Apple's encryption controversy, Bezos's hacked phone, and Sonos stopping old product updates

Stories from this week: Trump demands Apple unlock iPhones: ‘They have the keys to so many criminals and criminal minds’ How to FBI-proof your encrypted iPhone backups Can Apple live up to Apple’s privacy ads? Apple rejects AG Barr’s claim that it didn’t assist with Pensacola shooting probe The FBI has asked Apple to unlock another shooter’s iPhone Senator asks Jeff Bezos for more information on Saudi-linked hack Saudi Arabian prince reportedly hacked Jeff Bezos’ phone with malicious WhatsApp message PSA: Never open a WhatsApp message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia Here’s a first look at Android on Microsoft’s dual-screen Surface Duo Microsoft’s software plan for the Duo Android phone is surprisingly realistic Introduction to dual-screen devices Motorola’s foldable Razr will launch on February 6th after delay Cruise driverless taxi: no steering wheel, no pedals Sonos will stop providing software updates for its oldest products in May Comcast plans price hikes for cable customers as it looks ahead to streaming Peacock launch Google’s ads just look like search results now 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.

• 0:01Nilay Patel?

  Today on Vergecast, we go deep on the Apple encryption controversy. The big Bezos hack, his phone got hacked. We talk about folding phones. We end talking about what's going on with Sonos and their devices lasting past May. That's next on the Vergecast now.

• 0:13Speaker 01

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• 1:13Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. Flagship podcast of the technology revolution. Huh? I'm Nilay. I'm Nilay. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  I am your... I've run out of synonyms for not friend.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  All right. Dieter's gonna try real hard today. Paul Miller is here. Hello. And Russell Brandam is joining us today.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  Why hello?

• 1:39Nilay Patel?

  Russell, you're here because you understand how mathematics can keep information secret.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Or at least the philosophical implications thereof.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think I'd like to think so.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Because there's like a lot. There's...

• 1:54Speaker 03

  I think the problem isn't the math. The problem is where you put the math. It's the location of the math.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay. We'll get there in a second.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  But also, the location of the map can itself be mapped as mathematical coordinates.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Not to... I'm just gonna tell the audience, we're gonna talk about folding phones. We're gonna engage everyone's...

• 2:15Speaker 04

  We're gonna talk about folding space.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Latent...

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  Everyone's latent frustration with Sonos. We're gonna do the gadget stuff.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  That's coming.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  The news... Of the week, the thing that dominated, I would say, the, the, the tech, foreign policy, security access.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Was encryption.

• 2:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, certainly.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  And not because anything in particular happened.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  Well, some things.

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  Some, like, things, like, conversations hap- like, people talked.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  But no actions were taken.

• 2:51Speaker 04

  Well, you, so you mean in the Apple side, not the, not the Bezos side, right? Because those are the two.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  There are two, yes. There is the Apple iCloud encryption drama, and then there's the, what happened to Jeff Bezos's phone drama.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Both of which are like, you know, you gotta, you gotta lock it down.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let's start with Apple. The Apple timeline.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  Is, as far as I understand it, the United States government, even into the Obama administration, and now with some particular vigor in the Trump administration, has been begging Apple to unlock iPhones, to provide a backdoor to unlock the iPhone. That's a thing that the government wants.

• 3:28Speaker 04

  Well, and, and specifically to allow law enforcement, when they have a warrant, to get into the local storage of the information that's like physically located within your phone.

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Like, it's on the hard drive of the phone. And, and often, if you don't have the passcode that you put in when you unlock the phone, they have done a good job of making it very, very hard to get that.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  Right, especially if your passcode is like six digits or more.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the, the specific instance here is, William Barr, Attorney General, has been turning up the heat based on wanting to get into two phones that were related to the, the shooting at the Pensacola Naval Base. And as with the last go-round we had with this encryption stuff, it's a little bit unclear if they actually needed Apple to unlock the phones in order to get to the data that they want, or if the data was actually important. But that's like, that's the thing that started to kick all of this attention off.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Right, we want to get into these.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  Increased heat on that.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  We want to get into these terrorist phones, Apple won't let us, Apple's a bad guy, give us a backdoor. That's usually, this is how it went years ago with the San Bernardino case, Apple held fast, they didn't do it, it's happening again.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  A thing that is true that Apple does not deny, does not hide, is that law enforcement can get iCloud backups and Apple has the key to unlock your iPhone backup encryption. Because they say-

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Your iPhone backup.

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  Your iPhone-

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Truculently, right? Not your iPhone iPhone, but your iPhone backup. Yes. Yes.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Which contains everything that's on your iPhone.

• 5:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, except for that window of time, right? If the criminal sends a text message, like in 20 minutes, I'm gonna go rob the store, that doesn't hit the backup until they plug their phone in.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  I'll also say in tangible terms, so I don't know 100% the details of the Pensacola case because it's still sort of coming up, but in San Bernardino, it was specifically eight days. So they had the iPhone backup that had been made eight days before the attack and it seemed like maybe he had turned the backups off because he decided he was gonna do horrible things. But like, the whole case, they were like, well, it was this terrorist's phone. And it was really like, do you think that he was talking to ISIS in this specific week immediately before he went crazy? And like, I do think because this stuff is important and these like, conversations are

• 6:01Speaker 04

  important and you have to draw the line somewhere and there's all these principal things, it is, the conversation usually skates past how much of this data is already accessible to law enforcement.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  Right, because it's in the iCloud backup.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that, that complex-

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  Situation is just the context of the things that kicked off the conversation this week. That's the background. Government wants to get in the phones, Apple gives them iCloud backups, there's usually a delta between the backup and what's on the phone today. Right?

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  Reuters publishes a piece this week saying, "Apple was gonna fully encrypt." That's the wrong phrase. We're gonna talk about why that's the wrong phrase. "Apple is gonna fully encrypt iCloud backups such that only you, the user, will have the key, no longer be able to turn that over to law enforcement, thus precluding law enforcement from seeing your backups."

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Well, no, no. That piece, people had said that right after San Bernardino.

• 6:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  And I was very skeptical at the time because I was like, "This is going to get them in a world of hurt."

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  And then Reuters, well, yeah, so continue.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so the Reuters piece is, "Apple was gonna do it." This is very much in contention. Apple told the FBI they were gonna do it, and the FBI freaked out and Apple didn't do it. Apple, for its part, absolutely disputing the idea that it ever tells anyone about future products and services.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, they're just like, that's, you know how like, we would send them emails, be like, "We heard new AirPods are coming out," and we get either dead icy silence, or we get, "Apple does not comment on products, like, upcoming products and services." This is like, did you tell the FBI about encryption? And Apple's the same statement that we would get about like, "Hey, are there new AirPods coming out?" They're like, "We do not comment on upcoming products and services." So, that's kind of their position. Like, we would, we would never do that.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  It is true that there had been reporting back, like Russell said, around the San Bernardino time, in the Wall Street Journal, that Apple was probably thinking about strengthening, getting rid of its own key to get to your iCloud backup.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Okay, so, so I just wanna make two quick notes on this. One, I do think-

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Where's the math?

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Well, no, no. This is, I, I think because of the architecture of the systems, I think it was reasonable to look at iCloud circa like 2012 and say, "Some security engineer at Apple is building this in a way so that if they wanna make it so that only a user can unlock it, they will, that will fit with the way they've architected this," right? So, that, I, I think is a plausible claim. That is a far cry from being like, "Apple is going to do this."

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  It's like, this guy at Apple is sort of like- It when things work this way. The other thing is, it's not like they really had to ask the FBI to know how the FBI would feel about this. Like, it was kind of like the FBI has been pretty clear about it. Like, anyone reading the piece was like, well, that's gonna piss off the FBI. So like, I don't know why that, that feels like less of a sticking point, where it was just like, they thought about it. And the guy's like, you're gonna get me in trouble with the FBI. What if we don't do that? Like, that seems plausible to me.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  I would say, Apple, they are in an uneasy truce in a position that is maybe not where they wanted to be. Or anyone wanted to be, which is, they're gonna hold the line on a backdoor into the hardware of the phone. That's, that, that's where they are. They do not want to create encryption backdoors to the phone. They are in a position where a lot of people back up their phones. They have a plausible story for why they need to hold on to that key, which is people often forget their passcodes.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  So they can restore the phone from the backup because they have the key as well. That's like, it's very plausible. That's a very normal thing that happens. I forgot my passcode. I go to the Apple Store. Can you help me? Yes, but your data is gonna be four days old because that's your last backup. But that's the best we can do. We keep your stuff private. We're the privacy company. So they've got this like uneasy truce that also gives them an out to the FBI. We're helping you anyway. Don't, don't move the line further. So that's like the Reuters piece, talking about Apple's internal dilemma about moving the line further. Who knows if they want to the FBI or not, right? Then Donald Trump started talking. Like, it's just a real thing that happened this week. Gave an interview to Joe Kernan on CNBC at Davos.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  An incredible environment for him to be talking about encryption. And he said, "Apple has to help us. I'm very strong on it. They have the keys to so many criminals and criminal minds, and we can do things."

• 10:43Speaker 04

  We can do things to their criminal minds.

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  Do things. And then, this is, uh, Trump is like a transactional guy. He said, "I've given them waivers, or on tariffs. I've given them waivers because it's a great company and it made a big difference." And he said, "I'm not concerned about my relationship with Cook. You're dealing with drug lords and you're dealing with terrorists, and if you're dealing with murderers, I don't care." So that the deal that Trump is very clearly putting on the table is, hey, I helped you with the trade war that I started, but in exchange for that, I want you to unlock the phone. So now Apple is in this very uneasy position, I think, where they they've arrived at the, I don't think by design, position of we're not going to unlock the phone, but we'll turn

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  over the iCloud to you. And now Trump is like criminal minds.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Right. And and this time, like the last time it was, well, if if if it really starts escalating, there'll be a huge lawsuit that'll eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. And like that, that's the consequence. But now there's a there's that consequence on top of the consequence that Trump will just like undo the tariff deal that he made with Tim Cook. And all of a sudden, like, because Apple made this choice, iPhone prices will go up tomorrow.

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  And by the way, just to to make that even clearer, because there's, of course, a tweet. The Trump tweet was, we are helping Apple all of the time on trade, all capital letters, and so many other issues, yet they refuse to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers, and other violent criminal elements. They have to step up to the plate and help our great country. Now, exclamation point.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  I'll just, I'm gonna be an insufferable, okay, killers, sure, terrorists, drug dealers, I don't know. I feel like maybe it's.

• 12:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Um, so, so, okay, a thing about just the tariffs, just to be specific about what we're talking about, Apple did get, there were some carve outs that they asked for, there were others that they didn't, but the real thing that Trump has given them is they were toying with the idea of putting tariffs on computers and phones. And so all the Apple products that were hit by tariffs were sort of accessories. It was the, possibly the wheels on the Mac Pro, but like that level of thing. Uh, and it wasn't like the iPhone. It wasn't the MacBook. So, and that's a huge deal. It would have been disastrous for them. And and also, like, the deal is still preliminary, like, it seems like things aren't escalating,

• 13:15Speaker 04

  but that kind of stuff can change. So it is true that there is this cat, there is this thing that could happen in trade that would be catastrophic to Apple that Trump has mostly avoided. I think like-

• 13:28Nilay Patel?

  Because like he and Tim Cook hang out all the time.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Well-

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Before this interview on CNBC, he literally had had breakfast with Tim Cook in Davos.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Right. I, I, there are like, obviously lots of, like, why does anything happen? But it seems odd, like, it would be very, it would be hugely damaging, not just to Apple, to say, "We're going to put a 15% tax on every phone that is imported from China to America." Like, that would be a big deal, that would be a problem for people beyond just Tim Cook. And like, Tim Cook happens to be the guy who really cares about that and is standing next to Trump. But it, it's, it's weird to phrase that as like, "I did Apple a favor." It's like, "Well, you did like, people who use phones a favor."

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you are maybe reading too much into this very explicit tweet, where he's like, "I did you a favor."

• 14:18Speaker 04

  Oh no, he's literally saying that. I'm just like, I don't know if that's really what happened.

• 14:21Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, that, again, this is all just the context. Still, like, the Reuters article happened, the Trump tweet and the Trump comment happened. What that led to is what I would say is a, a pretty remarkable conversation about what data Apple actually has, where it's encrypted, what the government can see. And it turns out, and I don't think this is by any fault of Apple, it is just so necessarily complex that I don't think most people understand that like, Apple's billboard that said, "What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone", is just like, incorrect on its face. Because a huge amount of what happens on your iPhone is then transmitted to iCloud,

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  which Apple will like, happily turn over to the police if they get a warrant. And that, I think, is much more confusing for people to understand. There's also, uh, we should have this conversation, an enormous problem with the language we're using to describe these things.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  This is the, is, it's not the, so, the "fully encrypted", and they had like, they were gonna fully encrypt iCloud. And it's like, well, it was already encrypted. And also, there's a lot of just like- Basic infrastructure that needs to be encrypted, where it's like, I'm using encryption to send my sort of credit card number to Everlane, because I don't want like the guy working at my ISP to be able to steal my identity.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  But he definitely wants to.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Right. But like, that's encrypted. It's not like a problem for the FBI that I'm using. Like, so it's sort of tricky. As Dieter says, it's where the math goes.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like, does a number exist? Or is it, does it, can a concept be real? And if so, shouldn't it be at a physical location?

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  Why did I walk into this with you? It's like, Dieter's like, opening the door. He's like, just drag me in. I know what's gonna happen in the room. And I was like, I'm going into the room.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  In, in the world of Bitcoin, the word that they use is custodial. You have non-custodial wallets. So I have a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet, as in, I control the private key, and I'm the only person who's ever held that private key. And, and so nobody could, even if they wanted to, even if Trump wanted to, he couldn't get my Bitcoin.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, what if he put charged you terrorists on phone?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  I have that bumper sticker, actually.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  Custodial wallet is something like, like Coinbase, you know, like typically exchanges have a wallet. And so they are holding the private keys. And so theoretically, they can be compelled by a government to hand over those keys, which is why people like non-custodial wallets. And then there are, there are sort of like semi custodial, there are like gray areas where you get into it. And so Apple's obviously in a gray area where you are a custodian of your private keys. They're in the secure element of your iPhone. And that secure element is designed to be only accessed by someone with, like, with your pen or, or your face or whatever.

• 17:24Speaker 05

  And then they also have a secondary set of keys at the cloud that can also decrypt the same data, the backup data.

• 17:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, not the, but not the phone. And this is, I think, the level of complexity here, because we tried to make the world's simplest how to. Although it had a great headline in the end from Barbara, how to FBI proof your phone? And it was just like, we're just gonna explain to you what the different encryption settings do and how to end up in the most private state. We ended up going back and forth. We, you know, we, we had to send a bunch of questions to Apple, but had to come back. We had to understand what the answers. I ended up on a, with a whiteboard, drawing all of the states your phone could be in with the different iCloud and messages and iCloud toggles.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Well, the messages thing like it basically took the, the basic level of complexity and then multiplied it. Right? Cause like as however many different states of, you know, encryption you can have and access to keys and backups you can have on messages, multiply that by, by your phone and you just like, you have a million different options.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  And the, and the vocabulary problem here makes it even worse. So let me try to do this and hopefully along the way, everyone will understand why the language isn't there. And I, I didn't even think custodial or not, cause like, that's pretty good. It still doesn't quite encapsulate the last turn of the screw of pain. Uh, okay. So the first state is you have everything turned off. Right? No iCloud backup, no messages in the cloud. By the way, Apple never talks about messages in the cloud. It is off by default. They built this whole thing and they, I don't know. They, they, they do not want people to use it as far as I can tell. I think one of the reasons they don't want people to use it is because when you turn it on, uh, the government.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Their ads are, are false.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, when you, when you turn it on, the government can't get it. Right? Like theoretically, your messages become end to end encrypted between all your devices. But let me, let me start. The first state is everything is off.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  The government can't get into your phone without your passcode. Or they can, you know, go to one of these hacking groups, which we will talk about and maybe they will find a way into your phone. But there's no, there's no front door into your phone that isn't.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  In this case, the math is on your phone.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  The math is on your phone. The second case, you turn on iCloud backup. That's the primary case that we've been talking about. Your phone remains locked. You have to pay some group or the NSA to hack into the physical hardware of your phone, but Apple will turn over the key to your backup. Your text messages are in that backup. Your iMessages are in that backup. So the government can get your iMessages.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  The math is on your phone and it's in on Apple servers and Tim Cook knows how to solve the equation.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  Right, okay, sure, just gonna keep going. The third case is you've got iCloud backup on and you've got messages in the cloud on. This is Paul Wurth, it's just so dumb, the outcome.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  Your iMessages moved to be encrypted end to end, so only you have the key on your phone, which the government can't get to. Your iCloud backup still remains with Apple having the key, they can turn it over, but you know what gets backed up to your iCloud backup? The key to your messages in the cloud.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  In this case, the math belongs, it lives in your heart. The math, deep in your soul is where it comes from. So the government can get your iCloud backup, decrypt it, get your key, and then go and unlock your message backup.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  That is, I think, not the outcome anyone was anticipating.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  Okay, so I have-

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  That's very confusing.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  I have a theory as to why this is, in terms of like, Apple Kremlinology.

• 21:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  So like, I think we see this in a lot of different Apple products, where Apple will kind of get together and they're like, "We're gonna make a phone, we want it to be really expensive, what can we do that will allow it to be really expensive? Here's this guy who does a lot of cool camera stuff, and we're just gonna sort of put him in a room and he's gonna do nutso stuff with the camera." And then, at the end, they come out with a keynote and they're like, "Look at this camera." So, security is kind of like that, I think, where they got like, really intense people who are like, "Yeah, like, I'm gonna design this end-to-end hardware-coded messaging system and it's gonna be completely airtight and no one's gonna be able to get the messages

• 21:50Speaker 04

  under any circumstances." And then they're like, "Okay, cool, we wanna, like, what if someone wants their messages?" Like, they lose their phone and they wanna back it up. And he's like, "That's not sort of what I did this for." And then they're like, okay, you've done great. Now we're going to talk to this other guy. And I do think there is like, there are people within Apple who are trying to build extremely robust and secure systems. And often they're like, given the leeway to do that. And you end up being like, wow, like iMessage encryption is really impressive. But they don't have control over what is built, like, once it's out there. And Apple is always and only focused on like, consumer experience.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  So they're just like, backups, people want them, do it. Like, and so you get these, from some angles, like, really airtight systems that then have weird holes punched in them, that it's like, why would you ever design it this way?

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I do think that the primary person who's going to get locked out of your phone is you. Like, the most likely scenario with all this encryption and all the security is that you, the user, will just forget your passcode and be locked out of your phone.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  I hear all of this, and I want to be the most paranoid person ever, but I also know that I kind of want Apple to save my ass.

• 23:14Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, all right, like, like, every time I do text support for my family, I'm like, what's your password? And they're like, I don't know. And like, that's most of the task. It's like, now I'm going to reset your password for you. Please write it down this time. So that's like, the one state. Then there's a state where you turn off iCloud and turn on messages in the cloud. I don't know who gets there, but in that state, the government can't get your text messages.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  Really?

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  If that's what, yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Because then that's, that's end encrypted in messages, but there's no iCloud backup for them to retrieve the key from. But how would you describe that third state?

• 23:48Speaker 05

  How does your Mac get at the messages if the key stays on your iPhone?

• 23:52Speaker 04

  Aha. So-

• 23:54Nilay Patel?

  This is actually really interesting.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. When they send an iMessage, so, so if I send an iMessage to your phone number, Apple, it's going to Apple's servers to see which IP addresses it's being sent to, and it has a log of all of your devices. And so it sends encrypted copies of the message, specifically encrypted to the key associated with that device, into all of the different devices simultaneously. This is also, like, this causes various problems if people switch from iOS to Android for some reason.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  Who would ever do such a thing?

• 24:31Speaker 04

  I know. But, but it is, okay, so the cool thing is that it's tied to the key within the secure enclave on the iPhone, which they can do because they make their own chips. That is not true for MacBooks, although it's another one where it's like, you could just start making your chips and make the, like, iMessage is that much more secure at any time, so you're sort of like, clearly someone was thinking about doing this at some point. Whether they actually get that into the end zone ever is kind of up for grabs. But again, there's like, the cranky encryption guy in some, like, portion of the glass ring of Apple, who is like, guys, we gotta do this, we gotta get the secure enclave on the laptop.

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's just extraordinarily, like, I'm saying, I don't think they're trying to hide the ball. I think even trying to describe the current set of possibilities has taken us 25 minutes.

• 25:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:28Nilay Patel?

  And like, it took, with that Barbara post that she wrote, which is great, you should read it and send it to everyone you know. Like, that, even that is very long and involves a lot of screenshots with arrows, just to be like, look at this, look at this part of the interface.

• 25:41Speaker 05

  I, I, I want to give the benefit of the doubt that they're not hiding the ball, but at the same time, is it kind of the case that with a warrant, the government can basically get at any and all information in the cloud right now?

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, that is, and that is a legal rule.

• 25:59Speaker 05

  Personally encrypt it?

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Well, no, so they can get the encrypted part, the, the thing you do is you encrypt it in the cloud and you hold the key. They can get, at some point, the feds show up to the server farm and they're like, we're feds, here's the warrant, give us everything on this, and the server farm's like, okay, if it's encrypted, then they have the encrypted data, but they don't have the key, so I can just do that in Google Drive now, but like, anything in my Gmail, like, basically any Google product? Like, yes, all of that is, is... Accessible.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Although intriguingly, there are Android backups that are secured by Google's Titan security chip and it's down to the like on their server. It's encrypted. Google doesn't have the key. And if you go in and try and hack the encryption, in the same way, your phone will erase your data if people punch in the wrong passcode too many times. The Titan security key will do that with your backup in Google's cloud.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  That is cool.

• 26:55Speaker 05

  That's neat. See, that's surprising to me just because it really does feel like the sort of thing like nobody wants to poke the bear and actually truly secure the data from the government.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it doesn't matter because it's Google. So they've got 50,000 other ways to find out everything about you. So whatever is secure in that server kind of doesn't matter, but it's there if you want it.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Yeah. But Paul, that is a pretty good point. Like there are a lot of reasons that you want the government to look at a bunch of stuff. So.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  Well, also there are like specific legal requirements, right? Like if you're holding data, like you, there's a law that says you have to put it up. And so, and you know, they'll cart you off if you don't at a certain point. But what you were saying.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  So like, I don't know, like there's the CSAI, child sexual abuse imagery, right? That gets thrown around these networks all the time. People are like, you should do something or we have to catch the people. There's not a lot of political will in the world to say the government shouldn't have access to every resource to go after those kinds of criminals. But it means they need the evidence. And so like, that is a deep, when I talk to security folks, that is like one of the deepest tensions that they are always talking about. There are bad actors in the world. We actually want the cops to go after them, but we need to keep everybody safe. Like, how on earth do we balance it? And right now, the thing that is happening is at least as far as I can tell, like the four digit passcode is like kind of weak and can be broken.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  So everyone just sort of relying on companies like Greyshift and a hacking team and NSO Group to be able to celebrate, to show up and be able to like get past the 10 try activation lock and then brute force a four digit passcode. That's, I don't think that was the outcome anyone planned. Like if you sat down and designed a policy, you would not be like, most people will use weak passcodes and the government will get into it and that will forestall the problem for another round, which is more or less where we are. And like, but how do you solve the problem of?

• 28:54Speaker 05

  Right, but like, the government has a right to break into my house if they have a warrant, but they don't have a right to tell me like, I can't have locks.

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that's why this is like a math problem.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Well, I also think, you know, you start saying, oh, there are these bad guys, you know, we're using this to crack down on sexual abuse, but then eventually, as these things get opened up, it sort of goes to more and more minor crimes until eventually you're using it to

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  drug dealers.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, people who are just selling drugs and trying to provide for their family.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  And the whole problem here is that the discourse that we are having about this issue is Donald Trump tweeting and Apple, um, Apple is in fact doing, like, speaking in some nuanced ways in some places, especially in like their documentation, but the vast majority of people's understanding of Apple's position on this is a big ass billboard that says what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone. So like, the, the, the actual like debate that we are having as like a nation is like so far afield of the actual complexity of the issue that my level of hope that we're going to land at a place that seems like nuanced and reasonable is very low.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that billboard did not do them any favors. Like, that billboard just created the opportunity for everyone to constantly attack them because it turns out most of the things that happen on your iPhone go to iCloud.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty true, actually. Like, they don't, like, even if, even if they don't go to the government, they flatly do not stay on your iPhone.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Well, also, it's not like-

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Literally, the whole point of the device is to communicate with other things.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  That's the other thing, like, we're talking about this in the context of like only using Apple services on an iPhone, but like, you're using an app, the app knows, like, the app is also storing this data somewhere. So it's like, it's a networked device, you can only, yeah.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  Let's take a break and come back and use that to transition to Jeff Bezos.

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• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Russell, walk us through the Jeff Bezos story.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  OK, um, a man is born. A while ago, Jeff Bezos, out of the blue, announced that he and his wife were getting divorced in like a weirdly public way. It wasn't really clear why. Later, it became clear that he was having an affair, possibly with his wife's knowledge. It was anyway, things were splitting up and the National Enquirer had learned about it. And he believed that they had tried to extort him, but it was this sort of massively acrimonious and bitter thing. And there was, in particular, this real question. They had gotten photos and messages that he had sent to his mistress and these very

• 32:43Speaker 04

  just very private things that like you don't normally see from powerful people and were kind of embarrassing and sort of they ended up coming out because the National Enquirer had them. So there's this real question of like, how did they get them? So fast forward a little bit, there were over time, like a couple of people had some theories. They were like, oh, it's the mistress's brother or maybe he got hacked by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is actually kind of the overlapping point here because that was also, they were also deeply implicated in the Pensacola shooting. But we found out today, basically, well, this week, that there is very good reason

• 33:21Speaker 04

  to believe that he was not just hacked by Saudi Arabia, but specifically was exchanging WhatsApp messages with Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and the Crown Prince sent him a message that had spyware on it, and that was what compromised his phone and leaked all these messages. And then it was sort of relayed to the National Enquirer for complex political reasons.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Is the assumption, but there's, there's like, there's, there's like 99% it's true, but there's like, they never found apparently direct evidence of the malware. They just, he got a weird video and then like two minutes later, it started exporting a ton of data out somewhere.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so the thing that I would say, which is kind of in the background, a lot of this coverage is, so the new thing that we have is there is this report, which Motherboard obtained and published, which great work on their part, that is basically Jeff Bezos' personal security firm consultants, the sort of Liam Neeson and Taken type people who sort of, he was like, something's wrong with my phone.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  His name is Gavin DeBecker, and he does kind of look like Liam Neeson and Taken.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. But so the, they are not like, if the question is like, was the DNC hacked by China? Like, there is a group of, there's like a kind of company you bring in. This is not really that kind of company. So the analysis that they did was not like sophisticated by the standards of cybersecurity investigation. And like, that doesn't mean that there's nothing there. It's just like, this is sort of the, this is like the entry level analysis. And there's still a lot of other stuff that we need to look into to really nail it down.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  And the thing that connects these stories to the earlier stories is apparently Jeff Bezos reportedly forgot his password for iTunes.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Really? That is what I read in one place, yes. That is amazing. That's not the thing I think connects the stories. So the thing that connects the stories is state actors getting access to the contents of your phone. Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  Well, right. And this is a classic Snowden revelation is that even if you are the best at encrypting everything when it's on your disk and over the wire. If you ever want to look at the encrypted information, it has to be decrypted by the client application. And in this case, that would be WhatsApp. And so we don't, I guess, know specifically the vulnerability, but WhatsApp has had a bunch of very similar vulnerabilities to what Bezos is describing, where like you do a video call to somebody and that will cause

• 36:04Speaker 05

  like a buffer overflow or something and then allow that person to exfiltrate data. Or there was one with like a GIF that would like cause like a double free and then they could exfiltrate data. One possible defense against this is is some of the permission stuff that like Google's been working on where you have apps have way less access to everything on your on your phone. But it's pretty obvious that WhatsApp is going to have access to WhatsApp stuff.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think I think the real key here is the there's an operating system level protection. That is like WhatsApp does not need, I mean WhatsApp actually does need like access to your photo roll, but it doesn't need access to all of the data on your phone. But of course, if you're making spyware, you would like it to have access to all the data on your phone. So we're kind of getting back to the same iCloud thing. Like it's the same people at Apple who are working to maintain like. It's really hard to make sure that the video that you're playing doesn't have something spooky in it. Like, that's just, what you want is, once the spooky thing starts, it's isolated, you notice it,

• 37:20Speaker 04

  you can stop it, and you can keep it from getting to the other parts of the phone. But that means you need to sort of maintain the system integrity of the operating system. And that's exactly what you would be breaking when you're sort of making the backdoor for, you know, the FBI.

• 37:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, the argument that we were having right before we started was, is this, are these stories like deeply related? Or are they different? Here's my argument for why they're different.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  I think we've made some number of arguments why they're similar.

• 37:49Speaker 05

  Does it have to do with the location of the map?

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  It does have to do with the location of the map. The first story, the Apple iCloud encryption, Trump wants to unlock the phone, is a story about an individual hardware unlock. How do we unlock this phone? Right? Because we've made abundantly clear they can get to iCloud. That is disconnected from, is there a market for exploits in the world, such that a rogue government can go buy one from, I think the report's an NSO group? And then use that-

• 38:19Speaker 04

  Although, we should say NSO group denies any involvement.

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

  And I think Facebook is now suing the NSO group over this.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  They already were. WhatsApp, WhatsApp has been suing the NSO group over a vulnerability that they found and didn't tell WhatsApp about, which is kind of standard operating procedure, but WhatsApp's not thrilled about it. Anyway, continue.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. So, the existence of exploits for individual apps like WhatsApp, or Gmail, or like a rogue PDF that like cracks your Windows PC, which is like the classic case, is almost like secondary to whether the government can hardware unlock a phone. And so, this conversation is just so complicated, it almost seems like everything is the same. But these are actually really different ideas.

• 38:58Speaker 05

  Uh, well, there is the security vulnerability-

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  Let's say you are, let's say you're the drug dealer who got swept up into the reckless abandon of the government, right?

• 39:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  And they-

• 39:11Speaker 05

  For the drugs that I was selling.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then they get your phone.

• 39:14Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  Right? And there's no way to hardware unlock your phone, but they have a WhatsApp message that'll do it for them. It's still not gonna work. Because they got to unlock the phone to open the message. Like, they're different. They're just like totally different.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  The goal, the end goal is to exil freight, exil freight, exfiltrate my data.

• 39:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  They want my data and it's encrypted and I hold the keys. In this case, how do they get my data? Now, if it's Bezos, they send him a video message. If it's me and I've got all the drugs, apparently they ask Tim Cook to decrypt, you know, like my iCloud backup or, or to invent a backdoor that dissolves the whole point of encryption or something like that. But the, the end goal, they're, these are just different means to the same end goal, which is exfiltrating data.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think that the actual difference in mechanism is critically important to the, the, the.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  It is true. I mean, so, so I would say the other way you can zoom out and sort of rub your eyes until it gets blurry enough that it looks the same is the answer for all of this is, one, to have the data in as few places as possible, accessible by as few like actors and programs as possible. And then, two, to have systems that are robust in terms of not like just flying off the handle when some unexpected program runs into them. And both of those, the question of like, how plentiful is the data going to be? How many places is it going to be? And then how sort of sturdy are these systems going to be? Like, the FBI, part of the reason security people don't like the FBI,

• 41:01Speaker 04

  even though they would like to, you know, many of them don't like drug dealers either, is that the FBI is pushing both of those in the wrong direction.

• 41:10Speaker 05

  Right. The NSA hordes zero days, right? Like the sort of hack that broke WhatsApp. So the NSA hordes zero days so that the government can ostensibly go after bad guys by hacking into them.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 41:24Speaker 05

  But by, by not divulging those zero days, everybody, including Jeff Bezos, who we know and love, is vulnerable.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  Well, we know.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  To hack.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  Do you think when Bezos realized he's been hacked, he'd be like, if only the Fire Phone had worked out? If only I ran this platform. No, Paul, you're correct. And I, the, I've heard this argument made. I don't know if I buy it, but it's if Apple was more compliant. In decrypting the phone, the government would no longer hoard zero days. They would actually disclose more vulnerabilities and everyone would be saying, I didn't say I believed it.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  That's not even the same. The NSA already, like, the NSA already has their stuff. They could get into the phone.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  I didn't say I believed it, but I guess, let me say that one other way. Apple's noncompliance is accelerating the market for firms like hacking team and celebrate and whatever to exist because there's demand that Apple could erase. Do I believe that? I don't, but I've heard that argument made.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  And one of the ways to think about security is, and this is why Bezos is pretty much screwed no matter what, is that how high, like, how much is someone willing to spend to attack me? And then can I raise the barrier to being attacked higher than that amount? So if someone's willing to spend zero cents to attack me, you know, it's probably pretty unlikely I'll be hacked. If someone's willing to spend a hundred dollars, it's a lot more likely. And so I have to do a lot more work on my part to defend against it. But Bezos, I mean, I don't know all of the end goal of attacking Bezos, but you could conceive of a scenario where it's worth millions of dollars to attack Bezos. And zero days are like a hundred thousand dollars.

• 43:13Speaker 04

  I would just point out that like the other dystopian aspect of this is that Jeff Bezos has resources at his disposal that are on the scale of a nation state. Like, probably not actually as much as like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but like, in terms of like, can an individual defend themselves against a nation state? Like, Jeff Bezos would probably be my pick for like the individual who could. And I think that's part of why this is so like weird is that if he can't, then that actually does suggest that like there is something, there wasn't like a like a box that he could throw money into where the more money he threw into it, the more secure he got

• 43:58Speaker 04

  because they're all just the same tools. He's using WhatsApp like everyone else.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It is. There is just an element of comedy that like he got like a meme from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and opened it and like his phone got hacked. Like there's, there's just an element of that where it's like, it actually doesn't matter how much money you have. Like the memes will kill us all.

• 44:19Speaker 05

  There's an alternate story where Bezos is mistaken and it wasn't the video from the prince. And the prince is just so sad that Bezos thinks his funny meme was that.

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's, look, that's the claim that's being made. The timeline lines right up. And like, who would have access to a zero day like this? Like, it's a lot of circumstantial evidence, but it's like a lot of it.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think people are going to look more at the FTI report. I think one of the frustrating things about cyber attacks generally, and I don't think this is going to be an exception, is that like, a lot of times you just never get to 100% attribution. And there's always some hole to poke in it, which makes it sort of deniable. But I don't know that we're going to get more sure than we are now.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyhow, that's a lot of hacking talk.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's my favorite kind of talk.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  Russell, thank you so much for joining us. We are somehow going to seamlessly transition to folding phones.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 45:24Nilay Patel?

  If you'd like to stay along for that ride.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  No, I'm gonna, I'm gonna run in the opposite direction.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  All right. Thanks, man. All right, Dieter Bone. Hi. How you doing, buddy? I'm awesome. Uh, there's a lot of phones that fold in half.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  There are a few phones that fold in half, but there's about to be a lot of them.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  I think is the, the lesson that we're learning this week.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to start with the Surface Duo or do you want to start with the actual folding screens?

• 45:47Speaker 03

  So the, we can just do it kind of in order. So we have the Moto Razr. They said it wasn't a delay, but it was a delay. Sales start on the 26th and they're going to be available on February 6th. And so I'm excited to see how that thing goes, especially because A, Motorola has been very cocky about its reliability and so hopefully they're right. And B, it's a Verizon exclusive and Verizon has two ways of doing exclusives. They have like, it's cool exclusive and they put a lot of money behind it. And then they have like what they did with Palm, which is,

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, make a phone for us, please. We'll see if it works. If it doesn't, whatever. Presumably this will be somewhere in the middle, but how much effort Verizon puts into marketing the Razr with its exclusive is going to say a lot about their confidence and whether or not it's any good.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  There's a third option, the we're going to hug you to death option, which is you made a cool phone. We would prefer that no one else uses it to steal market share from us. So we're going to buy it from you as an exclusive and then never talk about it again.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  Which is a real, when you say like, is there going to be marketing support? Like the third option plays out way more than you think it does. Cause when push comes to shove, Verizon's like, buy one Galaxy S10, get 45 additional ones for a dollar. And that's like, that's, that's where they're built to go.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Is there a possible world where this is a sensation like the Razr before it?

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes. I think that's an extraordinarily possible world because I continue to believe this. Exact, like executives that I've talked to do not agree with me. So take it for what it's worth, but even we asked Panos Panay about this, about the Duo. I think folding screens. Two screens, it is a form factor change on the order of like the big smartphone phone form factor change, like not on the order of like the iPhone, but on the order of people really wanted a bigger screen phone. And for a minute, Apple was losing share at Samsung because they didn't have a big phone and now everybody has like, it's like, it's in that. Uh, that's a good comparison. Yeah. Right. It's like, it's a form factor change. It's a hardware change. The phones are gonna

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  look different. That drives way more consumer demand than anything else. We know it to be true. So it's true. Every time Apple redesigns the iPhone in China, their sales go up, right? Because those customers can switch easier because they're not like the nine message. Wow, really? That's every Vergecast keyword all at once. Um, so I think this is like, it's great for, uh, morning TV shows, right? It's the hot new gadget on the Today Show. It's like, what are the coolest gifts for Christmas? Have you seen the Motorola Razr? It's back. It unfolds. Oh my God, the screen, like, it's that product. And so I think like, it will be a sensation of hype, at least, whether or not Motorola can make enough, whether or not the screen immediately blows up in your face, like many question marks after

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  that. But like, in terms of consumer awareness, they're, they're just gonna get it just because it looks different. And I think it's great, like.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  And it's because it's the Razr, right?

• 49:01Nilay Patel?

  Right. It looks like a Razr.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  There'll be a bunch of old people that are like, oh, I had a Razr once. There'll be a bunch of young people going, what's, what, what is all, what are all the old people talking about?

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  And you know, it'll be a confluence of attention. Um, the other thing is more leaks are coming out about the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. The, uh, a bunch of these are coming from, uh, Max Weinbach over at XDA Developers. And the big one that I think we should be paying attention to is apparently the screen is going to have, uh, glass. It's going to be a glass screen, uh, and it will have a little crease on it. Samsung ultra-thin glass, which has a crease is what he says, a dynamic AMOLED display. So it could be our very first glass folding phone.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  Which would presumably not scratch as easily.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Right, but it also presumably will like have a pretty visible crease, which we're starting to go away on some of the other phones, like the Razer in particular, because of the like, in the hands-ons, it seemed like the crease wasn't very present. We actually have to review it to see if that turns out to be the case. So this might bring back a little bit of the crease. So we'll be looking for that on February 11th at Samsung Empacked.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What if the crease is actually just Samsung has figured out how to do an ultra-thin OLED that folds around and the screen goes edge to edge and you open it? Do you mean like?

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Like it's a screen, like it's a glass screen.

• 50:19Nilay Patel?

  It's two screens where they abut each other in that, again, a perfect way? Because that would solve the folding problem.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  No, I don't think so.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they got to folding glass?

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they, I mean, I hope so. We'll see. I don't know. Maybe it's glass and then there's like a little plastic thing and then it's glass again. That would be amazing.

• 50:35Speaker 05

  I feel like if the, if the crease is really noticeable when you're watching Netflix or YouTube, then they might as well have done a Microsoft and just done two screens. But if, but if it's not, I feel like you get best of both worlds.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  So this brings us to Microsoft, which.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Who? Yeah, this, I, I'm excited about this and it's not only because they proposed new web standards for CSS and JavaScript, but that is also why I'm excited.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  They have put out an SDK and an emulator for the Duo, the Android phone. They've also put out that they're going to have more stuff for Windows 10x. They put out those web standards and they've put out sort of their rules for all the different postures that an app could show up in on these devices. And they've given a little bit more detail about the Duo. And what's exciting to me about it is they have set up a really good system for not having the phone suck out of the box.

• 51:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Because no one is going to update their apps to work with the, the Microsoft Duo, except for Microsoft. Sorry.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  But they are forcing every app to launch on one screen or the other and not, they won't let any app launch across span both screens. And that has to be a thing that a user consciously chooses to do, which means that like, they don't have to solve, they don't have to get, they don't have to wait for developers to make good fullscreen apps. They just have to use what's already good right now, which are portrait apps. The other thing I like about it is with the Galaxy Fold, when you do multitasking, you'd like slide this thing over from the side and then you'd like pick something from a list and then you'd like pick another thing and then it'd be get this weird tile situation. It was a mess. With the Duo, they just like give you, they use the basic multitasking view and then there's a big window, thumbnail of the window and then you like drag it where you want it to

• 52:27Speaker 03

  go and you're done. So it, it builds on your understanding of how to move stuff around in a much more learnable way than what we've seen on other Android tablets.

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, I think they're, Microsoft's decision, and again, we, we did talk to Pennis about this on the Vergecast before, but they don't think the hardware of the folding screens is ready. They think two displays is the future. Here's a Phil Scott, and so I think they're correct to focus on how's the software going to work, right? Because everyone sort of agrees that the hardware is not ready. But no one else is a software company the way Microsoft is. So they're, they're chasing, like Samsung is going to have some wild ideas about how to use its unfolding screen, but they're going to be like Samsung software ideas. Like you're going to, you're going to unfold the Galaxy Z Flip and the bottom screen is going to be big speed. Like, it's just going to be a mess, right?

• 53:18Speaker 03

  What are the, what are the ideas is that the hinge is sturdy enough so that you can set it down at an angle so that you can do video calls without having to prop it up?

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. That's kind of clever, right?

• 53:27Speaker 03

  I'd buy it. But that's like more about camera. Anyway, Microsoft is like reasonably good at software, reasonably good at UI ideas, reasonably good at integrating that and your operating system and making the apps work. Like, they've got that set of chops that I think most of the Android phone vendors do not. Fair.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  So they're solving that problem. Here's my big question. Does solving that problem for two discrete displays map to now it's one display that folds in half?

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  Why not? Well, because when you have one display that folds in half, when you open it, you only have, you really only have one display. So automatically launching the apps on the left versus the right, like, doesn't really do anything for you.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Doesn't do it, doesn't, it doesn't make sense. Okay, that's fair. Uh, I think they, maybe by then, they will have actually managed to get some developers to do what literally no Android developer has ever done in the history of Android, which is make good fullscreen Android apps.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you're an Android developer, I don't mean you, I mean everybody else. You're cool. The rest of the ecosystem is terrible.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  Canonical examples, and I remember this way back when, uh, Google was first doing tablets, is this idea of like master detail. So like, uh, uh, think of, uh, mess, like, your emails on an iPad. You have a list of messages on the left, and then on the right, you have the message that's selected, right? Um, and so there's this concept that if you have a narrow screen, you just see one of those at a time. You click on the message, then you see the message, then you click back and you see the list of messages. And when you go wide into a tablet, now apps can magically have two pane simultaneously. That didn't work out for Android for whatever reason. Or maybe it did, I just didn't spend enough time with Android tablets.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  Uh, what, what, what, uh, uh, because I like, I think Microsoft is really smart in the sense of like, let's pretend it's kind of two phones, and it's really easy to send apps across between them. But, but these other ways of actually actively using both sides is, uh, do you think Microsoft's really solving anything there?

• 55:29Speaker 03

  I, I kinda do. How, I mean, how often, how often does anybody with, like, say, a, a note or a Galaxy S10 plus or whatever, actually do split screen on those phones? Uh, probably not that much, but how often would you if you just had two screens, it was really easy to do? I think you'd do it a little bit more often, especially if the system for doing it was just a little bit more elegant and intuitive.

• 55:51Speaker 05

  The two apps at once thing?

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I do think that's cool.

• 55:55Nilay Patel?

  So I saw Nadella using a Duo last week, and he, he just was the coolest man. He like pulled it out of his pocket, he was like, he was scrolling, I swear to God, he was doing it more animatedly just to like rub it in our faces, like, he was just like swiping, you could see that he was like on one screen, on the others, that was great. Here's my question. All of this works if Microsoft Gets into the market and they sell a lot of phones, right? It's a phone. It's supposed to replace your phone. And I am not 100% sure that they can tick all the other boxes of phone stuff that they need to do. For example, mostly what we talk about with phones now is the camera.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Rights.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  Right? And so like, can Microsoft go from zero to computational photography tomorrow? Right? Like, maybe they can, they're Microsoft.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  They probably still have some of those old Nokia engineers hanging around, you know? Who made those great, the, those great Luneos back in the day.

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  She's like, finally, you guys. I've been waiting. Here's a gigantic 40 megapixel camera sensor. It's called the PureView. Let's just bolt that to the back of this. Uh, I hope so. That would be great. I, but though, I think those are the open questions for Microsoft. I think they, they're going to do better on the software side. And the thing looks compelling as hell because it is very thin when it's open and that, that's just awesome. But to replace your phone, there's just a whole battery life.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 57:22Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, there's just a whole universe of things where in particular, Apple and Samsung have gotten so good. Uh, and Google orbits them, I would say.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Google's just had a bad year, y'all.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's like January 28th.

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  Like, what's the date today?

• 57:42Speaker 03

  I, no, I meant, I worked for the Pixel 4.

• 57:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I forgot. I saw like a deal on the verge.com, like Pixel 4 discount. I was like, oh yeah, they have a Pixel 4.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  I have a Pixel.

• 57:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But like, Google is very good at camera stuff. That was their wedge in. Are they good at the other stuff? They didn't quite get there yet. And that's why we keep dinging them. Can Microsoft catch up on all of those fronts and execute a very novel idea about phone interfaces? On a very unique piece of hardware where the app ecosystem isn't just going to chase them. That is a big set of question marks. But I did see it, like dude, using it and it looked super cool. So, but I, I just think like, we're gonna, you should, everyone should be ready for it. Even though it is only January 23rd, be ready for like, late November, early December. Just the wave of local news voices being like Motorola's back with a folding razor. And you won't believe this screen.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's just going to be around you. Like, remember when we were at the Apple event? And we were watching, it was like the Today Show. It was Good Morning America and they were talking about tips to improve your battery life. Do you, we were like in the hotel the morning, we were like getting ready to go to the airport and it was just like on in the background.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  And all their tips, like they were like, you don't need a new phone with great battery life. You could get better battery life right now by just turning your phone off. And it was like, I don't.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  You're not, I don't know that Americans are being helped by this at this point in time. But like, that's, I think that's where we're going with the form factor stuff. The question is whether a consumer walking into the store with even an older iPhone, an iPhone eight, that has a reasonably good camera is going to trade down or trade sideways instead of getting the thing they're always expecting.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  I do think that there is such a pent up thirst for a small phone, even if people like deep down don't actually want one, everyone thinks they want one. And depending on what Apple does with the next SE that's sort of out there and rumored and how big that is, it's possible that these folding phones could pick up a bunch of people saying, you know, I just want a small phone that fits my pocket. I don't care about the quality of the camera, this or that or the other thing. And so I'm getting the razor because I could actually put it in my pocket without it sticking out.

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it depends on how, you've seen it. No, Heim saw it.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  It's like pretty, it's so wide, right? It's like a wide phone.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the, the Galaxy Z Flip from the leaked photos also looks pretty wide, but you know, I don't think it's like much wider than a phone phone. A regular old smartphone.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait to get these things. I'm sorry. I'm so excited about them. All right. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. Literally as we have been speaking, Sonos has provided a statement about its products. So we got to talk about that. We'll be right back.

• 1:00:31Speaker 06

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• 1:01:00Speaker 07

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• 1:01:09Speaker 08

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• 1:01:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul, every week.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  You go in. You provide America the stability it so desperately requires. With a segment.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  Increasing desperation. It's called-

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that it's working, but we're gonna do it again.

• 1:01:48Speaker 05

  It's called Express Card Never Died and Only Slept.

• 1:01:51Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  This is a false statement.

• 1:01:57Speaker 05

  It sounds-

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  No wonder America's falling apart, man.

• 1:02:00Speaker 05

  So, so there's these new, like, alleged leaked photos of the Xbox Series X. I, to be honest, I'm not like huge into leaked back panels of unreleased devices. It's not like totally my bag, although I did, I did click on this, so maybe it is. So, let's assume that this is a real photo of a real, like, dev unit of the Xbox Series X. You got two full-size USB plugs, an Ethernet port, a Spitif. And there's no power brick, right? As far as I know. Anyway, I don't know, there's a power plug, right? But it's not, it's not like the one in the back of your desktop PC. And HDMI.

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  But there's also this weird rectangular slot.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  Long slot.

• 1:02:50Speaker 05

  And so according to the leaker, it's like it's for diagnostics, right? Because this is a dev unit, this isn't a real Xbox Series X. But what if it was Express Card? And for people who maybe are a little younger, don't remember Express Card. There was a time when, when, when most laptops came with one, sometimes even two, Express Card slots. And this was for an expansion port that was basically PCIe. Like you could plug in like a graphics card over this.

• 1:03:24Speaker 05

  Famously, they were perfectly timed so that there were a lot of these laptops that had Express Card slots, but were built before Wi-Fi was hot. So a lot of people added Wi-Fi to their laptops and then later on put like LTE or 3G cards.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  Anyways, you know, obviously, Express Card is ridiculous for a modern, thin laptop. But I'm just trying to visualize some good recent.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. I have two questions here. One, what diagnostics are you running that you need a slot? Like a 50-pin connector?

• 1:03:58Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  Like, okay, fine. And two, what, what are you connecting to an Xbox that you need this slot? Because it's basically a PC. So like, why wouldn't you just like put a Thunderbolt on it?

• 1:04:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  Because it's PCIe and so it's easier to code to than USB because you don't have to worry about drivers.

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  Well, my first thought before I thought of Express Card is like you could put like an extra NVMe drive. Basically, basically what I want is unadulterated access to the motherboard. Like, I don't want, I don't want to go through Intel's proprietary bridge from, from PCI to, to Thunderbolt. I just, I want to plug straight in.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we just did 40 minutes of conversation on security. You're like, I need hardware access immediately.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  It's the Vergecast, we haven't mentioned it. So I just, I just want to point out that, that standard, the Express Card standard, PCIe or whatever, it was the, the spec that was used for handspring visor modules. And therefore it was the spec that the Trio's radio used to communicate with Palm OS.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Nilay Patel?

  I buy it.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  At least on the first one.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  Didn't Palm also make a big bet on IRDA?

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  I mean, that bet, that could still pay off. You don't know.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Like you could.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  It's still around.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  You could definitely walk up to another Palm user and be like, let me share my contact info with you. And then like hit send IR signals.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Oh, look up. Look up Palm train commercial. There's an amazing commercial where like, uh, there's a, a, a man and a woman on like opposite trains. And they like see each other like, hey, you look, you look pretty hot. And then like, as the trains are leaving, they managed to beam each other, their contact information over IR across trains.

• 1:05:42Nilay Patel?

  And then, and then TVs for miles around had their volumes turned down. Okay. All right. Literally as we were talking, the CEO of Sonos, Patrick Spence, sent a note to customers.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Nilay Patel?

  Saying they got it wrong and clarifying some things. Let's just, I want to zoom out of this semi-breaking news. Huh, get it? Uh, and talk about what Sonos. So a few weeks ago, there was a controversy over Sonos' recycle mode.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  Right? So if you have an old Sonos product, you want to trade up to a new one. Sonos has a trade up program. You tell them that you want to trade them up. They'll give you a discount on a new thing. And then they will send a software command to your old thing that disables it from working. And then you are meant to take it to a recycle center and they have a list of those. Or if you can't find one of those, you can mail it to Sonos and they will recycle it. A person who works at a recycling center said this is bullshit on Twitter, which is how most problems start. Um, in fact, these devices are bricked. The best way to actually get, uh, use some of these things is to reuse them, is to put them back in the field. It's very hard to recycle everything. Sonos is just bricking devices because they don't want to use them. That, I, was it like, you know, like in a lesion, right? It's like not quite true.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  You could just not participate in the recycle program. You could just leave your thing alone. It would keep working. You could just buy a new thing at full price and sell the old thing. And, you know, recoup the difference. But if you took the recycle mode deal, then you would get a discount and your thing would be bricked. So like one option out of many, but Sonos was not actively like bricking stuff to get you to. But it's the internet. So people got confused. I will say it is not great that recycle mode involved this bricking of devices.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  But that's what, that's what it did. Okay, so that controversy is there. Sonos is like riding the wave. Then they announce the next thing like last week, which is, hey, our old devices, they're gonna stop getting software updates in May because they're old. Like, and like old, all the way to like 13 years old, the first generation Play One, um, which is like between, depending on when you bought it, between like eight and five years old. It's like old, older things, not maybe as old as you want. And like only certain categories of them. So I have like a Sonos Connect that I bought like two years ago, not affected.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  The Sonos Connect I bought like five years ago is affected. So there's even internal variations. They say, you're not gonna get software updates anymore. We don't think our platform roadmap can support those devices. And this is like hidden because it's complicated. They don't think changes in streaming service SDKs can be supported on those devices.

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  Got it. So is this a DRM problem? Is that what you're saying?

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  I think it's, my, my guess is like, it's like a lossless music problem. It's like, it's like a streaming service gets bigger, more compute intensive, needs more RAM.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Nilay Patel?

  It's that problem.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  Whatever the problem is, it sort of doesn't matter. Like, consumer electronics, generally speaking, unless it's a, like a PC, or I don't know, a TV, after five years, like, there, there are very few categories that still feel like they're good and continue to get software updates and work as well as they did, right?

• 1:08:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  An iPhone, five years at the outside, an Android phone, five years in, like, you, you should be on your fourth one by then.

• 1:09:04Nilay Patel?

  An Android phone like 18 months in is a little shaky.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  So everyone got this note from Sonos saying, hey, we're gonna stop supporting the software. Importantly, everything's gonna keep working. Everything will just keep working. It's just not gonna get new features in the software. And if you have modern Sonos products, they won't get new features either, because once you have a bunch of Sonos stuff in your house, it all runs the same software.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  This is complicated. Everyone just sort of muddled this together as Sonos is gonna break our devices in May.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's just 100% what happened because they, they mishandled the recycle mode controversy.

• 1:09:39Nilay Patel?

  Everyone thought they were bricking devices and they sent out this thing saying, hey, we're gonna stop supporting the software on old devices and everyone just assumed their devices would stop working.

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  I gotta say, we, we really live in this world where stop supporting often does mean bricking.

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:09:55Speaker 05

  Especially stuff that involves anything in the cloud.

• 1:09:58Nilay Patel?

  And it is true that if you have, uh, Joe Brown, he's at our Popular Science, he's like a friend of The Verge, friend of ours, like, uh, he's like, I got like $2,000 or $3,000 on the Sonos stuff that like now has a clock on it. Like at some point now I definitely know it'll stop working.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Nilay Patel?

  So they put out the statement today. I will quickly read it to you. It's just a text file on the internet, man, just load.

• 1:10:23Speaker 05

  Oh, don't try and load Sonos's webpage, it's down. Like they can't, they, their software can't run a webpage, much less update older, older devices.

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing. Okay, so they put out a statement today, it's from Patrick Spence, he says, we, CEO of Sonos, we heard you, we did not get this right from the start. First, rest assured that come May, when we end new software updates for legacy products, they will continue to work as they do today. That is in bold. Like they, people are so convinced that Sonos is gonna brick their stuff that they're like, in bold, we're, we're not bricking it. Actually, the next line is, we're not bricking them, we're not forcing, that's true, we're not forcing obsolescence, we're not taking anything away. The thing, and then it goes on to say they're gonna find a way to split Sonos, so if you have modern new stuff like a Sonos 1, it can work independently of the old Sonos stuff. Probably not as seamlessly, but then you'll get updates, feature updates for the new stuff, your old stuff keeps working, you are a little bit less great, and they said

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  they're gonna try to figure out some ways through that, too. Okay, that's like the problem. I think they're doing the best they can with a bunch of 10-year-old hardware in the field. I think the problem is like what you identified, Dieter, Paul saying, people expect their speakers to last forever. And the second you put a computer in something, like the clock just starts ticking. And I think that is, that is the whole problem with the smart home. Right? Like, most of the stuff in your home, you expect to last forever. Speakers and stereos are one of those things that are a part of your home, not so much part of like, like, I have a amp at my house that is older than me. It's from 1974. It works just fine.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's great. I have a record player that's from 1994. It works just fine. Because it doesn't have any RAM in it. Right? Like, it's just like, there's no, there's no computer in there, and it's just gonna work forever.

• 1:12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it, it really is the, I mean, we're playing, we're playing MP3s still, basically. It is interesting, like, I really wonder, like, at what point is the codec an actual issue for them?

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  No, but it's beyond the codec. Like, think about the, actually, the stack of software that need, that you need to have a Sono speaker on, or any connected device. It needs a Wi-Fi radio. Wi-Fi from 10 years ago is very much unlike Wi-Fi today. Right? Like, it, those things still have Wi-Fi, like, 802.11b radios in them. So they're not like the greatest Wi-Fi products. They have to somehow mesh network with the new Sono stuff that has new radios in it. If they want to improve the new stuff, this stuff's something that could backward compatible with the old stuff. And it's lost to work with, you know, in another five years, are there, are you even gonna be able to buy a B router? Like, who knows?

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if it wasn't the, the codec, it would be the Wi-Fi. If it wasn't the Wi-Fi, it would be, you know, degradation of the RAM or whatever. Like, it's gonna be something. Computers just do not last that long, the way that they are built in consumer electronics. And the way the software.

• 1:13:19Nilay Patel?

  So that's the Sono story, and maybe I'm being an apologist, because I, I think, A, I have a lot of their stuff. Um, B, I think, you know, a 10-year, they, they promise to support things for 10 years. And just already longer than most things. Right, so maybe I'm giving them like, uh, being a little too nice. But given that set of constraints, I think they're doing better than most other consumer electronics companies do. Like, Apple is not out there being like, our phones from 2010 are like still in the mix.

• 1:13:49Speaker 05

  Right, hardly hardly, but hardly anybody even tries. I guess what I'm, I'm trying to think of like, what sort of technologies could we embrace? Like, if I'm buying something right now, could I, could I have a better opportunity other than just trusting a name brand like Sonos? Who seems to have a good track record? What, what, what are the sets of technologies that I have a better chance of it lasting for a long time?

• 1:14:10Speaker 03

  I, I've got, I've got a very hot take that we, we're gonna have to loop back to, but here we go. Uh, I blame Project Ara for all of this.

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, remind everyone what Project Ara is.

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  Google tried to make a modular phone, uh, and they way overpromised and everyone made fun of it. And they're like, this is dumb, this isn't gonna work. And then turned out it was dumb and it didn't work. And then they tried it again and it continued to not work. And Samsung actually tried this with the, their TVs. They tried to put the computer in a box that went on the back and, uh, no one did it. No one bought it. And the solution, the like, obvious solution to me is you build a speaker that's designed to last 50 years. And you've got a, a computer that's designed to last five years. And there's no way to make a computer last longer right now. So just make sure that you can separate those things and put a new computer on it when you need to.

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  Are you talking about decentralized, open source communication protocols?

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  No, I'm talking about modularity. I'm talking about just make the gadgets a little more modular so that you can take the old part off that doesn't work anymore and replace it with a new one that works better. But we, as an industry, have decided that no, everything needs to be sealed and, uh, unitary and beautiful and perfect. And Sonos, like, played along. And maybe it's dumb or mean of me to demand that Sonos realize that they should have made the computer part modular way back when. But I don't know, man, we always knew, they always knew that speakers need to last longer. Uh, maybe it was naive for them to think that they could make the computers inside them last longer too.

• 1:15:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and even their somewhat modular products like the amp, the connect amp, like that, the older version of the amp, which is like... You plug your own, it is modular, right? You like plug speakers into it. Well, that's on the list. And I'm sure the power amp inside the amp, the actual amplifier works fine. It's the computer that went bad and you can't replace that.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  But like, is anybody gonna do that?

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  No, that's the thing. It's like, it's, it, I, my dream is that people, this will wake everybody up and I fix it, we'll win and we'll get modular stuff everywhere. And batteries will become replaceable again. And like, yeah, like none of that's happening. Um, because there is apparently no consumer demand for it. There is consumer outrage on the backend. But connecting that consumer outrage to consumer demand for things that are actually modular in the first place. I don't know that we're gonna see that happen.

• 1:16:33Nilay Patel?

  So let me, let me paint a much more negative picture.

• 1:16:35Speaker 05

  Just, just a, just a little bit of optimism. I imagine there are enough people who have been burned by their phone having degrading battery life, like once or twice now. It's like, wow, even when I took really good care of that phone, it got really, really bad at battery life and I couldn't replace it. And that was frustrating. That a product with a, a, a replaceable battery is a strong selling point if, if someone can offer that.

• 1:16:59Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, but you know, your phone has degrading battery life and apples are on a processor and they're like, there's a weird explanation for why, like, you can get your battery replaced still, right? And you see the performance decrease and you're like, my phone got slow. It's time for a new phone or I'm aware that I can replace the battery. I'm gonna do it. If you have a bunch of like speakers or I think way more dystopian is like smart home stuff.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22Nilay Patel?

  Like my thermostat is gonna stop getting software update. Like it's like very obvious, right? Like it was the first thing I thought of. It was like, I have a Nest thermostat. It does its job every day. It turns the heat on and off. And I can look at the status of it from my phone. I do not need it to do anything more than that. At some point Nest is gonna say this processor is too slow. The wifi radios are out of date. And I'm be forced to buy a new thermostat in a way that literally Nest promised was thermostats have not been redesigned or replaced in 60 years. Like that was their selling point. That's like Tony Fidel said to me. And now I'm like, every five years I gotta buy a new thermostat. Because like, it's a computer and your web service needs, wants to communicate to it differently.

• 1:18:03Nilay Patel?

  People who are installing smart plugs in their walls right now, I, what is gonna happen to you? We keep talking about Z-Wave and Zigbee. It's like, everyone is buying one, like stuff on one of those protocols right now. And then this new thing happens. It's like IP based Zigbee weird thing that's out in the world. And all those manufacturers like, we support this now. And like, you're just, I've got a smart home full of Z-Wave stuff and they failed. Like, that, I don't know how you connect that consumer demand to modularity or whatever. Cause you're not, you're not gonna go around to all your smart plugs and be like, I'm gonna replace this radio. You're just gonna throw it away.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Nilay Patel?

  And like, uh, that, the sonus thing to me is like, just, it's the first blip of people being extremely unhappy about things they perceive to be part of their home, going obsolete for computer reasons. Cause you take these computer reasons and you apply them to standard computer stuff. Like, I bought, I mean, like, what's a classic thing? Like, uh, you built your own PC and you buy a new GPU for it. And you can't get the full performance out of the GPU because you don't have the right motherboard. So then you kinda end up buying, and like, by the end of it, you've built a whole new PC, right? Like, that happens to people all the time. And that's just sort of like, accept it. Here, it's like, yeah, I gotta tear down my house, I think.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  Cause like, that, to me, I, though, like, we're so used to compute, what is this show about? This is, Dieter has a newsletter about computers, this is a podcast about computer problems, right? And like, we, we know what they're like. We, we, we know about the security issues. You start applying that stuff to toasters and plug outlets and lights, like, the one thing that we never talk about is like, all that stuff goes bad. The company goes out of business, or they wanna change the, the communications protocol it uses, or the API changes and that stuff goes away. And in computer world, that means, I'll just buy a new one, I get it. In house world, it means, I'm extraordinarily mad at you and you're gonna issue an apology. That is basically, we're doing what we said we were gonna do, we're just saying it calmly,

• 1:20:04Nilay Patel?

  which is what this apology is, and that's as best as you can do.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  But, I mean, the question is, uh, do you just nope out, right? Do you, do you, well, I'm never buying a smart speaker and ha ha, I told you also, ha ha. Like, I, I don't like that answer either. Um, but, maybe, I don't know, it's.

• 1:20:21Nilay Patel?

  I, I just think, I think there, there's an optimism in that there are a lot of technical ways to solve these things, like making things modular and like, there's nothing really, it's not like with, like, physics are what keep us from, you know, being able to run, you know, Fortnite at, at 4K on our, on our phones at 120 frames per second, you know? But there's no like, real limitations like that, that really stop. It's more of like a willpower, like, there needs to be a demand. And I saw this really interesting headline with, um,

• 1:20:50Speaker 05

  It wasn't the headline, but Adobe is teasing this a Premiere Pro collaborative editing thing. And this is for, you know, film production, which has a very important secrecy component. So you don't always want film editors to be connected to the internet. And so one of their selling points is nothing, nothing is on the cloud unless you put it there, says Adobe. So it's like, you know, when, when, when you need to do, I mean, this is networked computing. Like this is serious stuff. It just doesn't have to use the internet because it's not actually a technical requirement of the, of the solution. And because there is demand, they can eat, I mean, I don't know about easily, but they are filling that demand.

• 1:21:36Speaker 05

  And it, and no internet required solution for something that for most of us, like, we don't know typically how to edit documents collaboratively without using Google Docs or something else that's on the web. But they can figure this out for video editing because there was a demand for it.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  We figured it out in 2002.

• 1:21:54Speaker 05

  Was it Subitha Ed?

• 1:21:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my God.

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  I think, Paul, you're correct. And it's just like the, Amazon's business model does not allow you to not be connected to their server, right? Like they're going to sell you cheap echo speakers and hope that they make the money up on Alexa over time. How they're going to do it, we still don't know. Mostly so far as the peer that like Alexa screams at you about Black Friday from time to time. Like that is the commercial relationship I have with that product.

• 1:22:22Speaker 05

  Apparently they upsell you on Amazon Music.

• 1:22:25Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. 55 million subscribers, man.

• 1:22:28Nilay Patel?

  Right, but like that means like the amount of cheap hardware in your life is just like going up because they're all making it up on services.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  And so like.

• 1:22:36Speaker 05

  But then the cheap hardware harms you. And then you get some more cheap hardware and that harms you too. And then at some point you're like, you know what? This cheap hardware keeps on harming me. And I think.

• 1:22:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but then there's like a new generation of teens. Like your market knowledge is not translated.

• 1:22:52Speaker 05

  You don't think the teens are gonna listen to me when I tell them that the cheap hardware will harm them?

• 1:22:58Speaker 05

  Welcome to my TikTok channel.

• 1:23:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, yes. Paul's cheap hardware TikTok channel. Let me tell you why this $30 Google Home is actually a threat to democracy.

• 1:23:09Speaker 05

  Gather around.

• 1:23:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna end it there. We've been going for a while. I feel like we were gonna maybe talk about, I was just gonna yell about Comcast for a while, but I can't.

• 1:23:20Speaker 05

  Just assume, just assume that Eli has yelled about Comcast.

• 1:23:23Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm just gonna say it.

• 1:23:24Speaker 05

  Proceeded by a clarifying disclaimer.

• 1:23:27Nilay Patel?

  Comcast said, yeah, Comcast, Comcast Investor and Vox Media, Jones of Virg. Their earnings came out and they said, one, they're raising prices on cable subscribers, which is amazing. Two, their capex, their investment in the network has gone down by 10%, which is the exact opposite thing people said would happen when Net neutrality went away. It was, as you probably promised that capex would go up, Comcast's capex would go down. And then three, they said, "We stand to make more money in streaming than anyone with their new Peacock service, and the reason is because they can bundle it with the internet service they own and then exclude it from data caps." It's, it's the nightmare. I told you, I told you so. Okay, that's the Virgcast. I told you so.

• 1:24:09Speaker 05

  Rock and roll.

• 1:24:11Nilay Patel?

  Paul. No, it's, everything's great. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you. Goodbye.

• 1:24:34Speaker 09

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