New releases: Surface Go 2, Macbook Pro 13-inch, and the first Xbox Series X gameplay footage (Goodbye Paul)

Stories discussed this week: The disappointing truth about antibody testing Apple is giving $10 million to COVID-19 testing kit company FDA authorizes CRISPR-based test for COVID-19 Sen. Ed Markey wants the FCC to rethink its broadband deployment plans An Amazon warehouse worker in New York has died of COVID-19 An Amazon VP’s resignation has cast a spotlight on the company’s working conditions Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders demand Amazon explain whistleblower firings Pittsburgh’s airport is the first in the US to use UV-cleaning robots NYC will use powerful ultraviolet lamps to kill the coronavirus on subways and buses ESPN to air live NBA 2K League games We’ve known how to make healthier buildings for decades The spring of iterative hardware updates MacBook Pro 13-inch: come for the keyboard, stay for the performance The saga of Apple’s bad butterfly MacBook keyboards is finally over Microsoft’s new Surface Go 2 has a bigger display and better Intel processor Microsoft Surface Book 3: new Nvidia GPUs, up to ... - The Verge Watch the first Xbox Series X gameplay footage, showing off ray-tracing and graphics of the next-gen console These 11 new games will get free upgrades for the Xbox Series X Here are the first 13 games optimized for the Xbox Series X Xbox Series X Optimized games promise 4K up to 120fps, ray tracing, and fast load times Madden 21 shows that cross-gen gaming on Xbox Series X and PS5 could be messy Sonos announces the Arc, its first Dolby Atmos soundbar Sonos will launch its new app and big S2 software update on June 8th Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, it is Paul Miller's last episode. We got some special surprises for that. We run through the usual virus news, then we talk about the MacBook Pro 13-inch, the new Microsoft Surface Go 2, the Surface Book 3, a bunch of Xbox news, and then Dieter desperately tries to explain Google's messaging strategy to me. We'll see how it goes. It's The Vergecast.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra, because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey. I got you.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  Serum moisturizer, or moisturizer serum.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse? Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 1:06Speaker 04

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty, only at Sephora.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Hi, I, uh... Let's get you a basket.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Paul Miller Weekly Segment.

• 1:28Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm your friend, Neely. Dieter Bohn is here. I don't know what I am. I'm also a friend. Dieter's going through her time. We're gonna get through it together. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Paul, this is your last show with us for now. I'm very sad about it. It's a breakup episode. It's gonna be emotional. It's gonna be sincere. I saw, Paul, I saw some speculation on Twitter that we had had some sort of beef.

• 1:57Speaker 06

  There's no beef.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  There's no beef. Perfectly honest, everybody, The Verge, like every other business, Fox Media, The Verge, our budgets changed. We had to make some calls. Sadly, we have to say goodbye to Paul. But first of all, Paul, I want to say you and I have been podcasting together. It's 2007? Is that when we rebooted the Engadget Podcast?

• 2:17Speaker 06

  I don't, I can't remember that back that far.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  It was a long time ago that we rebooted the Engadget Podcast together, which was a lark of an idea before any of this podcasting business looked anything like it does today. So we've been talking to each other about tech on a show like this for a while. We started The Verge. Three of us are actually founders of this thing called The Verge. We started The Verge with This Is My Next Podcast together. Before there was even a website, there was this podcast.

• 2:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think of this podcast as, the Engadget Podcast was originally Peter Rojas and Ryan Block. And I was listening to that and a fan of that.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 2:59Speaker 06

  Then I moved to New York, worked for Engadget, then I was on that podcast, and then we, we sneakily stole as much audience as we could with podcast continuity by having This Is My Next, which moved into The Vergecast.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  It's true. Do you remember when we used to sneak, we were at Engadget and we would like sneak around plotting The Verge and we called it Project Secret? It was, it was like the worst code name of all time. Really? That was the code name. It was horrible. It wasn't great.

• 3:33Speaker 06

  That's great.

• 3:33Nilay Patel?

  I would say, uh, worse, the only one that's worse was, uh, I think vox.com, as we're called it, Project X. Which, do you, there was like a movie about like chimpanzees being trained to like drop bombs on people.

• 3:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's very sad.

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  The wrong code name. Anyway, we've been doing this together for a long time. The thing I was thinking about is, Paul, this is not the first time, right? Like you left the internet for a year and left The Verge. You came back, you left again. When we were starting Circuit Breaker, because I really wanted to do gadget coverage again, very serendipitously, I remember Dieter and I were like sitting in a bar.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  Being like, who is going to help us do gadget coverage again? And you literally called out of the blue.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  I was like, I need a job.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  Just like lightning strike. You have actually since left The Verge, but we kept doing the podcast together. So this is the first time it's The Verge side initiating the split. It's mine. It's me doing it. But I anticipate that you'll be back again in some way in the future. That's just what history suggests.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  Well, and anytime you need a guest to shill Bitcoin, I'd be happy. But no, you guys have given me so many opportunities and so much grace. And you've been really bros and friends. And so I really, you know, I really appreciate the way you guys and Vox Media and Verge have treated me in our on and off relationship over the years. So there's definitely, there's no, no hard feelings at all. And yeah, I'm sure we'll find ways to collaborate.

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  You know, the one thing I'll say, and people have pointed this out, Paul, you and I have talked about this a lot over the past few years. You and I obviously do not have similar political beliefs. I don't know if that's clear to the audience at this point.

• 5:20Speaker 06

  What?

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  But one thing I have always appreciated, and I think both of us have gotten notes from the audience to this effect. I think it's been valuable to have those disagreements in like a civil and rational and direct way, regardless of the policy disagreement. You and I have been friends for a long time. And I value the fact that we built The Verge together. And I really have come to value the fact that we hopefully have been able to model for people. What it's like to still be friends, even though you have deep, deep, deep, deep political disagreements. Like, we come out of it laughing more times than not. I'm gonna miss that. I hope people see that that was something you and I have talked about and cared about and wanted to do for folks, because it's been important to me.

• 6:04Speaker 06

  It's totally important to me. And it's, I never wanted this to be like a political show, but it, you know, as tech became more political, I feel like that just sort of was inevitable. And so I still don't think of myself as a hugely political person. I just have, you know, maybe outside the mainstream thoughts on the role of the government in our lives. And it was cool to have an opportunity to share that, you know, without yelling at each other.

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  And now I'm gonna yell at you.

• 6:36Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  So we're gonna miss you here, but Paul, you've got a new show and a new site, right?

• 6:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, if you go to paul.lol, I'm so proud of that domain name.

• 6:46Nilay Patel?

  That is an incredible domain name.

• 6:48Speaker 06

  You can sign up for my newsletter, Cyberdeck Users Weekly, and I'm also doing a podcast of the same name. I've got two episodes out, so you can subscribe to that, like and favorite on your favorite services whenever it gets deployed to iTunes. But yeah, paul.lol. And I just wanted to say thank you so much to all the listeners who have reached out and so many notes of love on Twitter. You know, it really means a lot and I really, really appreciate it.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  All right. Now we gotta do a show. We gotta do this show.

• 7:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:22Nilay Patel?

  And then you can go listen to Paul's show. It's great. He's just a one more podcast listener. It's even more, even more reasons to pull over in your car. All right. So I'm gonna start. Show comes out on Friday, which means it's really easy to count. It is week eight. It's been eight weeks since Donald Trump promised a website based on a flow chart.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  Can I tell you something about this, Neelai? Every week you do this and you say it's been, and I get that goddamn bare naked lady's socks stuck in my head.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  It's been. Yep, eight weeks since the flowchart day. Since you flowcharted me. Website still does not exist. Verily, which is the subsidiary of Alphabet. The story is so tiresome. Just know that it's been eight weeks. If you're still curious what I'm counting, just listen to last week's episode. The one before that. Same information. The one before that. With a lower increment of a number. But know that the real way we're gonna come out of this is with a robust testing and tracing apparatus that does not appear to be in place yet. So we're still paying attention to that. That said, when it comes to testing, there was a bunch of news this week that is interesting. The FDA authorized the first CRISPR based test for COVID-19.

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  Most tests now are based on technique called PCR. We actually have a great story from Nicole about how PCR testing works that you can go read. The CRISPR based test is a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, a little bit more accessible in terms of what kinds of equipment you need in your lab to do it. So that first test has been authorized for the FDA. Apple invested $10 million in a COVID-19 testing kit company. So you see the, like I said, we're coming out of this with testing and tracing. So the, the amount of investment and interest in testing is going up. And then Liz Lopato wrote a really important piece that I think everybody should read about antibody testing this week, which goes into immense detail on how antibodies in

• 9:18Nilay Patel?

  your body work, like the different methods your immune system uses to produce and use antibodies. Sometimes they just don't do anything. That's just a real thing. And then the amount of antibody tests that are on the market, you can actually go get one right now, but many companies will happily sell you one. They have not all been proven to work. So some of the tests have up to a 14% false positive rate, which effectively makes them useless. So there's just a lot of hope, I would say. Hope, confusion, optimism and pessimism around antibodies and antibody testing. Liz spent, I think she spent over two weeks reporting this out, talking to a lot of doctors, a lot of scientists, a lot of researchers about antibodies and antibody testing.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  So just go read that piece. We really wanted to provide like a very credible, serious, deeply reported. Rational look at the state of antibody testing. And Liz absolutely pulled it off. And the animations on how the antibodies in your body actually work are great. Alex Parkin did those. So go check that out. It's to me, one of the more important pieces on this whole thing that we've published.

• 10:24Speaker 06

  Do you think that there's going to be some sort of biotech renaissance coming out of this? Because it seems in a sense that whatever biotech we had, the people who are trained and capable right now are the people who can engage with this current scenario. But new investment and new people switching their major or that that kind of thing could be, you know, what the future of that industry. Do you guys have a good vibe on that? Is that just like wishful thinking?

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  You know, I was on, right before we came on the show, I was talking about my first remote CNBC appearance, which notable mostly because my AirPod fell out of my ear on live television. But it's funny because, you know, the CNBC anchors who are all very smart, very plugged in, they were talking about the amount of funding they're seeing in the biotech industry. Right. And it was literally in a context of WeWork, right? Like all of the sort of startups that were getting the money and the unicorn valuations, WeWork, Uber, all, it was all like consumer stuff, all stuff like you need your mom to do, you know, like on demand made service or, you know, like it was, it was, it just felt small or it seems now in in this moment particularly small. And the investment is now flowing to things that are big. I think that's a really interesting phenomenon.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  Honestly, Paul, I think the answer is I hope so. But we're seeing it now. And I think the generation of kids who are going to be interested in, you know, biotech and bioscience, like it's got to be huge, right? Because if this is the defining moment of your life, then it's going to have that kind of ripple effect. So I hope so.

• 11:57Speaker 06

  There's amazing video series I was watching, like right, kind of when the lockdown started, where Gio Hot, the guy who, you know, jailbroke the iPhone, cracked the PS3 and now has a self-driving car company. He's just like, let's hack, hack the genome of the of the virus, you know? And he's just downloading like publicly available information and processing it with Python. It's really interesting, like the tools that exist right now.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's like that sort of like democratic access to the information. Like the virus is sequenced really fast. Yeah, that's like remarkable. The the split between the amount that we know and the amount that we don't know is just as we read the coverage, as we talk about our coverage, that split is fast. We know more about this virus than almost any virus in history at this speed. Right? It's brand new. So the amount that we know for the fact that it's new is remarkable. It has been an international race. And then the amount that we don't know is vast, and that's the thing that will help solve it.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  It's like we have, we have a ton of intelligence about the the virus, but like as a country, we're not acting with a ton of wisdom. We've got like way too much, too many like charismatic leaders at the top saying the wrong things, and we need to move with, we need to have more dexterity about

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  cleaning up our our testing process here.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  I don't like this.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  To make our country, give our country more strength.

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I get it. We should just grind on stats.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  I would take it. All right. Other virus news. Amazon is kind of getting it on all sides right now. So Josh Jezza on our team actually broke the news. The first Amazon warehouse worker at the Staten Island facility in New York died of COVID-19. That comes on the heels of a lot of protests and a lot of complaints from workers about the conditions in in Amazon warehouses. Tim Bray, who was a VP at Amazon, resigned specifically because the company was ignoring worker unrest. That's a high level executive principal engineer at Amazon. Very public blog post.

• 13:55Speaker 05

  He was a very public person. Everybody, a bunch of people in tech knew knew him, knew him from before. And if you have not read his blog posts, his letter about why he resigned, you absolutely should. I know me recommending reading a, you know, a letter from a VP of Amazon doesn't sound that exciting, but it is bracing.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  It is very clear. He's a good writer. One of the keys was Amazon has fired some of its most vocal whistleblowers. That's one of the reasons he quit. Congress is now demanding explanations. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren came together to demand Amazon explain why those whistleblowers were fired. There is a growing unease in Congress, senators, representatives from both sides of the aisle, calling on Amazon to explain whether or not it lied in hearing antitrust hearings about whether it uses its data to make competitive products. Amazon also, they're getting it from regulators, they're getting it from their own workforce. I think pretty soon they're going to start to get it from customers because their ship dates are still pretty low. And like, Amazon at this

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  moment cannot sell you toilet paper, right? Like, the things you think Amazon could do for you, it's not able to do. So that's three sides. And Casey wrote the newsletter this week, it stuck with me. The thing that made Facebook change was not consumer unrest, was not privacy scandals, was not regulators. It's when they were less able to hire people, when talent didn't want to come work at Facebook, when talent was going elsewhere, people were leaving the company. Amazon's now, it's something close to that moment, plus this additional regulatory pressure, plus this sort of customer, like, for me, where I'm at, everything takes a week to get from Amazon down from tomorrow. And I think that is just a big combination of things. So we're

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  tracking the Amazon story. The virus is really shedding a light on that company. Some interesting tech approaches the virus. Pittsburgh is going to start using UV cleaning robots in the airport. So they're going to shine bright UV lights that kills the virus. New York City is going to start using UV lights to kill the coronavirus in subways and buses. So now these kind of cleaning techniques are coming to the fore. That's been really interesting. And then on a sort of culture side of the story, ESPN is now going to start airing live NBA 2K League games. Like, we're just fully in the moment of athletes playing video games on live television. I'm extremely here for it. If they would like to let me play Madden against Aaron Rodgers, I'm available. I'm

• 16:18Nilay Patel?

  cheap compared to them, I'm guessing. I'm not free, but I'm definitely cheaper. So it's just an idea. Just if anyone from ESPN is listening, I'll do that. I'll lose. I'll even throw the game to Aaron. I just want to do it. And Nicole Lettsman wrote a great piece this week about building design, office design, and how we actually know, we've known for a long time how to make healthier buildings, healthier office plans to combat the spread of germs and viruses. I think that's going to, as we think about how the world will come back to work and business, we're going to see a lot of that change implemented. So go read that piece. It's like right in the strike zone of science, design, technology. It's really cool. Go check it out. Okay, that's all the virus updates I have. Now we gotta talk about MacBooks, talk about Surface Go. There's like a lot of news.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  A lot of hardware.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  We get to talk about MacBooks. Real privilege. Let's take a break. We'll come back and do that.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey. I got you.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse. Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty. Only at Sephora.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Hi, I, uh... Let's get you a basket.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  Gator.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. What a week.

• 18:16Nilay Patel?

  It was a huge week of very small hardware changes.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  You actually wrote your newsletter this week. One of the headlines was, "It's the Spring of Iterative Hardware Updates." Take me through it.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  I was inspired by Marcus Brownlee, who tweeted that it was the year of the Ultra minor Apple update, which sounds a lot like the year of whatever, whatever. The sponsored years from Infinite Jest, if you're the kind of person that has read Infinite Jest, or the kind of person who has pretended to have read Infinite Jest, which is...

• 18:39Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I carry it around everywhere.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm never without an unread copy of Infinite Jest.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  So, the news from Apple is that they have updated the 13-inch MacBook Pro. And the main thing, the thing everyone's gonna pay attention to, and the thing that you should pay attention to, is they swapped out the butterfly keyboard for the scissor switch keyboard, the quote-unquote "magic" keyboard, which makes it, I think, .02 inches thicker and like .08 pounds heavier. You can give her the metric yourself if you'd like.

• 19:14Speaker 06

  I'm not gonna help you, but I'm gonna remind you that if you need to, you can do it on your own.

• 19:19Speaker 05

  If you are lucky enough to be in a car right now, pull over.

• 19:22Speaker 06

  No, just ask Siri.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Ask Siri, see how that goes for you.

• 19:29Speaker 05

  So if you're not familiar with MacBook Pro, there's the 13 inch, there's actually always kind of been two of them, and there continues to be two of them. So the base model, other than the magic keyboard, is pretty much unchanged from what was available last summer. Dan reviewed it. It's got an eighth gen Intel Core processor. There's like, it's just, they put the good keyboard with the escape key in it at the end. But then there's another version that has the 10th gen processors. And that's the one I'm reviewing right now. And I did not expect it to be quite as good as it is. Iterative updates, like, yeah, it'll be faster, whatever. But I, especially with Intel, I've sort of become acclimated to not really knowing, seeing a huge difference from year to year

• 20:14Speaker 05

  in my day-to-day experience of it, and only really seeing the difference on like, you know, this thing is 10% faster on this, you know, benchmark or whatever, which doesn't really affect the kind of work that I spend most of my time doing. But I don't know, compared to a three-year-old laptop, this is notably faster. And of course, it should be. That's like how you expect the world to work. But, you know, Apple did the thing. They, they put in the newer, modern processor in a MacBook, which is not something we've been able to take for granted from Apple for quite some time. So that's, that's the story with the MacBook Pro. We're reviewing it. If you want to know about it, and what you want me to do with it, tweet at me.

• 20:49Speaker 06

  You're reviewing the $1,800 SKU?

• 20:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's the $1,799, which is a Core i5 with 16 gigs of RAM. It's LDPR, LDPP, LDPR4X, and it's got 512 SSD.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  It's just weird. Why can't there be a fast, I mean, $1,300 is, is, you can get a lot of laptop. Like, there's this wave of like $650, $700 AMD laptops that are coming out with like the new Ryzen 4000 series laptop chips. Like, those are gonna be very performant for like, less than half the price of this.

• 21:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there's that. And then there's like, you can get Windows laptops, even 13 inches, that like have real GPUs in them instead of the Intel Iris Plus. The Intel Iris Plus in this thing is impressive. It actually, the whole package, I don't know if it's the GPU or just the 10 shot processor, the whole thing actually did better on Premiere Pro than I expected. Normally Premiere Pro is the way that we can tell that, that, well, why Apple software doesn't support its chips. You know, like Adobe just isn't doing it. And that's probably still the case here, but like, it did way better than I had any right to. It was almost as fast as a 16 inch, which is wild.

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm fairly certain the betas of Premiere Pro now actually have GPU support for encoding, which we'll see. I mean, it's, it's always like a risk. Like, what if I offload this to a slower other processor is like that, that's that checkbox. And sometimes, right now, like Lightroom, depending on your computer, it actually gets slower when you turn on GPU and code, because the integrated GPUs are slow. But they're at, there's, Adobe's slowly getting there after however much outcry. One thing I think is interesting, and I noticed this, and you called it out in your hands on too, Apple's preferred software, like applications to show that it's faster are 10,000 miles away from Adobe. And it's like

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  extremely vague. It's like 4X faster in this game you've never heard of. Photo editing in Affinity Photo is twice as fast. It's like, what does that even mean? Like, how are you benchmarking that? I think they're now at a point where to show that things are faster, they have to find applications that are optimized for the platform. And they're being way louder about it than than before.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. I think, Paul, you're right about the the pricing. I mean, look, like, Mac users are kind of a captive audience. Like, this is why the keyboard caused so much angst is like, if you wanted a Mac, you had no choice but to buy a keyboard that you couldn't trust for not quite five years, depending on what model, but. I mean, we should talk about it. In the past six months, they have refreshed their entire laptop lineup. After five years of trying to make Butterfly work, in six months, they're like, nope, we're done.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  And they worked, when they put out the 16 with this keyboard, they did not, they did not suggest they would be moving this fast. So like, it'll come.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, they're, they're, I mean, you know, Apple never likes to give you a hint, you know, they don't, they don't, they don't like being Osborned or whatever. But I don't know, I kind of expected them to not move quite this quickly. I was thinking that what they were going to do, and I actually asked them to do exactly what they did, which is screw you, put the 13 inch out, don't wait for the micro LED screen or whatever. But I, in my heart, I kind of expected them to like, put the 16 out and then wait till they had like, some fancy new screen technology or some other bigger iteration to put out on the 13 inch. And they chose not to. And part of me is like, oh, I'm sad. And part of me is like, yep, good. If someone needs a laptop right now, and there are people that like, need a laptop right now because their keyboard is broken in isolation and they got nothing else to do.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  There are at least two Verge reporters with broken Butterfly keyboards right now.

• 24:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  Just like freaking out.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  So if you have the money and you can afford it, like, I haven't given this a full review, I can't like endorse it, but I would be completely shocked if this wasn't radically better than the 13 inch MacBook you have now, if it's, you know, more than a couple of years old.

• 24:30Speaker 06

  Do you think Apple learned a valuable lesson about hubris?

• 24:36Speaker 05

  No.

• 24:38Speaker 05

  What are you talking about? Absolutely not.

• 24:42Speaker 06

  Just kicking it around.

• 24:44Nilay Patel?

  I think, I mean, honestly, like you said, macOS is a captive audience, right? If you want to run macOS, they still sold a lot of Macs during that period, even though the keyboards are notoriously bad. I think it got to the point where they were putting out new laptops with repair extension programs at the same time.

• 25:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  Just to calm people down. Because, you know, Apple's line was, this is a tiny fraction of keyboards that are breaking.

• 25:11Speaker 05

  The vast majority of people.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everybody loves them. Customer sat is through the roof and it's like Casey Johnson and Joanna Stern, their keyboards broke and it's all blown out of purp- like. That is not our experience, right? Like, again, there were two people on the Verge staff. My 13 inch MacBook Pro review unit had two broken keys, but three months ago, two keys were broken. We just know lots of people. I think it was under-reported. I think people just dealt with it. And so Apple's stats were wrong. And I think the more they looked into it, the more they realized trying to fix it versus just rebranding it and going back to the trusted design was the way to go. And I think they moved really fast. You know, obviously, Apple's product cycles are, they're a lot longer than just immediately reactive.

• 25:58Nilay Patel?

  All these products were probably ready to go. And they're cruising into graduation season and then back to school. And they need to be ready for that. They need to have a MacBook Air out now, stocked up in the channel, so they can do their discounts for back to school, assuming there is such a thing. You understand what I'm saying?

• 26:17Speaker 05

  Back to homeschool.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Here's my question for you, Dieter. Fully loaded MacBook Air or MacBook Pro? Because MacBook Air has the 10th gen chip.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. It has a 10th gen chip, but it's got a way lower thermal ceiling, right? Like, you can't, you can't run that thing hot. It'll, it'll start to choke way faster. And that will affect you, it won't affect you with like your 15th Chrome tab or whatever. It will affect you if you're trying to do stuff with like Lightroom, right? Or if you're trying to do stuff with, well, even with the GPU. But like, basically, if it runs hot, if you're doing video, you're doing anything quote-unquote "pro," you're, you know, decoding the genome or whatever, if you're G O hot, then you should step up. I mean, a bunch of people are asking me this question. And, you know, until I've like done a review, I can't say. And there's also like that lower base model of the Pro sort of out there, you know?

• 27:13Speaker 05

  I think that if you are asking that question, you should probably get the Pro. Because like, if you're not price sensitive enough and you like, you sort of, you are like thinking, well, maybe I want that power, you'll just feel better having gotten one of the Pros. If you're not asking that question, you're just like, I just want a Mac. I want a thin light MacBook. Then get the MacBook Pro. You'll be happy. So like, if you're asking, you're probably gonna be unhappy. Like, if you don't get the Pro, the first time the air is slow for you, you'll be like, ah, Dieter, how dare you? And I don't want that in my life. So.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, you can spec out a MacBook Air. Actually, specs are ridiculous. You can spec out an Air with a 10th gen i7, 16 gigs of RAM, and a 2 terabyte SSD for $22.50. That computer feels ridiculous to me.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  Yep, I completely agree.

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you're gonna spend that much money, you should definitely buy a Pro. Because I can't imagine why you need those specs if you're not trying to use them. Unless you just want to keep a computer for 10 years. Whereas, let's see. Oh, it's funny, the Pro, the MacBook Pro page on Apple's website is, uh, it's dark because it's, uh, it's Pro. Whereas the 1799 configuration, you can spec it out. Oh, 32 gigs of RAM.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can get up to 32 gigs of RAM and 4 terabytes of storage on the, uh, the new MacBook Pro, the 13 inch.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  You know, the only thing that would make me buy an Air over the Pro is the touchbar. I'm just gonna say it. I really dislike the touchbar. But I guess we gotta see. The thermal thing to me is, when I was reviewing the Air, you just watched it hit the ceiling. And the processor throttles way down by design. And like, you hear the fans, you're like, now my computer's slow. Which I, the more I think about it, makes less and less sense to me. If you're gonna run the fans super hot, it's because you're letting the processor get hot. It's like, that whole system is optimized to keep things cool, because it's cooling system, I understand. But if you're gonna run the fans super hot, like, high, and just deal with the noise, why not let the processor run hot?

• 29:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe they just can't. I, I still feel like, somewhere along the line, Intel told Apple, we got this, don't worry about it. Go ahead and design it the way you're designing it. We're gonna, we're gonna take care of you with the next version of the chip. And Apple's like, cool. So we'll use this thing that is too hot now. But you promise, the next one will be cool. And Intel's like, yeah, we got you. And Apple's like, we totally believe you, Intel.

• 29:41Speaker 05

  How does Apple make that belief? I don't know.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  I mean, and they couldn't get away from the air form factor, right? I mean, they tried.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  They super tried.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Refused to let them. All right. Well, speaking of Intel chips, iterative revs, a bunch of new Microsoft stuff.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. So the headline is Surface Book 3 and Surface Go 2. But there's also like, they finally put out release date for the earbuds and they also dropped the price. There's also new Surface headphones. There's a Surface Dock 2. There's new keyboards. So just like, Microsoft's like, oh yeah, we make stuff. Here it all is.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  But no one really has to, I mean, they're, they're saying Build, which is their traditional keynote developer conference. We're in developer conference season.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  And so Apple is still having a virtual WWDC. It seems like they're just all systems go.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. Google announced they're doing a keynote just for Android. It was like, they made a cute little video with George Takei, but it's not the full Google I/O developer conference.

• 30:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I always scaled way down. And then Microsoft is kind of like, we're doing Build, but it's more for developers than ever before.

• 30:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  And Build was always kind of the outlier, right? Like WWDC, the keynote was still a consumer keynote. They would like, at the end of it, they'd be like, and Swift UI. And then everyone would be like, but you announced a phone and pay attention to the phone. So Apple was their keynote at the developer conference was very consumer focused. Google was somewhere in the middle, right? They would announce a bunch of consumer products and then it was very much a developer conference. Microsoft was always at the farthest end of the spectrum where it was like, come for the keynote. Someone will write code on stage for an hour now. Which is very useful for its audience of developers, very much not a consumer keynote. So what you're seeing is Apple still going.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 31:26Nilay Patel?

  Google has scaled I/O way down, like basically not happening, but like they're going to do an Android.

• 31:33Speaker 05

  Thing.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  Announce.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then Microsoft Build is fully a developer conference now. And they're just releasing all the hardware this way.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:42Nilay Patel?

  There's a great video of Panos Panay, like, in his wood panel study.

• 31:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Saying, "I'm super pumped," and like, holding out products. Like, I love that. Anyway, Microsoft stuff.

• 31:51Speaker 05

  Uh, so I mean, what do you want to talk about first? I mean, I guess, uh, let me do, let me do the Surface Go 2 first, because that's kind of the easiest. Um, there's three things wrong with the original Surface Go. Well, four things wrong with the original Surface Go. The first thing that's wrong with it is it broke my heart, uh, because I loved it so much, because it's so cute and we and exactly what I want out of a computer. But it was not great. The first thing that was wrong with it was the screen was too small, the bezels were like embarrassingly huge. The second thing that was wrong with it was it was s- s- slow, slow, it was slow. Super slow. And then the third thing that was wrong with it was battery life was like not at all what you would expect out of it. So they've attempted to solve all three things, but only if you buy the model that costs like 629. Plus, you gotta buy the keyboard. Plus, you could decide if you want to get LTE.

• 32:33Speaker 05

  So the base price is 399, but for that price, you still get the Pentium Gold processor, which, mer. And even worse, you get eMMC storage, uh, which is, mer. So you gotta step up anyway to get an SSD. And you might, if you're gonna step up an extra, you know, I don't think it's 150 bucks or something, you might as well step up to the 629 edition. Which gets you a proper core M3 processor and 128 gigs of storage and I think 8 gigs of RAM. I've used it for like a tiny little bit and it does seem like it's, uh, it's gonna be okay. The screen is bigger, it's 10.5 inches, and they say the battery is bigger. I don't know the exact watt hours on it, uh, off the top of my head. So if you're willing to spend a little bit more money, they may have fixed the problem, but we don't know.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  But, uh, I'm excited about it because, um, I can't help but be excited about tiny computers.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Really feels like two different machines.

• 33:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 33:25Speaker 06

  Like, E- E- eMMC is so, so dang slow.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  Pentium Gold. It's paired with a Pentium Gold, which honestly sounds like a chip for old people. Like, it just sounds like a laxative, I'm sorry.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  You get an AARP discount.

• 33:44Speaker 06

  I would love a good old fashioned bake off between whatever iPad, I don't know which exact iPad you could get for $400 right now, but that iPad versus Surface Go, that's $400. But this $630 machine, like if you're thinking like, I want to do a laptop-y type thing with my iPad, or I want to do, you know, in a $4,000 keyboard or whatever Apple's charging, you know, versus I want to do a laptop-y type thing with this $630 and $100 keyboard with an M3, like that seems reasonable and interesting.

• 34:17Speaker 05

  It's reasonable and interesting. I mean, we'll see. It is only 120 gigs of storage, but oh, fine. You can, you can expand it with a micro SD card if you really want to. The thing that's interesting though, Neil, I said it's for old people. If you look at their video, it's like all kids. Like they are, they are definitely thinking, especially if I got that 399 model, just buy this for your kid. It'll solve their homework problem and they'll leave you alone while you're in isolation. Like I feel like that's what they're going for.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's in honestly, like not having enough laptops for your family to properly homeschool right now is a thing, but it's a thing that is well solved by Chromebooks. Like that's like a Microsoft trying to make a thing that competes with Chromebooks is just a theme now.

• 34:56Speaker 05

  Well, Windows 10 X, they'd like, oh, just kidding. It's not a dual screen OS anymore. It's now for single screens. The, uh, we're like, what?

• 35:04Speaker 06

  Wait, what?

• 35:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh huh. They're just going straight after Chrome OS with it now. They're just like, just kidding. Windows 10 X is for single screens first. We'll figure out the rest later. Who knows what the duos coming out and the Neo and everything else.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  I, I think if you, if you go to Best Buy and you browse the Chromebooks, they're, the 300, $400 Chromebooks are so, they just don't seem very trustworthy. And when you have a piece of hardware like the Surface Go, it has this premium aspect to it and it's from a brand that you know very well and you, and you love them because they don't allow you not to love them because they buy everything that you love.

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  The Wonderlist shutdown really hit you hard.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  I was just gonna say, now we're gonna talk about Wonderlist for the next 45 minutes. Great.

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  I just think like, right, but then you buy it, you buy the cheap one for Microsoft because it's Microsoft and you love it. And then you're.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  You made a mistake.

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then you've got this like slow story, like that's just, none of that makes any sense to me, but we gotta get them, we gotta review it. The more interesting one to me is the Surface Book 3, which is.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  Do you want to take this one, Neil? Like, because it is the most confusing machine ever.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  There's actually a number of Surface Books in my family.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  For whatever reason, my niece and nephew have them.

• 36:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  I always ask them if they use them as tablets.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  And?

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 36:23Speaker 05

  Never.

• 36:24Nilay Patel?

  Never. They never take them out of that base.

• 36:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. And the base to me is like the most interesting part of the entire product. Because if you've got a big, thick base that makes it effectively a laptop, well, they've stuck more battery in there, they can, there's all kinds of stuff they can do. Once they know in the base. And so like, you just put it together and then you have a much better computer because you've got more battery. The thing is allowed to run faster, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then you pull it off and you've got this like giant Windows tablet. It's unwieldy. And it's like, shouldn't you just put them together all the, like, it's a tablet that is best as a laptop. And worse as a tablet than almost every other tablet, but it's so compelling just because you can pull it apart.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  I mean.

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  I agree with you, it's confusing. I just don't know why, why we are across the industry now. We are insistent that the computer part needs to be in the screen, right? The iPad Pro has the same problem.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  You can, you can make a tablet and you can like do stuff with it. I would not go so far as to say that the, the tablet part of the book three is worse than everything else. It does mean that they have one compromise. So what they did, like, there's a 13 inch and there's the, you know, the bigger one, the 15 inch. And you can get, if you want, like an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Max Q or the 15 inch, you can get a 1660 Ti. You can like throw just a ton of RAM, GPU and all kinds of shit in the base. But the GPU has to live in the screen. Because you can take it off and it still needs to, you know, work, which means that they've gone with, they haven't gone with like the 45 watt chips that you get in like a regular laptop. You have the, the smaller lower watt, 15 watt Intel processor, first of the processors,

• 38:08Speaker 05

  which means that this, this machine is this incredibly confusing mix of like way more powerful than say a MacBook Pro, because you can get like a GPU that like actually gets used by a bunch of apps and like can let you play games and do like a ton of stuff. But at the same time, less powerful than a MacBook Pro because it has a, a Intel processor that's like super throttled and, you know, in its wattage. And so it's like, it's an interesting experiment to see what this computer is for. Who needs it? Who benefits from this particular combination of componentry?

• 38:41Nilay Patel?

  But the form factor of the computer is the confusing thing. Like if you need that GPU, why are you also thinking, sometimes I don't, and I just want to walk away with this tablet?

• 38:53Speaker 05

  If you're, if you're a CFO, Neelai.

• 38:56Speaker 06

  You're talking like someone who's never seen a Microsoft back.

• 39:00Nilay Patel?

  But it's like, oh, I gotta go over here and circle it.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  Sometimes you gotta sit down with your spreadsheet and crunch some numbers and you wanted, you want your GPU to do that.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Why do you need a GPU to do that?

• 39:10Speaker 06

  If you're a young, talented architect and sometimes, yeah, you're in the, you know, and then sometimes you gotta flip out the screen and show a client something and then, oh, your kids are home and you gotta pull up a recipe. There's a kid, I don't know.

• 39:26Speaker 05

  You know, if I was a young, talented architect, I would just become a young, talented architect influencer. And I would just shop myself to all of these companies nonstop. It's like, every product video you make basically features me. You should just put me in it and I would just be a multimillionaire.

• 39:41Nilay Patel?

  And it's just, it's just Dieter circling buildings over and over and over again.

• 39:45Speaker 06

  I could, I could imagine, I'm sure there are some people that they like the detachable tablet so much that that's why they would get this. I do think this would actually be a better product if it. Because I can imagine more people who would benefit from, I don't need a lot of CPU, but I do render things out every once in a while. And I need, I need the GPU to kick in, or I play video games that are often not bottlenecked by the CPU at all, just GPU. So there are, there are interesting use cases where that actually kind of makes sense, that low-power CPU and a good GPU.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna read you these two sentences from Tom's post on the Book Three. "This isn't the best choice for a gaming laptop in terms of price and performance, unless you want the unique combination of a removable touchscreen that also includes stylus support. You can configure Razer's new Blade 15 with an RTX 2060 and 144 Hz. display for less than the starting price of the Surface Book 3." You have to really want to pull that screen off and have a tablet. To me, the Surface Book 3 and the iPad Pro are like an apex of form factor confusion around tablets, right? Like, we have gotten to the place where we definitely think that tablets are important, but to make them useful, you definitely have to turn them into laptops.

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  And now it's like, because we think tablets, there's something here with this tablet thing. We have to remove, we have to be able to split this form factor up. But also, we know that everybody just really wants this form factor. Just, I don't know, maybe, here, here's my hot take. Tablets are useless. The end. Like, the idea that a tablet for a pro in this capacity is a useful thing. When Steve Jobs put out the iPad, he said it's a third device that needs to be good at these things in the middle. You still need a phone and a laptop. The more they've tried to sell tablets, the more they've tried to encroach on laptops. And all that has happened is we have turned them into laptops that are slightly worse because they're inherently compromised.

• 41:43Speaker 05

  Because phones got so much better and bigger that people just did all that tablet stuff on their phone.

• 41:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, look, I think the, like, I love the idea that it's a cool tablet that you can use and do all this stuff. And you click it in and it gets a better GPU and battery. That's, it's just cool on its face. But in practice, it's just gotten to the place where all we have is slightly worse laptops across however many different companies.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  The right compromise here, honestly, is just, just make the 360 hinge, honestly. Just. Everyone, everyone will think that they're gonna flip it around and use it. It'll be crappier as a tablet if you ever actually do it. But then you get all the benefits of a laptop. Just make the hinge that does the flippy thing all the way around. The end.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna put out the same challenge that we put out to people who game on Android phones. The mysterious Android gamer. If you are a hardcore Surface Book user and you are always attaching and detaching it from the base. At least once a week. Just tweet it to you. You don't have to do it every five minutes. Yeah. Once a week is like still not enough. Like, once a week is like you realize that you've spent the money and you're gonna try to force it again. Right? Like, three times a week. Okay. Every other day, you're on, you're detaching it intentionally because that's how you use it. Tweet it us. He's at Backlon, I'm at Reckless. We'd like to hear from you. I suspect, suspect you don't exist.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  But, you know, let me know.

• 43:10Speaker 05

  Oh, a bunch of people are mad at me because I, in the Surface Go 2 video, said that I think that, that I don't like the Surface Connector. And I don't. I, I, I know that Microsoft loves it. I know it's a very useful port. I know that it sticks in magnetically. I know that it makes it really convenient to plug a dock in. But you know what does all that just as well? Thunderbolt 3. It's not a magnetic connector, but other than that, it just does it. And Microsoft apparently thinks that that's wildly insecure, which is interesting. USB-C does it, that's not quite as well, but it can. You just don't get that magnetic fin.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  Wait, why does, why does Microsoft think it's insecure?

• 43:44Speaker 05

  Like, because there's a, there's a leaked presentation, Tom wrote about it, that apparently Thunderbolt 3 has like direct access to the motherboard and direct access to the RAM in some way that isn't mediated by software, which means that it could potentially be insecure. Is the claim from this internal presentation?

• 44:01Nilay Patel?

  Right. But Thunderbolt 3 is basically PCI, right? Like, that makes sense. Okay. I mean, Apple seems to not worry about it so much.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  Well, my whole thing, like, there are many, many good things about the Surface Connector and I like, I understand. But it's just like with the Apple's Magic Keyboard for the iPad. Just because the thing that they made is pretty good, like, that doesn't mean they could have made something better. Like, the, the things that have to happen to Microsoft's Surface laptops and tablets and whatever in order to keep that Surface Connector there is theoretically holding other things back.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  Like they have to put the space in there to make the the fin port work in the magnets. Number one. Number two, it's keeping them from like figuring out a way to like make Thunderbolt secure the way they might want to, right? Because like, oh, we got, we'll just keep this thing. I don't know.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they're keeping their options open with AMD, right? Because Thunderbolt is very much an Intel thing.

• 44:51Speaker 05

  That could be. Yeah, I don't know.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, they might be keeping their options open with ARM as well. Like, what Apple does with Thunderbolt and ARM is going to be, it's like an upcoming question, because Thunderbolt right now, very much tied to Intel.

• 45:03Speaker 05

  My, my original, my pinned tweet for years was, it's okay to like things and it's okay that other people like things. And like, don't be, don't be mean for people who like in the thing that they like. I'm just gonna put out the flip side. It's okay that I don't like the Surface Connector. It does not mean that you're wrong, that you like it. I, you are correct. The Surface Connector is great. I am correct. The Surface Connector is garbage.

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Hot take on the Vergecast, everybody.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  How philosophy works.

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone is right. The connector both exists and does not exist at the same time.

• 45:33Speaker 06

  Wouldn't like to be a Surface Connector.

• 45:36Nilay Patel?

  All right. More Microsoft news. Does Xbox Series X have a Surface Connector? That would really turn this upside down.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  So Microsoft's, I don't know, tidal wave of Xbox Series X news continues to crash upon our shores.

• 45:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  Today was gameplay footage that came out, showing off ray tracing, they're showing off their graphics, they're showing off the games, they have a bunch of game announcements about what will be optimized, game sharing between the original Xbox One and the Xbox Series X, some, some confusion around how other companies are going to implement it, particularly EA. What is going on here?

• 46:13Speaker 06

  Here's, here's what I think.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  Microsoft's strategy, I think, is to really push this thing where you can buy games right now, and they'll be playable on the next gen. And when you buy, and when the next gen comes out, current Xbox One owners won't feel super left behind. And so this, this is a kind of a weird. This doesn't feel like an E3 slate of games, if you know what I mean. Like Assassin's Creed was is definitely like the biggest IP. Like, the best looking game in this lineup is called, and they led off the presentation with it. Bright Memory Infinite is crazy beautiful, made by one person.

• 46:58Speaker 06

  It's like, and so they're really leaning into, the way it's looking to me with a lot of these games, they don't look very next gen, except for like the ray tracing aspect, which is obviously super next gen. So it's gonna be stuff like lighting. And like anything you can do on the GPU, anything you can do like with a shader, to like make cooler special effects, like better smoke and wind. There's a ton of weather in a lot of these videos. If you if you've noticed, like in the games, like, looks like weather technology is great. And you've got like in the Bright Memory trailer, there's all these like moving trees with leaves and stuff.

• 47:39Speaker 06

  And it's and rain and it's stunning and very next gen looking. But I feel like what is not here is what next gen looks like in like 2021, 22, when you have games coming out that won't be backwards compatible. Because if you make a game that has to also run on Xbox One or PlayStation 4, it has to work with a regular hard drive. And so you can't pack in like way higher res textures, for instance, that wouldn't, you know, load as well. You know, I just feel like there's a lot of stuff that game developers have to decide whether they're gonna make a title right now that's gonna bridge both consoles,

• 48:22Speaker 06

  which is probably a better decision at the moment. But there's gonna come a time when I feel like what will truly look next gen in more ways than just these like graphical effects, will be the like higher res textures and stuff that takes more advantage of the SSD and the CPU.

• 48:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so Microsoft has a new badge optimized for Series X. Like all of Microsoft's badges in the past. It means one or all of several things. So it's 4K resolution. It's faster cargo compression. It's the use of the SSD. But it doesn't, it doesn't require the developer to use all those things. It's just maybe some of them, maybe all of them. I think this transition period in this console generation is going to be real weird. Right?

• 49:11Speaker 05

  You're trying to convince a bunch of people to buy your new console when they currently have an existing console. Right? How do you get someone to buy a new console? Well, there's better graphics and there are these games that you can only play on this new console. Well, they're trying to split that difference. It's like, well, there's better graphics, but the games like they're going to be backwards compatible. They're going to work on everything, but you'll know you're getting the better graphics. If you have this badge, but this badge doesn't necessarily mean you're getting all the cool stuff. It just means you're getting some cool stuff. And so all of a sudden you're, you know, your pitch to the gamer is go buy this new expensive thing. Some games may be optimized for it, but we don't want to cut off the backwards compatibility. So you could still play them if you don't, don't buy it. But if you do buy it, it'll be optimized for it. You'll see, you'll know because of this badge, but you also got to make sure you look at what's listed underneath the badge.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  So you can find out exactly what benefits you're getting.

• 49:58Nilay Patel?

  I think this is all directly related to the just gigantic shift in business model that the entire tech industry has seen. Right?

• 50:06Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 50:06Nilay Patel?

  So what was every previous console? The first generation of hardware sales lost money. Right? This is just the standard way that particularly console gaming industry worked. Microsoft put out the Xbox. They lost Xbox. They lost money on every Xbox sale for a while. They made all the money on games. They had the install base. They would put out the next version, cut costs, slowly start to make money in hardware sales, but then have the install base, make money licensing all the games. That was the old way, to some extent, still happening. What is next to it now is a gigantic services business, right? Xbox Live, all of the in-game purchases, all the stuff, right? Like subscriptions to, they're selling movies in the store.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  So just having the hardware there is important. And now, once you want that, you need an entire range of prices of hardware. Right? Like you need, you need the cheap one, you need the expensive one. You just need to get the box in people's houses so I can start spending money on it.

• 51:05Speaker 06

  Even their branding, along those lines, even their branding for this cross plat, cross generation games is called smart delivery. And smart delivery does not at all evoke cross generation compatible, be like smart compatible or something, you know? Smart delivery is like a service.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's what I was saying about EA at the very beginning of all this. EA has not pledged to use it. So you can get, you can buy Madden, but if you want to get Madden now and then use it on your Xbox Series X, you have to like buy it within some window and then upgrade it within some window. And it's not this promise of when you download the game, we'll deliver the right bits for your console.

• 51:44Speaker 06

  Cause they don't want you to go to GameStop and buy like an old version of Madden 21 and then it runs next gen probably, right?

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  I wonder what it's like to be like the product lead for Madden at EA and just be know that like, no matter what, every year, I'm gonna turn on this money fountain. Just like, like when they have their like stand-up meetings, they're like, how are all the games going? And they get to the Madden guy, he's like, money fountain scheduled to turn on.

• 52:12Nilay Patel?

  It's coming, don't you worry about it. We have an exclusive license for this game.

• 52:17Speaker 06

  What if it's, what if it's like an ice luge, like, like that, like they have CES for like to pour the alcohol down the ice luge, you know?

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I bet it's a more expensive ice luge than what it's, yeah, probably. The CES ice luge is spectacularly low rent.

• 52:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:31Nilay Patel?

  I bet the Madden money fountain is a towering structure. Anyway, the next gen console stuff is happening. I just think that. Do you guys watch, I think Polygon did a great piece on ray tracing in Minecraft. Just go look it up on Polygon. There are a bunch of demos of what it looks like with ray tracing, ray trace graphics on a PC in Minecraft. It is, it's Minecraft. It looks insane. Cause it's still Minecraft.

• 52:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  But it's like some of the most beautiful lighting you've ever seen in Minecraft. And it's just one of those places where, because the game, it's not trying to be beautiful. Like Minecraft, at no point is Minecraft trying to be beautiful. You can just very clearly see what the ray tracing is doing. It's, it's just such a stark difference in the game versus other games are usually trying to be beautiful and they're faking it anyway.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah. Lots of other games have been trying to fake a lot of these effects. So I, I'm very excited if, if this is all, I mean, again, this, this, this, this game made by this one dude. Like is an example of, in some sense, it's, it might become cheaper to make a good game. You know, it might be easier to make something that's very beautiful. Or, you know, it's cheaper to make something performant. Like, you know, Grand Theft Auto famously would read game data off your hard drive and the Blu-ray drive simultaneously to keep up.

• 53:58Speaker 06

  And so a developer doesn't need to invest that crazy amount of effort to, to get something good. These, these consoles are bonkers powerful. And it's, it's really exciting. I'm just trying to like hedge my own excitement because I always know like, you know, you get a launch lineup and it's a little disappointing. I mean, like, remember all that, like fake Boca and stuff and like lens flares in like the early 360 generation? Like, yeah, developers are going to have new effects and they're probably going to slather them on just a little too thick, I feel like at first. But in a year or two, games are going to be ridiculously better than they are right now graphically. At least there's that, there's that horsepower is available.

• 54:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think I'm gonna switch back to the Xbox this this cycle.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  Whoa, why?

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  Why? I just feel like the the amount of complication in smart delivery and all this stuff. Like, Microsoft is a better computer company. And all this stuff feels like hard computer service problems. And Sony is like a great, I mean, I love my PS4. I've actually been playing more than ever during all this. It's just a great product, but there's just a part of all of this developer transition, all of this service integration where I'm just like, I don't know if Sony can pull it off.

• 55:21Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  You just, you know?

• 55:23Speaker 06

  You you just love you some Azure is what you're saying.

• 55:26Nilay Patel?

  I just I just like smart like smart delivery conceptually, right? It's like, it's just a very hard thing to pull off.

• 55:33Speaker 06

  I I just wonder if smart delivery implies that Apple or I I wonder if smart delivery implies that Microsoft is gonna lean a little bit more on this cross generation thing and therefore be a little slower to flagship. Because Microsoft also has a lot fewer first party titles than than Sony does. So if if, you know, Microsoft's gonna have fewer standout flagship, you know, show showcase games to pull people in. So like, there's just gonna be the big tent that allows, you know, every, you know, every game to run everywhere where Sony maybe, and this is total conjecture, but maybe Sony will be pushing harder to like here is something that is literally impossible on any hardware

• 56:18Speaker 06

  on the planet other than the PlayStation 5.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I'm sure that's what they'll do, and I'm sure I'll end up buying it. I mean, why am I pretending like I'm not gonna buy both, first of all? Just for the sake of conflict on this show. Um, but I've been a PS4 person and it's been great. And I just find myself like, oh, the computer part of this computer is not nearly as good. Like, it's just like very obvious that Sony is better at games and worse at. Managing a service and computer stuff. We talk about like, there's just, everything is now a computer. And so like, being good at the computer stuff is more important than ever. We'll see. I guarantee you that Sonos will come out with some game that makes me buy a PS5. All right. Speaking of computer stuff, one last thing to talk about. Dieter, you, you told me that you trolled the entire internet.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  Well,

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  With this Google.

• 57:04Speaker 05

  I had to troll the, the internet. It's, it's a, it's a fair and accurate headline, but if you don't read it, read it. Cause you know, then, then maybe you would be confused. The headline is Google, Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team. So.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  A team of apps.

• 57:21Speaker 05

  There's a, there's one person now in charge of all of their apps instead of them being spread out across a bunch of different teams. All their communication apps. So let me tell you a story. A long time ago, there was an app that was the best email app for the iPhone. By far. Yeah, but it was very, very good. It was called a Compli. And then Microsoft bought it. And you know what they did? They didn't ruin it. They turned Outlook into it. They just turned it into Outlook and it became their email app. Unlike what they did with, you know, Wonderlist. The person who was CEO of the company that made that app, Javier Fertaro, bounced around Microsoft for a while, did some Cortana stuff for a while. And last October got put in charge of G Suite. And in the time since, Hangouts meet Chat, Chat meet, Meet Chat, Meet Cute, whatever it was called,

• 58:05Speaker 05

  has now simply just become Google Meet and Google Chat for enterprise. They're working on cleaning it up for, you know, consumers. That's still a little bit of a mess. But they just made the call, like, seems like he knows what he's doing. And so they have, they have put him in charge of.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  The, the apps that are on Android for communication. So primarily it consists of like Duo Messages and the phone dialer. Now there's a bunch of really deep nerdy WebRTC and RCS politics we could get into here if you want. I'm, I'm willing to do that.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  Go. That's why we're here.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  So if you think this means that they're just going to unify everything, it does not. Like Google thinks like, look, the people, like the, the quote I got from Hiroshi Lock, Lockheimer, which I haven't put in the article is, look, y'all use Slack, right? Yeah, yeah, we use Slack. Is anybody angry that Slack doesn't integrate RCS?

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's just like.

• 59:00Speaker 05

  No, the answer is no. And so.

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  But it's not even like.

• 59:04Speaker 05

  I know.

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  I like Hiroshi a lot.

• 59:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  That question is insane.

• 59:07Speaker 05

  Well, but the point is that do you want your Android messages to integrate with your work chat is like kind of the question. I don't know. Like this is their contention is like, look, like the work stuff, the enterprise stuff shouldn't be merged with the consumer stuff. There's like different use cases for different kinds of apps, different kinds of communication apps. That's their, that's their, what they're saying. And so don't expect all these apps to merge. And I actually, I do want them to like clean it up a little bit more. But I don't want them to rush into it because I saw what happened the last time they tried to rush into unifying all of their messaging apps. And it was called Hangouts. And that worked for about a month. And then it all went to shit. And then it has taken them three years to recover from that.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I agree that enterprise apps and consumer apps are different. I would also point to the fact that the two most popular enterprise apps in the world right now are Slack and Zoom, which are great consumer apps. And that is why they are successful. And consumers are using them in droves.

• 1:00:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, I think that they want Google Chat, Hangouts, that transition to finally happen. I think that's like the next thing that has to happen. That like, it has to stop being in this weird nether zone that it's been in for a very, very long time. Like, we're gonna kill it. And everyone's like, no, like, no, we're gonna replace it. We're like, okay. And when are you gonna do that? And like, well, we're gonna do it. And it just like, took a while. And it's still taking a while.

• 1:00:29Nilay Patel?

  But to get back to the RCS and Slack point.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:00:33Nilay Patel?

  That makes no sense.

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  No one is like, I want an iMessage from Slack either.

• 1:00:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. I also guarantee you that if that demand existed, Slack would build, test, deploy, and iterate on its RCS connector.

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  10 times faster.

• 1:00:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Nilay Patel?

  Than Google has done anything with RCS.

• 1:00:52Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  The demand doesn't exist because RCS is for texting, and Slack is for chat rooms at work.

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  So then Google's argument, the reason that, like, the analogy being made here is why would you expect chat and Android messages to be the same thing?

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  Wait, I'm sorry. Which one is Google Chat?

• 1:01:14Speaker 05

  This is part of the frickin' problem, right here. Google Chat is Google's Hangouts competitor. And it will eventually be the thing that they replace.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Wait, it's Hangouts competitor?

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  God damn it.

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  Google Chat is Google Slack/Microsoft Teams competitor. And eventually, it will be on the consumer side become, I think, what we're places hangouts, which is what everyone used to call Google Chat, but was never actually Google Chat. Neelai is dying. I literally am watching him die right now on my video screen.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  These names are all bad.

• 1:01:50Speaker 06

  I do like the idea that I can't accidentally convert a personal chat into a work chat. Like, I like there's some sort of membrane there.

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Speaker 06

  But there are a lot of times when you are in a one-on-one conversation, and then you want to move to, you add somebody into that. And you're like, actually, you know what? This should be a voice call. Oh, actually, let's do this on video. Hey, let me share my screen. Oh, let's bring this back to voice.

• 1:02:22Speaker 05

  Google Chat/Meet are designed to do that. And then on Android, it's a combination of Android Messages and Duo. And like, so we're not going to get like a grand integration, but there are going to be some benefits. So one of the things that Javier told me was like, right now, there's Hangouts/Meet and there's Duo on Android. And they both use some variant of WebRTC, right? But like Duo is like using a new kind of video spec for, to make sure that it looks better. And I don't think Meet is there yet. And so Google's, you know, they support this open spec WebRTC for video on the web. And then they're building products on top of it. But they're building products in two slightly different directions. And now he'll be able to just like have them build in the same direction

• 1:03:06Speaker 05

  and use a technology in similar ways instead of different ways.

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's nice.

• 1:03:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  This sounds better. I agree with your take.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  This is not my take. I'm just telling you what I have been told. My take is Google has been wildly negligent with RCS and with Android messaging. They took way too long to recover from the fiasco of Hangouts because, you know, it's like, it's like, have you ever had just like a really, really bad meal at like a particular restaurant? You know that that restaurant is good, you know, and like you, you want, you'll go back there again, but you just don't want to think about it. And then you finally go back like, oh, God, I should, I should have like solved this problem sooner. That was Google Plus/Google Hangouts for Google, right? Like, they just, it was so, all of that, that entire episode was so painful for them. It was easier for them to just not think about it. And that meant that things got messy. And now they're thinking about it again.

• 1:03:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, the take I was agreeing with was they looked around and they identified a guy who seems like he knows what he's doing. Yes, that is true. It is amazing that I said I agree with your take and you went there. I was just like, this guy maybe seems like he knows what he's doing. Like, yep, he's got some history. I think if they more cleanly differentiate the enterprise and consumer stuff.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  They come up with some branding that actually makes sense. Yes. And they should just name all the consumer stuff G Chat, which is a product that has never existed, but everyone thinks exists. It exists now. It's the enterprise product.

• 1:04:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. I can't talk about this anymore. We're taking a break. We'll be right back.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

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• 1:05:39Speaker 02

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• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul. Yeah. Every week, my friend. Mm hmm. You do a segment. What's it called? What, what is it called?

• 1:05:54Speaker 06

  It's called embarrassingly parallel. It's called phone prison. Lonely alone. Fold the phone. It's called the hearings. Record resolution revolution. I've carved this for you out of aluminum. It's the weekly robot backflip update. Rhymes with what's popping. Sha Su Eavage. Safety first, they said. Ring a ding ding. Kickflip, the kickstand script. What is it like to be a dolphin? Please don't block my chain. Wireless vapes. Keyboard in the front club. Population two. Cold ears, warm heart. Can't lose. Can't lose. The decline of dirt. Meal pods two. Jeff Bezos edition. First to fold. Type like nobody's watch. Spin to win. Space egg. E-skates arms race.

• 1:06:39Speaker 06

  Clam this. Because I'm going to interrupt this week's regularly scheduled segment for an important announcement from the USB Implementers Forum. Call touch a tree, touch the future. Hashtag dongle what? Nightlight highlights. Sleep tight. iPad LAN party. My heart is a low frequency oscillator. Please replace magenta. Why didn't you push that button? Don't brick the shoes. Don't brick the jacket. Smart yoga pants. Nice netbook, man. Tell me, am I beautiful? Why not two? Keyboard in the front club honorary inductee edition. The penultimate dongle. A jaunty nega notch. Invisible to visible.

• 1:07:21Speaker 06

  I believe I have met this robot dog before in a past life. Phones aren't jokes. Robots dance while they die. A cloud computing murder tale brought to you by the same people who collectively write all the James Patterson novels. It's called Android tablets are a real gift to humanity, and I think we forget that sometimes. Did I ever tell you about the time I built my own computer? The year of the Linux desktop with a delightful plot twist brought to you by Christopher Nolan. Dongle town USA. The JSON of emotions. ATX more like late TX. No more notches. And there's a question mark. A lot of people leave off. The question skate for is not a joke.

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  Do I look like I'm laughing? Now that's a smart kid. The sweetest pies. Admin book is best book. It's called you've been a good boy. Nice book you've got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. Are there no laws for hype piece? And the track point guys laughing. Sorry, I can't pass the jewel because of cybersecurity. Fringe ice is trash ice. Please don't at me. If my shoes turn green, it's time for crime. Let me just jot that down with my money pen. It's called, what do you want? A medal? Here's the place where we do the crimes. Signed, your friend, a team. 600% screen to body ratio. I've seen the matrix. I'm not an idiot. You know what?

• 1:08:51Speaker 06

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• 1:09:34Speaker 06

  Take me to your metaverse, Mr. Sweeney. I'm a Moog man now. It's my year of the Linux desktop, boys. If I were a rich man. Pop the stack. More hurts than you can handle, old man. Tap me on the shoulder. Display port alt mode 2.0. A memoir.

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  One last time to hold this nation together.

• 1:09:58Speaker 06

  Can you do it?

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  As we've heard, it's always been called the same thing.

• 1:10:02Speaker 06

  It is and always and will always be called so long. And thanks for all the Bitcoin. Obviously, I'm referring to the Zoom acquisition of Keybase. Keybase is the coolest and worst thing simultaneously. They have basically made like serious and amazing software and encryption and cryptography tools, easily usable, beautiful, super friendly, and they're also funded by what in my mind is a scam coin called Stellar.

• 1:10:44Speaker 06

  And so Keybase, they did some sort of Stellar did like an airdrop via Keybase where they just gave a bunch of people Stellar because it's a scam coin and nothing means anything. And I got like, I don't remember how much, but it was a serious amount of dollars. Then I like, there was like somebody popped up a service where you could just like send the Stellar to him and he'd pay you in lightning, like Bitcoin.

• 1:11:12Speaker 05

  You're just making up words.

• 1:11:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, it worked and I have money now thanks to the Stellar acquisition of Keybase, but it's also really sad because it felt like one of the coolest things in the space was like trending towards a kind of a scammy world. So now Zoom just bought Keybase as part of their like, we're going to make our software secure and it's not really clear what's going to happen to Keybase. Like it might just be an aqua hire. I think the phrase is leaders from Zoom and Keybase will work together to determine the future of the Keybase product.

• 1:11:50Speaker 05

  I mean, that that means it's done. That means it's done. There's no way that that that that statement is, that's a classic aqua hire statement. We will work together to determine the future. That means goodbye. That means it's going to get underlisted at best.

• 1:12:06Speaker 06

  My, my hope is that just like if you told me four years ago that I would host all my code on a Microsoft cloud service and use a Microsoft like IDE for, for developing full time like I was like, get out of here. But they, they pivoted so hard to loving developers. They really embraced the words of Steve Ballmer, developers, developers, developers. And you know, now love them or hate them, it's hard, kind of hard to get away from Microsoft's services for developers. So I'm saying Zoom pivots from being hilariously insecure to being the ultimate cryptographer because,

• 1:12:49Speaker 06

  because keybase has a whole suite of products. They have encrypted Git. They've got like in, in encrypted chat. And I think that they have working group chat as well. Like they've got all these wonderful services. They've got like a, like a Dropbox competitor in a sense. All, all encrypted, all with good cryptography. Zoom could be the, the company that brings them to the mainstream and turn that image around.

• 1:13:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the, the amount of work Zoom has done to bring on advisors. We're, we're going to interview Alex Stamos, who's a Zoom's, one of Zoom's security advisor in a week or so. They've brought on these advisors. They're buying keybase. They've frozen their features for 90 days to focus on security. It is a pretty rapid response to a lot of well deserved criticism. Paul, I agree. No one knows what's going to happen with keybase. Like even their, their own press materials are like, yeah, we'll see. In a normal world, we would just find out because keybase is in our office building. But I would just like go over there. But I guess not. So we'll just, we'll keep sending emails until they answer.

• 1:13:58Speaker 06

  Anyways, thanks for the Bitcoin, guys.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna buy you one Bitcoin, but it turns out they're very expensive.

• 1:14:02Speaker 06

  They are expensive.

• 1:14:03Nilay Patel?

  So I will not be buying you a parting Bitcoin.

• 1:14:07Speaker 06

  It's pumping that the halving is coming up. Are you guys aware of this?

• 1:14:11Nilay Patel?

  Yes, because Liz is dying to write about it. What is your take on the halving, the halvinging?

• 1:14:17Speaker 06

  Well, so every four years, Bitcoin has a fixed issuance rate that gets cut in half every four years. So about every 10 minutes, a new block is rewarded to like a new block is mined and the miner gets a reward of Bitcoin. So that's how that's the what's called the flow in into the Bitcoin system. And we're right now at like 17 million Bitcoin and there's only ever going to be 21 million. So that but the the incoming supply gets cut in half every four years. So that's what we're coming up on. And at the moment of the halving, the stock to flow ratio of Bitcoin will be scarcer than that of gold.

• 1:15:01Speaker 06

  So there's there's X amount of gold that exists. And then there's Y amount of gold that is mined, right? So the amount that exists is the stock, the amount is mined is the flow. That that Bitcoins ratio will be more extreme than gold's ratio after this halving. So it's very exciting and and.

• 1:15:24Nilay Patel?

  What what does what does that does that just mean that I'll see ads for Bitcoin on like late night cable TV?

• 1:15:30Speaker 06

  It means, yes, yes, it means it means Bitcoin is becoming like the most scarce asset in existence. So if you think Bitcoin is money and you think it's an asset, it is becoming officially the absolute hardest money. Like if you if you are into gold because of its stock to flow ratio, you just got one upped.

• 1:15:53Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I want to believe. I just at some point, you watch all of these things result in what people really want, which is dollars.

• 1:16:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like the when I say Bitcoin is expensive, it's because I have dollars and I want, you know what I mean? Like the the relationship to the fiat currencies is still just the the fundamental of the thing. When do you think the transition to Bitcoin being valued for Bitcoin is?

• 1:16:19Speaker 06

  I think in.

• 1:16:23Speaker 06

  I feel like in 10 years, you would be like mad if someone tried to pay you dollars.

• 1:16:29Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:16:30Speaker 06

  Like.

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  A hard prediction for you're going out with a bang.

• 1:16:33Speaker 06

  I think there's something wrong with most monies that can be printed and Bitcoin can't be printed. And there's something kind of special about that. And so, yeah, like, most people get interested in this stuff because of for dollar gains. Like, I'm gonna buy low and sell high. But most of the people I follow in the Bitcoin community are trying to create a permanent exit from the fiat system.

• 1:17:00Speaker 05

  Paul, I have a harder question. How many years until Bitcoin doesn't make me feel stupid?

• 1:17:07Speaker 06

  I mean, like, how many layers of the internet are there? Like, I don't fully understand TCP IP and DNS and all that, all that sort of thing. Like, Bitcoin is relatively difficult to understand.

• 1:17:24Speaker 05

  I think the problem with Bitcoin's complexity is that there are people who are financially incentivized to make it complex. Because when they make it complex, they are able to like get an edge on other people. I don't mean like in the core paper of like what Bitcoin is itself. I mean, in the Bitcoin economy and like the shit that happened, the meta stuff.

• 1:17:44Speaker 06

  It feels like all the money in that economy is trying to make things easier. Like Cash App, you know, you could just tap a button, buy some Bitcoin, or you can like dollar cost average with like Swan Bitcoin or, you know, a lot of the, the work in there is, is trying to make it more usable and, and easy to use. And I feel like when you compare it to the fiat system, like which one's really actually more complex?

• 1:18:09Speaker 05

  All right, well, this is an excellent transition into you talking about your new show because you're, you've already done two episodes and you're talking about Bitcoin. Tell people about your new show and then we'll get out of here.

• 1:18:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Cyberdeck Users Weekly, I just want to talk about like what technology is for and like kind of the weird directions that I'm interested in going with it. I don't know, like, like, I'm thinking of doing an episode of like, are we using computers correctly? You know, like, maybe we should be doing more math. I don't know, like, I just got a lot of thoughts I want to dig into. And I've also got a lot of people that I love in like, the open source and technology industry that I want to talk to. So my first interview was with Matt Odell, who is a Bitcoiner. And that was a lot of fun. But he's like a longtime Vergecast listener. So we got to talk a lot about, you know, security and

• 1:19:00Speaker 06

  privacy and technology in general. And then also Bitcoin. So there's probably going to be a lot of, a lot of that. And yeah, we'll just, we'll, we'll see where it goes. But yeah, some people are already listening, and I'm really grateful to them. And yeah, you can find me at paul.lol.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, Paul, it has been a privilege and great fun to be doing this show with you for across three different shows to be doing it. I'm sure we will have our paths crossed again in the future. But thanks for doing this for us, man. Thanks, thanks for making the Vergecast. It's been great.

• 1:19:35Speaker 06

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:19:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. That's Vergecast. This is for you, buddy. Rock and roll.

• 1:19:42Speaker 06

  Paul.

• 1:19:43Nilay Patel?

  Paul. Paul.

• 1:20:34Speaker 07

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.