Pod Insights The Vergecast Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review / Spotify is acquiring two major podcast tech platforms / The LinkBuds are Sony’s strangest earbuds yet About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Monica Chin discuss phones, laptops, and chips announced and reviewed this week.
Senior reporter Ashley Carman joins the show to discuss the latest podcast industry news.
Further reading:
Samsung’s Galaxy S22 phones are the safe bet
OnePlus Nord CE 2 review: a great Oppo-tunity
Realme 9 Pro and Pro Plus announced with color-changing new design
Oppo releases official images of new Find X5 flagship phonet
Apple reportedly plans to reveal the first iPhone SE with 5G in March
AMD’s new Ryzen 6000 H-series processors are launching in laptops starting today
Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review: the price is no longer right
The Asus ROG Strix Flare II Animate: feature-packed, but overpriced
Cooler Master’s Sneaker X PC case has a lot of sole
Intel's first discrete Arc desktop GPUs are coming in Q2 2022
This DIY ultracompact computer has a mechanical keyboard
Samsung teases new Galaxy Book and more at February 27th event
Spotify’s COVID problems are bigger than Joe Rogan
Spotify is acquiring two major podcast tech platforms
Spotify wants to beat YouTube at audio
Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for Joe Rogan’s podcast
Hot Pod Summit is back at On Air Fest 2022!
The LinkBuds are Sony’s strangest earbuds in years — and surprisingly good
Audio-Technica’s new $200 earbuds promise an impressive 20 hours of battery life
Garmin’s Epix 2 multisport watch made me a touchscreen convert
Garmin's Fenix 7S Sapphire Solar makes the case for smaller fitness watches
iFixit has a Steam Deck teardown — and will officially sell replacement parts from Valve
Disney is developing planned communities for fans who never want to leave its clutches
Google is bringing Chrome OS to PCs and Macs
Facebook rebrands News Feed after more than 15 years
Elon Musk tells a judge the SEC’s ‘endless’ investigation is stifling his free speech
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 14,050 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? This week on The Vergecast, Monica Chin joins the show. We talk a little bit about the phones that are coming out ahead of MWC, AMD's new Ryzen chips, and the Asus Rogue Zephyrus G14, which contains that chip. Then Ashley Carmen joins the show. We talk about Spotify's big acquisitions, then a little bit of lightning round. That's all coming up on The Vergecast 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, welcome to The Vergecast. The flagship.
1:57 Nilay Patel? We are the flagship podcast of shape rotators. Get it behind the sports cells. Well, we're beginning the show. That's Dieter. I'm Eli. I don't, I don't know what I'm doing here. Welcome to the voyage.com. Alex Krantz is here.
2:15 Alex Cranz? I am trying to figure out which of which of the the chipmunks we are because so many people listen to this podcast so quickly.
2:22 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
2:23 Nilay Patel? A shocking number of people were like, we only listen at like two X.
2:28 Alex Cranz? Please let us know which which chipmunks we sound like.
2:31 Speaker 04 I feel like I'm the guy.
2:35 Speaker 04 I'm the dude who's like hanging out with us.
2:36 Nilay Patel? You're Dave. That's his name.
2:38 Speaker 04 Dave.
2:38 Nilay Patel? Why aren't you deep in chipmunk lore? Come on, get into it. Name all the chipmunks and the chipmunks. That's Monica Chin, by the way. Hey, Monica.
2:46 Speaker 04 Hi.
2:47 Nilay Patel? Monica is going to help us run through some laptop and phone news from MWC, a little preview of MWC, and then Ashley Carmen is going to join us later. By the way, the other thing I want to call out, the number of people who wrote to us about Bing and why they use Bing, the volume was so high that I was like, ah, we have to assign a story. So our fellow Umar wrote a story about it. It was great. Thank you for all the people who wrote in. That story was illuminating. I tweeted it with the word apparently. I wrote, apparently people use Bing and like Microsoft was offended.
3:18 Nilay Patel? So if you're at Microsoft, like the PM of Bing is like, it's my goal to switch Neil I to Bing. So good luck. Then we're gonna have to up those rewards tiers, buddy, but you can get there.
3:28 Speaker 03 Well, actually, the there's been a whole thing. Someone wrote a post about how the quality of Google search results has gone down and they have. I tried to search for Farhad Manjoo's article today, and I just searched for his name. And the first thing that popped up was somebody copying the New York Times, not the New York Times article itself.
3:44 Nilay Patel? Amazing. That post is great. It's about how people are appending Reddit to their Google searches. So only searching Reddit directly.
3:51 Alex Cranz? Yes.
3:51 Nilay Patel? Because then you get real people talking instead of like SEO recipe spam or whatever. I could do like a full hour on how the entire news industry.
3:59 Speaker 03 Oh, we are so off topic. If you're in your car, I need you to pull over, pull out your laptop, open Chrome, hit Command Q, or just open up Preferences inside Chrome. And then I want you to click on Search Engine. And then click on manage search engines. And then, if you'd like, you can add any search engine you want and change the shortcut, or even change your default search engine to include site: reddit.com. So you can change your default search engine and include all sorts of alternate search engines with your own keywords on them. It works really well. It's how I search the search. Anyway, strongly recommend in both Chrome and Microsoft Edge that you play around with adding custom keyword search engines to your universal bar at the top. The Vergecast, everybody.
4:43 Alex Cranz? You can do it in Alfred, too. Like, you can do it in all the little, the little hotkey search things. You can program as many as you want.
4:50 Speaker 03 The nice thing about doing it in Edge, or, yeah, I think, I think Chrome 2, is it will sync across different computers, but not to mobile, because the mobile version of these browsers apparently doesn't count.
5:00 Nilay Patel? Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Alfred Power Tips. 1998's hottest podcast. Amazing. Very excited for all the Alfred users to ping us. You know who you are. Everyone else has no idea what we're talking about. Because, you know, Sherlock is a built-in search on Alfred.
5:20 Alex Cranz? They all use Quicksilver. What are you talking about?
5:22 Speaker 03 Oh, my God. Much bar.
5:25 Nilay Patel? MWC preview. That's what we came here to talk about. That's what the people pay us the money for. The money being nothing. It's, it's your attention. This is an advertising business. Anyway, the S32s are out. Allison Johnson currently reviewing them. We've got our hands on, they seem very safe, but there's a bunch of other phones coming up that we see come in MWC. What's going on there?
5:45 Speaker 03 So MWC is traditionally the place for a bunch of not Samsung companies to announce phones, but past few years, and this year, I think also, everyone has figured out that, like, if we just do the announcement ourselves, it'll be fine. So they're still hitting that sort of vague target around MWC, but they're not necessarily being announced at MWC. We'll have to see what happens. So there's the OnePlus Nord CE2 that John just reviewed. There's the Realme 9 Pro and Pro Plus. We also have seen some images and teases of the Oppo Find X5, which is their flagship phone. All of these are BBK phones. So you know, OnePlus is now kind of like Oppo. They're just a sub brand of Oppo.
6:30 Speaker 03 And Realme is also another one of these sub brands that will eventually, I'm sure, get absorbed into Oppo when they get bored with it. And I don't know, like, they all seem fine. To me, the most fascinating thing about the the Nord CE2 and especially the Realme 9 is it seems like MediaTek is like getting into phones that are halfway decent and you don't just laugh the phone out of the room because it's running a MediaTek processor. Very interesting.
6:57 Nilay Patel? Well, so that's like, kind of like the classic pattern, right? You've got the low end brand and then everything kind of gets fast enough. And they become, right? They're now just like a decent mid range performance because the tippy top of performance is ridiculous for most people.
7:11 Speaker 03 Right. But I guess what I'm saying is like, I've never considered a MediaTek phone to be allowed to be called like high mid or high low end or, you know, mid range or whatever. Like, it's always been like, oh, sorry. I mean, do what you can. But now it's like, oh, MediaTek, okay. Which is surprising.
7:27 Nilay Patel? How much do you think this is driven by cost, right? Like OnePlus, I think you could argue that they have left their low cost roots behind. But they were, they were kind of the lower cost phone for a while, right? Flagships at mid range prices. Realme is definitely in that lower cost tier most often, right? Do you think, do you think it's, well, these MediaTek, MediaTek chips are cheaper and we can just use them and maybe they're fast enough? Or is it like, whoo, that chip shortage sucks and MediaTek is, ooh, right? Like, here we are.
7:56 Alex Cranz? They just got a box of them.
7:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, boy. I hadn't thought about that. It could be both. I just, I wanted to tell a nice story about, you know, good job MediaTek. But yeah, maybe it's just like, well, the bin of Qualcomm 635s is empty. What else do we got?
8:12 Nilay Patel? By the way, the name of this, the name of this processor is, in the Realme 9 Pro is the MediaTek Demensity 920.
8:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:21 Nilay Patel? Demensity.
8:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:22 Nilay Patel? That's definitely a word.
8:25 Alex Cranz? Honestly, I like it better than Intel.
8:27 Nilay Patel? So, you know, I think we talked about this last week. I asked the CEO of Qualcomm on Decoder, like, yeah, why is every phone in America a Qualcomm chip? Right? And he hemmed and hawed, and he was fine, like, the carriers are only certified Qualcomm chips. So like, a real question is like, are the carriers going to support any of these phones?
8:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, in the US at least, unknown. Yeah.
8:45 Nilay Patel? They look cool. I like the the Realme. It's like a sparkle back.
8:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, it changes color if those are like sunlight. It's like, yeah, like hypercolor. The 90s are back. We got a vibe shift coming, and the Realme 9 Pro is at the forefront of the vibe shift. Be ready.
8:59 Nilay Patel? If you don't know what Dieter is talking about, you are blissfully not online. But our sister publication, New York Magazine and their vertical, The Cut, published a piece called, "A Vibe Shift Is Coming." You should read it. No one knows what it means. But it's like, an all time great headline. And it's just like, basically it boils down to like, maybe we're older and things feel different, or it boils down to no one will ever be cool again. And those are the two poles. But a vibe shift is coming, and hypercolor phones are it.
9:29 Speaker 03 I guess the other phone that's going to be in, not in NBC, but around NBC, is, you know, we're getting up to like, expecting Apple's spring event. And they're probably going to introduce the iPhone SE, which will be the first one that has 5G. And I wish that I could be happier about this, but I really am not happy about like, the iPhone SE form factor. I feel like it's, at this point, like, the idea of like, having a cool, new looking phone that is nevertheless like, low cost, has hit everywhere, and that the fact that the iPhone SE, I know people still love that form factor, whatever. I just, I feel like it's time to update something there, more than just throwing a 5G radio into it.
10:10 Nilay Patel? You think? That's all they're gonna do? You don't think they're gonna go full screen, Face ID? All that stuff is cheaper now, right?
10:16 Speaker 03 All that stuff is cheaper, but you know what's even cheaper than that? The bin full of Touch ID buttons.
10:22 Nilay Patel? What? They don't have a bin full?
10:26 Nilay Patel? I love that like the idea that like someone just keeps making them and they're like, I hope they use them.
10:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I look, I think ultimately, Apple knows the carriers are desperate. Did you see this the other day? The headline, the top headline on CNN.com was not Ukraine. It wasn't Sarah Palin suing the New York Times. Well, none of that. It was looming 3G shutdown could affect more than phones. And I was like, I don't know. Like, I understand there's a lot of management turmoil at CNN. Like, I don't know what tech editor was like, I got it. 3G shutdown. But like, it's real. It's coming.
11:05 Speaker 03 My car is gonna stop working. My, I mean, my car will keep working, but I will no longer be able to use the remote app on my Volkswagen. Because it is on 3G. And they say, maybe, maybe we'll make a module for you next year, maybe. But like, I can no longer use my phone to like lock my car if I would need to.
11:23 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna get you one of those crazy Android tablet head units.
11:27 Speaker 03 Oh, God.
11:28 Nilay Patel? This is, this is, this is gonna be the worst gift I ever give you. Like, one of those like $1,200. It's basically, it's like a MediaTek Android tablet. But it's your car radio.
11:40 Speaker 03 Can it adjust my climate, though? Because like, that's integrated into the screen.
11:44 Nilay Patel? Yes, it can. These things are nuts.
11:46 Speaker 03 Okay, okay.
11:47 Nilay Patel? They're not good. And when you read any of like the car forums, if people put them in, they're like, I don't know why I did this.
11:54 Nilay Patel? Like, the YouTube videos are like, I put a Tesla radio in my car, dot, dot, dot. I regret everything.
11:59 Speaker 03 Are the bootloaders locked? Can I, can I load a custom ROM onto them?
12:03 Nilay Patel? You know, Dieter, I think you're gonna find out when I buy you one of these things.
12:07 Nilay Patel? Anyway, so the, all, to bring this all the way back around. Yes, the carriers are desperate to turn off their 3G networks, to refarm the spectrum, use it for other things. Apple knows that. That's how they're generating, the sales they're generating.
12:21 Speaker 03 Yep.
12:22 Nilay Patel? So if you're like, okay, fine, we're gonna, we're gonna just go after the low end and collect these carrier subsidies. Right, like you can just make a 5G iPhone SE and just assume AT&T and Verizon will just like throw them out of trucks.
12:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:36 Nilay Patel? They'll just drive down the street, fling them at people.
12:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's sort of, it's really opportunistic, like Samsung makes a phone at every $23 price point, just like clockwork, no matter how much you want to spend, Samsung has a phone at that price point, full stop. And Apple wants to make sure that when the coming carriers must get everybody to replace their phones, no matter what apocalypse comes at the 3D shutdown, those last stragglers, they need to have an iPhone SE sitting there, because otherwise they're gonna, those people that don't want to spend the full amount of money are gonna end up with an Android phone, and that's unacceptable.
13:09 Nilay Patel? I just think that's like fundamentally fascinating. We are definitely in a moment where more of Apple's strategy is being driven by the carrier world than I think, we've talked about it a lot, but I, you can just see it, right? That's where the upgrade cycles are coming from, is the carrier is desperately trying to get people onto these new networks. And now that they've solved their FAA problems, actually use the mid-band spectrum.
13:30 Alex Cranz? So what happens in like two or three years when everybody's upgraded?
13:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't know, 6G. We're gonna start racing the 6G, like it's, it's like, I, I don't want to say, I'm saying half a joke, but like, that's definitely what's gonna happen.
13:45 Speaker 03 I mean, AT&T is launching 6G next week, right? They're just gonna rename it for the hell of it?
13:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
13:50 Alex Cranz? Just add a little like line on the 5, and they're like, we did it, 6G.
13:54 Nilay Patel? Someone sent me a picture, Evan tweeted at me in his phone had a bug, and it just says G at the top. It's like, where am I in the race? And I think you've won. I think that's fundamentally, that's winning. When you no longer know, you've transcended Gs.
14:09 Speaker 03 Yep. I think the last MWC adjacent thing to talk about, which brings us into talking about a whole bunch of laptops, is Samsung has teased a Galaxy Book. And I frankly don't know what's going on with Samsung and laptops. I just like, it always feels like they're like giving it the old college try because they'd feel bad if they didn't, but their heart is never really in it. And is, am I wrong, Monica? Are they gonna, are they gonna like?
14:34 Speaker 04 The last Galaxy Book Pro was actually very, very good. It's our best page. Like there it was really excellent, but they've definitely put some out in the past that were more experimental. So it's always, it's always hard to know which category they're going for. But I do think that the progression of Samsung laptops in the past years has gotten like, there's been significant improvement and I think significant like progress in the pragmatics sector.
15:03 Speaker 03 So should we be hyped for this February 27 event?
15:05 Speaker 04 So I'm looking forward to it. I mean, I'm looking forward to trying it. I think, um, I mean, like I said, the last Galaxy Book was, it was really one of my favorites that I reviewed last year, to be honest. Um, so I hope they fix the right things.
15:17 Alex Cranz? Is it going to be like a 14 inch? Is it going to be a 15 inch? Like, do we have any idea what the size of this thing is going to be?
15:23 Speaker 04 No one has told me.
15:27 Speaker 03 Maybe that's what it is, is that there's like, there's a hype cycle for other laptops.
15:32 Speaker 04 I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiple sizes, but.
15:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think for me, it's, it's that there, there's not like a rumor hype cycle for Galaxy Books in the way that there are for other Samsung devices or even other Windows laptops. And so it's just sort of, they land and it sort of doesn't feel like it's part of the same like excitement wheel as other, you know, consumer electronics. But yeah, no, I'm excited to check it out.
15:53 Alex Cranz? They're not like HP or, or Dell, or even nowadays Asus, where, where there's lots of experimentation. There's lots of like, kind of cool things setting the tone for the rest of the laptops. Samsung is very much like, yeah, we do this pretty good.
16:06 Speaker 04 Well, I disagree with that. I think, um, in the past, they actually have like, things like the Galaxy Book Flex and the Galaxy Book S have been like types of things that no one else is doing. And for a while, that was really what they were known for is like, these aren't laptops that people are necessarily going to buy. Like they're not really going to sell well, probably. But they are doing like these kind of wacky things. Like one of them's like 0.02 pounds and one of them has this processor that no one else has. And, um, the Galaxy Pro, I think was, um,
16:37 Speaker 04 Well, sort of one of the first times I've seen them really try to do like a like a MacBook Pro like competitor that people might actually buy instead of a MacBook Pro. And I think the Galaxy Book, the most recent Galaxy Book Pro, like the regular one, not the two one that we reviewed, is one of the lightest laptops you can buy. Like legitimately, there are almost no laptops of that size that are lighter. And I think that was a really big accomplishment. And that's one of the reasons I think it's so great.
17:03 Alex Cranz? Was it lighter than the LG Gram?
17:04 Speaker 04 I don't know, because I never actually reviewed the 13 inch. And I've never reviewed an LG Gram of that size, so I'm not sure. But I know there are like maybe two or three laptops that are lighter than the Galaxy Book Pro 13. It was really like astonishingly light. So that's that's one of the things that the Samsung line, I think, really has going for it. And obviously, I always like to see very light laptops that don't compromise a lot of things, which we've seen a lot of other companies doing recently.
17:31 Speaker 03 Well, on the other end of the spectrum, we're starting to see Ryzen H series laptops. And you actually reviewed one of them.
17:38 Speaker 04 Yes.
17:38 Speaker 03 So what's going on here?
17:39 Speaker 04 So I'm currently talking to you from the ROG Zephyrus G14, which has AMD's Ryzen 9 6900HS. It's the first Ryzen 6000 processor that we've gotten to review so far. We ran some games on it. We ran down the battery. It's been interesting.
17:58 Speaker 03 What does that mean?
18:00 Speaker 04 Do you want me to just go into my general?
18:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, let's do it. I want to. I mean, I want to hear what's going on with like the the Ryzen H series, like these in laptops, like what's that generation mean? And I'm really curious about the G14 because thanks to you, I I stand the G14. It is. It's it's my boy. I love it. And I'm curious about the new one.
18:20 Speaker 04 The G14, for those who are unfamiliar, is has been one of the Verge's favorite gaming laptops for the past couple of years. And a big part of that has been that it's just unbelievably affordable for the benefits that it offers. So when it came in 2020, it was showing these like crazy frame rates and it was like. Significantly less expensive than basically everything else that was delivering those frame rates. The reviewers just across the board were astonished by it, basically. Like, they'd never seen a laptop of this size delivering these frame rates at this price. And the battery life, to top it all off, was like the longest battery life we'd seen in a gaming laptop at that point. So, ever since then, Asus has been slowly bringing
19:05 Speaker 04 up the price of this laptop. So, the one we reviewed last year was like $400 or $500 more than the one we reviewed in 2020. And this one is even more expensive than that one. So, it fixed a lot of the problems that we had with the last generation. The last generation has 16:9 screen, this one 16:10. The last one didn't have a webcam. They put a webcam on this one. The webcam is actually pretty good, I think. Like, better than most laptop webcams that I've tried. They kept a lot of the same things, like the keyboard and touchpad on the Zephyr's G14 have always been like some of my favorite keyboard and touchpad on laptops, period. Like, people ask me, like, what's the best laptop keyboard? And I will say, the G14 is like one of my favorite ones.
19:46 Nilay Patel? We argued about this when we were doing the Mac review.
19:49 Speaker 04 One of the problems with the keyboard on the last generation was that there was some flex in the deck. And so, people like Neil, I would get annoyed when they would like press down and it would depress the deck. But they actually made the deck, I think, much sturdier on this one. And that's a very big improvement. Like, I was trying really hard to depress the deck and I could not. So, they made a lot of things a lot better. The other thing they did was they, the past generations have had Nvidia GPUs, and this one is all AMD. So, not only does it have an AMD chip, but it has an AMD graphics card. So, they made all those changes. And at the price of like $1499 or $1599, which was the original price of the G14 in 2020, this would be just like a phenomenal buy.
20:31 Speaker 04 It's performing like pretty well compared to things at that price point and to things like in the upper 1000s tier. And when it comes to the chassis, there's really like nothing wrong with it. Like, the only thing I really had to claim, I was like, they took that, there's no fingerprint sensor, and I wish there was. But like, that's like a really tiny thing. The screen is fantastic, like it's unbelievably bright. Really, everything about it is great. But the unit they sent me is $2499, which is just really, really expensive. And now down, other units for sale for less than that, but they didn't send me those. So I have no idea how those units perform. I can't, I suspect they are better buys, but I, I wish they'd send me those, but I can't speak to value them because I don't know the frame rates
21:15 Speaker 04 they're going to put up. They have like different, different GPUs, different like RAM configurations, stuff like that. So I just don't know. The only one I have is the 2499 one, and this one is not worth 24.99 because that price point is just, that is like how much like the best 15 inch laptops on the market cost. Like that is just like, that is like the big leagues. That is a much higher priced tier than this device has been in the past. If you're going to pay that much for something, it should be like solidly outperforming something you can get for $1800. And it's just not, um, on the games that we tested compared to like the Razer Blade 14 with an RTX 3070 compared to like the Zephyrus G15 with an RTX 3070, both of which are like at least several hundred dollars
21:59 Speaker 04 less. This is not, not only is it not decisively beating those on every title, which it really should be if it's charging this much, but like it's below them, um, like noticeably below them on some of the titles that we tried. So.
22:11 Nilay Patel? Do you get the other trade off? Do you get longer battery life, less heat for the new chip?
22:16 Speaker 04 The things that you get for that price are one, you get this fancy little thing on the lid uh, called the anime.
22:21 Nilay Patel? So not battery. Yes.
22:24 Nilay Patel? They're like, let me tell you about the dancing LEDs. No, this is Asus's thing. They've got a keyboard that does the same thing. I love it.
22:29 Speaker 04 Like you can put like words on it. You can have to say like, hi mom and like whatever you want. You can, there are fun things you can do with it, but like it doesn't impact your like gaming experience, right? Cause it's on the lid.
22:40 Nilay Patel? So LED sign on the lid. Got it. Battery life.
22:44 Speaker 04 16 by 10 aspect ratio.
22:46 Nilay Patel? Yes.
22:48 Speaker 04 Which is great. That is, that is a big thing. I'm very happy about that.
22:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:52 Speaker 04 It's, it's 32 gigabytes of RAM, which is hard to find in a 14 inch laptop. Most of the, the Blade 14 units and the G15 units that we tested both had 16 gigabytes of RAM. So that is a bonus and it has longer battery life than most gaming laptops in the industry because gaming laptops, if you are familiar, like a lot of them will last like two hours. So this lasted about like seven hours and 15 minutes for me, which is like pretty good. But it's not good if you're comparing it to last year's G14, for example, or the G15. So it is still like a downward trend when it comes to the Zephyrus line. Like the previous one, I think lasted like over nine hours. Like it was like unbelievable battery life.
23:34 Speaker 04 And that was again, a huge part of why this laptop was like worth so much money. Uh, which is like, seems like it's being chipped away at. Gaming battery was also not great. I got like less than an hour of Red Dead Redemption 2 gameplay, which like, it's still like, you know, on other AMD systems, I've gotten like an hour and a half. So it's, the battery life here did not blow me out of the water the way that I think something that costs this much should. So those are some, so you are getting some extra benefits over, say, something like the Blade 14 or the Zephyrus G15 with the 16 by 9. But one, those two laptops both have models that are coming out this year that we don't know the details of.
24:18 Speaker 04 So they might also, if you want to wait for those models to come out this year, they might have some of the same things going on. And I just, I don't think, while I think the benefits are worth paying some for, I don't think they're worth paying like $650 more for. Which is like, how much more this would be than a BL14 with an RTX 3070?
24:36 Alex Cranz? Like, did it just give a reason for why this thing is so much more expensive? Is it like trying to chase Razer and be like, well, you're paying for design? Or is it just like, is it the, the shortage of, of chips? Is it just?
24:48 Nilay Patel? Well, there's an LED sign on the front. You can make it say.
24:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, the, the real reason is probably that those, those damn fancy lights are just cussing.
24:57 Nilay Patel? It's a hundred dollars in LED. So let's talk about this from the perspective of the processor, right? That like, this is the showcase for the Ryzen series every year. The entire Intel world, I don't want to say the Intel world, let me say yes. The entire X86 world is like in the shadow of what Apple has done with its M series chips. You know, we reviewed the MacBook Pros, we think there's going to be M2s coming out this year. Those are all the rumors. Doesn't it seem odd that, right, this is AMD's best effort? AMD does not have the. Process problems that Intel has, right? They've been ahead of the curve. Is it a little odd that, you know, their latest and greatest in sort of the showcase device is not outperforming where you'd expect?
25:38 Speaker 04 When we're doing like CPU gaming stuff, we usually run CS:GO. That's like a famously CPU-heavy title. So we compared to the last, the last G14 that had Ryzen 9, 5900HS. So the exact same processor as this, but like one generation before. We saw like some frame rate improvement, but it wasn't like blowing the last one out of the water. You know, when you compare the battery life that we're getting here to the battery life that we're getting from Apple's M1, like even the M1 Max, like there is still a very, very significant gap, especially when you look at how long it can last, like playing a game on battery, like that delta gets even bigger, which as we know, Apple's like battery, the
26:20 Speaker 04 performance that you get from one of these new M1 machines on battery is like not that different from the performance you get while it's plugged in, which just doesn't seem to be the case here. I think this is a very competitive year for chips, as we know, like Intel has its new older generation, like it's coming out guns blazing. And I think AMD needed to do a little bit more.
26:39 Alex Cranz? We're comparing it to the M1, but that's not really fair because the M1 doesn't have the gaming capabilities. Like, okay, theoretically it has the gaming.
26:48 Nilay Patel? Or games.
26:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it doesn't have the games. There are no games for it. So I like, I always kind of am a little cautious about comparing those two because they're totally different. Like it's different architectures, it's different use cases for the most part. And this one, it does sound like it wasn't as good battery-wise as last year's model. What was, what was last, was last year's model like an Intel? Was it an AMD? Like?
27:12 Speaker 04 No, last year's model was the, as I said, the Ryzen 9, 5900HS, which is this processor, but one generation earlier.
27:20 Alex Cranz? Okay.
27:21 Speaker 04 And AMD didn't make like a significant, like, like a massive earth-shattering graphics update to it or anything. And it was with an Nvidia RTX 360. So they swapped that out for an AMD GPU in this one. And so you think that you, that should be like, these are both AMD, like AMD's like engineering them to work together. Like you'd think that should be delivering better results, especially because the CPU, this is like a monstrous CPU. Like we know that this. CPU is very powerful and it's clearly, you know, based on these CS:GO results we're seeing, it's doing its job. But when we look at the games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider that leverages the GPU a lot more, the AMD pairing is just not doing as well as we're seeing from AMD Nvidia systems.
28:06 Speaker 03 So, I mean, we gotta talk about, if we're talking about the games and GPUs, we gotta talk about the other big news this week is that Intel's Arc desktop GPUs are actually finally maybe gonna ship in like Q2. Do you think that these are gonna be worth a damn?
28:20 Alex Cranz? I'm kind of excited to see these because they've had really interesting people working on them. They've been working on them for a long time. They are really bullish about them and Intel can't be bullish if they can't deliver because we will all make fun of them when we test them. Like, it's very easy to go and like make claims and then we can test them and be like, no, you're wrong. Like, you can't do that in GPU and CPUs. I mean, they, people try, but you can't really. And so I think there's something kind of interesting here. And it sounds like the third generation of this, they just announced, so they said they're gonna be working on this third generation. It's called Celestial, which is, ooh, what a name.
28:56 Speaker 03 That's some, that's some dimensity right there.
28:58 Alex Cranz? Like, MediaTek, Intel, they're all just hanging out being like, what's the worst name we can come up with? But the Celestial is actually supposed to take on that ultra enthusiast market, which is the 3090, the really high-end $1,000 GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. And that, like, okay, if you're so bullish that you think you're gonna be competing on that level in three generations, like, that's...
29:24 Nilay Patel? Can I just read then, I just looked at this roadmap. Can I read these names to you?
29:28 Speaker 03 Oh, no.
29:30 Nilay Patel? So this generation is called the Alchemist.
29:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:34 Nilay Patel? And then, by the way, this, talk about a shitbox graph. Okay, this graph has no x-axis. The Y axis is just labeled performance with no units. And then the chips are all identical and they just kind of like curve off into the distance on no time horizon, right? Like no idea. It just is labeled the multi-year roadmap.
29:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:57 Nilay Patel? And then there's no X axis at all. So is it 50 years? Is it tomorrow? Who knows? But these are the names. Q1 2022 Alchemist.
30:06 Speaker 03 Yeah. Love it. That's a great class.
30:09 Nilay Patel? The next one, whatever timeline this is, is the Battle Mage.
30:15 Speaker 03 Yes. Oh, so that, I mean, look, if you think you can stand up Elminster in this, this thing, like I got something covered for you. This Battle Mage is going to change the game. This is the best D and D shit I've ever seen.
30:30 Nilay Patel? They should stop at Battle Mage. I agree. Then, then there's Celestial, which they've just obviously started to work on to ship. What is time? There's no X axis. Who knows?
30:39 Speaker 03 But once you, once you max out your levels, they're the only thing left to do is take on Immortals. And so like you, you, you progress.
30:46 Nilay Patel? Well, but hold on, my friend, because the one after that.
30:49 Speaker 04 Send into a new plane and we don't even need these anymore.
30:53 Nilay Patel? Right. But then you, you fall right back down to earth as a Druid. Cause that's the fourth one.
30:58 Speaker 03 How, how does Druid come before Battle Mage? Like that is, like, are they go, oh, you know what it is? Actually, I got it. They're going for dual class. Like this isn't multi-class. They're going for dual class. So they level up from Alchemist to Celestial. Then they like start over at day one with Druid. And then eventually they've got a dual class celestial, you know, Arc Mage.
31:24 Nilay Patel? If I'm reading this correctly, Teeter is correct.
31:27 Speaker 03 Ah, yes.
31:31 Nilay Patel? I hate you. So I don't know what these letters mean. There's just a lot of letters here, but under Alchemist, it's, it's labeled X to the EHPG, like X to the power of E. And then Battle Mage is X to the E2. I'm not sure if that's X to the E squared or X to the E2. I feel like Hyam is gonna get really mad at me for this entire conversation. And then Celestial is labeled X to the E3.
31:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:58 Nilay Patel? And then Druid is labeled X to the E next architecture.
32:02 Alex Cranz? You're right.
32:03 Speaker 03 So it is.
32:04 Nilay Patel? Celestial is the end of the road.
32:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:06 Nilay Patel? And then you, right, then you lose all your weapons and you start over in the state of nature.
32:10 Speaker 04 What names were pitched that they said now Druid's better?
32:13 Nilay Patel? I just gotta say, like, meanwhile, Apple's like, I don't know, M1?
32:19 Speaker 03 Hang on. To be fair, Apple, Apple gets itself in, in like weird corners with like the A13 Zed Bionic Neural Engine, right? Like, they, they, they definitely start tacking on stuff.
32:30 Nilay Patel? Druid Max Pro.
32:33 Alex Cranz? Just call it a wizard and be done with it.
32:35 Speaker 03 I love it. Actually, if, like, the other thing we need to talk about with names, and it's related to maybe a sense of confidence, is Project Endgame, which is Intel's plan to do low latency streaming, and they're gonna put Arc GPUs in the cloud.
32:54 Alex Cranz? Everybody's gonna turn to dust at the end.
32:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:57 Nilay Patel? Right.
32:57 Alex Cranz? So you, they're not gonna feel good. That was a really bad Marvel joke. Sorry.
33:01 Nilay Patel? First of all, Project Endgame is incredible, right? It definitely implies they're gonna murder Robert Downey Jr. I don't know what they're thinking. A lot, a lot of people are gonna be very mad at them when this happens.
33:16 Alex Cranz? They're ruining the franchise, man.
33:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's a real, a real problem. Black Widow should have gotten a funeral and Intel's walking right back into that conversation. But like, okay, so the idea is you're gonna put a bunch of Arc GPUs in the cloud, and then you can stream access to them for a low latency computing experience. Well, right, there's two choices here. One, it's like just a compute service and other people can build front ends on top of it. Or two, they're just like building a full-on GeForce Now, Stadia, Xbox game streaming competitor, right?
33:46 Speaker 03 How many times have we heard something that made us think that maybe Intel is going to do something direct to consumer and we're like, are you? And then they chicken out at the last minute, like every time, like there's no way that Intel is going to do a direct to consumer service. Like maybe they'll go to enterprise with this. Maybe they'll try and like convince Nvidia to make it to backend for, you know, something. I don't know, like.
34:10 Alex Cranz? Oh, they'll 100% go to enterprise for this. Like, like GPUs are in hot demand. Everybody wants GPU servers. Nvidia is killing it in that space. And this is like, they've got to take them on because currently Intel effectively owns the CPU like server space, right? Like, I think they still have 90% of ownership versus AMD. And this is watching, now they've been watching Nvidia eat their lunch for years in the GPU server space. And they've got to, they've got to compete. Like, this is absolutely a business, B2B play.
34:45 Nilay Patel? So the one way you might know it's a B2B play is that they, they didn't really announce Project Endgame, which is an incredible name. They just like rolled it out as part of a presentation to investors. Like, they had their investor meeting and like, here's all the plans, like, here's our super compute roadmap and what Xeon's doing. And, oh, by the way, we're announcing something called Project Endgame. I just, I'm just imagining like the Morgan Stanley analysts being like, we believe Project Endgame will be a game changer for innovation. Investors should take note of Project Endgame. That's just
35:28 Nilay Patel? a ridiculous situation. Anyway, we're getting the Project Endgame is this year, we're told. After the first Arc GPUs ship, we shall see. As Monica was saying, this is like a big year for chips.
35:40 Speaker 04 It's a very competitive year. And it's like AMD got a little, and you went with a refresh. So we'll see what happens next year.
35:49 Nilay Patel? There's a bunch of other stuff. We have not talked about this PC case that looks like a sneaker. Rest assured, there's a PC case that looks like a sneaker, like a cyber sneaker. It's very good. There's some mechanical keyboard stuff, but we've gone way over it. Monica, thank you so much for joining us. We were like 20 minutes and it's been like 40. So I appreciate you.
36:06 Speaker 04 You're welcome.
36:07 Nilay Patel? We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back with Ashley Carmen to talk Spotify.
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37:18 Nilay Patel? Asha Carmen, welcome.
37:19 Speaker 07 Hello.
37:20 Nilay Patel? So I was, we were gonna have you on anyway, because you are hosting a big event for us called Hot Pod Summit, and we're gonna talk about that. You are right, Hot Pod, which are newsletter about podcasts, which is very funny because now when people tweet angrily about podcasts, I get to say, well, I don't know, man, we run a newsletter about podcasts. You gotta believe it.
37:36 Speaker 07 I know, I saw you drop that move.
37:38 Nilay Patel? It's a whole thing. Anyway, Hot Pod Summit's happening, and I was like, we should just do a little promo segment, and then more endless Spotify. And they won't stop it.
37:48 Speaker 07 They just won't stop.
37:49 Nilay Patel? Let's start with this little Rogan scoop that The Times had, because I think it's important, but then I don't want to talk about that anymore. I want to talk about the acquisitions, because they're actually really important.
38:00 Speaker 07 Yeah.
38:00 Nilay Patel? But The Times had a little, kind of like an earth-shattering Rogan scoop this week.
38:04 Speaker 07 Yeah, so Vergecast listeners are well aware of the Spotify Rogan drama that's been going on for the past month, but what they might know, have heard us discuss, is that this deal that Spotify made with Rogan to exclusively license, distribute, promote, and monetize his content was for $100 million. This was initially reported in the Wall Street Journal. The Times reports this week that it actually was for at least $200 million, potentially more, and covers three and a half years. So basically at least double, double, an astronomical number.
38:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
38:38 Speaker 03 Can I just, if you're Spotify and you see everyone using this 100 million number, do you, you just like, don't you know that eventually someone's going to figure out that it's a different number at some point?
38:48 Speaker 07 I mean, they got away with it for over a year.
38:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Also, like Spotify is basically like speedrunning being a platform.
38:58 Speaker 07 It's so true.
38:59 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, if we've been doing this with Facebook forever, name any YouTube, just name them all. Like first, you're like, we'll engage the press and try to make them write nice things. Then it's like, we'll lie about content moderation.
39:14 Nilay Patel? And now it's like, we'll ice them and, and right. And they're going to end up at where all the other big platforms have gotten, which is gigantic press shops that are constantly engaged. I don't know if you saw this last week, Alex Heath and I were laughing about it. Facebook put up a job listing for just a crisis PR person. And like the listing is like explicit. They're like, when anything bad happens, you have to go research what our best arguments are and give them to executives so they can say them to the press.
39:41 Speaker 07 I love it. God.
39:42 Nilay Patel? That's, it's a whole job at Facebook, or I'm sorry, Meta. So I think Spotify is just not there yet. But I know what journey you're on. Like Godspeed. Enjoy. Like, you know, it's a
39:53 Speaker 07 They just need a Rogan comms person. They're like, anytime the press mentions Rogan's name, you must know what to do.
39:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I just, I don't know. Live, left, love Spotify. Anyway, um,
40:08 Nilay Patel? Ashley's like more exhausted by this than I am, but like, I'm finding it hard to not be perfectly sarcastic all the time. Anyway, that's the Rogan stuff. Next to that, this week, they announced two acquisitions. And I feel like the acquisitions, you had a great piece, they're, they're competing with YouTube. That's a, a great frame for it. But I feel like the acquisitions are not getting the attention they deserve. Because people kind of just don't understand how podcast money works. So tell us what the acquisitions are and then let's try to unpack that a little bit.
40:35 Speaker 07 Yeah. So this week Spotify announced that it is acquiring both Chartable and Podsites.
40:42 Nilay Patel? Have those deals closed?
40:44 Speaker 07 I don't think they've closed yet.
40:45 Nilay Patel? Okay.
40:45 Speaker 07 So that's why I'm saying they are acquiring. I'm sure it will close, but I don't think they have officially. So both of these companies work on attribution and tagging within shows. So essentially like traditionally in podcast ads, for example, there's promo codes, vanity URLs. This is like sort of what we had to work with if you were an advertiser is like, oh yeah, I saw someone went to that. Use that promo code. Okay. We can say it was Vergecast. These companies are able to use tags in the actual RSS feed and then pixels on websites to basically say, oh, the person at this IP address listened to this ad. Then we saw that they came to the actual website. Okay. They like took action. And it essentially is just a way to measure ROI.
41:29 Speaker 07 So this is really critical for a company, for everybody, but Spotify especially is interested in this because obviously their whole bet on podcasting is advertising. And they want to be able to offer the most robust analytics, proof that it works. They need to prove that these advertisers should be spending money. So that's why they invested in both these companies. It was just kind of like shocking that they bought up both because those are like the two biggest names in the space.
41:54 Nilay Patel? And they compete, right? Like at the end of the road, you need some sort of analytics to prove that your ads worked. So you can go tell advertisers to buy more ads because they worked. And you kind of pick one or the other, right?
42:07 Speaker 07 Yeah, I think some people might've used both, but it was because like Chartable, you could use more for measuring your marketing. But yeah, no, they were fully seen as like competitors.
42:15 Nilay Patel? So Spotify buys two competitors. What I think is like hard to grapple with. Is you think of Spotify and especially in the context of Rogan, Rogan's exclusive. So like, how does Spotify compete in podcasting? And you think it's like exclusive in the player. But then there's Apple with RSS and Google with RSS and YouTube, which is a huge player. But the reality is Spotify owns Megaphone, which is the dominant platform that serves podcasts. I will now disclose, our podcast is served by Megaphone. So when we're done here, Andrew is going to edit the show. He's going to upload it to Megaphone and that is what will distribute it everywhere. So now Spotify has the technology that can insert the advertising tags into those RSS feeds
43:00 Nilay Patel? that your Apple Podcast player uses. They own that whole chunk. Like, that's the monopol, that's the money. Like, if all of the money in podcasts, if you want to buy a podcast ad from almost any company, at some point, the dollar you pay that company will flow through a Spotify technology.
43:18 Speaker 07 Yes. My hunch is that, like, I could be speaking out of turn here, but I do think pixels and trackers are like not that, like, the backend, the beautiful display and the analytics is complicated. But I think for like a big company, they can probably build their own pixel and trackers. So I imagine what will end up happening is all these big networks will have their own internal trackers and then the smaller guys are, yeah, going to be with Spotify. But that's a lot of people. That is a lot of people. Not everyone can go out and build their own tracker.
43:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, I was just looking at the Megaphone list. It's like, our logo's on there, disclosure, but like Marvel, all of Marvel's podcasts are served by Megaphone. CNN, like, all the big publishers are with Megaphone. So they're already bought into some part of the Spotify experience. And what is crazy to me is when you think about competition in podcasts, everyone is looking at players, like Pocket Casts exists, but those are all front ends. That's like saying other web browsers exist. All those other web browsers are front end to Google's monetization stack. Like, you run around browsing the web, like, Google's just like making money. And you're not like, oh, there's a lot of competition in web advertising. Like, it's Google and Facebook dominate web advertising with Amazon increasing, but
44:31 Nilay Patel? different because it's all on Amazon's platform. That's, it's just like utterly fascinating that no one has paid attention to Spotify slowly gobbling up most of the monetization stack.
44:42 Speaker 07 Hey now, someone has paid attention.
44:47 Nilay Patel? Is there a reaction from the podcast industry for this? Like usually when this stuff happens, like, yep, you cover it really well on Hot Pod, but there's like, I don't know, aftershocks of like, people being like, indie podcasts are dead.
44:58 Speaker 07 Yeah, I think it's more of a like, damn Spotify's eating this industry vibe. Honestly, I'm like surprised at how little reactions I've seen. I think this speaks to that. Maybe a lot of people just are confused by ad tech in general, and it's not something that like, it should inspire a lot of strong feelings, but it's complicated and it's a big topics. And I think perhaps people just don't know what to think of it yet. But this is why when we have this event next week, I think it's gonna be spicy.
45:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I think like probably everybody in this event is like, either you had this tweet, like, soon everyone at Hot Pod Summit will work for Spotify.
45:33 Speaker 07 It's scary. It's kind of sad. Like, diversity is fun. Let's get some different voices and different, you know, opinions in the mix that all don't just work for one company and also don't need to like have approval to talk.
45:45 Nilay Patel? So, put that in the context of competing with YouTube, right? Because I'll say this, the number of people who are like, put the Vergecast on YouTube every day, or any podcast, or whatever it is, because people consume podcasts on YouTube like crazy. And it seems like, because YouTube is the kind of thing it is, the podcasters like to get better analytics out of it?
46:06 Speaker 07 Yeah, so basically, like, when this deal happened, yes, this is super interesting as far as Spotify wanting to just own the entire tech stack and dominate podcasting. But for me, when I heard it, I was actually thinking about it in terms of them really just making moves to directly compete with YouTube and start to build a wall against them. Because essentially, like, YouTube without trying very hard is a major podcast player. And they have amazing analytics. Like, it's basically Google Analytics. Like, you can have an amazing dashboard, you know what's going on, you know who's watching your videos, where they're watching, what they're doing when they're watching. Like, it's wild how much info you can get. And so YouTube recently made its first real podcast hire. They started allowing free background listening on YouTube Music in Canada, kind of hints
46:50 Speaker 07 that there might be some movement in podcasting there. And truly, if- YouTube just allowed people to also upload their RSS and have their audio analytics alongside their video analytics. I mean, Spotify's in trouble. They're already doing all the creator work that Spotify wants to do. They already have a programmatic ad product that works really well. It's freaking AdSense. Spotify's in trouble. They just don't have the audio component, and that to me seems like the easy part almost. So I think that Spotify is trying to really build up what it can offer so that more people stick with it than go to YouTube or anyone else.
47:25 Nilay Patel? I was joking before you came on with Dieter that I'm just gonna walk around the Hot Pod Summit next week and either say to people, "Man, I wish Apple had fixed this earlier," or what was the other one, Dieter?
47:37 Speaker 03 Well, what I actually think you should do is you should, when someone's complaining about Spotify and their distribution and how everything's going through one point, you'd be like, "Actually, no, the solution is really simple. Syndication will mean that the podcasts be reached from multiple, you know, different distributors."
47:54 Nilay Patel? He was so proud of it the first time, and he was even more proud of it the second time.
47:58 Speaker 07 The way your face lit up just then.
48:01 Nilay Patel? So Ash, do you think Google like knows that it's sitting on this?
48:05 Speaker 07 Yeah.
48:06 Nilay Patel? Because they were gonna spin up, because they were gonna spin up Google Podcasts, right? That was a thing they were gonna do, and they kind of backed into YouTube as actually the solution.
48:14 Speaker 07 It's interesting because the New York Times has been doing a little more podcast reporting.
48:18 Nilay Patel? And it's spurned into action by an intrepid young reporter.
48:22 Speaker 07 So they wrote about, they write a lot about moderation on the platforms, and they basically will point out, you know, some bad actors are using podcasts, and they're freely available on Apple or Google or whoever. And Google's comments on the record to them have been like, something along the lines of like, "Yeah, we're just a search engine. We are not going to like block RSS feeds," essentially. And so what's kind of interesting, I think, if kind of reading between the lines here, is if that's how Google Podcast sees itself as like kind of the traditional, just the interface for the RSS feeds, YouTube is more like the Spotify, which is user-generated content that's hosted on YouTube. Like, I'm sure- If that same problematic podcast was on YouTube, they would have a different statement
49:04 Speaker 07 and maybe it would act. But I think that's kind of just the two differences we're seeing in Google's strategy.
49:09 Nilay Patel? So you think they're gonna like lean into, okay, YouTube podcast is a thing. Don't use Anchor if you're just getting started. Use a YouTube audio tool. If you're a big podcaster, don't use Megaphone. Use YouTube's tool to distribute and we'll give you the Google Ad Tech stack and our analytics and send them out into the world. That would be huge if they do it.
49:28 Speaker 07 I mean, you know, it's sad. Like in podcast land, I'm like, they hired one person.
49:34 Speaker 07 But like, that's a big deal for us. So again, it's entirely possible that in six months, this guy no longer works on podcasts. But I think, I think this could be where they're headed. I am curious actually for your take, Neelai, because one of the angles I didn't really explore much is sort of how this tagging technology could relate to like Apple blocking, tracking across apps.
49:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
49:58 Speaker 07 And I wonder if Spotify just is like, well, we're not going to be able to see what website you went to. Just, I don't know. I guess I'm just curious if this could relate to that at all.
50:08 Nilay Patel? So that, I was thinking about this a lot yesterday. RSS is fundamentally so dumb, simple, that like, I don't know that Apple can do it. Cause all you're really doing, right? You're just, someone's like, I want your podcast. They go to the Apple directory. The Apple directory is just feeds. And then you make the request. And all that is happening there is all those requests are having a tag, like just a long string of hex appended to the URL. So they can, they can, and then that same tag is appended to a tracking pixel. So they, they just know, like, okay, the person who downloaded, made this RSS request in the URL is the person who went over here. That's, I think, different than a third party cookie.
50:51 Nilay Patel? Because it's the URL of like first, like you're making their question and saying, okay, here's your URL for RSS from now on, right?
50:57 Speaker 07 Yeah.
50:58 Nilay Patel? I don't, I don't, do you have any thoughts on that? That seems, it's pretty hard for Apple and its podcast app to somehow fight URLs.
51:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I think it's easier for Apple to do it inside its own podcast app. They, I could see solutions. I mean, they're, they're like, they've got subscriptions now, right? So they are, they're doing some advances, but like the precise way that they would handle tagging in the like open podcast directory that like Pocket Casts and Overcast and everybody else can plug into. Getting tracking tags and, you know, more advanced analytics out of that, I agree is like very difficult. But I wouldn't go so far, just, I don't know, in principle, to say that I think that that would block them from doing more advanced analytics inside Apple Podcasts itself.
51:41 Nilay Patel? No, I meant blocking Spotify's analytics. Right. So the way they block third-party cookies is they're just like, if your website loads and it calls a cookie to another domain, that request is blocked.
51:53 Speaker 03 Right.
51:54 Nilay Patel? And from like a technical level, there's some complication there, but from a conceptual level, it's just like the dumbest thing. They're like, is this on your domain? It's not, you're blocked. And that means you can't track people across sites.
52:04 Speaker 03 Oh, so can, can Apple stop them appending a tracker to the end of a URL? I don't know. I think people at, at Apple are smart enough to use grep and, you know, delete everything after the question mark in a URL. Like, come on.
52:15 Nilay Patel? I, but I think the people at Spotify are smart enough to form a URL. Right, like, that is the dumbest arms race in tech. If that's where we're at, right?
52:24 Speaker 03 I mean, but we've been in dumber places.
52:30 Speaker 07 I guess I just wonder if it's like a preventative measure for Spotify with the death of the cookie to buy this and have this advantage of like, we have, yes, it's RSS.
52:40 Nilay Patel? We can close the loop for you.
52:42 Speaker 07 Yeah, and it's primitive, but like, if this is a competitive advantage, actually, to just own this tech stack, I guess.
52:49 Nilay Patel? That's what I mean. Like, at some point, you have to pay to use Chartable or Podsites, right? Okay, so now you're a business and you make a hundred dollars a year in advertising. Well, you gotta pay some money to Megaphone. To serve your podcasts, you gotta serve the podcast, you gotta pay some money to your analytics vendor to prove to your hundred dollar a year client that their their spend was worth it. So now you're like, even if it's some teeny tiny rates, okay, you made $75, you paid $25 to Spotify. Well, that's like, okay, the entire, all the dollars in podcasts, one way or the other, are gonna end up in Spotify. And so I think what chart, I can't remember if I got this right. They're gonna let Chartable be open and anybody can use it and pod sites are gonna keep to themselves or the other way around?
53:35 Speaker 07 Chartable is going to be integrated into Megaphone and a Spotify spokesperson told me today that you could, you have, you just have to have a Megaphone account. So I think it could be free, but you don't have to host.
53:47 Nilay Patel? I got it. Yeah, I just like, I'm just looking at that. I'm saying, everyone thinks podcasts are very simple, right? You just like, open this app on your phone and you like, get a podcast. Behind it is an entire engine of money in Spotify, well, just like Google. If you look at the ad tech stack and there's multiple layers, Google owns the number one or number two player in every component of the ad tech stack. They've monetized the web at a high rate and they are the dominant player in web monetization. Spotify now owns the number one or number two player in every component of the podcast monetization stack. It looks exactly like Google and your, you know, your front end, that's the open podcast system is just a front end to a Spotify monetization funnel, just like your browser is a front end
54:31 Nilay Patel? to the open web, which is really Google's monetization funnel. And like, I don't know, paging Lena Khan.
54:38 Speaker 07 Yeah, is there gonna be any trust about this? Or is everybody just like, well, it's podcasts, whatever?
54:44 Nilay Patel? Ashley.
54:45 Speaker 07 I'm sorry.
54:47 Nilay Patel? Ashley's like, YouTube hired one guy.
54:50 Speaker 07 Yep, YouTube hired one guy. Neel I said, no one's been paying attention to this, but one person has.
54:56 Nilay Patel? Well, I meant like.
54:58 Speaker 07 Oh, I know. I'm just saying, it takes a lot for people to get excited about podcasting. You paid attention. We both did. But I'm just saying, it's Rogan.
55:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like, everybody's paying attention to Rogan. So suddenly, like, my mom knows what a podcast is, which is exciting in all of my conversations.
55:13 Nilay Patel? Lots of people knew what podcasts were.
55:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah, a lot of people knew, but like.
55:17 Nilay Patel? Technical underpinning of podcasts and how, why Spotify is making a business out of it.
55:24 Nilay Patel? Is because at the end of the day, just like YouTube, lots of people are going to make shit for no money. Like Spotify will not have to pay people to make things.
55:34 Speaker 07 Right.
55:34 Nilay Patel? They will somehow find a way to monetize it. That way it could be Spotify's programmatic ads, which they can now dynamically insert, and they're already doing, or they're going to do their own, but they're going to serve them in Spotify's tools and then track them in Spotify's tools. So instead of paying the music industry every time somebody streams, every time a podcast is monetized, Spotify will take a cut. And that is a way bigger and better business to be in than music. Just like YouTube, like quit YouTube originals. They're like, wait, why are we paying to make Cobra Kai? Like you idiots will just make shit for free. Like way better business to be in. And I like, that story is huge. Outside of whether, you know, like the word podcast only implies that you use RSS to serve it. That was the other one.
56:19 Speaker 07 Yeah.
56:20 Nilay Patel? You can just walk up to any group of podcasters and be like, you shouldn't call them podcasts unless they're RSS. And you can just like fit into any conversation at any time.
56:26 Speaker 07 I dare you to do that. At least once during the day.
56:29 Nilay Patel? 100%. Just any conversation, any group of people, you can walk up to them and be like, I wish Apple had done this earlier.
56:36 Speaker 07 We're going to have a town hall where anyone can speak their mind.
56:39 Nilay Patel? I'm just gonna stand up and be like, I wish Apple had done this earlier.
56:43 Speaker 07 I will call to you.
56:46 Speaker 07 So you know now.
56:47 Nilay Patel? Let's say, let's talk about Hot Pod Summit. What's going on there?
56:49 Speaker 07 Yeah. So Hot Pod Summit, we're kind of advertising here, but it's invite only. So, sorry.
56:57 Speaker 07 Some, maybe some people on this podcast are listening, but it's gonna be really cool. We're talking about YouTube. Specifically, we're going to have the head of Rooster Teeth's podcast on. We're gonna have Marquez on to talk about how he uses YouTube. We're going to talk about programmatic advertising. We're gonna have two creators, one of the co-hosts of Who Weekly and a co-host of Celebrity Book Club to talk about how they use Patreon and Discord and all of that. And we're going to talk about how public media and indie networks can compete with big tech money to even retain talent. There's another one, but you know what? I got like four out of five. We're gonna have a moderation panel. Casey will be on stage to do the moderation panel, which will be another spicy one.
57:35 Nilay Patel? That'll be good. All right. Well, that sounds exciting. I'll be there. So it'll be fun. Good to see everybody. Ashley, thank you so much. I'm sure Spotify never stops. So we'll just see you again soon.
57:46 Speaker 07 Yeah, I'm sure.
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59:14 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Lightning round time.
59:20 Nilay Patel? We're gonna get that soundboard one of these days. Dieter, these link buds, Sony link buds.
59:25 Speaker 03 So imagine a tiny donut and then put it in your ear. And that is what these are. I love these. I am a known fan of open ear headphones in some way, shape, or form, so you can ride them on your bike. I don't think you should wear both of these. I think you should leave one ear open with these. But the more I've been working from home and trying different earbuds out, the more I find I value like comfort more than sound isolation. When I go back into an office, that will change completely. But right now, if I can't wear your headphones for like four hours, then I want nothing to do with them.
1:00:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I find my AirPods Pro hurt after a long time. Like on a plane, I'm like, ooh.
1:00:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, so these are just like, they're like, they're more open because it's a donut in your ear instead of like completely sealing your ear canal.
1:00:12 Nilay Patel? They look very strange. Also, this picture that Chris Welch took of the case where he's like, from one angle, the case looks smaller than the AirPods case. From another angle, it does not. Like, it's just like one of the funniest photo jokes that we have sort of like take like done in years, like unintentionally hilarious photo joke. It's very good. More earbuds. Audio Technica's got new earbuds. 20 hours of battery life, 200 bucks.
1:00:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, that seems like good. I mean, I, I don't know, they're not huge, but I mean, the the earbuds are huge.
1:00:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah, the earbuds are enormous.
1:00:45 Speaker 03 Yeah. My favorite earbuds of all time. You ready? You ready for this?
1:00:50 Nilay Patel? Oh, boy.
1:00:51 Speaker 03 Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus because the battery was incredible. They were rock solid. They were cheap. You had wireless charging and they just, they just were easy to use and cheap and worked better with more devices than AirPods do. I have no ideas if this, these will be, you know, in that class, but I, I love the huge battery life on those. And so, I don't know, diversity in earbuds. If you need 20 hours of battery life, it's good that you have a choice.
1:01:21 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's always kind of well to me, though, that like, earbuds still aren't that good. Like, if you compare them to wired earbuds, like my $100, sure, 215s from 2014.
1:01:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:01:35 Alex Cranz? Give me better sound and everything else than my AirPod Pro.
1:01:40 Speaker 03 Welcome, Alex, to the Vergecast.
1:01:42 Alex Cranz? It frustrates me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's into, it's lightning round.
1:01:46 Nilay Patel? Really? Uncompressed wired audio sounds incredible and shit Bluetooth compression sounds bad? What a surprise.
1:01:53 Alex Cranz? We just keep convincing ourselves. We just keep saying, yeah, these are fine. They're like, like a McDonald's burger. Like.
1:02:01 Speaker 03 Dang.
1:02:02 Nilay Patel? Apple gave an interview to our friend Michael Singleton at Billboard this week. The stat was hilarious. It's like, the whole thing was like, 50% of people are using spatial audio. And it's like, dudes, it's on by default. That's a horrible number.
1:02:16 Alex Cranz? 50% of people are going in and turning it off.
1:02:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:02:20 Nilay Patel? Like, you're pushing it as hard as you can. Okay. But as part of that, he was like, yeah, I know people want lossless, but there's no wireless protocols that would support lossless. And it's like, somewhere like the APTX team at Qualcomm is like, dudes, we announced that last year.
1:02:39 Alex Cranz? Crying in a corner.
1:02:40 Nilay Patel? Bluetooth lossless is like a thing that Qualcomm has already. And they're like, no, it does not exist. It shall not exist. What will happen is that we're going to take all the low end out of your audio. And when you turn your head, it's going to sound weird.
1:02:54 Nilay Patel? Have you ever wanted the singer to be in your right ear? We'll just turn your head.
1:02:58 Alex Cranz? I want it.
1:03:00 Nilay Patel? Anyhow, Thomas Sucker, the Rick Dog.
1:03:05 Nilay Patel? The Garmin Epics 2 Multi Sport Watch.
1:03:08 Speaker 03 Yep.
1:03:08 Nilay Patel? He loved this thing.
1:03:09 Speaker 03 Yeah. And now Victoria Song reviewed the Phoenix 7S, which is like the, the smaller version. They're, they're a little bit different in what they're for and what they do. And their screen technology is different.
1:03:18 Nilay Patel? They look cool.
1:03:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:03:19 Alex Cranz? They look rad.
1:03:20 Speaker 03 The Epics 2 seems very impressive. It's got a touchscreen that you can turn off. Having converted to Garmin, I've got a venue here in the last year for when I use an Android phone instead of an Apple Watch. I gotta say, the slope from, do I want to get a Garmin watch instead of a standard smart watch to I need to be an athlete who goes out into the woods is very steep. Like, I just, I like, I feel bad when I am not like on a trail now because I have this, this thing.
1:03:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:03:50 Speaker 03 Garmin watches are like legit, they've gotten really good and they've got like a rabbit fan base and you would, you would think that there would be more.
1:04:02 Nilay Patel? Dieter's just thinking about being on the trail right now. That was that side. He's like, looking at his watches, like, I could be on a trail right now.
1:04:08 Alex Cranz? Went away from us.
1:04:09 Nilay Patel? I fix it is going to officially sell Steam Deck replacement parts from Valve, which is fascinating.
1:04:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:04:15 Nilay Patel? They have the teardown, but the, the announcement is Valve is like giving them the parts to sell.
1:04:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:04:21 Nilay Patel? You can do this when you're going to sell a thousand of the things.
1:04:23 Alex Cranz? You know, what was actually for me, the most exciting part of that story was that it looks like the hard drive or the solid state drive is going to be easier to replace than we thought because I bought the 64 gigabyte one and we'll have to immediately replace it. So this was just really good for me personally.
1:04:39 Nilay Patel? All right. Google is bringing, so Google bought a company called Neverware. Which a long time ago, they announced this thing called Cloud Ready, where you can put Chrome OS on like any computer. I put it on a bright pink Sony V I P. That's why I brought this up. Did a whole story. Anyway, Google had bought Neverware, and now they're announcing this program where they're gonna do installers for old PCs and Macs.
1:05:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:05:02 Nilay Patel? I'm thinking about putting it on my old single USB C port MacBook, like the MacBook, like 12 inch MacBook.
1:05:08 Speaker 03 Oh, that could be interesting.
1:05:09 Nilay Patel? I'm guessing it's still gonna be slow. That computer is slow.
1:05:11 Speaker 03 I bet you the battery life will be about 20 minutes on that, too.
1:05:15 Nilay Patel? Well, one of the problems with Neverware was they had no GPU drivers or anything. Like, there was like too little of a company. So particularly embedded Intel CPUs. I couldn't get the drivers. So everything was very slow. The V I P will never live again. Like, I gave it to Macs. Like, it's her toy computer now. She likes it. But there's a lot of PCs that are, right, not gonna make it to Windows 11.
1:05:39 Alex Cranz? Most.
1:05:39 Speaker 03 Well, the big question here is, right now, it's like, I think you need to sign up for it. And they're thinking it's for like businesses and schools. So like, will they make this available to you to just screw around with on your, you know, single port MacBook? Or is this a, we want to only serve schools that have fleets of old computers and we want to make sure that they switch to us instead of stay with Windows?
1:06:00 Alex Cranz? How do they monetize?
1:06:01 Speaker 03 Unclear.
1:06:03 Alex Cranz? Like, is it monetized at all?
1:06:03 Speaker 03 They get you to not use Windows.
1:06:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:06:07 Nilay Patel? I mean, honestly, like, they already give Chrome OS away. Like, it's Google. So, right, the whole, the entire web is a front end to monetization. Then they sell Google, you know, they sell the Google Workplace, Google Workplace.
1:06:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:06:23 Speaker 03 Google Workspace?
1:06:25 Nilay Patel? Something. They sell the Google Office apps to schools. So that's a part of it. But the real thing is you're not buying an iPad and you're not buying a Windows PC. So, I think it's fascinating. I love the idea of like, things getting a second life. And there is, it is true that there's a whole lot of PCs out there that are not gonna make it to Windows 11 that are still fine. God, let's do the two Facebook things at once. Here we go. Facebook is on a tear of rebranding things. And I will say there is reporting out of All Hands this week. They had an All Hands that announced this. They're like, what will all these name changes do?
1:06:59 Nilay Patel? None of this is a different strategy.
1:07:00 Alex Cranz? Well, they haven't hired the PR person yet to fix it all.
1:07:04 Nilay Patel? Well, they elevated Nick Clegg to like president of Facebook to deal with policy because Mark just wants to live in the metaverse. Anyway, Facebook rebranded itself to Meta. Meta is rebranding the news feed to just feed because people hate news. So that'll fix it. And then Facebook employees are no longer Facebookers. They are Meta mates.
1:07:22 Alex Cranz? No.
1:07:22 Nilay Patel? Disclosure. I hate this.
1:07:28 Nilay Patel? Meta mates. And then they picked this line from the Navy, which is like ships, ship, shipmates self. Right. Which means like think about your ship and they're right. Now it's Meta, Meta mates me. Is there new? That's the new. It's good. You know, when, when a company starts breaking out the military metaphors, you definitely know they feel confident.
1:07:48 Alex Cranz? They're doing great. They're living their best.
1:07:52 Nilay Patel? Very good. Meta mates. I think of you all as my meta mates. Last, last two. Elon. Hath Elon'd. Elon'd. He, his lawyers filed a motion telling a judge that the SEC is chilling his free speech. Because they keep investigating his tweets.
1:08:09 Alex Cranz? Is that a Tesla take?
1:08:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I don't know, man. I just. Okay, here's my thing. I would say on the internet, a pattern I have like caught is that people will just say legal words. Like they're magic. Pro bono. Yeah. HIPAA. Like you're just like yell shit, fair use. And then you're like, you just assume that you've. And like free speech has become one of these phrases. Right. You're just like Ron Weasley in your ass off. You're just like.
1:08:41 Nilay Patel? Section 230, like, yeah, that'll do it. It's driving me nuts. Anyway, that his, right, he got, he had to pay the $20 million fine. He was required to step down as Tesla chairman after the, after the stock price tweet. Right, I'm taking Tesla private, fund insecure. He had to do that. They said he had to monitor his tweets and no one knows if they ever did that. And so now he did another tweet that he said Tesla would make around 500,000 cars. This contradicted the company's guidance that they would make between 360 and 400,000. So in the context of a public company CEO, how many cars you ship is a big deal. That's how much money you're gonna make. So that's like material information.
1:09:24 Nilay Patel? If, if the company is saying $100,000 fewer cars than your CEO. So they're like, you can't do that.
1:09:29 Alex Cranz? So he's effectively mad that he can't like just rip on a bong and tweet whatever he wants.
1:09:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Anyway, the end of this all is Musk said the SEC was making unconstitutional power grab. This true thing. And then the judge to the lawyers in court said, come back with your reasonable pants on.
1:09:56 Nilay Patel? But I didn't even get that right. The judge said, come back with your reasonableness pants on.
1:10:01 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:10:01 Nilay Patel? Which is even weirder when you've settled this down. So then now you have later Musk was like, did the poll where he's like, should I sell 10% of my stake in Tesla? He was already gonna do it because he had to. So it's like a joke, you know? But then when he did it, the Tesla shares dropped. So the SEC is like, you can't be doing this to people. Anyway, this is all nuts and he's just out there yelling free speech when he's the CEO of a public company. He can move the stock price. Anyway, I, I need a word for magic word lawyering. If you just like, look at Twitter, it's everywhere, just like people just screaming legal terms of art. I got it. Amicus tweet.
1:10:46 Nilay Patel? I was going with muggle attorney.
1:10:51 Speaker 03 Oh, muggle attorney is really good.
1:10:53 Nilay Patel? You say the magic words, but it don't do anything. All right. If you've got ideas, tweet them at me. Okay, last one. Disney is developing planned communities around the United States. They're called Story Living. So you can, you can live your story life at Disney.
1:11:08 Alex Cranz? What's wild is this isn't the first time they've done a planned community.
1:11:12 Nilay Patel? Right. They've got Celebration, which is like apparently a very strange place to live in Florida.
1:11:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:11:16 Nilay Patel? But now they're gonna do Story Living by Disney.
1:11:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, but the, the plan with Story Living is like, they're gonna have storylines sort of integrated into like your shopping trip to go buy,
1:11:26 Alex Cranz? No.
1:11:27 Speaker 03 groceries or something. So everything will be part of a Disney storyline.
1:11:31 Nilay Patel? Can I just read these two sentences? Members of the public will be able to visit Cotino, which is the name of the first Story Living community, by purchasing day passes.
1:11:41 Speaker 03 No.
1:11:43 Nilay Patel? While a section of the development will be set aside for residents aged 55 and up. So it's, it's a zoo for retirees.
1:11:50 Speaker 03 Yeah. Where, where do they make the soil and green?
1:11:55 Alex Cranz? Under the fountain.
1:11:56 Speaker 03 Okay, okay.
1:11:57 Alex Cranz? The algae filters down.
1:11:59 Nilay Patel? I just love the idea of like, America reconstituting itself as a series of theme parks. And then we have to like, in their service by Amazon warehouses, and then we have to like, drive through the badlands to get from one heavily guarded day pass theme park to another. Like, let's do it. I've watched that movie so many times. It was rad. Charlie's Thron was great.
1:12:23 Speaker 03 No.
1:12:25 Speaker 03 The odds will definitely be in our favor.
1:12:27 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna move to Story Living. All right, that's it. We have gone far over. It was a delight. You can tweet at us. Dieter is at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Cranz. Ashley is Ashley R. Carmen. Monica is MC squared 96. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. It's like a great time. Tell us about Bing. It was good. I want to call it Becca's video about shooting wildlife photography.
1:12:48 Speaker 03 So good.
1:12:49 Alex Cranz? Incredible.
1:12:49 Nilay Patel? Very good. Just go watch it. It's a delight. It was like emotional at the end. It starts with, it starts with pee and it ends with like tears. It's. A full journey.
1:12:58 Alex Cranz? Some ventriloquism in there. It's just, you go places.
1:13:02 Nilay Patel? All right, that's it. Rock and roll.
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