybe you should go after the Nazis, is what I'm saying.

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  Just to be clear.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Facebook is the Nazis. My wife works for Oculus by the way, to visit Facebook.

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  I just wanted to get that one all the way out there. Alright, well, I'm just saying, the fight over, the amount of antitrust heat applied to Facebook is going to land on this deal, which instinctively, I don't think anybody was thinking about, and it's gonna happen.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  It's a blowback right there.

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be just interesting to watch that conversation proceed, because this is, this is exactly the sort of industry consolidation that even as a consumer, Paul, I think you're, you're feeling like, I don't want you to do all this other stuff, I just want you to do the thing I'm paying you to do. And then the sort of regulatory folks are saying, we have to be more careful in scrutinizing these deals. I don't know where it's gonna land, like I said, I, I'm personally conflicted, but it's, it's clear to see. Kind of on both sides, the consumer side and the regulatory side. These deals are a little bit, a little bit, they're coming under more scrutiny.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  My preference, if we want to go bonkers antitrust, and obviously I do not think that is the solution to my Spotify turtles show problem. If we want to go bonkers on antitrust, I do think it'd be good if, if Congress did some sort of guidance to the FTC that said, yo, we want you to be way more aggressive stopping these sorts of mergers because they're, you know, because of all these problems and because of Nazis. Because, because so many of these companies like Anchor, and I don't know a lot about Gimlet, but you know, most startups are built these days and financed these days with some sort of thought towards, oh, we're a technology company.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  We're going to exit by either having an IPO or selling to a really large, really large technology company. And so when you're saying really large technology companies can't buy technology companies anymore for fear of antitrust, then you have changed a large portion of the economics of Silicon Valley.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, and like I said, we'll see, I think that conversation, it has been entirely focused on, we should break up Facebook, but now you've got this high profile deal and it's going to come around to that. Okay, we got to wrap this up. Dieter's going to keep reading the Wikipedia page from World War II, which is a whole life fallen down many times. It's very interesting, but we're going to take a break. And when we come back, Dieter's going to talk about his palm phone review. There's some Samsung rumors out there. We're going to talk about some Wear OS, classic gadget stuff, basically. Check this out.

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• 28:13Speaker 06

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• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  Dieter.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  You, my friend, played with a tiny phone.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this phone came out last October, November, November 2nd or something, I don't know. So I did a little piece then, we talked about on the Vergecast phone numbers, but I finally got around to like reviewing, reviewing it. And I wanted to like actually give it a shot. Uh, and it's bad. It's not a, it's not a good phone.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  That's, that's, but it's bad because it's interesting that it's bad because I don't think that it's possible to make a good secondary phone, like a phone for your phone. It's almost impossible unless you live in a very slim, like sliver of a type of user. So like, maybe if you are all in on the, on iOS, you could get an iPhone SE and make that like a backup phone and just have everything come to you via iMessage and FaceTime, uh, which now works again. Um, or, you know, maybe, you know, there's like, there's like little bits and bobs, but because there's no way to get Signal, WhatsApp, and like basically text messages, like getting those synced over to your phone are really hard.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Uh, and so there's no way to make that good. And even if you could solve that problem, then you have the entire other problem of making a good phone that's small.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  And I believe in my heart that it's possible to make a good small phone. I think the iPhone SE came very, very close to that. In fact, Nick Stat wrote a really good article about how it became his like weekend phone, although he swapped Sims, but it's still like that. It is possible, but, uh, the, the palm ain't it. Just sorry.

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  Really? I enjoyed your interview because every few lines you took a beat to be like, This is a bad phone.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  It's literally like, like, we usually use photos as section breakers in our reviews as part of the layout. Dieter used, "It's a bad phone."

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  Over and over again.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Well, honestly, like, I kept saying it because like, everyone who looks at the phone is like, "Oh, this must, this is cute." "Tell me it's good." They want to believe, like, "Oh, yeah."

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  We were shocked when it came out.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, when it was announced and we, and we did the coverage of it, like, famous people were tweeting the link, like, "Finally, the solution to phone addiction is here. It's this tiny, beautiful phone that Steph Curry has designed armbands for." And I think even in that moment, we're like, "The guys, it's a bad sign." Like,

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  "The famous creative director is usually a sign of doom."

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have an uncompleted thought, and like, Steph Curry being attached to it is like, part of this uncompleted thought. I like, ended the review on this. Everyone knows that they want to, you know, not be quote-unquote addicted to their phone, although addiction is not the right word because the science is still unclear if you really want to be technical about the, you know, scientific definition of addiction, still. And I think there's a parallel to dieting. Like, we know that just like, raw willpower is a bad plan. If you just feel guilty about it and just try and like, you know, muscle your way through it to lose weight or to spend less time on your phone, you're gonna end up failing and then feeling bad about yourself as a failure as a person to have not achieved this thing through sheer willpower. There are like, structural, infrastructural, like, societal things that are keeping you from, you know,

• 31:54Speaker 03

  using your phone less, or losing weight in that case. And so, the palm phone is a quick fix. It's a fad diet. It's this thing that promises to solve this really intractable, hard problem. And so, like, "Oh, I'll buy that thing and I'll solve that problem." But really, the way that you solve the problem of, you know, losing weight or like, getting healthy is, you know, diet and exercise.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  Changing your behavior.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Right. And you can like, you can come up with multiple different frameworks for it. But like fundamentally, like it's actually like pretty straightforward, except that it's not just on you, because often you might live in a food desert. You might not have the, you know, the access to a gym or like good food or whatever. And so this problem of, you know, the apps and the notifications and all this stuff distracting us and pulling our attention away on our phones. It, there's just, I just feel that there's like a ton of parallels to the health movement. And I feel like we are going to see other hucksters in leather jackets, because the guys at Palm all wear leather jackets in every photo they're in. Selling us fad diets for phones. It's good, like expect more fad diets for phones.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying the Palm phone is like a, it's like a Nordic track in your living room that you never use?

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Yes, that's exactly what it is.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  You bought it like on the infomercial at night?

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  And then you're like, I'm gonna be a cross-country skier. Like, oh, that's a, that doesn't actually stop me from eating too much every day.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  This is a wonderful analogy. So I, as a fun fad diet type thing, I quit smoking on New Year's.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  That's not a fad diet, Paul. That's just something I want you to do as your friend.

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Well, but you know what I mean? It's, it's cliche like a fad diet is, you know?

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Um, and so I'm, what is it, February?

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  So, I mean, I, I, I'm doing pretty good. But one, one interesting thing.

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  February, you've made it through like the hard part.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Well, I feel like it, but it's, it's an interesting thing about, I mean, I guess the science isn't out on nicotine addiction. That is an addiction. But, but something that I, I think it was a Jordan Peterson talk. He was talking about how with an addiction, you're not just addicted to cigarettes, you're addicted to all the places and all the ways that you would smoke. Like if you think of like people will tend to, tend to have a tendency to like, oh, I, I smoke after I drink or when I'm out with friends or at bars or certain stressful times like. And so I think that's interesting of like decomposing your, your struggles with using your phone too much.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Uh, you, you can't just use phone less, period. It, it, it's really multivariate. And so figuring out ways to use each part of it less. And so that's what I've realized quitting smoking is I have to quit smoking. Outside and quit smoking after I eat and quit smoking after I go, you know, like each little place is eat is a different quit in a sense.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  So I, I, um, my strategy for quitting smoking was to quit smoking while I studied for the bar exam, uh, on the theory that if I could not smoke during the most stressful period of my life, that it would be fine. And that, that was true until vaping came around. I'll be honest with you. Um, nicotine sucks, but the, Paul, what the thing I noticed was I every, I marked every transition by smoking, right? Like class is over, I'm walking into this building. I walked out of this building. I'm going to bed and waking up. That's not how I feel about my phone necessarily, right? Like there are these moments where I absolutely need to use a phone. The thing about the palm that gets me is its strategy is like, what if this was just shittier to use, right? Like it's like you tried to quit smoking by smoking like horrible cigarettes.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Oh, I've done that.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  I've heard, I've literally heard that as a strategy. You smoke so much that you get sick on cigarettes and then I've, I've not, did not try that.

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  No, that's, that's using a phone until you like the phone blows up. Like that's a different analogy.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  No, this is like smoking menthol. You hate the taste of menthol.

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, I, that's what I want to focus on. Why is it a bad phone? Like that, that is the thing. Like inside of this analogy, right? You buy this thing. The reason it's supposed to be effective, it's because it's bad at the thing, right? It's a small crappy phone, but is it effective at being a small crappy phone or is it just a crappy?

• 36:11Speaker 03

  No, it's not effective at being, like you don't actually want a crappy phone. You want a small phone, but the thing that's, that prevents you from using it too much is because it's like, it's small, not because it's bad, right? Um, but you know, it's slow, but I forgive that, right? It's got a slow processor. It's fine because it's a small, cheap phone. Well, relatively cheap. It's 350 bucks. Um, but it, it's software is, uh, only like every now and then helps you navigate the fact that it's a tiny phone. Most of the time it, um, doesn't, you know, like especially in like a web browser or something, but you're not supposed to do that, right? Like every, every, there's always a like response to me, to one of my complaints, but the thing that I can't get over is if you want a little phone to leave your main phone behind, what do you want it to be good at? You know, things

• 36:54Speaker 03

  that aren't distracting. Um, you want to take a picture with it, uh, and the camera's just super not good. Um, and you probably want to listen to like, you know, music with it, right? You want, or a podcast, you want to go running with it and, um, you know, it doesn't have a headphone jack, fine. Um, but. It also doesn't have volume buttons.

• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Hmm. Cause you're addicted to volume buttons, Dieter.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  More than anything, though, it has terrible battery life. It has super terrible battery life. And they solve that by introducing this thing called life mode. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Hashtag life mode.

• 37:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. No.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  Um, where when the screen is off, it turns off the radios. It turns off Wi-Fi and it turns off cellular radio. So like, nothing comes in. And they're like, see, it's great. No distractions, no notifications annoying you. Because the phone is like, basically off. Um, but two things. One, uh, you'd think that it would last on standby forever because you've turned off the cellular and the Wi-Fi radios. Nope. It's still just about a day sitting in your pocket. And then two, when you turn it on, even though you've like been a good, good person and not installed a million apps on it, as soon as the radio hits the network, all the notifications that have been waiting to get to you start rolling in and they just start showing up on your phone when you're trying to open it up for five seconds to take a picture of your kid.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  That's incredible.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. What are you doing?

• 38:20Nilay Patel?

  So you also reviewed the Tick Watch, right?

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. So that should be out by the time you're listening to this. Um, the Tick Watch, there's a Tick Watch E and the Tick Watch S. And they're Wear OS and they're also bad. Um, but it's not Mob Boy. Mob Boy is a company that makes them. It's not their fault. Like, if you're gonna buy a Wear OS watch, one, don't, because they're bad. But two, if you really want to, you really don't want to get a Galaxy watch because you don't want to install the extra Samsung software. And you really don't want a hybrid smart watch, uh, because you do want a full screen or whatever. And you really don't want a Fitbit. Like, you go down the tree and you're like, I must have a Wear OS watch. You should spend as little as possible on it because they, they have to be like revamping that platform soon because it's so bad.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  And so the Tick Watch is, um, like a hundred and fifty, a hundred and eighty, I don't know, a hundred and sixty or a hundred and eighty dollar smart watch. Uh, that's just big and chunky and kind of slow. Uh, but has pretty good battery life. Uh, but it's only a hundred and sixty bucks. So if you must have Wear OS watch, one, let's talk about why, because I don't think you do. But two, uh, get this one because it's the cheapest one and it's like, fine.

• 39:24Nilay Patel?

  So it's so funny. The reason I brought it up is, um, my strategy for using my phone less was to get an Apple Watch.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  How's that going for you?

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  It's great, actually. I just leave my, when I'm home in my house, like, I-

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  Put my phone down and I just walk away from it. And I have a cellular one, although that like, I can't, I've never used, I, I don't have the like, the courage to like leave my house without my phone yet, I may be working up to it. But, you know, like running around the house, like I can get texts. I tweeted last week, uh, the baby puked all over a car seat, which was extremely gross. She did it during, uh, the net neutrality hearing, so maybe she was just like reacting.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  To that, she was reacting the notion of government regulation.

• 40:06Nilay Patel?

  But I was like in it, I was like cleaning puke out of the innards of the car seat with a screwdriver and I used my nose to walkie talkie Becky and feel like, come down here, please. Like that stuff is great, like, uh, I got one for, for Beck too. And she switched from a Fitbit and she said, not having steps be the first thing she sees on her watch.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  Has actually like calmed her down.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  Like she still runs every morning, but like she doesn't feel like, well, she's like literally not having that be the first piece of information I see has like changed my relationship to the device. So it's funny that like, because the Apple platform is reasonably good and importantly, it can respond to iMessages, which is the main thing I, I don't want to be worried about. Like I've been able to set the phone aside, which is always kind of the promise of the Apple Watch. It just doesn't seem like where OS can do it. So it kind of seems like if you're on Android, you're like kind of doomed to be addicted to your phone.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  Because there's not a great alternative off of it.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  You can, you can get like the, those basics that you're talking about, Neelai, from basically anything, but you can't get a good smartwatch that does it unless you get the Samsung Galaxy. And actually we're seeing rumors that there might be another iteration of the Galaxy Watches, uh, at Samsung's Unpacked event, uh, later this month. So I'm actually kind of excited for that. And I'm about to like shrug and say, you know what? Fine, I'll, I'll install the three different apps on my phone that I have to install to use Samsung software on a non Samsung phone. Or you know what? There's like a very real chance, if they like do a good job with the S10, that I'll switch to an S10. And then I'll just, I'm just going to live that Samsung life. I'm very excited about one UI, uh, strangely. Uh, I've been testing the beta, gonna do a video about it.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  And if they honestly like, Samsung may have made their software like good enough for me to be like, yeah, this is worth it. If the camera on the S10 is good, there's a very real chance I'll switch away from the Pixel to, uh, an S10.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, we've got a bunch of rumors. You want to walk through them? Like, S10e, Wi-Fi 6.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot we know about the S10 already.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  So, I mean, should I care about Wi-Fi 6?

• 42:17Nilay Patel?

  No, but you know what's weird? Like, I looked at our stats and the amount of interest in the headline, the S10 will be the first Wi-Fi 6 phone, was out of control. We cover Wi-Fi news and we're always like, no one cares. We're like, here's a crazy router. Here's the Wi-Fi 6 specs. And everyone is like, yes, finally a dose of Wi-Fi news. I don't get it, but we're gonna keep doing it?

• 42:42Speaker 04

  It is the most excellent rebrand of a wireless protocol imaginable. Because if you think of what is Wi-Fi? Wi-Fi, as it progresses, is just stacking more and more complexity. And it's a hairy, weird ball of multi-mimo and all this craziness, right? And so, it's like, hey, we made Wi-Fi more complex this year. Like, psh, I'm not into that. But if you said the sequel to last year's Wi-Fi, so much better.

• 43:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, we're gonna talk about, we should talk about Samsung. But it's, the point you bring up is great because it's in such stark contrast to what's going on with 5G.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, there is a Wi-Fi consortium that owns the name, that licenses the logo, that sets the spec. And so, they're like, these things mean Wi-Fi 6. And it actually means something, whereas AT&T can just be like, ah, 5G. Eh? You like that? All right, but Samsung, remember, let's do those first.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  The main thing I want to talk about is this, now that we know the name, the S10e, which is like the light version of the S10. There's a chance that Sam-

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  Does E stand for crappy? Is that where we are in the technology industry right now? 5G, S10e?

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  That's, sure, addition. I don't know, man. You totally just ruined the point I was gonna make is they may have done a slightly better job at like the third random phone strategy than Apple did with the XS, XS Max and XR.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 44:13Speaker 03

  Like, well, just simply because the S10e is gonna have a 5.8 inch display, which means it's smaller. So if it's the one everyone should get, I mean, we'll have to see. But if they made it like, you know, the inexpensive one and they actually made it smaller, but it's still good, then that like, that makes sense to a person. The little one is cheaper and then you get the like real one, or then you can get the big one. Whereas with Apple, you can get the little one, or you can get the middle sized one that's cheaper, but not as good, but also it has better battery life. I don't know. Or you get the big one, right?

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  That story is confusing. Depending on what they actually, if this S10e is any good, we could actually have like a slightly more coherent strategy in terms of its phone lineup from Samsung than we do from Apple. And I'm just gonna repeat that phrase. Samsung may have had a more coherent product strategy than Apple. Samsung.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying that it's a possibility and that is wild.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  It is wild. It is a possibility. Samsung is gonna do that, but then they're also gonna put out like the Galaxy A10 Warthog and no one is gonna know what that is. Except the name of a plane that I just used for a Samsung phone. Cause they have every other phone in the world. Like they'll have a Galaxy S10e and a Galaxy E and they'll be right next to each other and it will be impossible to know which one is which.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Well, as long as they put the right ones in the store, then it doesn't matter. Like they can make a million different phones and as long as you, when you walk into a AT&T store, you're gonna see S10e with 5GE and you're gonna be like, that's what I want. It'll be great.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they're gonna show this foldable phone at this event?

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Yes, I think they're gonna show it. I don't think they're gonna like, show everything. I think they're gonna, it like, they teased it once. There are enough other foldable phones out there. We saw a few at CES. There's more rumors coming around. If Samsung doesn't at least tease a little bit more at this event, they're gonna lose something. Like Samsung loves to be like, first. And people aren't gonna associate, whoa, foldable phone from Samsung. They're just gonna think that there's a bunch of crappy foldable phones and then Samsung will also release theirs. So they have to do something with it at this event to put a stake in the ground because that ground is getting pretty full of stakes right now. That's a bad metaphor, but pretend it was a good one.

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  That just sounds like you're trying to kill a vampire.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna take a break. And then we're gonna come back. Paul's gonna do his thing. We, there's some Apple stuff to get through. And I'm gonna close out by just sort of like, we're gonna fade it out as I rant about net neutrality. It's gonna be great. We'll be right back.

• 47:02Speaker 05

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• 47:34Speaker 06

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• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, Mr. Miller.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Every week, my friend. Consistency.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:09Nilay Patel?

  Execution.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  Reliability.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  What's it called?

• 48:12Speaker 04

  Polish. It's called iPad LAN party.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  I know what this one is.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  There is a most excellent new dongle on the market. From Belkin. It's called the Belkin Ethernet Plus Power Adapter with Lightning Connector.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's obviously meant for like enterprise use where you want to. This is, this is one of those things, you know, a lot of times we feel like we are the blessed ones because we're consumers, so we get the new things. And in enterprise, they're all running like Windows ME or something. But this is one of those cases.

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  Dude, if you're the enterprise guy, you install Windows ME, you should be fired.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  I used to have to run a Windows ME network of 30 computers at a school because that's all they could afford.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  It's in your, if you're in your car right now, pull over, please tweet at us the last time you used Windows ME if you have deployed it. All right, Paul, continue.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Oh, man, I have visceral memories of the last time I touched the computer.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Windows ME. But so, but they have this thing called power over Ethernet where power goes over Ethernet. So you plug Ethernet into a small little computer and that is the power and also the connectivity. And then I just got, I was just remembering LAN parties I used to go to. And that was the last time I experienced low latency networked video games. Like where you had like latency under 10 milliseconds because everybody was literally in the same room.

• 49:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  On one little router. And now we all use the internet and like, we're probably mostly dealing with 40, 60 milliseconds on good connections for everything we do. And we don't even know what good times are like.

• 50:10Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying you get this.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  I'm saying.

• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  You have Fortnite.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  Fortnite on here and then convince Epic to give you a Fortnite server so that you can play local LAN Fortnite.

• 50:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm trying to think of iPad games that run off a local server.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  But here, here's the special part, though. Leave your power adapter at home.

• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  So my understanding of this, by the way, it's a hundred dollars.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 50:35Nilay Patel?

  We haven't even gotten to the best part of this dongle. It's a hundred dollar ethernet adapter. But my understanding of this is that if you're, I don't know, putting out kiosks or you've got like frontline workers

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  in a, I don't know, a shop.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  You plug this thing in and then you plug the ethernet cord in and you get connectivity and power. And then you've just wired up all your displays and you're good. You only have to run the one cable. There's no additional dongle required. The thing that makes this very funny to me, of course, is that the iPad Pro is out with a USB-C adapter. And you can just get like a thirty dollar USB-C hub and do all this.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I guess they still sell the iPad. By the way, the regular iPad, Amazon was selling it for two seventy-nine today.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  Good deal.

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  Every time Apple is like, the phone has to be this expensive. I'm like, you sell the iPad with a bigger screen and a nice processor for two seventy-nine, you can make a cheaper phone.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  I digress. It's just funny that there's like the ultimate lightning adapter is here. It's a hundred dollar ethernet cable, right as Apple moves to USB-C. Good times. All right. Speaking of Apple, Geter, do you want to just walk us through this like insane list? It's like a bunch of like Apple updates.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  There's a bunch of Apple stuff that happened, but like the two things are that the Apple update, twelve point one point four fixes group FaceTime. Good on them. It's a week later than they said, but they did put an update last week saying, we're gonna do it and whatever. So, hooray, they fixed that and some other stuff. And they're also compensating, like, there was this whole drama that the, there was an original bug report that like didn't make its way to the right people fast enough inside Apple. So they're actually giving a bug bounty to that teenager who discovered it and his mom tried to find it. They're also gonna apparently give him some college money. So that's good. But the potentially bigger Apple news is Angela Rents, who's head of retail, came over from Burberry, is leaving in April. And there's been a lot of like, huh.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  She's been there, what, five years? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, spring of twenty fourteen. And she's being replaced by Deidre O'Brien, who is now in charge of both people, like HR stuff, and retail.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  So I, yeah. The title is spelled retail plus people.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  And you know, with all things Apple, you have to be like, how does Apple want me to pronounce things?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  So, right.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  And the answer I got from Apple was, it depends on if you pronounce it tennis or excess. No. They're just like, it's up to you. So I don't know if it's retail plus people or retail and people. And they thought that was very funny that I asked. Apparently I was the only one who asked. Yeah. It's another Apple title where it's just kind of like, we probably have one idea, but everyone else will say something else. I do not know why a 30 year veteran of HR is suddenly running these stores, by the way. Well, I mean, it is the biggest group of employees they have, right? Yeah, but that, you just assign an HR person that has nothing to do with like the store experience. Well, there's, so that's one question that is unclear to me. That's a lot of responsibility for one person.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  Uh, the other question is, why did Angela Rents leave? Um, and near as I can tell, it's, uh, you know, according to, according to nine to five Mac, uh, they've got a source that says that a rents told the team that she's going to step back from dating management and lead a quieter life rather than jump to another company. So she's literally going back home to London to spend time with her family. I mean, that, that is the sort of default. I mean, they, they gave her this, like Tim Cook tweeted this like very warm goodbye. It's just. Vogue did a profile of her. Firing, right? She's staying through April, you know, like when this news came out, um, like everyone used it as an excuse to like, say, oh, obviously she's leaving because I had to wait 10 minutes at the Apple store once.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Like everyone's complaints about the Apple store, the physical Apple stores just came rolling out as though that were the reason. And I was like, I don't know. She did all right. Like the town hall thing that they did was annoying, but like, I don't know. I, I, this doesn't smell like a, like a firing to me. It, the timing is weird because Vogue just did do a profile of her. Yes. All of the rumors. I mean, she was on every shortlist of who's Apple's next CEO going to be. Yeah. Right. They, she made more money than Tim Cook. This is true. Like he recruited her super hard and she had a higher salary than Tim Cook. She's CEO of Burberry. It kind of makes sense. Like Tim Cook, he's only ever been CEO of Apple. You're CEO of Burberry, you get to be the, you know? Yeah. Everyone knows when you jump jobs, you make more money. So.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Take a swing through Dell and back again, you know what I'm saying?

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  But the fact that she was so prominent, it's just, I think there's a big question mark there. And I, I'm with you. I don't think it's like Tim Cook went to the genius bar and he was like, this is taking too long and they like fired her. But those complaints about the Apple Store are super real, right? They have leaned completely into being an experience as opposed to being a, like a retail environment. And I think that makes sense. And actually, she has been out in the past saying, we sell most of the phones online and through carriers. When it, like the, this product line where we're in the lead in is actually the Mac. So people buy lots of Macs in Apple Stores, but the phones actually sell out in the world. So if you're not selling most

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  of the phones, which is your business, well, what, if you look at what they do in Apple Stores now, they like teach you how to take photos with your phone. They teach you how to like, make photo, well, they don't make photo books anymore. They teach you how to like make stuff in GarageBand.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Apple, Apple Stores teach you interpersonal, human relations because that you, it's, it's the hardest place in the world to make eye contact with somebody and get them to come over and talk to you. When you want to buy a dongle. It's great.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they're gonna sell the hundred dollar ethernet dongle in Apple Stores?

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, my point is like they've radically shifted the experience of these stores to be more about what you can do with your phone. And like, that was her whole thing. But I think that regardless, I really don't think this is why she's leaving. But this is a moment to rethink it, right? A new person's coming in. You've got all these people saying, I will need to go to the store. I need to return something. It's like very difficult to like go through that in Apple Store.

• 56:44Speaker 04

  My feeling about the store always, like this goes back years and years, is that computers are scary and they could break. And you don't know who HP is, you know? But if you have an Apple Store in your town, you can take your computer to the Apple Store and then it gets fixed. It's like this safety net and this like personal touch that, that kind of closes the loop for your whole computer experience. It solves the computers are scary problem because there's a savior now for you.

• 57:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  And I think that's different now with phones. Or Bart is just a completely random and she just wants to spend more time with her family.

• 57:22Nilay Patel?

  I think she probably wants to spend more time with family, but I do think it's a little bit different now with phones, right? Because one safety net a lot of people have, in fact, most people have is their carrier store. Like, right? More people have Android phones than anything else. Most of those phones get sold through carriers. Those stores actually have a larger footprint. It's like a real, it's a real thing. I don't know if it's great. Certainly going to the AT&T store is not. No one at the AT&T store is like, would you like to sit on a beanbag and learn how to code?

• 57:46Speaker 03

  No, they're, they're, the AT&T store is like, how do you, how do you feel about your don't settle for maybe network that has 5G E logos that Apple has capitulated and allowed to appear on the iPhone?

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  So has this happened yet? Is it, this isn't in this?

• 58:02Speaker 03

  It's on the beta.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  So if you've been following along with this saga, AT&T has decided to rebrand its LTE Advanced network, which deployed well after Verizon deployed its LTE Advanced network. Same network technology. They've rebranded LTE Advanced as 5G E. Unclear what the E stands for. Evil. No surprise that, you know, Samsung's, LG's of the world are allowing AT&T to change the logo, right? Like, that's the Android world, like the carriers get to do a lot of software stuff on those phones. You always think Apple's gonna like, hold the line, right? And all last week, Paul, we're like, Apple is Facebook's only regulatory agency. It will defend us, it will hold the line.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  And then it turns out that they are just letting AT&T put a 5G E logo on the iPhone. On the XS, the XR and the XS Max, right?

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Do you think that AT&T like literally leases that screen space and like pays for it from Apple and so they get, just get to do whatever they want with it?

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  I think that iPhone sales are slowing down and this is not a good time to piss off the carriers who might market your phone for you.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  Wait, wait. Okay, that's also good. Dang it. I like both of these things. Okay, but on Dieter's one, could AT&T like just start like typing me, like sending me messages to that little thing? Could they say, hi, Paul? Like, this flag up here means?

• 59:27Nilay Patel?

  I think they would have to change the name of the network at the network level. Yeah, they would have to change the network flag at the network level, right?

• 59:34Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  But like, that, I mean, that's a, that's a, I would say that that is a nuclear move just to send you like a 12-character message.

• 59:44Nilay Patel?

  They could also just text you.

• 59:45Speaker 03

  We just Google messaging.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, so yeah, there, there's a part that they control, which is like network ID. So if you've ever traveled with a phone, like you know, like you put it in some SIM card, it just like shows up correctly. I don't think they get to control the like network identifier, that other thing. That's like a technology dependent thing, but they certainly have to tell Apple like on AT&T's network. This set of technologies is labeled as such, and we want you to do that. You have to think Apple could push back on it like, for example, Apple pushes back on install our garbage apps.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  Right. For I, VZ Navigator does not appear on the iPhone. It certainly is everywhere else, but they capitulated 5G and that just makes me very, very sad. Seeing which I want to talk about our nation's telecoms. So on Friday, there was a hearing, the FC, Mozilla and a bunch of parties took the FCC to court. And said, you do not have the authority to revoke net neutrality, to repeal net neutrality, which was a court fight we knew was coming. Yeah. The day Ajit Pai and, and the FCC repealed net neutrality, this lawsuit was filed, we knew it was coming.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  So actually, Neil, I need to ask you about something because I, I watched our live tweets about this. Um, and you know, what was going on in the, in the court hearing. And what I was hoping for and expecting was, uh, for it to just be like a Vergecast, but in court. Where they would talk about all the issues about net neutrality. And it was a little bit, but there was way more time dedicated to Verizon throttling first responders than I expected. How, what, how did that become the like, the flashpoint? Is it just like the sexiest net neutrality issue there is or what?

• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it certainly want to capture the court's attention the most. Um, so there's like three or four, uh, we were all surprised in covering it. So my expectation was in order for an agency to like, make a move like this, they have to put a bunch of evidence. They have to have a good reason, they have to have a statutory basis, they have to make a reasonable decision. And you can argue that like, actually, all that happened was that Trump got elected and he pies a Republican, he became the commissioner, or he became the chairman, and he decided to do it, right? Like, they didn't build that body of evidence, there's actually a ton of evidence that so many of the comments that were entered in the record were fake. Like, that's kind of where I expected this to land, right?

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, you don't actually have the authority to do this thing you're saying because you didn't build this body of evidence. That's not where the court spent the most of its time. They spent the most of its time arguing about whether the internet should be an information service or a telecommunications service. At one point, the judge just very directly asked one of the lawyers, "How do we slice this baloney?" Which is amazing. How do I make this decision? And then, the city of Santa Clara, California, firefighters affected, they said that the FCC, in taking away all these rules, did not consider public safety. They did not consider the fact that we, you actually need a rule saying that, you know, first responders shouldn't be throttled. And they didn't make that rule, they took that rule away, it was embedded in these

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  other rules, and they, in not considering this, that's how you know they acted capriciously. And on top of it, the FCC's net neutrality, the rulemaking process that revoked net neutrality also says states can't make their own net neutrality rules.

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  So you take away the rules, they can't throttle first responders, you prevent California from making those rules, they really want those rules because of the endless wildfires that are occurring. And the court was very receptive to this. You ran too fast, you didn't think about this, you, the FCC does have a role to play in regulating mobile broadband, particularly for first responders. The market won't, the market is not, well, how we want those folks to deal with the networks. And that, there was just a lot of time spent on that.

• 1:03:26Speaker 04

  Maybe I missed something, but how was throttling first responders something that the old net neutrality rules would have covered? Is it just that the FCC was more hands-on at that time? And so, after a company throttled first responders, the FCC would make a new rule because they were in charge of the internet back then?

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  No, so, the Title II, the imposition of net neutrality happened under Title II, they called it a telecommunications service. Title II says you're a common carrier, you're not supposed to throttle from the jump. Right. And then there is like a whole set of public safety regulations as part of Title II.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  I thought throttling, as long as you did it equally across all of your customers, if a customer is paying for a 20 gigabyte plan and then they throttle after that 20 gigabytes or whatever.

• 1:04:14Nilay Patel?

  No, no, but I'm saying in addition to that, there was a set of public safety regulations that were part of Title II. So then you wipe out Title II, all the public safety regulations go away, the baseline throttling rules one way and you end up with firefighters getting throttled. So like that, that's a whole set of things, like the, the entire legal framework for first responders was deleted by the FCC. When they wiped out net neutrality because it, they didn't just say net neutrality goes away. They said, we're reclassifying this as Title I. Which is all very boring and wonky. The point is, Dieter is making is we expected one kind of fight and we ended up with firefighters being throttled.

• 1:04:53Nilay Patel?

  And that's where the court spent a lot of its time. The thing to me that I found interesting about all of this is simultaneously to this hearing. You know, the House is controlled by the Democrats now. Democrats put forward a net neutrality bill. It got debated in a hearing today. This is happening on two tracks. Like there's the, the Trump FCC blew it track. Like they weren't, they shouldn't have done this. They, they acted too rashly. They actually didn't have the authority to do this. They didn't have the case. They took out the first responders court track. And then there's the, hey, we actually need a rule, finally, just an actual law in Congress that says what the rules are. Track that is happening simultaneously. And it, it feels like it's kind of going nowhere. McKenna Kelly, who's our excellent policy reporter, wrote about it today.

• 1:05:37Nilay Patel?

  But you know, her piece is like, even the Republicans are like, we just keep having this fight. It has to stop. Right. And I think when you have both sides saying, we know our constituents want this and there's this huge court case that might go, it could go badly for both sides. Right. So you have this massive amount of risk happening in a court system and you have a bunch of legislators, legislators hearing from their constituents. We just want some rules. There's like this glimmer of like action that might occur, which is wild. So like, we're going to keep, keep an eye on it. At the same time, you know, the thing the sort of anti net neutrality brigade says is, "Well, there's enough competition in the market. Like, look at Google Fiber." But Google Fiber, like, literally had to, like, take its ball and go home today because their

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  plan in Louisville failed so badly that they just shut down. Paul, did you hear about this? You will like this because it's an innovative way to lay cable that blew up in Google's face. So, they're like, "We're gonna reduce the cost of laying fiber in Louisville by doing nano trenches," which are little baby trenches that are just two inches deep. So, you cut a two-inch-deep trench in the street, you lay the fiber in it, and then you cover it with, like, proprietary Google rubber covering. But the rubber covering failed, like, a lot. So, the fiber was just, like, bursting out of the street. So, they had to fix it, which, like, made their costs skyrocket. And they're like, "Well, this plan didn't work at all. We're done."

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  So, I don't know, man. Like, these natural monopolies are a lot realer than I think. You know, like, we can invent nano trenching. It's just not, maybe Google needs to invent some new rubber. But their, like, Google Fiber is winding down.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  It's all big rubber's fault.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  Big rubber is controlled by Verizon. All right.

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, we're not, we don't have to get into it. I just feel like, man, it has been a few, it's, it's been a little while since we have, net neutrality's been over, and it seems literally fine. It seems like it's doing fine. And I, I just find it is such a ridiculous argument in favor of net neutrality. But whatever. The argument will go on.

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay. The argument will go on. Although I will say that, uh, the, the, the fine people in Louisville, uh, who no longer have access to Google Fiber, because Google Fiber can't find a way to install fiber in their town, and has flooded the town with its tail between its legs because it couldn't get on AT&T's towers to string out its fiber, so it went on a whole bad plan to, like, shallow dig the fiber around, uh, means that there's no real competition in broadband. And given the lack of competition in broadband, you all might want to make sure the monopoly that controls broadband in your town, you know, is forced to treat you fairly. Yeah, I mean, that's the whole, that's the argument. But like I'm saying, the fact that this court case represents just an enormous amount of risk for both the telecoms and the pro net neutrality side, and there's finally motion in Congress that might ameliorate

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  that list because you'll actually compromise a deal, could be a thing. I mean, this is me saying I think the government might do a good job, which I'm just as shaky on as Paul, but hey, it could be a thing. I'm an optimist. All right. I think we got to wrap this up. By the way, we've run way over time. That was a good one. Yeah, over the place. All right. You can listen to Why Did You Push That Button? All three seasons are out. We did a bonus episode at CES. They talked to a bunch of people, Ashley and Caitlin talked to a bunch of people about how you talk to your smart speaker, whether you're polite or not. It's actually a really funny episode. You should check it out. That's everywhere podcasts are served. You can listen to Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. You can listen to Function with Neil Dash. Also everywhere podcasts are served. You can tweet at us. Please do it. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at FuturePaul. Dieter's at Backlon.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  And we'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Promo code.

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