Foxxconn's empty innovation centers and a blackhole photo revealed

Loren Grush discusses the first image of a black hole, Nilay discusses Foxconn's broken dreams, Dieter discusses gadgets, and Paul discusses Microsoft's Chromium Edge browser. Long show but stick with us, there's a lot to know here. Stories discussed this week: - See the first image ever taken of a supermassive black hole - Ikea and Sonos made the ultimate speaker lamp - Foxconn’s ‘innovation centers’ are a bunch of empty buildings in Wisconsin - Turns out Amazon buying Eero wasn’t the startup success story we thought - New Zealand privacy commissioner says Facebook is run by ‘morally bankrupt’ liars - T-Mobile relaunches Layer3 TV service as TVision Home - Netflix confirms it killed AirPlay support, won't let you beam shows to … - YouTube TV raises monthly price to $50, but adds Discovery channels ... - Google patches ads into Android TV home screens without warning … - LG G8 ThinQ review: many gimmicks, not enough progress - Samsung's Galaxy A80 is an automated notchless slider with a ... - Hidden Google Play info suggests 'midyear' release for Pixel 3 devices ... - Microsoft's Chromium Edge browser is now officially available to test … - Microsoft reveals all the Google things it removed in its Chromium … Vote for Vergecast in the Webby's! as well as The Verge's Why'd You Push That Button? and our wonderful YouTube channel Verge Science also, we'd love our listeners and reader to fill out theverge.com/survey 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 week on The Vergecast, Lauren Gresh talks to us about the first ever image of a black hole. We dive into what's going on at Foxconn. We talk about net neutrality, the streaming wars. I give T-Mobile a score on the Go90 scale of Dune streaming services and much, much more. That's The Vergecast coming up right now.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Real innovation is powered by real people. This is Amex Corporate. Trusted experts, smarter technology, 24/7 dedicated support from day one to answer questions, help set up policies and approvals, and consult on spend capacity as your business needs evolve. Plus, on-demand resources help level up operations at every stage. That's the trusted service you've come to expect. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge Network, part of the Vox Media empire, part of a, well, that's actually it, part of the earth. I'm your friend, Eli Patel. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller is here. Hello. I want to thank our audience. I want to start by begging for your vote, but I'm going to start the begging with a thank you. I want to thank everybody for voting for us in the webbies. We're currently in first place. This morning, when I checked, we had 40% of the vote for best technology podcast. I'd like to win with 50% of the vote. I would like fully half of the voters to vote for The Vergecast. So if you have a second look in the show notes, there's a link, go to the webby site, search for us.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Here's what I want you to do. I want you to pull over in your car.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  I want you to close your eyes. I want you to imagine Paul. Wearing all black with some black hair and he's, he's really angry. He's, he's a little bit emo. He's got a scar on his face. He's standing in front of the webbies and he wants to win and your votes are the blasters from the robe or the robot that he's standing in. No, he's in the ship. He's in the spaceship. And he's just screaming more like Kylo Ren does.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  At you for your votes on the webbies. Just Paul dressed up like Kylo Ren screaming more like he does at the end of the last Jedi.

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  I understand. Dieter, what's in that jewel today, buddy?

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  This is a lot to take in. Yeah, we opened the Vergecast by Dieter telling Paul that he's Kylo Ren. I was going with more of like a Robert Smith, Harry Potter combo. Yeah. But anyway. I thought a lot about that. Let's say, let's just be clear.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Vote for, for Goth Paul in the Vergecast. Go to the webby's site. There's a link in the show notes. We would really appreciate your vote. We would love to win. We've won this award before. We would love to win it again. And thank you so much for everybody who's already voted. Also vote for Verge Science doing very well. Vote for Why'd You Push That Button? We would love, love, love, love your votes. Okay. So there's a lot of news to talk about this week. A lot of tech news, very grounded, very, you know, there's details. But there's like bigger news in the universe.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:39Nilay Patel?

  Literally news of the universe, which is the first ever image of a black hole was taken by our scientists on, on earth. So we can look at one. Uh, when it comes to space, who do we talk to? We talked to Lauren Grush. Lauren is out at a space conference right now. Amazing. Very Lauren. So I called her, we talked to her for five minutes to explain what's going on with this black hole, how they got the image. Check this out.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Hello?

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  Lauren Grush, how are you?

• 4:04Speaker 04

  I'm good.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  You're on the road.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Yes, I am in Colorado Springs for an event called the Space Symposium.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  That is literally the most on brand thing I've ever heard from you, Lauren. That's good. So you're with a bunch of space people and there's huge space news this week and I want to talk to you about it.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  There is.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  The first ever photo of a black hole.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Right. It's an image of a black hole. All up until now, all of the beautiful insane pictures that you've seen of black holes have just been artistic renderings or illustrations. They're not actually pictures of a black hole because as many know, black holes are much too dense and the light can't even escape from them. So, uh, difficult to actually get a picture when you can't see it.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  So how do they, this seems like a massive technological undertaking to capture this image. How did it happen?

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Right. So the black hole that they image, it's really far from Earth. Even though it's, it's, I think it's supposed to be 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun. It's so far away that it looks about the size of a small ballwood on the moon. So capturing it from Earth is really difficult. So this collaboration of scientists created this program called the Event Horizon Telescope, which basically uses eight observatories on five different continents all over the world to come together and gather data from this black hole. And then that basically makes like a virtual telescope as big as the Earth. And we need all of that power to be able to see this massive object that's so far away.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  How do you make a virtual telescope as big as the Earth? Do you, do they all work in real time together? Are they capturing data asynchronously? Like, how does it work?

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Right. So they're capturing data, they captured data for one week in April of 2017. And then the rest of the work had to do with supercomputers and algorithms. So it would basically be taking all of the data that they captured from the black hole and then putting it together into a computer, filling in the gaps, you know, where we don't have telescopes and then constructing this image of the black hole, um, that was released today. And I do want to say, it's not technically an image of a black hole because I said. Right, like I said, light cannot escape. So we did not get an image of the black hole itself. What we did get was an image of the silhouette of the black hole, surrounded by all of this gas and dust that is thought to swirl around these objects.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  That stuff gets heated up and it gets really hot and emits a lot of radiation. And so that's what the telescopes were measuring was this intense heat from all this plasma around the black hole. So you're basically seeing the black hole silhouette in reality.

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  So that's if you, I'm gonna try to describe a photo on a radio show, just go with me on this. So when you look at the picture, it's like a blurry ring of fire, basically. And you're saying that like, orange ring is other stuff that's just like, very dense, causing a lot of friction, a lot of radiation, and it's soon to be sucked into the black hole.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's all this stuff that's swirling around the black hole, slowly going towards it, and then at the edge, the reason why it's called the Event Horizon Telescope is because you get to the edge of the black hole, that place called the Event Horizon, and that's the place of no escape, right? Once you reach that spot, you're screwed, for lack of a better term. You're going into the black hole. And that's what all of this swirling stuff is slowly going into the black hole itself.

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  So if we learned anything new, I saw one really interesting picture that was like a simulation. This thing actually verifies a lot of simulations and theories that we have. But have we learned anything new?

• 7:41Speaker 04

  So I think it's gonna take some time to really grasp what we're understanding here. But one thing that they really wanted to know about was how gravity behaves at the Event Horizon, which is that really strange place. Because based on what Einstein's theory said, you know, super dense objects like the black hole can actually warp space and time around them. So scientists are kind of curious to know how that looks around the black hole. And so getting a picture of it can help us learn more about that. And then also they're kind of curious about how these, I mean, this isn't just a black hole. It's a supermassive black hole. It is much bigger than your average black hole. They're the kinds that are at the center of galaxies, right? We have one at the center of our galaxy.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  And so they want to know how it gets so good. And so taking pictures of it could maybe help them better understand just how these black holes grow so, so massive and so dense.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  Are we going to see more and more photos now? Images, photos? Images. Let's call it an image. It's not really a photo.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I would say image is probably a better term. I don't know. You know, I'm all about using words that people understand, so whatever. No, but, so they actually tried to image two black holes. One is Sagittarius A, which is at the center of our galaxy, but that is still being processed and it's a, it's a little bit smaller than the one that they just released today. But yeah, we could be getting that image soon too. So there's still more to come.

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  And is the telescope, I mean, the telescope is like a virtual idea of a telescope, right? It's like an accumulation of all these other telescopes. So that's still operating? Are they still out there doing stuff?

• 9:19Speaker 04

  I mean, these are regular observatories that are just observing all the time. They basically just had, you know, a week with all eight of them, or, yeah, with all eight in April 2017. So they basically just have to coordinate, you know, at the same time.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  They've got to get on the GCO and say, let's look at a black hole. At the end of the day, everything comes down to like meeting scheduling.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Exactly. But here's something that, that people on the Vergecast might enjoy. The amount of data that they are taking each night is one petabyte of data per night. And I think, what is that, like, like a trillion gigabytes or something, a million gigabytes, something like that. It's a lot. So they had to have a lot of really good data storage to do this.

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think they couldn't transmit online, so they were flying hard drives around the world so they could make this picture. It's, at the end of the day, you're still flying hard drives around the world. Lauren, I'll let you get back to the space symposium. Thank you for taking a minute to come talk to us about this. Super exciting.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, always available to talk about space.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  We're back. I got to say, Lauren is so excited about space. It's so much fun. We should have her talk about space to us, maybe like every day.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  I'm halfway through watching the TEDx talk that predicted this amazing discovery. And I was not aware that our telescopes are not powerful enough to see an orange on the moon.

• 10:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Doesn't that just intuitively, it seems like the moon is very close. You know what I mean? I really thought we were better than that.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  You really thought that that's what that's like the the metric moon oranges.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Moon oranges.

• 10:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, most people are like, you can resolve a car in a country far away. We're more we're more like, how many moon oranges does this telescope have? Can I tell you my favorite stat?

• 11:03Speaker 05

  Zero.

• 11:04Nilay Patel?

  From the press conference.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  The image is only obviously a few hundred kilobytes. But they have to collect the image. It's five petabytes of data. So they had to do that in lots of steps. And the first they had to get the data to everybody. So they couldn't send it over the Internet. So they put them on planes. And so they did. They needed half a ton of hard drives.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  It's just like moved. They had to like move all this data on hard drives. Jason Snell wrote a post about the half ton of hard drives. He references quote from a computer scientist called Andrew S. Tenenbaum. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurdling down the highway.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Not to like be a total killjoy, but like, you know, because we obviously, this is not a primarily a space focused podcast. But there's this aspect like when people say the words big data, like 99% of the time they are gleaning information from your purchases at Target on your credit card and targeting ads at you. But the other very small percentage of the time is scientists using almost the exactly same tools to do really cool.

• 12:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like take a picture of a black hole that looks like the eye is on. Yeah, it's out there. It's just looking at you. All right, so there's that black hole. What I will refer to as the good one.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  The exciting one. And then there's the the the black hole happening in my home state of Wisconsin.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  Which is the Foxconn project.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. I thought that it was official policy. It's official policy of the Vergecast that we only refer to your home state as Wisconsin Valley.

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  So there's this really weird thing that happens is you get older, you use social networks. Sometimes your ex girlfriends tweet at you. This is a real thing that happened today. So my high school girlfriend, I shared this story, Josh, as I spent 10 days in Wisconsin. And I was like, someone should tell Foxconn that Verge reporters know what AI 8K and 5G are. And my high school girlfriend tweeted me and said, also a valley. Because nothing about this thing is located in a valley.

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  Uh, which is true. It's just a very flat part of Wisconsin. Anyway, so we sent Josh Jezza to my hometown to look at what Foxconn is doing. They had built all these innovation centers around the state. I'm putting innovation centers in quotes. Uh, during the elections, they bought all these buildings. So Josh spent 10 days just driving around Wisconsin. He drove to Green Bay. He drove to Eau Claire. He drove to Milwaukee. He drove to Racine. He drove to Mount Pleasant. Uh, and-

• 13:41Speaker 03

  And nobody in any of those cities had any idea what's going on with, uh, Aaron Rodgers and the Packers coaching staff.

• 13:46Nilay Patel?

  It's not great.

• 13:52Nilay Patel?

  That's not a win either, but that's not the story we're talking about.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  I just heard Wisconsin disaster. I just assumed.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  It's not. It's many confusing things are happening in Wisconsin. Uh, but Josh went to these buildings. He went to the big Foxconn headquarters in Milwaukee. I just want to read, uh, this quote. They, they bought this building and they, they announced it by saying, Milwaukee is where we will transition our AI 8K plus 5G vision into reality. So whatever's hap- it's going down in Milwaukee. So he went to the headquarters. Most of the building is actually being sublet to another company that's renovating its office around the corner. So most of those employees were like, yeah, we, there's like five or 10 Foxconn people here. Uh, he looked in the conference rooms. It's my favorite little reporting detail.

• 14:42Nilay Patel?

  He saw an ethernet cable like coiled up on a conference room table and he saw the whiteboards and no one ever, for the few days he looked into the windows, the ethernet cable never moved and no one ever used the whiteboards and like no one ever did anything. Some Foxconn people like walked out of the building and he would ask them and one of them literally screamed, I'm sorry and ran away.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  So like, nothing is happening in Milwaukee.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Why aren't they building these buildings if they're not doing anything?

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  They're just buying buildings.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  They're buying buildings and saying, these are innovation centers. And then they're, they're, they're empty.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  Yes. So the, the, the prevailing theory is that during the previous election, Foxconn was unpopular in Wisconsin. You might note that Scott Walker was voted out of office because he signed the Foxconn deal. So to build public support, they, they made this huge, this series of announcements about building innovation centers in all the places where they were polling badly. So the, the, the reporting that Josh did was, they made all these announcements, let's go see what's happening. Right? Like, there's the big factory site, we've talked about it a lot. Shruti did the great reply all episode, she, you know, she talked to us on the show. We're pretty clear on what's going on at the factory. They're pushing dirt around in circles and not building TVs. What about all these innovation centers? What's going on there? So that was Josh's, like, the core of Josh's story, like, visit them.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  So one in Milwaukee, basically no one there. Goes to Eau Claire, looks in the window, literally a concrete floor with like, a toolbox on a box. And he talked to some folks and the sources are telling him, no contracts have been signed and no one has been paid. So this is literally an empty building. He visited the other one, which was basically a bunch of commercial spaces, like, an ice cream store and like, and they were like, he was like, so Foxconn's your landlord? And the answer was like, we think so, we've never talked to them. But they'd hung up signs that said Foxconn Innovation Center. He went to Green Bay, same deal. So Foxconn, nowhere to be seen. Then he like goes back to where the factory is supposed to be in Mount Pleasant.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  He goes to, there's this, they announced for the, the second time that they're gonna build a factory. So they've now announced this factory like three times. Cause you know, for a minute, they, they had unannounced it. They said they were gonna build this ecosystem and they've scaled it back. So there's this rumor that Foxconn is gonna show up at the board meeting after they've re-announced the factory. And so everyone gets excited, everyone goes, Josh goes, Foxconn does not show up. The residents of Mount Pleasant have become very smart and they're asking questions like, "Why would you build an LCD factory when there's an overabundance of LCD supply in the world? And like TVs are transitioning to OLED?" And the poor like Mount Pleasant town officials are like, "That's a question for Foxconn. The Foxconn isn't there." Then they give the same presentation they've given before,

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  but minus the slides with dates, and they tell literally the same jokes.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  Oh no.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  So as Josh is reporting this, I was like, he's like, "I don't know what this story is. Like, nothing is happening here." I was like, "The story is that this is a Coen Brothers movie." Like, this is just, it's just like, the silliest thing in the world. And then everyone is filling in these gaps. It's like void of information. So Josh hears all these theories while he's there. It's a scheme to get visas for Chinese workers. It's a plot to acquire intellectual property uh, from the university, to buy up real estate and become a landlord, which is the worst way to buy real estate and become a landlord. Uh, it's to get access to Lake Michigan's water. Uh, a farmer told him, it's a plot to get investor visas using commercial bonds. An excuse for the Koch brothers to pipe freshwater over the subcontinent of the divide.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  For the military to make a secret screen fact, like, the people of Wisconsin are just filling the void of information with just, my favorite one is like, it's a plot to buy all the ginseng in America. Cause it's all grown in Wisconsin.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  Cause Foxconn doesn't get the crazy subsidy if they don't actually make a factory, right?

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Hmm. So they need to steal water or something to, to get any use out of the, all this weirdness.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  There's like the big subsidy package and you can argue about whether it's a subsidy or a tax break. But the government is providing Foxconn with a huge amount of incentives and infrastructure support. So it breaks down in like three different ways. There's hire a bunch of people and like do capital expenditures, build a factory and we'll get some tax breaks and subsidize the cost of those workers, right?

• 19:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  They missed their target. They didn't get any of that in 2018. They missed their target by 82 people. Which is hilarious because they're Foxconn. They could just hire 82 people to sit in a circle and they would have gotten it and they couldn't do it. So they missed that one. Then there's the local governments taking out like loans to build roads, to do pipes, to do infrastructure. Mount Pleasant, that literally the place where I'm from, had its credit rating lowered because like the Moody's does not think it's going to receive that loan returned because Foxconn has to like show up and start paying taxes. And then there's like the, the state was already planning to widen the interstate again near

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  my house. And so they accelerated the project to widen the interstate, which is like a $1.5 billion project to support Foxconn. So there's the actual like tax benefit deal stuff. And then there's the race to spend money because they think Foxconn is going to show up. And so I, it breaks down in two ways. Then I talked to a, a, a smart dude in Wisconsin who's like very closely watching this stuff. And he's like, these tax credits make no sense because they're tax credits for new jobs. Right? So the state waived a bunch of taxes on Foxconn. It's not collecting any sales tax and the construction equipment and whatever, all the stuff. So if you're going to subsidize every job by some amount of money, some hundreds of

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  thousands of dollars, you're expecting to make it back through the income taxes of the new workers. Right? Like that's how the state would make that money back. But if a person in Wisconsin just changes their job and stops working at Miller Coors and goes to work for Foxconn, the state doesn't see more income taxes. So either Foxconn is going to give everybody this like massive raise or it's got to import 13,000 new workers for the state to get its like tax benefits back. So all this gets super complicated. But then at the end of the day, it's also like they're not doing anything. Like the buildings are all empty. So like that to me is like the biggest problem is no one knows what Foxconn is doing.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  And they keep saying it's an AI AK 5G ecosystem, which like at this point, every time they say people just start laughing. And then on top of that, here's my favorite little detail. They the foundation they built in Mount Pleasant is a compressed gravel foundation. Right. So they put a bunch of gravel, they compressed it and the LCD manufacturing experts that Josh talks to say that is not stable enough to build an LCD screen. It needs to be a different kind of foundation. So there's less vibration in the factory and compressed gravel won't do it for you. So like even the thing they've already built, the little building they've done does not support the notion that they will actually manufacture LCD screens there. All of which is say no one in Wisconsin knows what's going

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  on. They're all kind of just like laughing about it and Foxconn owns a bunch of empty buildings. And every time I I thought one of our headlines should be Foxconn refused to comment because that was like basically their attitude towards us besides sending these statements. At one point Josh walked into a Foxconn office and receptionists told him, we're aware of you.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Yes. That's very helpful. Anyway, it's a mess. I hope they do something. There have been some promises that more contracts will come out soon. But I I just think, again, it's my hometown. I'm very protective of it. I I think Foxconn owes everybody some answers about what they're actually going to do before this becomes this like decade long joke, which it's hurtling towards. And they've just got these empty buildings. One theory Josh heard was that these are all just going to be WeWorks, that the ecosystem is just people who are so inspired by the notion of 5G that they they'll just like rent some space and start a startup and that'll be the ecosystem.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you say AI AK plus 5G to me and I just I'm motivated to run out and and boost the economy. It's all I want.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  That's just so silly. Uh, there's this, Josh has this line in here like, how do you prove that Foxconn won't build a research facility, like a research campus bigger than MIT in the middle of Wisconsin, except by pointing out that Foxconn executives themselves often hint it doesn't make sense? Like, you have to prove a negative.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:21Nilay Patel?

  And I think the people of Wisconsin would like this bet to pay off. So they're not motivated to be like, this is trash. But I don't think they're gonna build a research facility that's bigger than MIT in the middle, and I just don't. I've been there. It just, it just doesn't seem likely. Anyway, that's Foxconn. I'm still, I'm still thinking about it every day. If you know what AI AK plus 5G means, uh, well, tell Foxconn. They would love to hear from you, but also let me know because I'm, I'm dying to figure it out. All right. That's one broken dream. This section is actually labeled broken dreams in our rundown. Dieter, you want to talk about the other, the other broken dream?

• 24:00Speaker 03

  There's so many broken dreams to choose from. Which one do you want?

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. Okay. Eero.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  So Mashable got the story. Uh, they had documents. We have also seen these documents that Amazon bought Eero for a grand total of $97 million, uh, which wasn't really enough to, you know, pay off the stock at the value for options for employees. So, uh, employees basically got nothing out of it, although they did get jobs. Um, you know, so that's actually really good. Everybody got hired. There's probably, um, you know, a little bit of the executives got, you know, a little bit of extra.

• 24:37Nilay Patel?

  The executives like took home millions.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's a little bit extra, you know, millions. But the, the truth of it is like the thing that, and I, you know, I'm the one who said that this acquisition is disappointing. And I think that it's not disappointing because like bad Amazon. It's disappointing because it would be nice if one of these little companies could make it on their own. And it's very clear that Eero is not doing that. They had a loaded debt. They had a plan to maybe make a, like a, you know, home security system. And then they had to bail on it because Google started, you know, releasing stuff with Nest. Uh, and so they were just. Sort of like not, not doing well. And if Amazon hadn't bought them, somebody else would have had to, or that might have gone belly up.

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  So, uh, not great for the employees. Um, you know, I, I don't know enough about what was going on, um, to say definitively, like there was mismanagement here, but I can say definitively that, uh, I have no idea how a company at Eero's scale, uh, makes it right now. Sonos seems to be doing fine. I think they're a little bit bigger, but if you're trying to like, I don't know if escape velocity is the right word, but you're trying to get good making a clever, small piece of hardware. Good luck to you.

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, Sonos has, uh, lots of products, right?

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  And they address like two different markets. So there's the consumer market and then there's the, uh, like the professional market where they sell a bunch of expensive stuff and like the, the home automation market. Right. So they have like at least a few different places where they put stuff in. They put out a lamp with, with Ikea, uh, this week.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  Uh, which is a delight.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Actually, it's like, so there's the, there's like the, the wall speaker, like nightstand looking thing. And then there's the speaker lamp and I can't, I just can't hear anybody talk about this thing without hearing, um, OutKast anymore.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  Speaker box. That's where you're at?

• 26:37Speaker 03

  I just, I just hear them saying speaker box.

• 26:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  Over and over and over again.

• 26:41Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. Uh, my favorite thing about the Sonos lamps, um, is that they are, it's Sonos tech and like Ikea design, but because it's Sonos tech, you can put them in Sonos configurations. So if you have like a play bar, you can use the lamps as the two rear speakers in your home theater, which seems terrific. Like that's, I want to live in the world where I'm like, my surround speakers are actually lamps. It's just a thing I set up using commonly available technology that I purchased at Ikea. Like that's, isn't that what you always wanted? That's what I've always wanted.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I do have, oh God, maybe I should do this. I, I do have a Sonos setup with, with, uh, ones that surround. And one of them is like in a perfect spot for a lamp.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  So like, I do kind of want to swap it out.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  Get those lamps. Anyway, so Eero, which is like totally got distracted by speaker lamps. The speaker lamp is a hundred and seventy-nine dollars. It's going to be available at Ikea later this summer.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  It won't sound quite as good as a Sonos one from what we are told or what we're made to understand, but whatever.

• 27:36Nilay Patel?

  And then a little one is like,

• 27:37Speaker 03

  But it's a lamp.

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  The little one is ninety-nine bucks, but I think.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  The comparison I'm making is Sonos now has products that range from $99 all the way up to like, you know, the $800, $900 like Playbar, like they have a lot of stuff. You can buy packages on Sonos that like, you know, thousands of dollars of surround stuff. You can put one everywhere in your house. Eero is like invisible technology. They only had the one product. Well, like I said, two, they had the beacon in the, in the, the main unit. Um, but it's one thing. They can try to upsell you on Eero Pro, which I had, which is fine. But like it doesn't, like Sonos, like use it every day. And if you buy a bigger house, you're like, I want another one. Eero, you use it every day, but you don't think about it.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  In the, in the software subscription part of it, I think was difficult. The cost of building the hardware are hard. There's the Mash report, um, so they had tried to pivot into like a home security, or they tried to launch a new product, like a home security thing, and that failed. And I think that crushed them. But at the end of the day, like it's weird that like companies of that scale can't exist. Right? And they, they collapse in crater and like roll into bigger companies. And I think we just keep talking about it over and over and over again. That the, like Google can put out Google Wi-Fi and just eat whatever loss. But like an independent company just can't. Yeah. Like Eero just couldn't compete with that necessarily.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Well, so, Neil, you've been talking a lot about this lately with regard to like Facebook Watch. Disclosure, my wife works for Facebook, et cetera. Um, Facebook Watch is bad, right?

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  But because it's Facebook and they have huge scale, presumably millions or hundreds of billions of people have like clicked that button and watched a video on Facebook Watch. Google Wi-Fi is fine. It's a good product, but if it wasn't, Google could just continue to just eat that. They've got such scale, they could just put it on Google.com. They'll sell a bunch of them, right?

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And when you search for mesh Wi-Fi routers, Google put ads for itself at the top of those search results, which they do.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  So.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Slack in those systems, they could, they could just afford to make bad products and nobody notices. And so if you're trying to make a good product, it has to be like, it has to be a perfect product and you have to succeed at like all sorts of things and you have to have a certain amount of growth, but it seems like, you know, somewhere around the hundred to $200 million range of the value of your company, you're just hosed.

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, the sort of like accidental success of bad products from the big companies, we should just do a story. So like Apple News, Tim Cook's like, it's the biggest news reader app in the world. It's a bad product. Like it's just like, kind of not good.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  But it's there. So they get to say like, and the flipboard people are like, F you. We made a good one of these a long time ago and you just like rolled in with your PDF reader, right? Facebook Watch, another one, just by accident. Like Mark Zuckerberg, when they, you know, they're rolling out paying for news, they're going to do this thing. And he's like, we've seen the same, you know, we've seen this great success with Facebook in his statement. We've seen this great success with Facebook Watch. And it's like, dude, a billion people use your app. Success for you is not, you know, 100 million people accidentally clicking on some stuff. Like that's success for any other company, but for you, that's like, oh, we kind of suck. We only 100 million people screwed up today. Like no one did this intentionally. So I wish we had a better way to measure what

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  real success is for these giants. But anyway, I love, like I have an hero. I think it's, they were a good company. They were fun to talk to. They were very sincere about what they were doing. It's a little sad that they couldn't make it work, but I'm happy that Amazon is going to keep the servers lit up, that the product will be supported.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  They're sticking for now to the privacy policy.

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just hope they don't kill it. Right? Like they don't just let it like, sort of like fade into obscurity. Like, you know, my nightmare is actually that Apple would buy them because Apple is

• 31:35Speaker 03

  Why was that a nightmare?

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  Because Apple is very good at acquiring companies and letting them like flounder for a while.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:42Nilay Patel?

  Beats, for example, the $3.2 billion purchase of the world's largest headphone company where Apple was like, you know, we actually don't like you and we've made our own headphones over here.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  So I'm happy Amazon, like I'm just, I'm not, I don't, Amazon in particular, whatever, but I'm happy a big company like soup them up and save them and blah, blah, blah. I am more concerned that when you search for Wi-Fi routers on amazon.com, you're gonna see Eero stuff before everything else.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  Amazon's choice.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like that stuff is weird.

• 32:17Speaker 05

  I just feel, I feel bad because there's a part of me, I, I wanted Eero because I, Eero in my mind was like, they're the ones that solved it. They deserve for me to buy from them. And Eero was like a hundred dollars, I'm generalizing, but it felt like Eero was about a hundred dollars more than Google, which was like a hundred dollars more than Netgear. And Wirecutter recommended Netgear, so I just went with Netgear. Cause I was lazy and so I just felt like Eero by being niche, had to make a product that was more expensive ultimately. And so while they were, you know, Casey kind of touches on something, he had a piece about like Snapchat's recent launch event or news event.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  Snapchat is out here doing all the innovation and they're losing tons of money and Facebook's out here being profitable with Snapchat's ideas, you know?

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's kind of like, you know, if you're the, if you're collecting the monopoly profits, you can be a little bit slower and crappier than your competitor and you can lose money. It's, it's, it's usually, I think it's like around a $50 difference for Google Wi-Fi and Eero.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can't get into the Google Pixel phones till later in the show, so.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  All right. Anyway, the truth about Eero is out. I will say that we, we had that number very early. We chased that story and congratulations to Mashable for getting it before us because we were on the case. But I'm glad the company survives. I'm just, there's just this sense that there shouldn't only be six companies. Why are there only six companies? Continuing on in this vein.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Look, on the bright side, net neutrality is saved because the House had a vote.

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  It's just this first section. It started with a black hole and we just kept going in.

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, it's true. Today, big news. Uh, the House voted on something called the Save the Internet Act. It's basically net neutrality, put it back under Title II. Um, right now, the Senate, run by Mitch McConnell, has said we won't take it up. It is likely that they will be forced to because there actually is a public outcry for it. A bunch of Republicans have said they would actually vote for this thing. Um, Donald Trump, his aides have said out loud, "We are gonna veto this." Yeah, so it's a long fight. Um, but I think points to, A, the fact that I think tech policy is going to be a big part of both Democratic primary, which is wide open right now,

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  and the forthcoming election. I think that's great. I think it's great that we're about to have a big tech policy fight. It also points to just the amount of like fuzzy data that's in the world about the state of broadband in America. So the White House like put out all these numbers about all this investment and this fiber stuff. And we had Carl Bode, who's a very, very smart writer piece for us, unpacking those numbers. You should go read it. But basically, it depends on what you measure. So a lot of the numbers they're citing about increased investments actually happened while net neutrality was on the books.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  And things have like flattened to tail off since, which makes sense, like that something changed and this flood of investment was made and then it like tailed off. So I, I think there's a big argument about, like, are we building the networks appropriately? Is there enough fiber on the ground? Paul, you brought that up last week. Like, do we have it? Are we doing enough to actually build these networks the way we want? And then on top of that, you have literally every big telco spending their money on streaming services and content instead of their networks. Like, that's happening. Like, you know who's putting out Game of Thrones this weekend? AT&T. That's an insane sentence.

• 36:02Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 36:03Nilay Patel?

  Like, just like a fundamentally insane sentence.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  If you call 1-800-1800 right now, they will tell you who lives and who dies.

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  So weird. The AT&T hit show Game of Thrones. That is just an objectively bonkers sentence. So you-

• 36:22Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, okay, here's, here's, here's a mild argument against net neutrality, right?

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  Paul, we've only ever had mild arguments about net neutrality.

• 36:32Speaker 05

  Okay, well, I, here, I'm not gonna swear, is what I'm saying.

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  But you could imagine a world where networks that if they thought they could make more money with their network, if they thought they could make more money by building more fiber, that they would work on that. But they don't see, they, they see limits on how they're allowed to, to use infrastructure. So they're gun shy with infrastructure and they're going towards content and content, you're, no, no rules. Just, yeah, just right.

• 37:06Nilay Patel?

  Everyone just wants to go to where there's no rules. That's why we work in content.

• 37:09Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  This, I mean, they, they- The trio of anarchists right here are just doing a great job.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  It's a, it's a classic thing that's pointed out on Reddit all the time because Reddit is always pushing you. Like every time you show up on Reddit, Reddit's like, guess what's happening in the government right now? And like, defend net neutrality. It's like Reddit, you are a platform that is, it's basically like a hierarchical moderation structure. Like Reddit is all about moderation, you know? There's the local moderation and then there's the broader moderation and there's voting and also blocking. There's all sorts of stuff. And so Reddit is super into net neutrality. No, no blocking, no filtering because they're a content company and they don't, but they want to be able to have those rights.

• 37:58Speaker 05

  Right? And so I, I, I just, it seems obvious that you would go towards content if you're scared that you will not be able to use infrastructure however you want.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, sure, but right now there are no rules for the, right? Net neutrality is gone. So the argument from Ajit Pai, the FCC, from the Republicans- Up and down from Verizon was take the shackles of Title II away and you will see investments skyrocket because we will be able to do paid prioritization. A two-sided market will charge Netflix and will charge you, will make double the money, and none of that happened, right? And I think that's the key. That's why I'm saying this math is fuzzy, it's worth unpacking. It's the heart of, I think, the policy debate is whether removing the restrictions actually increased investment in these networks, increased competition for the consumer and access. The difference, and I really do think this is fundamentally

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  right now a mild disagreement between us, because the difference in the sort of the content moderation policy debate that is also happening is you as a consumer technically, if not in reality, have access to more competing services at that layer of the internet, right? So you have very little competition for access, like broadband access. You have one or two choices at your home, you have like our four providers and wireless. And so it's hard, if Comcast decides to start throttling you, disclosure of Comcast's investment, blah, blah, the whole thing. You've heard it before. There's a relationship between Vox Media and Comcast, I assure you. They don't like me, that's part of the relationship. But

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  you've heard, like, if Comcast decides to start throttling Xbox Live until Microsoft pays up, your recourse is quite limited. But if you don't like what Reddit is doing, you might be able to go somewhere else much more easily. Now, is that true, I think is the heart of the debate in content moderation? Is it true that if enough consumers don't like Twitter, they're all gonna go to some other service and that service will be viable? Is it true that if you don't like YouTube, if you're a creator, we keep hearing from creators, Julie wrote a great story for us last week during Creators Week, creators are mad at YouTube. Well, where can they go? Right? So there, I think that that conversation actually transcends the sort of layer approach to the internet where you have the access

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  layer and the application layer. We've always assumed the application layer was full of competition and shouldn't be regulated at all. And now I think the whole content moderation debate is actually there's not very much competition here. There isn't very much competition for Google Search. There isn't very much competition for Facebook. And when they did have competition, they bought it. And when they do have competition, they ruthlessly steal from Snapchat until Snapchat dies. Is that real? Like, should we approach that with a stronger regulatory eye? And you're seeing it play out around the world. At the end of the day, though, I think all of us are kind of like, wouldn't it be better if there were just more companies and we had more choices and consumers were

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  actually making real decisions? Which is why I say vote Patel, break him up 2020. Just coming back to it.

• 41:06Speaker 05

  I think there's a horrifying specter of regulation that looms over all of these industries. Like, why would I start a social network when I have no guarantee that the Europe, the continent, won't say everything I'm doing happens to be illegal tomorrow? You know? Why would I start a upstart social network?

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  Casey gave me this great phrase called the splinter net. Like, that's what's about to happen. So like, this is true. This is just on my list. New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner just out and said Facebook is run by morally bankrupt liars. Like, they're just gonna regulate Facebook. Australia effectively banned live streaming because you're liable for the content of the live stream now, if you're a service provider. Every layer of the network. If you're the ISP, if you're the edge cloud provider, if you're Facebook, everyone is liable for the content of live streams, if you've been notified about it. That effectively means they have to turn it off, right? You just can't have it anymore. There's this white paper in the UK about how to build a new regulatory apparatus for social networks. Casey's

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  written a lot about it. You should check it out. But effectively, the legal systems, I think we always know this, Verge House listeners know this instinctively, the technology outruns the law, right? Like constantly. And it's like one argument for don't regulate at all, you're going to slow down the technology because you're you're slow and dumb lawyers. But I think here you're seeing the technology catch way up and say, hey, these networks are actually where our citizens are like living and working and we have dominion over how you moderate that.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  Let's regulate speech. This will go great.

• 42:48Nilay Patel?

  But it's really hard. I mean, that's like, it's, it's really, really, really hard. That's the answer.

• 42:54Speaker 05

  Stupid.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  But we do, but we do it.

• 42:56Speaker 05

  No.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  We do it all the time.

• 42:57Speaker 05

  There's a reason, there's a reason the US Constitution made a real smart play saying that the Congress should make no law abridging free speech.

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  But I just want to point out, there's 200 plus years of First Amendment jurisprudence against that, shaping what that means. And so far, none of that has applied to the internet. Also, other countries do not have that rule. So like, there's a real question about whether Facebook's conception of what isn't allowed speech should just be exported to Europe, should just be exported to Australia. Like, those people have a little bit of sovereignty, one hopes, and they should be able to tell, right? They should be able to, so I think you're going to see this like regional breakup of the internet. I kind of think it's good. Like, I, the more I think about it, I'm like, yeah, we should have like five different approaches and see which one works best.

• 43:49Nilay Patel?

  Instead of just letting Mark Zuckerberg be the, the ruler of the internet and have him decide what's going to happen in India and what's going to happen in Brazil and what's going to happen in Scotland. Like, that's, that is actually a weirder outcome than saying these like localities should make their own rules.

• 44:06Speaker 05

  This is my, ever since I read Mark Zuckerberg's like, please regulate us thing, I'm, I'm in a, I'm starting to feel like, you know what? These big corporations and these big government types deserve each other. Like, they all wanna like be king of everything. So just let them all fight it out and be, just work at being king of everything. And meanwhile, I'm gonna be over here hodling with Bitcoin, trying to come up with decentralized, open source protocols to replace literally every service from every one of these companies. Cause they're garbage and governments are garbage.

• 44:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm ready, I'm ready for it, Paul. I wish you luck.

• 44:44Speaker 05

  Unstoppable internet.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  But I think where we agree fundamentally is that the government and corporations should be in conflict with each other. And that means the government has to be able to do stuff, not just Mark Zuckerberg. That's like, that, that's, that's my, I think, I think Facebook should be more afraid of the government. Because right now, most people are afraid of Facebook. Anyway, I just wanna point out, once again, the Privacy Commission of New Zealand said Facebook is run by morally bankrupt liars.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got heavy. We're gonna come out of this black hole. We're gonna take a break.

• 45:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna read some ads, you're gonna call that number. We'll be right back.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/af.

• 45:59Speaker 06

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Now we're gonna tell jokes about streaming services.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Okay, so T-Mobile bought this company called Layer 3. And they did this a few years ago, where like, ooh, what is, what is T-Mobile doing with Layer? Like, Layer, what a weird company for them to buy. It's sort of like an infrastructure, but they do have a couple of consumer services. And man, I bet T-Mobile's gonna do something really interesting. They're gonna launch a really fascinating video service. And today, we're recording on Wednesday, they did launch a video service.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  They didn't, they didn't launch an interesting one, though. They just, they just launched a cable box.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  It's called T-Vision Home. Let's get it right. T-Vision TV, in case you didn't get it. It is, it costs $90 a month.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  So they, they literally went 90?

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  They went, they went 90. From the jump, they went 90. So T-Vision Home, you need a box. They say in the future, you will be able to stream it. You have to be a T-Mobile subscriber to get that $90 a month deal. But you need, you need their box in your house. That's just a thing you need. It's the standard cable bundle.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  Just the standard set of 150, and cheddar. They have cheddar on there.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  So Happy for cheddar, which is everywhere. And then you can like buy HP and all this other stuff. The $90 a month does not include, it's not inclusive of like taxes and fees. So the taxes and fees can be up to 20%, is what T-Mobile's saying. I want to point out, T-Mobile's entire thing is that they're the uncarrier and that their cost is just the cost. Right? They're all about no taxes and fees. It's just, here's the number, you pay it. But, except for their cable company that they launched. So I'm gonna go ahead and say T-Vision Home. On the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services is already at an 80.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure.

• 48:31Nilay Patel?

  I do not think what people want is a cable. Also, you need to have broadband service at your house for this, right?

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  So T-Mobile doesn't provide broadband service, so you would have to call your actual cable company.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Why would I get this instead of cable? Why would I get this instead of PlayStation View or Sling TV or YouTube TV?

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  Because you love T-Mobile.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  Let me, let me tell you, Dieter, let me tell you why.

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 48:59Speaker 05

  Because I have spoken, one of the great moments of my professional career was when I started back at The Verge, we thought it'd be funny if I wrote secretly, under a pseudonym, Al Plumelee, and I, as Al Plumelee, talked on the phone with Layer 3 in April of 2016. Layer 3 has its own network.

• 49:23Nilay Patel?

  Wait, did you tell them your name was Al Plumelee?

• 49:27Speaker 05

  No, I told them I was, I, I explained the whole joke. Really fun way to start an interview with a cable company.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  They have their own, this is one of those interesting, on the edge of net neutrality sort of issues. Sorry to bring it back to the black hole, but.

• 49:49Nilay Patel?

  You're at the event Horizon Ball.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  They, part of how they decided to improve just regular internet TV, right, is that, yes, it's like cable and it is a cable box, but their service primarily goes over their own infrastructure, their own backbone, so it's not being routed over strictly the, the open internet. So that is one potential advantage. Other than that, I don't remember.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  But they're not doing that to your house. When you sign up for T-Vision Home, it's not like John Ledger shows up with like a bundle of fiber over his shoulder to plug you in. It just comes over the internet. So what are they doing?

• 50:30Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, they, they've got their own backbone. I mean, famously, one of the famous other. Situations like this is Riot built its own backbone to improve latency for League of Legends. Right? So the idea is that if you have your own backbone instead, like the internet is as a protocol of

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  Of packets, you know, like it's a choose your own adventure for a packet and it's hard to tell how they'll get there beforehand. If you have your own backbone, there's just a direct route. And so you lose less packets. So you have less latency. You have less buffering problems.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  You could still have problems with your local ISP, but you have fewer problems with the overall internet. Just the premise as told to Al Plume in 2016.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  It's a fine premise.

• 51:17Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna say that streaming video on the internet, a little bit more of a solved problem than needing to buy your own backbone if you're T-Mobile. But maybe not, who knows? But at the end of the day, I don't think that the future of streaming services is $90 a month for a cable box. Right? That's what we're trying to.

• 51:35Speaker 05

  Oh, no. Cable's a garbage idea and it's dumb.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, so again, on the go 90 scale of doom streaming services.

• 51:44Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  Currently T Vision Home at a, sitting at 80. Look, maybe in three months, they're gonna release their app for phones. It's gonna like, you know, and you know, they're gonna make use of their 5G network and they've got this backbone and the video quality, like maybe. May- maybe they can crawl their way back to a 70 perhaps.

• 52:03Speaker 05

  AI.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're gonna use AI, they're gonna stream 8K over their 5G connection using the layer three backbone. Available only in southeastern Wisconsin to start. May- maybe. I'm just saying today, at where we stand, 80. 80 on the scale, the go 90 scale. Alright.

• 52:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  Next, Netflix, this is my favorite. This one's so petty. It's such a, it's such a delightfully petty app, like problem in the streaming wars. Over the weekend, Netflix disabled AirPlay to the Apple TV.

• 52:36Nilay Patel?

  They wouldn't say why, and then Sean Hollister like pushed him into saying why. So you can no longer AirPlay from the Netflix app on like an iPad or a phone to an Apple TV.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  They, and all they said was for technical reasons.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  So I had like a, what I thought was like a good one. I like guessed. I was like, you know, AirPlay 2 doesn't support 4K. You gotta like go to the cloud, blah, blah, blah. No, it's a, they said they can't certify all the new TVs that have AirPlay 2.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:04Nilay Patel?

  Cause you know, Apple put AirPlay 2 on Samsung TVs and Vizio TVs and all this other stuff.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  Netflix is dead serious about that certification thing, by the way. I am currently reviewing the Anchor Capsule 2, a Pico projector, or not Pico, but micro projector. Um, and I adore it, uh, but I haven't managed to get Netflix working on it because it's not Netflix certified. And so there's all these like insanely hacky siloed workarounds to get Netflix. Um, it won't even let me Chromecast to it, uh, like that fails out. Um, and I think it's because they like, they see what's getting, it's getting Chromecast to, and they're like, yeah, I don't know what that is. Screw that.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Um, so Netflix, like you can say many things about whether Netflix is being petty, or if it's a, a made up reason or whatever. But like Netflix is in fact serious about wanting to know, wanting to certify the TVs that it streams to.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  I don't know that they need to be that, um, I don't know, like dogmatic rigorous about it, but they definitely are.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  Let me, but let me offer you a, a fact, a counter fact, if you will.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you know what app is on all of those TVs? Netflix.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  Like every TV that Apple is like, put AirPlay on, has a Netflix app on it. The issue is not the certification. The issue is that AirPlay 2 does not send back a device ID.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  So Netflix can't confirm.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  And so until they get a device ID back from AirPlay 2, they won't say, yep, you can stream to this. This is the pettiest thing in the world.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Do you think they need that device ID just to confirm that it's the kind of, the TV supports HDR or not? Uh, or do you think they need that device ID because it helps them, uh, form a profile of who you are and what kind of TV you own?

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think it's both.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  I think it's absolutely both. Anyway, the pettiest outcome of the streaming wars is that Apple launched a competitive thing to Netflix and Netflix responded by like literally finding like broken taillight of Airplay 2 and being like, we've, we've stopped you and now you're going to jail. Amazing. Ideally, what you want is for them to, for Apple and Netflix to work it out so that you can continue airplaying to Netflix.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:17Nilay Patel?

  That would be good, but I suspect they will not.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  No.

• 55:21Nilay Patel?

  That's just my guess. YouTube TV raised its monthly price to $50 a month because it turns out TV is expensive.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  They added a bunch of like Discovery Network channels, I think, in order to like, and that's like one of the reasons that the cost has gone up. I subscribed to YouTube TV like right away when it had that $35 a month price. It's been creeping up since then. I, I don't think it's worth it for me for 50. Like it, I don't watch that much TV. I really don't.

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  All these prices are just creeping back towards the cable bundle.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:52Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's just like the ultimate thing is like, everyone would rather have a little bit of money. So they'll like, give you the thing in the bundle and then you'll pay one big fee instead of everyone trying to get 10 bucks a month from you.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  Remember that conversation like 100 years ago? I just remember talking to my buddy on the phone and we were talking like, what, before HBO Go came out. It's like, why can't you just, all I, all I want is HBO. Why can't you just pay for HBO?

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  And look at us now.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  Turns out now you, you actually wanted everything the whole time. You could slip it up in Antenna. There's like, there's a whole world out there. No one does it.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Get yourself a Amazon Fire TV recast.

• 56:28Nilay Patel?

  One of the, one of the silliest.

• 56:30Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  That's actually makes me feel better that they, they bought ERO. Like, if they're out there just like distracting themselves with making over the air tuners, they're gonna let the ERO team do whatever they want.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  This one drove me insane. So I don't know if you know this, there was this like bad bug in Android TV. Where like Google Photos basically was sharing data, like you could see other people's Google Photos. So they disabled this thing.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  Which also means my like assistant can't cast to my Android. I have a Sony Android TV. Beautiful OLED TV. Love it.

• 57:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:06Nilay Patel?

  Love the way it looks. Hate every, every piece of this software is infuriating. So in the morning, we would wake up and say, hey, play some music. The was set is like the, the default destination. So you wake up, say, play some music. TV lights up, play some music. This was great. Can't do it anymore. The assistant just fails out and says, try again when you're ready, which is infuriating. Like first of all, like this is not my problem. Like my problem. My problem is not that I am not ready to listen to music. The problem is that you have no idea what's going on. So like the worst error message ever. Assistant runs locally on the TV, right? So like, how do you debug it? It's like you pick up the Sony remote, you push the assistant button. You're like, hey, play some music.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  The TV says, sorry, I can't do that right now. Try again when you're ready. Because the connection between assistant and cast broke when this Google photo things happened and they disabled everything.

• 57:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, they did a self Netflix.

• 58:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is like a ridiculous problem that assistant just like can't cast music to itself on the TV. They still haven't fixed the Google Photos bug. You know, they rolled out instead, uh, uh, ads channel on the main interface of Android TV. It's just like a sponsored channel with some sponsored garbage in it.

• 58:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what you wanted.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  It's is just fix it.

• 58:23Speaker 05

  Is Android TV an officially supported Google product?

• 58:29Speaker 05

  Cause how would I know?

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean.

• 58:33Speaker 05

  Like Google doesn't make an Android TV product, right?

• 58:36Nilay Patel?

  No, they, Sony is there.

• 58:37Speaker 05

  Sony TVs and Nvidia Shield.

• 58:41Nilay Patel?

  There's a handful of other.

• 58:43Speaker 05

  And this weird, like a Pico projector I reviewed.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like Sony is their big vendor.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Nebula capsule that I'm reviewing right now. It's great.

• 58:50Nilay Patel?

  Nice. No, I mean, it's like, it's a real Google product. It's, there are product managers. They're very nice. I, I just, but you can tell, it's like, the Android TV team broke something and then they disabled the thing. And now the, the Google Assistant team doesn't know about it. So Google Assistant is just passive aggressively telling me to try again when I'm ready. This happens every morning. It's happened every morning for weeks. It's the worst. Uh, anyway, so there's ads on my Android TV now. I think that's horrible. The one thing I can say about Apple and the Apple TV and their entire strategy is they're not incentivized to put ads in front of my face all the time.

• 59:28Nilay Patel?

  I am very worried that when they put out the Oprah show and their Jennifer Aniston show and all this other stuff, that the ad, they're gonna start flooding that interface with their own content.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Did you see that, uh, I'm still like out of my mind with how weird that Apple TV event was. You see just today Oprah's documentary that, uh, she sort of announced she'd be doing, she's doing it with Prince Harry. They could have brought Prince Harry to Cupertino and they didn't. Like Oprah was great. I, I wanna see Harry too. Come on.

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, why not? She's Oprah. She can do whatever she wants. And then I'm gonna put it on the home screen of Apple TV. And then my Google Assistant's gonna be like, try again when you're ready. So annoying. Speaking of Apple, uh, Steve Chertan Smith, Guillermo Rambo, both kind of breaking the news this week. That it looks like iTunes is about to be broken up into a bunch of separate apps.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  So a movies app, a podcasts app, a music app, instead of this like monolithic desktop iTunes. That's all well and good. A long time coming. Here's the terrifying, uh, thing. They're gonna use Marzipan to do it.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  And that is bad.

• 1:00:36Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's, I have hope. I do.

• 1:00:40Speaker 05

  Good.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  I, I believe that the, it's bad today, that the apps are currently available on the Mac as Marzipan apps are terrible, but I think Apple knows it and I think they're going to fix it. And I think that there's going to be a, um, a magical new way to, uh, take your app and make it work across, uh, you know, your computer that has its dumb non touchscreen and your computer that has its amazing touchscreen. I think that all the multitasking problems on the iPad are going to be fixed. I think that Marzipan apps on the Mac are going to be great. I think there's going to be one single thing that works across all the devices. I think that that's never been a problem before. Write once, run anywhere. It's always worked perfectly.

• 1:01:18Speaker 05

  I like this.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  So I'm hopeful that, uh, breaking up iTunes. Um, the funny thing about breaking up iTunes is I don't, what I actually think is going to happen is they're not going to break up iTunes at all. It's going to sit there like the QuickTime app, just doing stuff all, and you just won't, you'll never open it again, except that there's no other way to sync the iPhone.

• 1:01:38Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  Right? So like you will still, if you want to back up locally, they're going to have to let you do that. And it's just gonna, it's gonna pop up randomly. Like when I want to play a WAV file or an MP3 file, just all of a sudden iTunes will be there and I'll have forgotten that it was there. It's going to be like the, the jump scare of computing on a Mac. And I, I'm here for it. I can't wait.

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  I mean, to, to, back to the, a little bit of black hole thinking, um, the, one of the huge barriers to entry of like, to compete with the platform companies, like not even Amazon can compete very effectively with the platform companies. And one of those things is a UI framework.

• 1:02:27Speaker 05

  You know, Apple has its iOS and macOS UI frameworks. Google has its Android and Flutter UI frameworks. And you know, there's, it's like, it's hardly anybody else can manage it. There are like two kind of, there's a few different open source like ones that like most Linux apps use like Qt or GTK. There are not a lot of full-featured UI kits because it's a very difficult thing to do.

• 1:02:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, you know, I, I, I hear your hope. I feel it in my heart. I'm also just kind of generally looking at the state of Apple's software.

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's it. I'm just putting it out there. Just, that's, that's a thing I know about. Like, I've looked at Apple News. It's, I'm very excited for Apple to finally accomplish the dream of right once, run anywhere with a beautiful UI. But we'll see. All right, dude, you want to talk? There's a lot of phones. Walk me through all these phones.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  Okay, so Vlad just reviewed the Huawei P30 Pro, which will not become available in the US. It has a remarkable camera. The camera on the P30 Pro uses a periscope system. So there's a mirror and a prism and it like runs it through a bunch of lenses sideways through the phone, which means they get 5X zoom that actually works. And then they use a hybrid system to compare it with, combine it with like the regular lenses. So you can get up to a 10X zoom that actually is pretty good. But the most insane thing is its low-light photography is bonkers. It is instant and it is better than pixel night sight in a lot of cases. Should you be sad about not being able to buy this phone in the US? Yeah, it's still running EMUI, Huawei's thing. And that's not great.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  And the, the pixels may be a little bit more reliable in its photography, like day in, day out. But the, the thing that it makes me think of, and actually the, also the, the Samsung A80, which has an amazing slide up thing. You slide up the back and the cameras whip around. It's so good.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Is there any innovation happening in phones that isn't like around the cameras? Like, I thought there'd be a bunch of screen stuff with the notches, but we figured that out in a little less than a year. And now, like, anybody can make any size notch that they want.

• 1:04:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Processors are doing what processors does. I think Qualcomm is, you know, not, not doing as well as it should. Intel is nowhere. Apple is doing amazing work. But like, if, if all the action on phones is just the camera, like, that's cool. And like, I love seeing that we're starting to see some real movement again. We saw it with Google and algorithmic photography. Now we're just seeing a whole bunch of manufacturers do wacky stuff.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  So it's nice that there's like, Apple and hardware, wacky stuff from Android manufacturers, and Google with algorithms. Like, that sort of three-part, like, competition is super, super energizing. But I do kind of wish there was some other battlefield on phones to talk about that wasn't just sort of, you know, that'll, they'll have more RAM next year.

• 1:05:37Nilay Patel?

  I think that is, if you went to India or China, you would, you would see form factor innovation. So we get like, bits and pieces of it.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, we see the Samsung A80, but it's, no one I hear is gonna buy it, because Verizon won't push it. Right? Like, but if you're there, and everyone buys a phone's full price, and everyone gets a new phone every 10 months, or whatever the stat in India is, which is crazy, and every phone costs $400, and switching is easy, because it's all Android.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  Right? So like, it's very easy to just like, switch phones when you're just running the same operating system. You're seeing this massive amount of innovation, like, form factor and size and battery life. That stuff is cool. And we're, I think we're just seeing glimpses of it, and we're like, well, in order to switch, like, A, I have to make an operating system choice, B, I have to like, go into a closet and have emotions about iMessage until I die. I probably have to get a new smartwatch. You know, Google's gonna surveil me now. Like, that stuff is a lot heavier, and I think in all these other places, you're just seeing, the form factor innovation in phones right now is wild. Like, it's legitimately wild.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  I mean, it's April. The Galaxy Fold comes out this month.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  But I think here, it's like, it's all cameras. The United States, the only thing you can compete on is cameras.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, LG is making a good old college try with audio quality. They're still putting their DAC in, you know, their headphone jack. And Cameron just did a really nice review of the LG G8 Think Q, Think, Think Q. Next.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  Think Q next.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like, it's like a completely forgettable phone, right?

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  So I would like to see some of that innovation come here, but I don't know, like. Is it, do you really think it's that it's iPhone lock-in? Because the iPhone has a larger market share in the US than it does elsewhere? And that's like the, the long and the short of it? That's dire.

• 1:07:26Nilay Patel?

  It's iPhone lock-in and carry. It's the same as ever. Like in 2007, when Paul and I were at Engadget, like every couple of months, we had, like, the reason Engadget Mobile existed was because every couple of months, like, NTT Dokumo in Japan would release 45 new phones.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:07:42Nilay Patel?

  And we'd be like, this has to go somewhere. Like, honestly, like, we can't, that can't be the whole homepage of Engadget. And then for about two years, the entire homepage of Engadget was phones. Like, HCC would release 45 phones. But it's happening again, right? Like, we have good friends who run NDTV gadgets in India. And like, they're always telling me, like, we, there's a new phone out in India, like, every day. Like legitimately every, like Panasonic has a reasonable phone business in India. That's crazy. But like, T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon won't carry those phones, won't promote those phones. They sign these exclusive contracts. I mean, this, everything is in the black hole of net neutrality. That's where I'm at right now.

• 1:08:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, because we had these controlled networks and we don't have a lot of competition on the network side. And it's like, you can't move phones between networks as easily as everywhere else in the world. You're not seeing this like handset ecosystem.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  There's only one solution. The FCC should give all spectrum back to the people and then we can create open source decentralized network.

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then I'm gonna come to your house with my microwave and destroy your life.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't know, that's like a little dangerous, but sure, maybe, maybe that's the answer. Okay.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  One last, one last phone feel. The, Chris Wallace just reviewed the G7, Moto G7, G7 Play, all that stuff, they're fine. But like, cheap phones are pretty good now, and that's a long running thing. And so the, the heat on the Pixel 3A has been getting higher lately on, on the rumor mill, which makes me think maybe they're gonna announce it at Google I/O, which should be fine. But man, unless that thing is dirt cheap, like, you can go out and get a very good Oppo phone for, you know, three, 400 bucks. You can go out and get like, a very good Nokia phone for around that price. Google needs to do something pretty amazing with the Pixel 3A to have it compete at that low end, because that low end has got a ton

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  of amazing stuff. And if they charge more than, I don't know, 500 bucks for it, it's dead on arrival. There's no way.

• 1:09:42Nilay Patel?

  You think that'll be an Android 1 phone?

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  Nah, it'll be a full Google Experience phone.

• 1:09:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's just, Google, how many times are they gonna do some version of a cheap Android phone? Android, you know what I mean? Like, they've tried it three or four times.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, the reason I went meh when you said Android 1 is I had to like, rack my brain to remember precisely what Android 1 means these days, because it seems to change every couple of years.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  Like, Android 1 is actually not stock Android. Like, carriers and manufacturers can do stuff to Android 1 now. Like, that's different than it used to be. Unless I'm getting it wrong, and there's another Android program that is like, it's legitimately changed every couple of years.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think the Pixel 3 in general has been a disappointment. I'm just putting it out there. We saw some stat that the majority of Pixel 3 owners are conquests from Samsung.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  They're Samsung, which are, I think in that sense, it's probably doing fine, but...

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, what they really want is conquest from iPhone, so not totally fine.

• 1:10:40Nilay Patel?

  Truly. All right, we're gonna take a break, come back. Paul's gonna do a thing, we're gonna wrap this thing up.

• 1:10:47Speaker 07

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.

• 1:11:24Speaker 08

  As a pioneer in the organic and natural food industry, the Whole Foods Market philosophy is rooted in a shared connection to people and to the planet. From farmland to stores, its products have always been a symphony of colors, textures, and flavors. In addition to its national brands, Whole Foods Market's team of local foragers continually scours the country to bring over 60,000 emerging and local products to its shelves each year. And they work with credentialed experts and top-of-the-line makers to offer customers the best possible variety. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, back, Paul.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 1:12:08Speaker 05

  Always.

• 1:12:09Nilay Patel?

  What's it called?

• 1:12:09Speaker 05

  I do a thing. It's called the penultimate dongle, is what it's called, Eli. And I'm, I can't believe you forgot.

• 1:12:19Nilay Patel?

  Nothing is more tailored to my interests than the second-to-last dongle.

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  Okay, so Vlad wrote up a USB-C audio dongle that is, according to Vlad, who I would trust on this sort of thing, the best USB-C audio dongle. It's the Hidiz Sonata HD.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  It's got a funky-looking cord.

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  It's got a funky-looking cord, which is, you know, to be hon- I mean, that's one really important aspect of any dongle like this. Like, if your phone is gonna end up in your pocket, you're gonna put a lot of pressure, and you're gonna end up flexing this cable, and especially, it's got two ends to fail. You know, so it's got a lot of potential for failure, so it needs to be built robustly. But apparently it sounds good. It's reasonably priced, but it got me thinking, what will be like? I was like, huh, I wonder if this will be the last dongle I'd ever need. And I was like, well, no, probably not. Like I might, you know, before, before wireless headphones are truly solved, I'm, I'm probably gonna lose this, you know?

• 1:13:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

  So maybe this is the penultimate dongle. And then I was wondering, what will be? Like, will there be a time in my life where I will be at Best Buy purchasing? It'll, it'll be called like Best Buy Newegg Amazon or something, and I'll be purchasing the last dongle that I'll ever need in my life? Or is this just a fact of nature? And the last dongle I will purchase will just because I'm, I will die the next day.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's very dark.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Also true.

• 1:13:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm gonna say it. We, we promised you Goth Paul and you got Goth Paul.

• 1:13:57Nilay Patel?

  That was, that's where we started. It's where we're gonna end. But, uh, no, think about this. Let me put this in your mind. One day, we're gonna buy dongles for the next interconnect to step us down to USB C.

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like that's the future. Accessories and we're gonna be annoyed because we have to buy a thing.

• 1:14:17Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna be like USB X was supposed to solve it, but why won't they just put a USB C port on this laptop? Maybe, maybe that'll happen someday.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  We're not anywhere closer to it four years after the first Mac, like, but it's coming. It's gonna maybe one day, right? So no, Paul, there will never be an ultimate dongle.

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  Uh, well, just, I was just wondering, I'm an optimistic Goth. I was hoping.

• 1:14:39Nilay Patel?

  Except for the fact that mortality will come for us all. Then yes, there will come a day that you purchase your last dongle. It'll just be related to a larger natural process.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  Not the evolution.

• 1:14:52Speaker 05

  Then you're plant food.

• 1:14:54Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. And you get sucked into a black hole.

• 1:14:56Speaker 05

  But then you can, spoilers, speak to your daughter with books.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  Interstellar.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right, right.

• 1:15:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:07Nilay Patel?

  That's a deep cut of a spoiler.

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  Wow. Oh, Interstellar, that niche.

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, speak to your daughter with books is not what most people think about. But it is true. I do stand behind the bookshelf from time to time and just rattle books at my daughter.

• 1:15:22Speaker 05

  While you cry.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  Speaking of the black hole, Jonathan Nolan now has a deal with Amazon to make shows for Amazon.

• 1:15:29Nilay Patel?

  So, that's good. All right, Paul.

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:15:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm coming to you for web browser news because I feel like this one is is close to your your interests. So.

• 1:15:39Speaker 05

  It is.

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft took out their own engine from Edge. They rebuilt it on Chromium. They've released, they're releasing Canary builds every day now, which is crazy. They're like, they're in the game. What do you think?

• 1:15:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  Is this good? Bad for the web? Good for the web?

• 1:15:55Speaker 05

  I mean, I can't, I can't decide. I really can't decide. I mean, there's this aspect that it may, it means more web browsers are the exact same thing now. Because Microsoft has a web browser that is the exact same thing as as Chrome as far as like rendering and stuff like that. But what was really interesting, what really stood out to me, like, so I, for instance, I use Brave, right? So Brave is a very similar premise to Microsoft's Edge. It runs, it's Chromium under the hood. But then you you've got, you know, a different browser because you have different priorities. And I don't know all of, I assume that my priorities do not line up with Microsoft's priorities.

• 1:16:36Speaker 05

  And therefore, I, I, I can't think of why I would want to use Edge. But I could imagine someone who's very into the Microsoft ecosystem, like want, now, one nice thing is that you can, you're gonna have Edge on Mac. That's coming soon. That's pretty exciting. But what was really cool is Microsoft just published a list of all of the things that aren't in their browser that are in Chrome.

• 1:17:01Nilay Patel?

  It's like 50 things long.

• 1:17:04Speaker 05

  It's start, they could have sorted this like alphabetically or something because it starts off, the first thing they removed is safe browsing.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:17:12Speaker 05

  It sure means something amazing that Google does, but there are so many things like if form fill, like I'm guessing, you know, that was recently a security vulnerability. It turns out auto filling forms, there was like a, it was a security vulnerability in multiple browsers. So I don't know, is Microsoft doing its own form filling? I'm assuming, but there are so many things Google does and it's just, it's interesting because when you use Chrome, it's a very minimal looking browser and you feel like you're mostly getting the web. But I know like I, the reason I'm using Brave right now is because I was using Firefox and I really liked Firefox, but there were certain websites, specifically the websites

• 1:17:54Speaker 05

  made by Google, like Gmail. I, I, I think Gmail takes about four times as long. This is anecdotal, but it feels like it's about four times as long to load Gmail on, on Firefox than it does on a Chrome derived browser. And there's just a lot of, there's a lot of special sauce. This is, Google is delivering an operating system, very obviously with every install of Chrome. And so the fact that there are more people that are using the obviously very good Chromium browser engine without Google's whole operating system along for the ride, I think is good, good for the web. But there is the aspect that

• 1:18:39Speaker 05

  Chromium is becoming the only target as far as from a perspective of a web developer.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  Is that good? I mean, like, I have so many feelings right now, but I'm just gonna bottle them up inside. Dieter, do you want to just read the URL for your piece? What is the web? Do you want to just end this? Just like slowly typing out the URL for what is the, a classic Dieter bone piece. You can read on the verge.

• 1:19:06Speaker 05

  What does it make you feel?

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  It it makes me feel sad and happy at the same time. I'm sad for the web. I do think that there should be multiple rendering engines out there because that ensures that websites are being coded to be accessible to multiple platforms to so that anybody can make make a web browser if they want to. And it ensures that, you know, you're not going to end up in an IE6 situation where like it only works on Microsoft's product. That doesn't, you know, like, that's not the situation we're quite in yet. You could still, you know, use multiple browsers. And even if everything goes to blink, that doesn't not going to be

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  as dire as we were before, but it's still very sad. I'm happy because I hope that this means that Windows will be faster and better with a good web browser that works better on websites. I'm very curious to see just how deep into Windows this new Chromium engine gets, because there's a world in which Windows is basically Chrome OS with a bunch of like Microsoft stuff on top of it, right? Like, they could use this rendering engine to build a whole bunch of it if they wanted to. We're not at a place where PWAs are running on this yet. It's still too early. We don't know what it's going to mean for Electron apps on Windows, although they will get some benefits because they are Microsoft is working harder to make sure they optimize Windows to run the Chromium engine in a battery efficient

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  manner. Like, there's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen to Windows that it's actually good for Windows because Windows will run better. But I overall, the whole, I'm not happy about what this is going to do for the web.

• 1:20:45Nilay Patel?

  So there's there's so many things. It's like, why are we ending the show with the thing that we have the most feelings about that is also the nerdiest and hardest to unpack? Like, net neutrality was easy. It's like, me, I and Paul disagree. When he yell for five minutes, we've moved on. This is like, all of us have a tangled, complex web of emotions. The Electron thing is that, like, that's why they did it, right? I mean, that's like, our understanding is that more and more applications are being delivered as a set of web technologies are getting wrapped up. They get run in a binary on your computer locally, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, that's a problem for all the desktop platforms. The idea of Windows in the future basically being Chrome OS but Microsoft is actually

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  not that bad. It's like, kind of cool, right? Because it means applications will be More widely deployed cross-platform.

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  Oh my God, you're gonna make me talk about progressive web apps now, aren't you?

• 1:21:37Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  Because that's one thing. Because that, Microsoft is trying to get PWAs to stop to work, to happen, so that it stops the march of Electron, and their flagship product for that is Twitter, which until today, if you tapped your touchpad in the wrong way, and by the wrong way, I mean at all, it would highlight the whole damn app. And they just fixed it today.

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so there's that.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Things are not going well.

• 1:22:00Nilay Patel?

  But then I will say, there's, there is in fact, another major, like, internet-defining rendering engine in the world, which is mobile Safari.

• 1:22:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:22:10Nilay Patel?

  Right, it's just like, it's there, it's not like Apple's given up on it, they haven't shifted to Chromium. That's the same Safari that runs on the Mac. So like, there's, there is some competition going on.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, from a company that totally has a great history of supporting the web and making sure the web is a really good user experience, so that you're not tempted to download stuff from their App Store where they can make 30%.

• 1:22:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  I love that idea of that, that kind of competition.

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  I will just tell you that Apple's attempt to get you to not read news on the web is a PDF reader that costs $10 a month. Like, they're not good at it. They might get better, but it's like, the reality is against you. What were you gonna say, Paul?

• 1:22:48Speaker 05

  My loose characterization of the, basically the three browsers that exist. Chrome is, is the web. Firefox agrees. Firefox and Google do not seem to be in beefs over what the next standards are going to be. But Firefox, they as a company have less money to spend on meeting those standards. So, and there's a sense where Firefox is behind Chrome, just because of the dollars invested.

• 1:23:22Speaker 05

  And then, Apple disagrees on the web standards, on what they are. And I think especially, progressive web apps have been a big one. I think that's one reason probably why they're, they're not a solved problem. Like, like if you see, if the three browser vendors actually agree on something, like, well, take WebAssembly, for example, they, it can be out of the gate, you know, pretty quickly. But if Apple is against something, it really, it really...

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  Really gets messed up.

• 1:23:52Nilay Patel?

  It seems, but PWI's are slowly coming to iOS, right? It's like a thing.

• 1:23:55Speaker 05

  They are.

• 1:23:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Speaker 05

  But the Apple has a slightly, some slight restrictions on them that make them non-universal.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  Which, by the way, some of those restrictions turned out to be a really good idea because it turned out that the ability to look at, say, like a sensor or, you know, your rotation that Chrome used to give you on Android was enough for advertisers to fingerprint you, even though they couldn't get access to your, you know, device ID anymore. You know, the, the number of ways that advertisers are pushing to fingerprint you and identify you is like out of control. And so Apple's actually fighting a really good fight there. And Google's doing okay. But like, they, Apple got rid of like the do not track setting because it actually was counterproductive because it didn't actually stop anything. No one respected it and they were using other

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  methods to fingerprint you. And so it gave you a false sense of security that you weren't being tracked. So they're just like, the setting is useless, goodbye.

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  Which was the right thing to do.

• 1:24:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It would be great if there are more than three companies. I'm just going to put that idea back out into the world. It would be cool if there were more than three companies.

• 1:25:04Speaker 05

  But what I'm saying is that there's barely enough money in the browser biz to make three browsers.

• 1:25:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right. Look, we need to find some sort of adjacent monopoly where we can collect monopoly rents and use them to fund our own web browser. And if anybody has any ideas, I've got a great idea for a vodka company I've been tossing around for a while.

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:25:25Nilay Patel?

  I just think that we, what we're going to start a vodka company. And we're going to take all the profits from the vodka company and use it to fund a great browser.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  Would you say that we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna slice off some of the market?

• 1:25:36Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna cut through the night. A great browser. That's, that's my plan.

• 1:25:41Speaker 05

  There is a sense where I think we try to do too much with the web. Like, like, there's, there's the internet, which is great, and a lot of great stuff has been built on that. And then there's the web and the web is our one shared platform. But I think it'd be nice to have more shared platforms. Like, in a sense, like Electron kind of became that, like, it's the shared platform for desktop apps. It happens to be built on basically specifying a, a, a very specific type of web, you know, and adds a little bit of node to it.

• 1:26:17Speaker 05

  But you know what I mean? Like, we're trying to do everything with the web, but like, maybe there could be another platform that would be, you know, cross-platform, Apple. You know, that's the thing. We tried to do all things that applications do on the web, and that requires a lot, stretching the web to the point where it is so hard to make a web browser that, that, um, and those web browsers are so powerful that they can fingerprint you based on the GPU utilization when the parallax effect happens, or something like that, you know?

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 05

  Like, that, it's so complicated of a, of a protocol that it, in a sense, can't be open anymore.

• 1:26:54Nilay Patel?

  So, I'm gonna just put forth, uh, Gopher, from the University of Minnesota.

• 1:26:59Speaker 05

  Exactly where I'm going.

• 1:27:00Nilay Patel?

  This is our pitch. We're gonna start a vodka company, and we're gonna retake the internet with Gopher. Uh, I'm sure the University of Minnesota, Dieter, you can probably make a call.

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Nilay Patel?

  Just say, can we have this? You're not using it. Gopher, by the way, uh, failed because it was-

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  Although I never graduated from the University of Minnesota, so...

• 1:27:16Nilay Patel?

  Honorary emeritus. Make him give you a title. You should go to graduation this year.

• 1:27:24Nilay Patel?

  Just like, wear the robes and show up. Uh, Gopher, by the way, failed, I believe, because it was patent encumbered. Uh, and the other one was not.

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  Uh, patent encumbered, and also, they wanted to, um, have you have micropayments. They wanted you to need to pay to, uh, you know, go, go do stuff. An idea that has come back around.

• 1:27:44Nilay Patel?

  See? This could be the future.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Nilay Patel?

  Mark Andreessen, remember how you killed Gopher? We're back with a vodka company idiot, and I think you're gonna love. Alright, that's it. That's the Vergecast. There was a bunch of piddly Google news, but whatever. We're, we're way over time.

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  You don't want me to yell about Google Assistant not supporting multiple accounts, so we're gonna move on.

• 1:28:02Nilay Patel?

  That'll be next week's Vergecast, everyone. Thank you for listening. Uh, you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. Paul's at FuturePaul. Thank you so much to Lauren Grush for setting us up with the black hole jokes for days. Please read Verge Science. Please vote for Verge Science in the Webby Awards. Uh, vote for Why'd You Push That Button? Vote for the Vergecast. We'd love it so, so much. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Paul.

• 1:28:26Speaker 05

  Snip, snip.

• 1:28:27Nilay Patel?

  Gopher.

• 1:28:47Speaker 09

  Support for this show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything? Ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to CoreWeave.com/ReadyForAnything.