Pod Insights The Vergecast Starlink, Epic v. Apple, and laptops laptops laptops About this episode The Epic v. Apple trial continues with big drama about naked bananas and weird game definitions. Nilay tries to get Starlink space internet working, and there's new Intel chips. Adi Robertson and Monica Chin join this week.
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Transcript 15,159 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? Today on the Vergecast, Addie Robertson joins the show to talk about week two of Epic versus Apple and what is going on in Apple's ads business. Really weird stuff. Then Monica Chin joins the show. We talk about my Starlink review and go over all of the new laptops that came out this week. It's a wild Vergecast coming up now.
0:18 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:03 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:52 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of infrastructure. That's right, it's infrastructure week to Verge. We have a lot of coverage of all of the different ways we're connected, all the services we need, which means, yes, it's true, on this episode of the show, we're going to talk about Starlink. It's going to happen. I'm your friend Eli. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your bridge to 21st century. There it is. Addie Robertson's here.
2:15 Speaker 02 Hi, I watch trials.
2:18 Nilay Patel? Addie's been watching the Apple Epic trial. A little later, Monica Chin is going to join us to talk about all the new laptops that came out this week. She also, she and I had a number of Starlink experiences, I would say. I want to start at the start with COVID. We are, we're in just a weird place with COVID, still the biggest story in the world. The CDC today, actually right before we came on air, said if you were vaccinated, you have to wear a mask in many, many situations now, which is cool. So get vaxxed if you can. We have a bunch of coverage on sort of this moment in pandemic, including getting hospitals ready for the next pandemic. Like, we've learned a lot. How should hospitals be prepared? And how to count the impact of the pandemic. People who got sick, people who died, lots of people died. There's a math fight, as you would expect.
3:01 Nilay Patel? There's a data integrity fight about that stuff happening. So we have coverage of that on the site. But as I said last week, if you're not vaccinated, please just go get the shot. That's like the fastest way to make this over. And it feels, feels like we are going to enter a summer where it's more normal than not. What we are not going to enter is the end stage of Apple versus Epic. Not my best segue, but I'm sticking to it. I was wondering. It wasn't great. Okay. But Addie, you're, it's week two of the trial. You know, the first week involved a lot of executives on the stand, a lot of internal emails. I would say everybody was a little loosey goosey with document production. This week, it's a bunch of experts, like antitrust experts, and things have tightened
3:45 Nilay Patel? up a little bit, but there's still a lot going on.
3:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know, so it's, we had one day of more executives. The most fun weird thing of the week happened, which was that they fought over a banana. And then since then, we've had three days of expert witnesses who are just getting into incredibly exhaustive detail about how you define the market that everyone is fighting over.
4:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so if you are coming to this cold, and I am so sorry if you're coming to the bridge cast in the middle of the trial. Also a little jealous. Yeah, so you're coming to this cold. Apple makes the iPhone, as you may or not know, on the iPhone. We're starting there. If you, if you are coming to the verge, Cassie, know what Apple and the iPhone are. God bless you. You're out of your comfort zone and I applaud you. But Apple makes the iPhone to do an in-app purchase for most things. So you open an app, you want to buy something. For anything digital, Apple takes a 30% cut. If you're a small developer, they take a smaller cut. But for big developers at scale, it's 30%. That rule's unbendable. Epic, which makes Fortnite, wishes to bend this rule. They put Fortnite on the phone and they issue a hot fix, their
4:53 Nilay Patel? word, as part of something called Project Liberty, also their word, where they put their own payment system into Fortnite, bypassing Apple's payment system. Apple kicks them off the store, Epic files an antitrust lawsuit, here we are. So that's, I just, contextually, that's where we are. And now what they are fighting over is adding, if I'm getting this correctly, what the market that Apple has monopolized in and what market Fortnite is in?
5:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, roughly. Epic's argument is, first of all, that it's not just a game company. It makes the Unreal Engine, it makes the Epic Game Store, which is like a meta game thing. And it bought House Party, a social video app, a couple of years ago. And it's saying also that the thing that's at issue here is transactions, that like, the market Apple has monopolized is not like the digital games market, it is the transaction market. So that should apply to like, the entire app ecosystem. Apple's like, you made a game, we have rules that apply to games, there are lots of other places you can go to get games, Fortnite is on literally every other platform, what are you doing? This is a thing about games, we clearly don't have a monopoly on games.
6:02 Nilay Patel? And then there's like, a lot of extremely hilarious marginal conversation about what is a game?
6:09 Speaker 02 Yes, it just keeps popping up. Well, and it keeps popping up in scenarios that are completely like, at cross purposes. So like, are you going to define a game in terms of whether or not it is like, interactive code that poses a threat to your computer or your phone? Is it a game in terms of whether it's categorized as a game on the store? Is it a game in terms of like, it's a separate product? Like, there are just all these different definitions. And if you think of them in a sort of aesthetic sense, it just turns into this hilarious, weird model.
6:40 Nilay Patel? Well, like Roblox just keeps coming up in this conversation, which is like a Minecrafty game in which you can create other games, right? Like,
6:50 Speaker 02 No, a game has a beginning and end and challenges in place. This is my favorite definition, which is from one of the Apple executives that was in fact talking about why games inside Roblox aren't really games.
7:01 Speaker 03 Is correctly defining a game itself a game?
7:06 Nilay Patel? Yes, we need to make a game where you define a game.
7:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:10 Speaker 02 Does it have a beginning and end and challenges? Because otherwise it's not.
7:16 Nilay Patel? I feel like we can definitely make a game where the object is to define a game.
7:21 Speaker 02 There are now multiple game jams based on this, so you can enter one of those. Based on the beginning, end and challenges and the unspeakable games from last week, where Apple criticized Epic for hosting another game store that had like adult content in it.
7:38 Nilay Patel? Actually, this is, we should talk about this for a second. So we had you on the show last week on Friday and on that Friday, this trial went into just like pure hilarity because of this H I O situation. Just walk us through that real quick.
7:54 Speaker 02 Okay, so there are like three layers of Meta Store here, but part of the trial involves Epic wants to put its own Epic Game Store onto iOS as a competitor to the App Store. The Epic Game Store, as its name suggests, is mostly a store for games, but it's been slowly adding things that aren't strictly game related, like Spotify and the Brave browser on it. And just before the trial started, it added, I don't actually remember what the real way is to pronounce it. H I O is the thing, it's a game store and its deal is basically being this sort of small, very easy to access, like indie store, hosts a lot of really small games. It's where I put my games. It also hosts adult content.
8:37 Speaker 02 And so through like this sort of transitive property, Apple decided that this means that Epic Game Store is hosting porn.
8:48 Speaker 02 The titles of which it cannot speak in federal court, but they are both offensive and sexualized. And so then this got into, like, there was this whole fight over, okay, well, Apple's saying that we need to keep the iPhone locked down and safe. So if Epic gets to put its game store on iOS, is that going to mean that there's just this pornographic free for all? The judge seemed to take it, like, seriously enough to ask some sort of follow-up questions. And then Apple also got back and basically tried to get Epic to throw HIO in Apple's words from a different scenario under the bus.
9:24 Speaker 03 Oh, my God.
9:25 Speaker 02 That they brought up the issue again. They're like, look, now that you know that there are these, there's this offensive content on HIO, are you going to take it off the store? Like, are you going to keep posting it? And Epic kind of punted, and they said that they support it, and nothing has happened. HIO posted very funny tweets about it. People have started game jams based on it. And it was also sort of the background for the weird banana thing that happened the next week.
9:50 Speaker 03 Can we please just start to finish, explain the banana thing? I mean, maybe not the very start.
9:56 Nilay Patel? Wait, before we do that, can I just remind everyone that Safari is on the iPhone? And that you are mere clicks away from the wildest porn in human history in Safari? Like, this is such a weird argument for Apple to make.
10:14 Speaker 02 You know what is actually a weirder argument is a thing that came up later in, I wrote about, I think, yesterday or today or sometime in this lifetime, about how Apple is also trying to make the argument that it is super open, and so it allows you to buy games on Steam, and then you can, like, remote play those games. If you have, like, a gaming PC, you can stream those to your iPhone. Steam has a really explicitly anything goes policy. A couple of years ago, they were like, if it's not straight up trolling or illegal, we'll leave it up there. So you can also absolutely buy just unspeakable things on Steam, and then you can stream them to your iPhone. And Apple made a big deal about how being able to use that process is really great and a sign that there's competition.
10:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And, I mean, I don't know, like, we talk about content moderation too much, but like, It's weird that on Apple's own App Store, if you download the Tumblr app, Tumblr was censoring Tumblr. If you download the Reddit app, the Reddit app actively censors the content of the Reddit website per Apple's demands. That's a weird place for the store to be in. Right? Like you shouldn't, we shouldn't totally be comfortable with that. And yes, you can just go look at Reddit on the web and that's fine, but like it's weird that the Reddit app from Reddit has to meet Apple's content standards to be in the App Store and there's no other way to get that app.
11:38 Speaker 03 Well, and what's also weird about that is if you install the, another browser from the App Store, you can use the browser to go to Reddit and see the content that the Reddit app can't do. So it's not like only stuff on the App Store needs to be censored.
11:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
11:51 Speaker 02 This also came up with Parler, like Parler, the thing whose deal is we do not censor anything at all. Like they changed their content for iOS and then there was Discord. Yeah, it's really strange.
12:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's just like a weird, it's not really related to this, this lawsuit, but like Apple's making it, they're like proud of it that they reach into apps in this way.
12:14 Speaker 02 That's kind of why it's like about, that's part of the lawsuit is that Apple offers this really specific kind of experience and Epic wants to stop them from offering this kind of experience. And it's like an experience that lots of people demonstrably want to buy into, whether or not they like that particular part of it.
12:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Okay. This brings us to the naked banana.
12:33 Speaker 02 Yes. So there is a character in Fortnite or a skin known as Peely. Peely is a humanoid banana. He's terrifying. I went and looked up like videos of Peely and he's like eaten and like drunk as a smoothie and it's really scary. I don't know. I don't really play Fortnite, but Peely's kind of disturbing.
12:54 Nilay Patel? I feel like, you and I have known each other for so long.
12:59 Nilay Patel? We're like, we're tired of lawsuit with like, fucking banana. Anyhow.
13:06 Speaker 02 So anyway, um, yeah, so the first, the week started with Apple decided it wanted to prove Fortnite was a game. And so it just literally brought up Fortnite and you just had like an hour long Fortnite tutorial. Uh, and that included the lobby and that included, okay, I, I pulled this up so I could read it. We have in front of a new set of, set of images and what is the screen showing? And then this was being asked to, uh, Epik's marketing VP, Matthew Weisinger. Uh, this is your matchmaking lobby, the attorney. And we have a large yellow banana here, don't we? In a tuxedo? Yes, that is Peely. That was Peely, did you say? Yeah. And in fact, in the tuxedo, he's known as Agent Peely, correct?
13:47 Speaker 02 That's correct. We thought it better to go with the suit than the naked banana since we are in federal court this morning.
13:55 Nilay Patel? I mean, it's pretty good.
13:56 Speaker 03 Why do they need to talk about the banana? What is, what is the legal purpose of bringing up the banana, much less the, whether or not the banana is wearing a tuxedo?
14:02 Speaker 02 I think that it was basically just a joke because it's objectively funny that you have a banana in a suit. But the problem is that then they added the implication, like after everyone had decided that Apple was weird and prudish and like freaking out about inappropriate content. And then they brought up the, uh, naked bananas in federal court. So that meant that Epik's attorney decided to bring this up later. So
14:24 Nilay Patel? No.
14:25 Speaker 02 two hours later, they're doing cross-examination. Okay, a little bit of a digression, says Epik's attorney. We talked about Peely, our banana. Remember that?
14:34 Speaker 02 I do. And there may have been an implication that to show Peely without a suit would have been appropriate, inappropriate. Do you recall that? Yes. Is there anything inappropriate about Peely without a suit? No, there, there is not. If we could just put on the screen a picture of Peely. Is there anything inappropriate about Peely without clothes? It's just a banana, ma'am.
14:59 Nilay Patel? It's just what a ride it's been for 10 years. Oh my god. And it feels like we're right back where we started. Um, all of this is like, they're defining these markets. They are trying to define a game fundamentally esoteric definitions. Like you can define it, there's a beginning and end and challenges. There are multiple other competing definitions. But at the end of the day is the big question here is, are the apps that you get from the App Store, does Apple control the experiences inside of the apps? Or do the software developers, right? And one of the big ones is if you want to buy something in an app, should Apple get a cut of having pushed that button?
15:45 Nilay Patel? Should a developer even be able to tell you that there's another way to pay? They kept on calling them anti-steering provisions, which seems like it seems so technical, like it doesn't, it so precisely describes the thing that it describes nothing at all.
16:04 Speaker 02 I actually wanted you to explain this because there's a whole big part of the trial that hinges on the legality of anti-steering. They've been drawing comparisons to an American Express case that found that you could actually have these provisions, which are basically where if you can get a better deal elsewhere, like if you could, I don't know, pay less with, this was not the case, but pay less with like a Visa card or something, that American Express could say like, okay merchants, you can't tell people that you have this other cheaper deal.
16:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So the case you're talking about, Addy, is Ohio versus American Express. I am utterly fascinated by the inside baseball here because Amex's law firm in that case, Krevath, is Epic's law firm in this case. And so in the Amex case, Ohio, the Department of Justice, sues Amex and says, in your contracts, you charge a higher transaction fee for people using their Amex card. In your contracts with merchants, you prevent them from saying things like, we would prefer that you use Visa, which charges a lower fee. Everyone thinks, everyone thinks Amex is gonna lose this case.
17:18 Nilay Patel? Big antitrust lawsuit goes up to the Supreme Court. You can't tell a merchant, like, do the cheaper, like, right? Supreme Court comes back, stunner of a decision. This is fine. It's a two-sided market. And the market for merchant contracts and the market for consumer payments are different. Amex can tell the merchants, if you want to sign a contract with us, you have to abide by our rules. Stunner of a decision. There's an article about Krevath winning this case. It's amazing, called Law Dragon, and the article is titled Redemption Road. And the sub-headline is, Krevath traversed a do-or-die path to a US Supreme Court victory for Amex that will change competition for years to come.
18:01 Nilay Patel? Amex is like, this was a bet the company case, and these, these guys won it for us. Now, that same law firm is on the other side with Epic, saying Apple's prohibition on saying you can have another payment processor is illegal. It's crazy. I'm just like trying to imagine like the, the board meeting where they're like, we're gonna take the Epic case. And like the one, like junior associate in the background being like, guys, guys, we just won the other case. It's the opposite.
18:27 Speaker 03 It's like, it's like Brett Favre playing for the Vikings against the Packers.
18:30 Nilay Patel? Yes, it's like that. And at the end, he throws an interception and loses, and they don't go to the Super Bowl. And I just don't know if anybody at Epic was watching the playoffs that year.
18:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:40 Nilay Patel? It's nuts.
18:40 Speaker 03 So I'm gonna make a Blake Bortles joke here if we keep going here.
18:43 Nilay Patel? Also, the experts, there are two dueling experts right now. They were on the same side in the Amex case. Like, there's all kinds of crazy antitrust base, inside baseball going on here, because this is fundamentally a tight-knit community of like, legal experts that no one paid attention to. It's like you lifted a rock and it all came scurrying out. They don't know what to do, and they're like, am I wearing pants? Like, these are just the wildest deep-sea creatures of the law. And now they're all just like on different sides. Anyway, I think the point of this is, it feels like the judge has way more optionality now in this case, because they're starting to say things like, well, maybe Apple can keep it locked down. But this prohibition on telling people they can pay on the web cheaper, because they keep,
19:28 Nilay Patel? she keeps coming, the judge keeps coming back to, well, you can just buy V bucks on the web. And Epic keeps saying, well, we can't even tell people they can do that. And it feels like there's like the judges, there are narrow lanes now for the judge to go down that didn't exist before, where like they weren't part of Epic's demands. The question is just whether any of that will be acceptable to either one of these sides. Because if the judge says, no, the store is fine, the in-app purchase this thing is fine, but you can't tell app developers that the web doesn't exist, right? And they can't even tell their customers you can go over here for cheaper. Like, that might be an acceptable outcome here. And there's like a lot of Apple, like John Gruber is like, that is fine.
20:10 Nilay Patel? Just Apple should let their own developers say what the rules are. And Apple prohibits that right now. But I can't shake, and I'm wondering at if this is coming out in the trial or if this is coming through for the judge. I cannot shake the sense that Apple really believes that the apps on the iPhone are like an extension of the operating system, like an extension of the App Store. And so even the transactions in those apps are Apple's transactions, as opposed to the way I think about software, which is like, there's an operating system and then you run software on top of it. And the App Store distributes the software, but then the apps can do whatever they want. And that's like a pretty big conceptual difference here. And I don't think I ever really realized that Apple, Apple thinks it's all one thing.
20:55 Speaker 02 I mean, I think the most sort of illustrative comparison that I, or like, thing I've seen Apple's lawyers and experts describe this as is like matchmaking, that basically they don't necessarily see this as you are installing a thing and you bought that thing and now the developer's selling you stuff. It's like, okay, we bring these people together in this ecosystem. We're like a venue that we host your apps and we bring, we make something that's so cool that people come and use them. And therefore, because of this, like, we have created this scenario that allows you to go and like work with the, and like reach your community and therefore we deserve a commission on anything that happens.
21:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:38 Nilay Patel? But like, I don't know, every time we tweet about this, there's someone, some set of people tweet back like, if you put your product on the shelf at Target, you're not allowed to put a sticker on your product that says it's cheaper at Walmart. And I completely understand that comparison insofar as the App Store itself. Right? You've got your app in Apple's App Store. You should not be able to market it as, hey, by the way, like, you don't have to use the store. You can go get it on the web. That would be weird for Apple to allow. It's like, not even good merchandising. But once you buy the Keurig or whatever from Target, you take it home, there's nothing that says Target has to get a cut of every K-cup you buy or whatever, right?
22:19 Nilay Patel? Like, Keurig can then market to you, it can do some weird DRM scheme, utterly, utterly fail to succeed at that. Like, Keurig has a relationship with you, a customer that's got a product in your life. You can buy K-cups from anywhere. Here, Apple's saying, no, even when you get the app, and now you have it, we still need to be in the middle of that experience on the phone.
22:43 Nilay Patel? In a way that-
22:43 Speaker 03 Sort of like, if you run a store and you sign a contract with a credit card company like Amex, Amex gets to say, you don't tell people that it's cheaper if they use Visa.
22:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, the Amex decision is very complicated and everyone hates it. So-
23:02 Speaker 03 Great.
23:02 Speaker 02 The judge also said she was not necessarily convinced that the situations were comparable, partly because of the stickers on, like, cash registers, that she brought those up, that if you go to a store, maybe, like, the vendor can't tell you that Discover or, like, Visa are cheaper, but you at least have those stickers up that are like, well, you can use these three payment methods. And she says that, okay, it's not necessarily clear that there even is that option, thanks to the anti-steering provisions on an app. So even if you're not mentioning that, like, it's cheaper, you should be able to see that there are other options. So it's possible that she will, like, go further along those lines.
23:43 Nilay Patel? This explains why when I buy anything, people are like, the cashier is like, looking at the stickers, like, I can't say it, but Visa.
23:52 Speaker 02 I mean, obviously, everyone at stores just wants you to use cash and they will actually like let you pay less if you use cash because credit card companies are all terrible compared to cash for them.
24:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but it's like a really interesting to continue with this comparison, the rates charged by credit card companies for transaction fees for merchant fees are competitive. Right. And that was part of this decision, like this is a competitive market. I think the Supreme Court said something like, there's nothing wrong with being hyper competitive. And that's what we see here, not like antitrust stuff like, okay, it's competitive. You've identified the competition. Here in an app, if you want to sell somebody a digital good, you can't even gesture at the notion of competition. It's Apple's payment processor or nothing.
24:37 Speaker 02 And also in an environment where the idea is say that you have this entire set of stores that are like just Amex stores. That's the other thing that keeps coming up in the trial is whether the iPhone itself and like the Android devices are a serious lock in issue that like if the cost of switching between these ecosystems is this high, then Apple has a lot of leeway to like raise prices or do anti-competitive things in theory, because people aren't going to go over to Android because there's this like big cost at the beginning.
25:05 Nilay Patel? I expected Epic to make a bigger show of this argument because it, you know, early on, they were very clear that, you know, iMessage and all of your apps and data, they'd unearthed all this stuff about it and they put it out into evidence. And I haven't heard them make like directly make the Apple makes switching costs higher argument. It's been sort of like it, Apple's monopoly. Obviously, it's hard to leave, but not the Apple actively makes it hard to leave.
25:33 Speaker 02 No, they've made the like, they have one of their expert witnesses who didn't make an Apple explicitly makes it hard, but a this ecosystem like is very expensive and therefore it is hard.
25:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
25:46 Speaker 02 So they've definitely brought it up, but yeah, you're right.
25:49 Nilay Patel? I'm kind of, I'm just like, wait, like Tim Cook is going to be on, on the stand like, I'm just like wondering, they're gonna be like, so blue bubbles, you know, it's a thing, right? Like, is that what they're gonna aim at with him? Like, they, they have these opportunities they haven't really taken yet.
26:03 Speaker 02 They have a bunch of Apple executives that they're either gonna have, that they've got depositions from, or they are going to call up. There's Tim Cook or, and like, Eddie Q, I think, has a deposition. There's a bunch of people on Apple's side that just haven't come up yet.
26:16 Nilay Patel? I cannot wait for rocking Eddie Q to take the stand. So right now, we're just sort of in expert testimony hell.
26:23 Speaker 02 We are. We've had one expert, and then we had a bunch of other experts who were rebutting that expert. And now we're back to the experts rebutting those experts, and the original expert is gonna come up tomorrow.
26:32 Nilay Patel? Amazing. By the way, all the experts are like, very highly paid. If you, listening to this, you're like, man, a new post pandemic career, just being a professional expert witness, seems like a dream, to be honest. Like, just say some hysterical stuff about a sexualized banana, have lunch, take a break, say the other expert's wrong.
26:51 Speaker 02 Oh man, no, one of them got, absolutely. So there was this fight over whether, it's an ongoing fight over whether you can pay for various in-app purchases through a mobile browser. And so today, this one guy had produced this, like, entire report of apps that he said could, and Epic's lawyers just came up and made them click through, like, Candy Crush websites.
27:11 Nilay Patel? Oh my god.
27:11 Speaker 02 And like Clash Royale's website, to see if they could find out how to pay for these things. And it turns out, it's actually very difficult to do.
27:19 Speaker 02 And then they were just doing like, the lawyer version of yelling at him.
27:22 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's good. I gotta say, as somebody who's in a marriage to lawyers, the lawyer version of yelling at you is very enticing. Anyway, that's a trial. I want to bring up something else that's going on with Apple this week, as we're coming on Dieter, it's like, Apple's getting all of its bad news out of the way at once. The, the issue of trial, really, for App, for Apple, is it makes a ton of money, taking a cut of in-app purchases in mobile games, like Candy Crush whales, are like, a huge source of revenue for Apple. Mobile game developers want to increase the pool of people playing mobile games, so more people buy stuff in-app. They do a lot of marketing. Historically, that marketing is on Facebook platforms. It's like the cheapest way to get your app in front of another people. App install ads for Facebook, big business.
28:06 Nilay Patel? Apple turns on app tracking transparency. Facebook's ad business takes a hit. We don't know how much yet, but like 96% of people opted out of cross app tracking. The same time, Apple adds ad units to the App Store.
28:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, it specifically added an app unit to the search page, which is kind of amazing. So like, at the same time that a bunch of other companies are unable to use data that that might help them figure out what apps you use and therefore what apps you might be interested in using and therefore advertise on Facebook, that you can now buy those ads against searches inside the App Store. And then, you know, they just kind of put that out there at the same time, I guess, because, I don't know, everyone's distracted by Epic or new iPads or whatever.
28:55 Nilay Patel? We had a previous CFO of Vox Media and he used to describe his job as just trying to catch the money.
29:01 Speaker 03 Okay.
29:02 Nilay Patel? I mean, he was a very charming man, but he would be like, being a CFO is like, the money's a basketball and I just got to catch it. It was like a real thing he used to say. And like, I feel like the App Store team did exactly that. They're like, man, all that money's got to go somewhere. Like, we might as well just hold out a bucket. But this was taken in just like, it's such an aggressive move to kneecap Facebook's ad business in this way and then kind of divert that money to yourself. So that's one.
29:31 Speaker 03 The big question is like, how big is the ad, the business of selling ads for apps inside the App Store, really? It's unclear.
29:38 Nilay Patel? Well, so this is the second thing. Right? It might be a small business. It might be a crappy business. Then they went out and hired this guy, Antonio Garcia Martinez, who is just like a notorious like asshole character, who wrote a book called Chaos Monkeys, about building Facebook's ad business and being on the growth team.
30:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, and being ruthless and terrible whilst he did it and, you know, saying, nobody actually cares about privacy, so why would we, why would we at Facebook? In addition to many misogynistic things, it turns out.
30:15 Nilay Patel? Right. So Apple hires that guy to come work on its ads team. At the same time, they're kneecapping Facebook's business with the ad tracking, which you might support, but you shouldn't, you should just ask people they want to be tracked, like whatever, but they've obviously created an opportunity for themselves and they're going to aggressively pursue it. And they hired like, I'm certain there's lots of ex-Facebook ads employees who are very aggressive you could hire. They hired the famous one who wrote a book full of how he's a sexist jerk. So he's hired. So now it's like, if you think about Tim Cook, when he was asked about Mark Zuckerberg and what he would do if he was running Facebook, and Tim Cook's answer is, I wouldn't be in that position. They hired the guy that put Facebook in that position.
30:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:59 Nilay Patel? Like famously part of that process.
31:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:04 Nilay Patel? So like, you know, there's another cycle, screenshots of chaos monkeys circulate on Twitter, the, it's bad, right? He's like, all women in the Bay Area are stupid. They're all weak. It's like, all, just like stuff like this. And he thinks he's this like great writer. And like, I would just make, a lot of people have made the Hunter S. Thompson comparison. I would just make the argument that describing what you're like at work and using the frame of, I'm Hunter S. Thompson at my corporate job selling advertising. That's not, you don't, it's not an excuse, man. Like, I get it. I understand why people want to make the comparison, but this isn't guy in ad sales. Anyway, there's a, Apple
31:46 Nilay Patel? employees, thousands of them, sign a petition, so we, and Casey and Liz broke that news last night. They got the petition hours later. Apple just clips this dude.
31:55 Speaker 03 Yeah. I want to pause on the petition briefly, because we have seen, most big tech companies have some sort of white collar employee, like, I don't know, walkout or organization or agitation. Google has most of it, I think. A lot has happened there, especially with the stuff that came out on Andy Rubin. They had that walkout. Amazon has had, you know, talking about worker conditions. There's been a bunch of employee agitation at all of big tech companies, but Apple's employees, for whatever reason, have not publicly had a, hey, company that employs me, you're terrible, you need to stop doing this thing in such a big way. And so this petition coming out of Apple is...
32:38 Speaker 03 I don't, I don't want to say overdue, but it is surprising that it has taken this long for us to hear from Apple's employees saying, we are holding our own company to account because that moment has happened for every other big tech company.
32:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I think, again, there are, maybe you think Antonio is the best person to grow your ads business. There are probably some arguments that he is. There are probably some arguments he's not. But like, just from a turn the knobs and make the money flow perspective, there's probably a, someone else who's like 85% as good, who doesn't come with this baggage, right? And the big question for me is, and I think for everybody is, Apple had to have known he wrote this book. The book got a lot of reviews and almost all of the reviews were like, whoo, this book is pretty misogynistic. Like, it's like hidden information.
33:31 Speaker 02 I had not actually, like, I'd heard the one bad quote before all this, but I went through and read the Apple's employees' letter. The thing that's like, actually creepy to me is not necessarily even the big headline, all women in the Bay Area are weak and I would, after the apocalypse, I would sell them for a shotgun shell thing.
33:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
33:48 Speaker 02 It's just that there are a bunch of excerpts that are pretty much overtly saying, yeah, the thing I look at when I see female employees is whether they're hot and whether they dress well, just over and over and over again. And that's just like, that's not just being misogynistic, that's saying like, you are really unable to deal with female employees at work as anything other than like, people that you find attractive. And that seems like a really bad thing for someone who's going to be in a position of power at a company.
34:16 Nilay Patel? Especially in a, like, a growing new business, right? Like, Apple's not good at ads. So whatever character that business takes will be the character of its lead. Like, all of that's bad. All of this is known.
34:29 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, hey, we should like hire this guy. Has anybody read his book is like, Apple doesn't miss that. Like, they're a rigorous company. Anyway, so they get rid of this guy. I am firmly of belief that they just fired him. Like, can you imagine Tim Cook like getting the alert? And like, I just guarantee he was like, what does this make it go away? Right? Like, he doesn't need to do this. They can just hire somebody else. The reaction that's like, yeah, another woke business doesn't know how to, like, I saw one today that was like, this is a sign from Apple that they don't value creatives. And it's like, what? I share that. I won't say, I don't want to like, lead to a harassment campaign, but I saw like a bunch of these tweets. I'm like,
35:13 Nilay Patel? you think Apple's gonna have a problem attracting creatives? Because they let one guy go the day after he started. Like, Trent Reznor used to work at Apple. I think they're gonna be fine. Like, there's just a part of this where with this trial, with the services revenue, with this like extremely opportunistic ads thing that they're doing, the bloom is coming off the rose of Apple as the idealistic company. Right? Like, they're obviously a business that is chasing growth, and it's such a big business already that they have to do aggressive things to move the needle. And like, that's the dangers. That's the, to me, that's the real danger zone for the company, not, are creatives still gonna like, yes, of course they are. It's Apple.
35:57 Nilay Patel? Right? That's, that is their, their DNA is like, serving and enhancing creatives. But what you see next to it is this hunger to control the entire experience of the phone, not because they necessarily want to make it great, but because that's how they can grow their revenue. And like, there, there's like an ickiness there that I can't quite get around.
36:17 Speaker 03 It, the frame of Apple is a company that might do dangerous things or bad things because they're chasing growth, like, just out of context, like, you could take, company is chasing growth and therefore is doing bad things and apply it to like, any number of tech scandals over the past five years. But no one's ever put that frame on Apple. And so it's really interesting. We, I mean, we sort of have, and we started to worry about the subscription revenue thing, but specifically talk about chasing growth.
36:44 Speaker 02 Well, it's happened in regards to China, but it just, we haven't really had a domestic issue.
36:48 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah, that's true. The, you know, there was more China supplier news this week that people were being forced to work in in inhumane conditions, like, and Apple has made, has managed to stay away from that stuff, or at least distance itself from that stuff. This thing, Antonia fight, like, that's the employees publicly tweeting, like, we want this guy gone. Like, that's not our values. So we'll see how that goes. I want to end with you, Addy, by by making comparison to another tech giant dispute, because this is really interesting to me. So Roku and Google are fighting. And like, the dynamics of the fight look exactly to me like the dynamics of the Apple Epic fight. So Roku
37:29 Nilay Patel? said, hey, Google, we want YouTube TV to work in a certain way. Google pushed back and said, no, we want to use these codecs. We want this data from you. We want this preferred search placement. Roku said, screw it. We're kicking YouTube TV off the store, the Roku store. YouTube, then, in a platform fight, just added YouTube TV to the regular YouTube app in a hot fix, which is exactly what Epic did with Fortnite. And now Roku is like, what are we going to do? We can't have YouTube on our platform. Like, you can get rid of YouTube TV. Not a lot of people use it. You cannot block YouTube from the Roku platform. So Roku's response, they gave it to Chris Welch, these are the actions of an unchecked
38:14 Nilay Patel? monopolist, which is weird, because Roku controls the platform there, but YouTube is a monopoly on YouTube. Do you see any parallels there? Is that being like, is this trial, like, starting to have, like, those effects where people are just, like, influenced by it?
38:30 Speaker 02 I mean, if you're actually talking about literal legal parallels, it seems like it would be pretty hard to map the this dispute on to Apple versus, like, Epic versus Apple, just because the positions seem kind of weirdly totally reversed. But it does feel like ever since the Epic suit, in part because Epic had its whole, like, Project Liberty, we're going to, like, organize the Coalition for App Fairness, we're going to make this a huge deal. Like, it feels like a certain level of floodgates have been opened, that, like, just sort of open beefing with big tech companies is becoming more of a thing.
39:03 Nilay Patel? Well, they're trying to show they're competing. Maybe this is all just like performance art of competition. Like, we're not monopolists. Look at this beef we had. And like, maybe they're all just stage managing it. But I think you're right. Liz always refers to May as meltdown May. And like, yeah, off, off to a tremendous start. I actually hope that these platforms all fight a little bit more and they realize that users are just mad at them. And it is in their best interest to like, work together and achieve interoperability in various ways. I'm an optimist. I'm not saying it's going to happen. But like, this level of like, low-grade warfare is like, it's not good for anybody. It's not good for Apple's image. It's not good for the people who want to watch YouTube TV on Roku. It makes everybody just look petty.
39:46 Nilay Patel? And like, at some point, I'm very curious, if people are listening to this and you're in this world, if the cost of the public relations hit is worth the business terms that you're trying to get. Because to me, like, the pendulum is starting to swing in the wrong way. All right. Addy, thank you so much. I know you want to get back to the trial. We're going to take a break. We'll be back with Monica Chin, talking about Stalking.
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41:19 Nilay Patel? We're back. Monica Chin is here. Welcome, Monica.
41:22 Speaker 05 Hello. Thank you for having me.
41:24 Nilay Patel? So we got to talk to you about a bunch of laptops, but you and I have had like many adventures with Starlink over the past few weeks. It is infrastructure week here at The Verge. We've run a number of stories about the future of our country's infrastructure, and that covers a lot of things. It covers charging networks for EVs. It covers, obviously, broadband. Andy Hawkins interviewed Pete Buttigieg, his Secretary of Transportation, and how to increase EV adoption and what cities should look like. Nicole Wettsman did a video on flushable wipes and how they're destroying our sewer systems across the country. So we've kind of taken an expansive look at infrastructure. We've done a lot on broadband, of course,
42:08 Nilay Patel? over the years, and we wanted to cap off Infrastructure Week at The Verge, which, but, you know, it's like a joke, right? The Trump administration is always trying to do Infrastructure Week. We finally did it.
42:19 Speaker 03 We actually did it. We actually did it. We launched, like, the website got launched. We made Infrastructure Week happen.
42:25 Nilay Patel? And then 10 years later, we did Infrastructure Week.
42:28 Speaker 03 Andy Hawkins got Pete Buttigieg to use the phrase "petro-masculinity." It's all happening.
42:32 Nilay Patel? It's all there for you. And we realized every time we've done a broadband piece, for a year now, the comments, the tweets are like, "Starlink will fix it. This won't be a problem when Starlink comes out." So we've...
42:47 Speaker 03 I'm getting it complaining about, just on Twitter, like tweeting about my slow uploads. He's like, "Oh, you need Starlink." It's like, "I'm in the middle of a city. Okay, sorry."
42:55 Nilay Patel? You know, Dieter just moved house. Congratulations, Dieter. And you have worse internet now than you did before.
43:02 Speaker 03 I do. Pay more for it.
43:05 Nilay Patel? The classic story of America. And when you tweet, like, "Oh, my upload speeds are bad," or Comcast didn't show up, everyone's like, "Starlink will fix it." You wait until Starlink. So... As I'm sure many nerds listening to this have been doing, a bunch of Verge staffers are on the preorder list, were like trying to get it. And I typed in my address and low and behold, it's available in my area. And I hit the button and it showed up six days later, which is not the experience most people are having, most people on this interminable preorder list. So I get it, set it up, realize like, oh, I've got a bunch of trees in the way. I've got to figure out where to move it. And then I took off. I did the Vergecast from my parents' house in
43:46 Nilay Patel? Wisconsin. And while I was gone, I thought to myself, oh, Monica has horrible internet where she is. I'll just like, give it to Monica. Like, we'll just see if it works. And then I delivered it to Monica in the parking lot of a grocery store. It was very exciting. Monica, how'd that go?
44:02 Speaker 05 Well, tried to set it up in a couple of different places. Um, I tried the middle of my driveway. I tried the middle of my lawn. I tried a different spot in the middle of my lawn. Sometimes it just told me that it couldn't connect to the network. And then sometimes it looked like it was trying to connect to the network and then failed to connect, but kept trying. But in no case did it actually work and give me internet, which was very sad, unfortunately. It did like the internet would show up. But then when I said, please load a webpage, it did not load a webpage.
44:32 Nilay Patel? So what's interesting about this, and I bring it up, and I want to talk to Monica about the actual like plugging it in, where does a DISCO process? But the Starlink network, there's, you know, thousands of satellites in space. They are controversial, right? They're like interfering with astronomers. Starlink has a plan to paint them black. That plan, this is true. This is a true thing. But what is it? What does it do? What does that achieve? Well, there's like optical refraction that it like helps with, but also it absorbs heat. Wait, this is a real thing. It absorbs heat. So the satellites get hotter, which interferes with infrared astronomy. So now this last batch, this is a real thing. They painted the side that faces away from Earth white.
45:18 Nilay Patel? Okay. So there's like two-tone SCOS satellites. The scatolites are in the sky. Anyhow, so right, Starlink is a constellation of thousands of small satellites whipping across the earth. There is a like hardcore technical advancement in the satellite dish. It's called a phased array antenna, which means it's basically lots of little antennas. And the dish can aim them in different ways. One of them is electronic, like you can just aim them inside the dish. And the other one is like mechanical. The dish has two motors and it can rotate and move. This is like a big deal because it can, it means it can track a focused beam of energy from another satellites.
46:00 Nilay Patel? It runs way faster than if you've ever had HughesNet or any other satellite system. The grid is like a honeycomb shape of hexagons across the United States. So I look on the map and there's all these cool user maps of Starlink coverage areas all over the web. I'm in a grid that has service. Monica, it appears that you're in a grid that has service. And the Starlink, you don't have to like sign into it. So it doesn't, it's just like, it'll try.
46:25 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, it's weird. Literally 10 minutes from me, it is available. But when I put in my address or like anything with my zip code, it says not available.
46:36 Nilay Patel? So you, the dish comes to our house. We try to move it into one of these other grid areas. It doesn't work. I get it back from Monica. I've been using it for the past week and change. Man, there's nothing like a product that you don't have to just glue your hopes and dreams on and then you get it. And it's the Nokia N900, right? Like that's the That's a deep cut. That is. If you're a new Vergecast listener, you know, the entire site was thrown into disarray for like two weeks when we reviewed the Nokia N900 because we said it was bad. But was it like the N920 or something? Maybe it was the N920. It was the N920. It was N920. Whew, like a week, like a week of controversy because we said that this phone that failed
47:21 Nilay Patel? is bad. That's where I'm at with Starlink. So here are the, here are the good things about Starlink and then I'll tell you some bad things. Good things are when it works, it is fast. They're only aiming to hit 100 megs down and like 20 up.
47:36 Nilay Patel? When it's working really well, you can get like 225 and 24 up. That's good. That's like reasonably good internet service. Sometimes the latency is low. Sometimes it's like, you know, at best I've seen it be like 25 milliseconds, which is not as good as my wired internet, but it's it's good, right? Like competitive with my 4G connections.
47:59 Nilay Patel? It is not reliant on any cable company. That is just like, I think that is the plus of this system. Right? If there are satellites above you and you can connect to them, you can buy this thing from Elon Musk. And you can tell Comcast or Spectrum to get out of here. I think people really like that. Here are the bad things. You need perfect line of sight
48:22 Nilay Patel? to the sky. And the sky is defined as a 100 degree cone off the front of the dish with a minimum elevation of 25 degrees because the satellites are pretty low in the sky. At least where I am. That's like low and wide. So where I am, there are trees all around me. And so I can't, the satellites are effectively behind the trees. So you gotta get it up. And like people go to wild lengths. Like I think that the Starlink subreddit is like currently one of my favorite places on the internet. Cause it's just people like hacking with a toy that is in beta and pretty hackable. And they're all just like figuring it out together. It's like this collective project to make this thing work.
49:07 Nilay Patel? So you gotta get it really high. If you do find, and I, right now I have it located about 60 feet in front of my house, pointed back up and over the house. Cause mine's on a hill. So it's like a way to make it look sort of up and over.
49:22 Nilay Patel? My chimney and the top of some trees are enough to obstruct Starlink for two hours. Sure.
49:28 Speaker 03 Two hours a day.
49:29 Nilay Patel? Two hours a day. It's just obstructed and the speeds collapse. So like even the merest whisper of a tree, a pole will like take Starlink out of the game. Uh, the only comparison it makes like millimeter wave, right? We like live through an entire hype cycle about millimeter wave 5G. And if you're not standing on the right street corner of a city, it like doesn't work. But if you are on the right street corner, whoo, it's good.
49:54 Speaker 03 And so is the idea here that like, everyone just needs to put this on a pole on the roof?
49:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But it ships and Monica, when I delivered the box to Monica, I saw her. I saw your face. Like it ships are like, that's just like a little itty bitty metal tripod. They're like Starlink is knee high. And everyone thinks it's like this portable knee high dish because it's small, but it actually needs to be as high up as you can get it. So it can clear whatever is around you for that hundred degree cone, 25 degrees above the horizon. Now, if they launch more satellites, the minimum goes up to 40 degrees above the horizon, which is not that much more, but potentially mitigates some of this problem. So that's just your first problem. You take it out of the box. You gotta, it needs to find a pretty significant and weirdly located hole
50:43 Nilay Patel? of in the sky, but kind of in northerly direction. Then you do it and I got it to work and it was doing fine. And I tried to make a zoom call on it and it just doesn't, it just doesn't work. Like it'll, it's fine. And then it just drops out and the latency spikes. It, you know, it's in beta. I will offer them that it is beta product. We didn't give it a review score, you know, like, fine. Their only promises are like, sometimes it'll work. And they have, they have met that promise. Like they say, Starlink is very open. Like it's going to go down. It's going to be weird. But you try to make a zoom call, anything real time, zoom, Slack, gaming, anything that
51:24 Nilay Patel? requires like a sustained low latency, real time connection, just not usable on Starlink. Anything that buffers streaming 4K video, fine, right? It can kind of like overcome the connection dropouts. I don't know. Is that worth $99 a month? Like you just think about all of the hopes and dreams that are foisted onto this system. Like that's the reality of it. The thing is very cool. It's very much a consumer product. So Monica like-
51:53 Speaker 03 What's the setup like?
51:55 Nilay Patel? Um, it's so the dish itself is like a white plastic. It's very Elon like it's very cool. They made sure it looks cool. So the dish is like a white plastic. The top of it is like matte white. Uh, if it has heaters and sensors in it. So if it gets snow on it, it can kick on a snow melting mode and melt all the snow off the face of it, which I think is really cool. Then the cable, which is attached to the dish, which is again, if you think about you, the fact that you have to mount it really high and drill it back into your house, it would be better if both ends of the cable were free. But the cables attached to dish, that is a power over ethernet cable. So there's a hundred foot power ethernet cable that you have to run into your house somehow. That plugs into a power adapter. Then there's
52:40 Nilay Patel? another power over ethernet plug on that same adapter and that plugs into the wifi router. So all of the power comes through this box and you plug that box in the wall. So the wifi router is just a POE wifi router. The actual wifi router is like a silver, it looks cool. It's like a silver wedge shape. We, no specs.
53:01 Nilay Patel? We don't know. It's like five and two point, it's like basically a dual band wifi five router, whatever. Yeah. Um, reasonably good range, covered my entire house. No options. No options, no settings, no nothing. You can't change the wifi name and password? That's all you can do. When you log in, you can, it prompts you to do those things. If you want to do those things again, hard reset the router, my friend. Yeah, yeah, of course. That makes sense. I mean, it's in beta. I'm like, but obviously all of the effort went into making the satellite part work. And they made that work. That's impressive. I was gonna say, that's not a small amount of effort, turns out. Yeah. I mean, is it good for astronomy that there's this many satellites in the
53:44 Nilay Patel? sky and everyone's always mad all the time? I don't know, but it works. Like, it's impressive that it works. It's impressive. They're launching more and more of these satellites all the time. It's impressive that they're trying to build this like, they don't want to manage the satellites. So they just tell the satellites where they think they should go and deploy them from the rocket and the satellites figure it out. Yeah. And then that part works. They're trying to do the same thing with collision avoidance. And that part has been hairy and there's been like two incidents where like they didn't communicate enough or things aren't really close. Controversy in space because of all these
54:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:21 Nilay Patel? All to get internet access.
54:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, Neil, this all sounds way, way simpler than digging a trench.
54:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah, no, it does.
54:29 Speaker 03 Putting a piece, a straight, a strand of glass in it like that. That's, that's way more complicated than launching a, an autonomous mesh network of satellites into space like.
54:40 Nilay Patel? Dieter, I haven't even gotten to the, the dream that the satellites themselves will form a mesh network in space, communicating via lasers.
54:48 Speaker 03 Oh, okay.
54:49 Nilay Patel? That's Starlink's next idea.
54:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:52 Nilay Patel? They're not there yet, but like in the Starlink engineers, like, here's the deal. Laser in a vacuum travels faster than light and fiber. So we'll just do all the communication in space and we'll, we'll reduce latency that way, like crazy Elon level engineering dreams from the Starlink team. And all of that sounds more realistic than I will call Comcast and they will provide me a good service at a fair price. Like, that's the story here.
55:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:22 Nilay Patel? Like, there's nothing about this internet that is like spacey, right? You're not getting anything other than internet access, but it feels more realistic that you will get good service at a fair price from this crazy engineering experience than from your local cable monopoly. I don't know how to feel about that. That's weird. But anyway, you plug it all in, sometimes it works, works for streaming stuff. I could not spend a day working on it. I just couldn't do it. It was impossible.
55:52 Speaker 03 Because you need to do, yeah, you need to do low latency Zoom calls and also you need, you can't just take a two hour break.
55:58 Nilay Patel? Uh, so when it's obstructed, it just slows down. It doesn't like die. Um, okay. Yeah, it's like, it's very, but like literally when I'm saying slack, like slack requires an active connection. It doesn't require a hot, like ultra low latency, but it requires like someone types at you, you get it. You type back at them. Starlink cannot handle this.
56:20 Speaker 03 Right.
56:21 Nilay Patel? I feel like everyone's going to come for me now. I'm very, I've been very worried about falling from this. And I just keep coming back to the fact that. Like in America, we pay very high prices for very bad service. It's slow, the customer service is like sadistic. And this represents a way to escape it and everyone's hopes and dreams have been like bolted on the Starlink. Like when I was like, oh, Monica's bad internet, I'll just give it to her. Like my frame of mind was like, oh, this'll fix it.
56:53 Speaker 05 I mean, my friend of mine having used satellite internet for like over a year at this point was definitely not that optimistic. They were claiming, they were claiming that it was gonna not have all the satellite internet problems. And I was like, I don't know, we'll see.
57:08 Nilay Patel? Uh, it's cool. I mean, I don't want to discount the, right, the technical achievements here, but there's just like wonky concept in the review. It's a very wonky. So there's like a telecom philosophy and I'd say it's called facility based competition.
57:25 Nilay Patel? This is a real thing. Yep. And so like, it all came from MCI, which is an old telecom, like old long distance carrier. And they decided they weren't going to use the wired networks. And they, they shipped long distance voice calls over microwave transmissions. Yep. This is like a big deal. And like brought down all the rates and people went crazy and facility. It's like everyone's like, this is the future. We're going to invent new ways of doing things. And then in Europe, which like comes and goes in waves and it's not always perfect and certainly sometimes fails. They're like, we're just going to put a bunch of fiber in the ground. And anybody can lease it. And so like, if you live in London, there are like 50 options for you to get internet service.
58:09 Nilay Patel? That are all priced competitive at different speeds. It's way cheaper than here because everything's just running on a fiber network and that's called service based competition. And I tell you, the wonky papers you can read about the pluses and minuses of both approaches are mostly written by telecom lobbyists. They're deeply unfun to read. And like all of the thesis comes back to, especially on the US side. Facility based competition is better. Don't you see how Europe is horrible? And I think all that has ever really gotten us is like Limax, which destroyed Sprint. Like a handful of, a handful of long distance carriers that are no longer existent or relevant. And now like
58:50 Speaker 03 Oh, no, I mean, Neil, it got us CDMA versus GSM. That was, that was, that was great.
58:54 Nilay Patel? Who didn't love that?
58:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
58:58 Nilay Patel? It's just like, it's weird. It's there's like underlying telecom philosophy in the United States. It's like, instead of competing to provide service over fiber, someone will invent something else.
59:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:09 Nilay Patel? And then Starlink is like, also, at the end of the day, all of our internet traffic runs over fiber. So, because it does, it has to.
59:16 Speaker 03 It has to.
59:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Anyway, the point of this is Starlink is neat. Hopefully, people in the hinterlands can use it and it'll be great. If you are dreaming of Starlink, you should call like your local county commissioner and be like, put some fiber at my house. Because that's the, that's the thing you actually.
59:34 Speaker 03 Well, look, Neil, I know it's gonna come after you for this. Back in, back in 2012, when I reviewed the Lumia 920, I was, I was scathing. And so, obviously, how mean, how mean I was to this phone, everybody had to come after me for it. I gave it a 7.9. And I said that there were issues with LTE reception. I pointed out that there weren't a lot of apps on Windows Phone 8. And I said, my concluding line was, the software and hardware trade-offs inherent in Lumia 920 could be worth it if you're bought into the Microsoft ecosystem. But for most people, I don't think it's a sure bet. So I was brutal.
1:00:09 Nilay Patel? And it came for you.
1:00:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, that was brutal.
1:00:12 Nilay Patel? There was another one we ran. I think it was Josh Topolsky who wrote something like, it's time for Microsoft to admit this isn't working. And that one also set the world off. I'm just saying, what reminds me of Windows Phone with Starlink is not whether Starlink will succeed or fail. It is that everyone is imagining a product and layering all of their hopes and dreams on it. I asked a question on Twitter and people were like, can I use it on a boat? And I'm like, dude, you can't use it in a field with a tree.
1:00:46 Speaker 03 But there's no trees on the ocean, Neil.
1:00:50 Nilay Patel? A boat is actually the perfect use case. It needs a fixed line of sight. How much do you want these motors to spin all the time?
1:01:00 Nilay Patel? It's just like every hope and dream you can have about internet. And I can't ignore the fact that it's next to the huge, enormous, insanely depressing 5G hype cycle. Right? Like, what is, what did Jeep Pi and Verizon, everybody say about 5G investment? Like rural broadband? The farmers are gonna be in the fields streaming live TikToks, changing the world over their millimeter wave brought. And it's like, why don't we just do that? We published a map this week, this, this what kicked off Infrastructure Week, is this map of broadband access speeds in America.
1:01:41 Nilay Patel? And like, the map is like a little controversial for a couple of reasons. One of the big problems in this country is that the FCC doesn't maintain this data, that ISPs self-report it, and they are friendly to themselves. So they will just tell the FCC, like, everybody in Idaho has access to gigabit internet speeds because they serve one house with it. And then like the radius around that house is big enough. So we use data from Microsoft services. So Microsoft is tracking people's connection speeds that use all their services. Xbox, Office 365, Azure, you name it. The more controversial part is we use the internet, the government's definition of broadband, which is just 25 down.
1:02:26 Nilay Patel? Which is terrible. Which is terrible. Like, you can't have a household working from home and going to school in 25 down. And we only really point out the areas where less than 15% of people were getting 25 down. Right. But like, huge swaths of the country have less than 50% of people getting 25 down. Where I live in upstate New York, 43% of people are using broad, quote unquote broadband speed, which means most people are not.
1:02:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'd be surprised if anyone around where I am is using it. I'm sure there are some people, but we get like four down, so.
1:02:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's just like, okay, but we picked this like, here's the desert, not just like here's a problem. Because if you went with where is most of the country not getting 25 down? It's the whole country. Right? If you pick 50%, it doesn't actually show you any information, except it sucks everywhere. Yeah. You pick a lower number, you're like, okay, here are like the targeted real problems. But you look at this map, you look at all the rhetoric around 5G, you look at all the same rhetoric around LTE. The cable companies right now are promoting 10G, which is very funny to me, uh, which is just 10 gigabits down. It's not a, it's not a G. Oh, my God. Yeah, they're just like, y'all like Gs? Here's another. Yeah. And like, they just didn't do a good job.
1:03:42 Nilay Patel? Like, people aren't connected consistently and they're not connected at fast speeds. And like, of course, a bunch of Elon tweets about how he's gonna fix it with science are like capturing everybody's imaginations. And I, the gap between that and what this thing is and what it could be is still, is still gigantic to me. Yeah. I don't know, man. Maybe next week I'll try to do the show or Starlink. Please don't. We'll see, we'll see. Anyway, my local ISP here in upstate New York is employee owned. They're very cool. Local ISPs are the future. That's all I'm saying.
1:04:19 Nilay Patel? Also, um, they're huge nerds. And so when I call them for service stuff, the actual people who like engineer the network show up and we just like chit chat about network engineering. Extreme come true. I don't have a lot of friends up here. We're gonna take a break. And when we come back, we're gonna talk to Monica about some laptops. We'll be right back.
1:04:39 Speaker 06 Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.
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1:05:55 Speaker 03 Okay, we're back. Monica, laptop fever has hit America.
1:06:01 Speaker 05 The mayor speaking.
1:06:02 Speaker 03 There was a giant drop of, I don't know, six, eight laptops that got announced because Intel has finally announced another chip. They announce a new chip all the time. What is special about the new Tiger Lake H-series mobile chips?
1:06:21 Speaker 05 So Intel announced 10 chips. There are five consumer and five commercial. So they're a part of, they're not like a new generation. They're part of Intel's Tiger Lake generation, codenamed Tiger Lake, the 11th gen chips. So we had like a few of these already. And the ones that we tried, we, really only one of them was in like a lot of laptops that we tried and it was not like great. It was okay, but like the competition is just, I mean, there's a lot of competition from both sides. So AMD, obviously Ryzen 5000, we saw huge performance gains and efficiency gains there. And then of course from Apple, we have the M1, which just did really, really well in the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
1:07:03 Speaker 03 And they're putting it in everything now. You can get it in an iPad, you can get it in a toaster. It's great.
1:07:09 Speaker 05 Intel, I mean, Intel's really playing catch up and we've been really waiting on these chips because these are the ones that we expect to be competitive with Ryzen 5000 because there are three eight-core chips and two six-core chips. So these are really like workstation chips, these are gaming laptop chips. We didn't really have chips from Intel that were competitive on that front before.
1:07:30 Speaker 05 So this is really if Intel is going to put out gaming laptops and put out workstations that are as good as the ones coming from AMD, these chips are going to be in them. So that's what's that's what's significant.
1:07:40 Speaker 03 Do you believe them?
1:07:45 Speaker 05 So I mean, it's hard. There are two sort of elephants in the room here. In terms of of of like raw power, like the frameworks we're going to get, we do generally expect them to be competitive with Ryzen 5000, certainly more so than the the chips that we've seen from this series so far. The big elephant in the room is battery life because AMD has been really good at that. We saw in the Zephyrus G15, that was like monstrous battery life. It lasted about as long as any gaming laptop I've ever tested for battery life. AMD has just made like incredible efficiency gains over the past few generations. And as you know, Apple's F1 delivers very good battery life as well.
1:08:25 Speaker 05 I was listening very closely and I did not hear battery life mentioned in Intel's presentation. I did not hear anything about it. And that is a worrying sign to me because I think if they I assume if they had made big gains in battery life, they probably would have said something.
1:08:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, of course.
1:08:42 Speaker 05 So that's a question mark. And that's really, I think, what we're going to be watching for is, you know, did this increased power to these Tiger Lake chips come at the expense of a lot of efficiency? And if we have gaming laptops that are really good, but they only last like an hour and a half, that's, you know, that's not necessarily a gaming laptop is going to be as good as what we're seeing coming out of coming out of AMD. Um, the other question is Alder Lake, which is like sort of the next generation that's supposed to be coming from Intel. So Intel claims it has this 12th generation codenamed Alder Lake coming later this year. That was announced at CES. And we really don't know how good this is going to be, but there's definitely a question of whether like buying these chips means you're buying yourself into obsolescence if we have Alder Lake coming out so soon.
1:09:24 Speaker 05 I did, I asked Intel's general manager and Intel GM about that when I spoke to them last week and they basically, I mean, they they said, they said, buy now.
1:09:38 Speaker 05 So that's the only information we have on that.
1:09:40 Speaker 03 Amazing. We've been down on Intel for like so much for so many years. It's actually hard. Like they've got the new CEO. He unveiled his new plan. They're like, they're, they're going to build chips for other companies. They're going to let other companies build their chips. They've got, they've got a whole very good strategy. It seems like for like catching up and getting out of this sort of perpetual state of feeling like they're just a little bit behind. It seems like they're still just a little bit behind. And so, you know, this isn't the like, oh, they, they're back. And I, I'm starting to feel like we're not going to get that moment out of them. Like Apple had this huge like kaboom moment with the M1. I think AMD actually with the recent generation of Ryzen chips has like really been like, oh, wow.
1:10:22 Speaker 03 You guys are back. What like, I wasn't paying attention, but here you are. These are great. And I just don't know if like if and when we're going to get that kind of moment out of Intel.
1:10:32 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, it's a really big question. Like, you know, it's not all that, all that many years that we've been able to say Intel's the underdog. But, but Intel's the underdog right now. I mean, they really, these chips need to be good. I don't think it's impossible, but um, you know, I think really efficiency is the main. One of the reasons that AMD's last two generations have been so impressive is that they are like just so, so efficient in so many of these systems.
1:10:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:10:58 Speaker 05 Um, which is really where we've seen Intel losing. Now, Intel has been very competitive on single core workloads there. But a big thing that we're watching for here is whether the multi-core workloads are really able to, um, to people we're seeing coming out of AMD, because it was just getting destroyed on those last year.
1:11:14 Speaker 03 So did any of the, I don't know, half dozen laptops that got announced with this stuff appeal to you? Like I'm, I'm looking at a bunch and like, oh, actually these seem like pretty good. Like maybe they actually did achieve some kind of efficiency because things seem thinner and lighter. I don't know. What, what do you think? Anything here appeal to you?
1:11:29 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I'm excited about is that we've seen a couple laptop, gaming laptops finally, finally ditching the 16 by nine aspect ratio. I'm very, very excited about that because I hate the 16 by nine aspect ratio and I've smacked off forever. So, you know, obviously for, for a while, that's been the only thing you could get a gaming laptop with because. You know, they just don't have that many 16 by 10 panels that are that high resolution or that high refresh rate. Since CES, we've really started to see QHD screens become a lot more common on gaming laptops. And part of that is that this is the first year where we've really had the chips that could make, could power games at QHD resolution at these price points and these, in these form factors.
1:12:14 Speaker 05 So we're, we're starting to see with this release, we have a couple 16 by 10 QHD screens. Yeah, so one of the ones I'm really excited about is the Zephyrus M16, which has a 16 by 10 QHD 165 hertz display. So that is pretty unusual to see in gaming laptops. And I think it's really cool because if you're looking for a gaming laptop that can also like be a productivity machine where you can multitask and do all your office work, where you don't need to have two separate ones, a QHD 165 hertz 16 by 10 display is like exactly what you want, that can really accommodate both of those things.
1:12:48 Speaker 03 That sounds great, but does it have a webcam?
1:12:51 Speaker 05 You know, I don't know, actually.
1:12:53 Speaker 03 Okay.
1:12:54 Speaker 05 It's a very good question. I, I, the cool thing though, is that the M16 is, is basically a very similar chassis to the Zephyrus G14 and the Zephyrus G15, which are really some of the, the most portable and most well-made gaming laptops you can get. So it's basically, they took the Zephyrus G14, the Zephyrus G15, which are like excellent tried and true laptops, and they put an Intel chip in them and made them 16 by 10. So obviously, we're gonna have to see how well they do. And the fact that it's an Intel chip, it's have an AMD chip will certainly have an impact on the performance, but I really hope that this one succeeds because I think it's a really cool idea.
1:13:32 Speaker 03 Well, I love, I don't know. You convinced me I'd to, to buy into this brand and I'm like now a fanboy and I am looking at what appears to be a webcam on the top of the bezel, so.
1:13:43 Nilay Patel? I mean, I'm just fascinated by the design moment that Windows laptops are having because of these Intel chips. Like, how many years do we spend yelling at Apple that they're making everything too thin? And now the entire Windows laptop ecosystem is like, what if it was extremely thin and light? And I feel like in another year, we're gonna be like, yeah, make it thicker and put a bigger battery in it? Like, did you learn nothing? But it's interesting to see, like, the designs these laptops are. Well, some of them are just like, they look exactly like Mac and cross still. But across the board, there are bolder, more interesting designs in Windows laptops, because the chip is allowing for better thermal designs.
1:14:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, if you want, if you are someone who really wants like, a big, like, massive, obnoxious 17-inch gaming laptop, like, those are definitely still out there. Like, your Strix Scars are out there, your G76 Raiders are out there. But I do think that, you know, there is a really large base of people who, you know, really want a computer that can double and do all the things they want it to do, that can game, but also they can acceptably bring to a coffee shop or a work meeting and like, not have people staring because there are lights all over it. I think that I really, I'm really glad that the industries are moving in that direction and putting out more options. And I think that these, these chips certainly are making that more viable every year.
1:15:04 Nilay Patel? So this means, I know it doesn't use a chip, but that means we should probably talk about this Acer thing, because it's so cool.
1:15:10 Speaker 03 Let's never talk about the name. The Acer Concept D7 Ezal.
1:15:16 Speaker 05 Are you saying, I don't know if it's Ezal or Ezel?
1:15:18 Speaker 03 It's like a bezel joke. They took the B out. It's the bezel's so small, they can't even fit the word bezel into the name of the laptop.
1:15:24 Nilay Patel? They want to call it the easel, and it's probably, there's a trademark. So they came up.
1:15:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:15:28 Nilay Patel? So I think they came up with Ezal.
1:15:32 Speaker 03 I prefer Ezal, anyway.
1:15:34 Nilay Patel? But anyway, so it's like a laptop, but it's got this wacky hinge and the screen pulls storage.
1:15:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, so the Concept D70ZL is like, if you can open it up and it looks like a regular laptop, but then there is a hinge in the center of the back of the lid, so you can fold the lid backwards and have it face away from the keyboard. And then there's also a hinge that allows you to pick the screen up off the deck and basically have it hover. And so you can, you can bend it in like a million different ways. They've sort of defined six different ones. There's like laptop mode, you can use it as a tablet, you can have it like as a laptop, but in reverse, you can have it as a tent, you can have it as a stand. There are a ton of different ways to use it. It's very cool just because like, like any, any purpose that you can imagine, like wanting a laptop for, there's
1:16:23 Speaker 05 like a form that works really well for it. The one I wouldn't, I don't think is super useful is tablet because it's like over five pounds. So I don't think I'm gonna be like, oh, tablet.
1:16:33 Nilay Patel? Any, any thing you'd want to use a laptop for, except for not breaking your back.
1:16:38 Speaker 05 As long as you're willing to keep it on, on your desk. But I really like, I ended up really liking the stand mode where you basically have it like in a tent over the keyboard because it's like having, it, it's like having a tablet that's like pressed up on a stand, but it's like a lot more sturdy.
1:16:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I just, I, I, I think it's super interesting that kind of Windows PCs are having a design moment. I know that Apple's doing all of its like M1 related rebooting. They obviously just do iMac. There's been a lot of weird leaks about next generation M1 or M series Apple laptops, but like for the most part, Apple designs have been static for a decade. And so it's like really cool to see kind of the, the Windows side of it with a chip that enables more interesting thermal design. Just like, go for it. Like, I don't think it's been this exciting for a while.
1:17:31 Speaker 05 Yeah. And I definitely hope, I hope that they, the, the Concept D that I reviewed does not have the most recent chips, but I would love for them to refresh this with, with the new chips that are coming out because that is sort of the, the target audience for them.
1:17:45 Nilay Patel? All right. Monica, by the way, I want to commend you on your story about Linux at the University of Minnesota, mostly for striking directly at Dieter's heart.
1:17:56 Speaker 03 I'm a gopher. What do you want?
1:17:59 Nilay Patel? But a great story. If you haven't read it, go read it. Monica dug into why the University of Minnesota is currently banned from contributing to the Linux kernel. It's just a wild, wild story involving maybe too much social engineering.
1:18:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:18:14 Nilay Patel? We call that, we were talking about Elon because of space link. I just want to point out Tesla stopped taking Bitcoin for vehicle purchases citing environmental harm and then Bitcoin is like collapsed. I've never seen Liz Lopato more excited to cover a story than anything. So I'm anticipating that something will happen.
1:18:31 Speaker 03 Yeah. Her second most exciting thing was when he was on SNL and called Dogecoin a hustle. Dogecoin collapsed. I think, I think there might be a problem where cryptocurrencies are too vulnerable to famous people saying things about them.
1:18:44 Nilay Patel? Uh, that's true. Liz is currently, she's one of the pool reporters in the Apple trial. So she's very distracted because she's literally in the courtroom as one of the pool reporters. But she and I have had a lot of esoteric conversations about what makes a cryptocurrency a currency that Apple doesn't charge a tax for, but V bucks not. Uh, so she's chasing that down too. Anyway, Elon stuff, it just keeps happening to us. Uh, I want to call out on Decoder. This week we had Kate Klonick, who is just an expert in the Facebook Oversight Board. We talked about the Trump ban. Next week on Decoder, Decoder is going to come out late. It's going to come out on Thursday because we got a big guest with it, with the news. I can't say who, but it's, it's big. And we got a surprise on Tuesday too.
1:19:29 Nilay Patel? So that's on Decoder. This week Kate Klonick, next week, big surprise. Also as part of Infrastructure Week, Mechanic Kelly did a live event with Senator Ed Markey talking about broadband policy. That's up and around the site. You can subscribe or you can follow McKenna's various regulatory coverage at theverge.com/hillreport. That is very interesting. Also, of course, heating up as you all know. You can tweet at us. I'm at recklesstheaters, at backlon, Addie is at the dextrarchy, and Monica is at mc squared 96, which honestly sounds like a rap name. And I truly, I wish you well in your burgeoning hip hop career. That's it. That's the Rich Cast. Rock and roll.
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