Computex 2022 laptops, Elon vs Twitter bots, and Apple ‘testing’ foldable E Ink display

Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the most interesting laptops announced this week at Computex 2022. 33:03 - Senior reporter Liz Lopatto returns to update us on Elon Musk's deal to buy to Twitter. 1:00:30 - Gadget rumors continue in segment three. Stories discussed in this episode: Asus’ ROG Flow X16 is a big, powerful 2-in-1 gaming laptop With new Acer Swift 3, OLED marches toward the mainstream Acer’s new Spin 714 could be 2022’s best Chromebook The new Framework Laptop is another step toward a truly modular gadget HP’s new Spectre x360 16 laptop is all-in on Intel Acer’s new Chromebook Tab 510 puts LTE into a super tough, super bulky tablet Acer’s new Predator Helios 300 supports glasses-free 3D content How an Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day Elon Musk says Twitter deal ‘cannot move forward’ until it proves bot numbers ​​Elon Musk’s latest stunt: calling on the SEC to investigate Twitter’s user numbers Elon Musk’s silence on how he’d moderate the Buffalo shooting livestream is deafening Twitter CEO defends bot estimates that put Elon Musk’s acquisition on hold Twitter shares plummet as Musk raises new doubts about acquisition Twitter (TWTR) Deal Is Proceeding, Not 'On Hold,' Executives Tell Staff - Bloomberg Elon Musk told us he was sending a car to space, then said he totally made it up Apple ‘testing’ foldable with secondary E Ink display, says analyst Apple will bring Live Captions to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac and more gesture control on Apple Watch iOS 15.5 arrives ahead of Apple’s annual developer conference Sony LinkBuds S review: supreme comfort doesn’t come cheap This is the design of Sonos’ upcoming Sub Mini Samsung SmartThings begins testing Matter devices on its platform Pebble founder: it’s your ‘last chance’ to make a small Android phone happen - The Verge Amazon’s new Fire 7 tablet finally has a USB-C port The defunct LG Wing is getting Verizon C-band because 5G in this country is silly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This week on The Vergecast, we'll take you through the highlights of Computex. Liz Lapata rejoins us for This Week in Elon, and Alex Krantz loses her [bleep] mind. Is e-ink coming to the iPhone? That's coming up right after this.

• 0:16Speaker 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.

• 1:01Speaker 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.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of free speech in America. Are we? Or our deals coverage. The problem with the tech industry right now is like, we're going to talk about Computex, we're going to talk about laptops.

• 2:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  But an equal amount of people are interested in the cool new laptops out of Computex is the torture deal machinations of Elon buying Twitter, which means that we now run like a finance site.

• 2:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  We run like an M&A site. It's good. We've, I've always thought our future is hardcore Wall Street coverage.

• 2:20Alex Cranz?

  I know more about the SEC now than I did a couple of weeks ago.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  I know more jokes that the SEC's name could stand for, just because of Elon's feed. Anyhow, there's a lot going on this week. It is true, there's Computex, there's more Elon Twitter, we got a lightning round, but I'm Eli, I'm your friend. David Pierce is here.

• 2:38David Pierce?

  Hi, I'm your friend who will always just tell you to go ahead and buy a MacBook Air. No matter what you want, I will just tell you to buy a MacBook Air.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, at the end of the day, though, really, again, you know, there's new airs coming out. This is like the worst time to tell people to buy a MacBook Air.

• 2:53David Pierce?

  Just buy a MacBook Air, it's fine.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna be fine. Fair enough. Alex Cranz is here, and Alex is gonna run the whole show with us. How you doing?

• 3:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm gonna be that person that tells you not to buy the MacBook Air.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  See, we've been-

• 3:05Alex Cranz?

  Just hold off, just wait.

• 3:06David Pierce?

  Alex tells you to build your own PC.

• 3:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just build it yourself, it's faster.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  Those are actually like the two farthest ends of the traditional PC spectrum, you understand?

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, I also think they might be the only options. Like, I don't know that there's anyone who exists between those two sides of the spectrum.

• 3:21Alex Cranz?

  It's HP, Hewlett Packard, the whole company.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, there is a lot going on. Like I said, there's Computex this week, so lots of Computex news. Liz is gonna come on, we're gonna talk about Elon and Twitter and where that deal is. And then, I think we're just gonna spend about two hours talking about Amazon adding a USB-C port to the Fire7 tablet. Doesn't that seem like us? Like, we would just, that's what we would land on for the last two hours of the show?

• 3:46David Pierce?

  It is the thing in the rundown that made me go, "Yes!", as I was reading it. So I don't know what to make of that, but here we are.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  David, I think you put this rundown together. There's no Project Jena 5-CIS news on here.

• 3:57Alex Cranz?

  Whoa.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  It's a real mess, dude.

• 3:59Alex Cranz?

  It's a ratio.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  Our nation's fourth 5G network stumbles to reality.

• 4:04David Pierce?

  My favorite sort of running thing about the tech industry is everybody's bad slides. And unfortunately, there were no bad slides.

• 4:12Nilay Patel?

  There's nothing I can read.

• 4:13David Pierce?

  There were no bad slides. And so, yeah, we're just, we're just stuck in Vegas with no service ever.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna look at my new favorite site, which is fiercewireless.com, which is a hardcore trade publication for the wireless industry. Oh, see, look, here's some news. I see. What were you doing, David? Did you know that the new director of the National Spectrum Consortium has issued some comments on Oram?

• 4:34Alex Cranz?

  Are they good comments, bad comments?

• 4:36David Pierce?

  What they are is not important. It's just that they exist.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  It's just when you see the NSC, you don't think the National Spectrum Consortium.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, no, actually, the National Security Council didn't say anything about Oram.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  This industry trade pub got into it. Anyway, they're confident that they will accelerate the development of next generation technologies critical to support US competitiveness. In case you're wondering what the status of Oram is.

• 5:00David Pierce?

  That's good.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  I know all of our listeners are worried about the status of Oram.

• 5:03Alex Cranz?

  I think they are.

• 5:04Nilay Patel?

  David's like, you know, like, we're spinning up these new episodes. Callie's got her mini series where she's like, yeah, ploopa doop is gonna make you a trash ball. I'm gonna do one that's just like a deep dive on Oram.

• 5:16David Pierce?

  You know that thing on The Office where, where Ryan just opens up a Word document, writes a fake URL at the top and gives it to Creed for his own blog? We're gonna give you a podcast that's just for you. It's gonna be, it's gonna be nine hours long and it is not going to be, it's not gonna be safe for the broader internet.

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  Andrew and I are gonna get together or we're gonna make a cover song of "I Ran" by Flocks of Seagulls, but about Oram.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  Okay, that I meant to.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is, I'm obsessed with this wireless technology. I hope you are too. If you work at the Oram Association, leak me some documents. That could be a way for us to become friends.

• 5:50David Pierce?

  You and me together.

• 5:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's get out of the realm of theoretical and into the realm of the extremely real, which is hardcore Windows laptops. David?

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  You're, this is a long list of hardcore windows. Well, I guess there's a couple Chromebooks in the mix.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  This is the time.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  What's going on at Computex? Tell people what Computex is.

• 6:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, so Computex is a huge, like truly huge conference that happens every year in Taiwan. And basically this week, I think along with CES is probably the time when we get like the peek into computers, like, like good old fashioned computers and like CES is like a TV and car show. Computex is when people are just like 13 inch laptops, let's do this. And then they just like throw them out of a truck at you. This year was both like, I mean, to be honest, I don't know what I expect because it's laptops, like laptops are laptops are laptops. And we had that like one cool phase a bunch of years ago where everybody tried to change things and then nothing has really changed. And now there was a ton of news. There were a bunch of new laptops, including a bunch of really good ones.

• 6:53David Pierce?

  And I would say generally speaking, not a lot of like wild new ideas about laptops. So we basically have, you have companies like Acer and Asus who are just out here launching every laptop they can possibly think of. And the big upgrade this year is they're all going from 11th generation Intel processors to 12th generation Intel processors, which is a big deal. Big performance, big battery. It's all very exciting. It's also just the thing that happens every time.

• 7:21Alex Cranz?

  I mean, you say that nothing big happened, but it looks like Acer has a laptop that's going to have 3D content on it.

• 7:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Alex Cranz?

  That seems very 2009.

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  Laptop that'll make you dizzy.

• 7:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  No, we are definitely in the part of the tech hardware cycle where they assume that people who are around for these ideas 10 years ago are like, have children or jobs.

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're like you, they won't remember. And I was like, no, we're still here, bro. Like.

• 7:52David Pierce?

  It's really true.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  I remember when you tried to do stereoscopic displays.

• 7:57David Pierce?

  But now they're burying it under more complicated terms. I think the one for this one, so it's the Acer Predator Helios 300, which is an unbelievably great name for a laptop.

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  That's a, it is a great name.

• 8:09David Pierce?

  I'm super in on that. It's a 15.6 inch laptop, has a 4K display, and the, the description of how, of what Acer did is it has a liquid crystal lenticular lens optically bonded on top of it, and it can toggle between 2D and 3D modes. Does that sound cool as hell? Yes. Does it mean anything? Almost certainly not. And are you going to want to use it? No, but it sounds rad, so I'm into it. I don't care.

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  So the lenticular lens is the thing that lets it send images out in two different directions. That is a very familiar, you've seen one of these before in your life. I think what they're doing is they're, when they say optically bonded, what they mean is our glue is really cool.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  So they've glued it, they've laminated it very tightly to the main display, and then they've got this additional, Monica did a whole write-up of this tech, Spatial Labs, in like last year, like almost exactly a year ago. She like went and like did the piece on Spatial Labs and Acer. The questions she had then was like, oh, this demo is really cool. What are you going to ship it? What are people going to use it for? And they were like, 3D design, some answers. She actually had one, they sent one to her, but it's very much like, now they're shipping one, and they're, they're like 50 games.

• 9:21David Pierce?

  With the promise of more to come, which is one of those sentences that you just hear like a wah wah at the end of.

• 9:26Alex Cranz?

  51 games.

• 9:27David Pierce?

  Exactly. But no, I think that's the thing with all of this. And this is true of like, there's a lot of this happening in the PC space right now, where there's stuff coming that you're like, oh, that's neat. And then you're like, will it change anything about how I do anything? No. It's like, that's how I felt about the 360 hinges on laptops that have been coming around for forever. You look at it and it's like, oh, that's cool. I can, you know, I can prop it up like a tent. And it's like, sort of, it's neat in a, in a way, but I have never once in my life, I think I would die of joy if I like walked into Starbucks and somebody was using their Lenovo Yoga in tent mode. Nothing, I would, I would shake their hand and ask them many questions.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember when Lenovo would like put on the icons of the modes in the marketing? They'd be like, tent mode, wide mode. And wide mode was just like laying totally flat for no reason. Like flipped around mode, you know, like they'd actually drawn icons for all of this. Here's my theory about all of this. All of this is designed by people who have like cool jobs. You know, like you're a laptop designer, you have like a stereotypically cool job. But if you were cast in a rom com and you're like, what's the cool job for your character in the rom com? Like laptop designers like on the list.

• 10:33David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  It's right up there with like print magazine editor who just circles things on a glass wall, which is my dream. I've been doing this for 10 years. I've never circled one thing on a glass wall and.

• 10:42David Pierce?

  Have you carried a large binder full of loose leaf paper with all of the magazine inside?

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  No, and every now and again, people ask me when I'm gonna, if like, are you gonna leave the verge? Like, you happy there? I'm like, well, I haven't circled anything on a wall yet, so we've got a ways to go. Before I've reached my goals. But right, you have these stereotypical jobs. And so you imagine these moments when like someone like takes their laptop and they put it into tent mode. Or like, they're like, hang on, let me push this button. And then like, the building flies out of the front of the laptop and spins around in 3D. And you're like, this is the coolest. Not only do I have a cool job, but I have a cool piece of hardware that enables me to do my cool job in the coolest possible way. And then in real life, most people are like, my job is Excel.

• 11:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  And when I actually do 3D design, I need a very powerful computer that's plugged into the wall. Which I think is how you get from that demo to 50 games.

• 11:34David Pierce?

  I think that's right. And that's fine and good for that device.

• 11:37Alex Cranz?

  3D is actually the best thing to ever happen to Excel.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  If you're one of the 3D Excel fans out there, can I?

• 11:44Alex Cranz?

  The number is just flying at your face.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  These tables really do pivot.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say this? We did the decoder episode with Kat Norton, Miss Excel. And I was like, maybe the third piece of media she'd ever done, but it went. So we weren't first by any means, and she's wonderful and she deserves all of her success. But that episode like went viral. And so now, like months later, the Financial Times is writing stories about Excel and TikTok. Cause it is just sort of like bled its way through the media. Sort of like one of the most stuffiest financial publications is like, Excel is on TikTok, you guys.

• 12:23David Pierce?

  So the learning here is that Excel is like, they always say, you know, porn drives new technology. Like, no, no, no, it's actually Excel.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, one of the real theses of decoder is like, every job is Excel. And if I just spend an hour with you, you will admit to me when your job turns into Excel.

• 12:37David Pierce?

  But no, I think the thing that was interesting to me about Computex was exactly that thing that you just said, right? Where there's like, all these nifty things that everybody is perpetually working on. And we see this at CES every year, too. There's like, three bonkers new ideas about how you can put a screen and a keyboard together. And what it turns out, people actually want is just a laptop. But then you get a couple of things, like there was Acer has this new thing called the Spin 714, that Monica on our team, who has basically seen every laptop that exists, is super excited about. And it's basically just like, they took a good Chromebook and made it nice looking, which sounds like a relatively small thing, but it's not at all a small thing. And like, that's cool and exciting. And then you have

• 13:19David Pierce?

  like, the HP Spectre, which is, I think, like, for years now, one of the sort of go to, if you're gonna buy a Windows laptop. It's like the XPS 13, and the Spectre X360. Like, just buy one of those, you'll be very happy.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I'm sorry. You think this computer looks good?

• 13:33Alex Cranz?

  I mean, have you seen a normal Acer Chromebook?

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, but they're in, they're in the competition with the new hot look in HP Spectre Chromebook, right? Which is like, it's, it's a thousand dollars, but that thing looks great. I'm just looking at a picture of this, and I'm telling you that on the bottom right corner of the display, there is a giant HDMI sticker.

• 13:53Alex Cranz?

  Well, you gotta know. This is exciting, HDMI.

• 13:58David Pierce?

  No, you're, I will say, you're actually missing the worst part, which is that above the display on the left, it says, in teeny tiny little letters, it says antimicrobial corn and Gorilla Glass, at the very top left of the screen.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  This is like, they couldn't get the good stickers, so they took any money, you know? Like, the HDMI Foundation was like, yeah, we got 20 bucks, will that get us a slot? You know, and it's like, it's the ad that would normally be on like, the back of the NASCAR, like, underneath the tailpipe. Like, that's the money. And they're like, no, no, actually, on this computer, you can have it right on the front.

• 14:35Alex Cranz?

  Now, everyone will know.

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  Also, I can't believe this is true, that the HDMI sticker is not on the same side of the computer as the HDMI port.

• 14:45Alex Cranz?

  It's just telling you it exists.

• 14:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, it has HDMI.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere here is HDMI.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  Look, I'm in the market for a new, so this is $750, which is expensive for a Chromebook, but it is also true that, you know, the HP, the new HP one is like floating at 1,000 and above.

• 15:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, and this one, like, the specs on this one are very good. It's like a, like, high-level

• 15:06Alex Cranz?

  I7.

• 15:07David Pierce?

  Current gen Intel processor, like, good storage, good RAM, like, it's, it's just a good computer, which you can't say of a lot of Chromebooks.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  You know what it has is an HD, my poor.

• 15:15Alex Cranz?

  Not a lot of can say that.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and this one actually says it to you every time you look at it. Look, I'm in love with a high-end, powerful Chromebook that looks cool. So, you know, I'll put this on my little, my little stew list, but it's gonna come with, like, the Gorilla, or what's the stuff, the Gugon. Can I say the, the, first thing we talked about is the Rog Flo X16, the Asus. And what's in, actually, the displays on all these are fascinating. So, we talked about the one that does, uh, Spatial 3D. This one, mini LED display with 512 dimming zones. Mini LED is starting to come down, right? The MacBook Pros had them, MacBook Pros are obviously a little bit more expensive. I think it's fascinating to see, okay, this display style's coming down. And then, there's one with a new OLED. There's like a inexpensive OLED display.

• 16:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's called the Acer Swift 3.

• 16:03Alex Cranz?

  Like, affordable OLED?

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Alex Cranz?

  Like, $750? $800?

• 16:08Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's a, how, how big is that screen?

• 16:10David Pierce?

  It's a 14-inch, it's $899, and substantially cheaper than your average OLED laptop, uh, and looks really nice. And yeah, that's one of the things, like, outside of all the, the wacky shit that everybody is perpetually trying to do, like, just give us better screens, seems like that's, that one's actually happening. It's like, make the processors faster, make the screens better, make the keyboards not horrible. Like, that is the recipe for a pretty good laptop.

• 16:35Alex Cranz?

  I do think the prices are interesting, too, because for the longest time, like, most laptops sold were like, under $500. Everybody just wants cheap, 1080p, 15-inch display, great. And now we've got a lot of sub-thousand-dollar laptops with, like, high-end monitors in them. And that's cool. Like, an OLED for under a grand?

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Alex Cranz?

  Would not have thought of that ever.

• 16:58Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I tell you this story? We, um, so we had the guy, Alan Young on Decoder, the Foxconn guy. Then Josh Dres and I, a couple of days after the episode, we took a call from a guy who's been in the display industry for a long time, cantankerous older gentleman. He was like, Foxconn was always a lie. They're never building anything. I know all these. So we gotta take this call. So we get in the call and we're like expecting to hear whatever. It was a good call. I'm not going to reveal everything he said. But it was like an old school, display manufacturing executive called to tell us, I've been following your coverage. Here's some things you missed. Go chase it down. I know these guys. It was obvious to everybody in the industry, they're never building a factory. And then he's like, I know people like OLEDs and I know you like your mini LEDs, but LCDs are just always going to win. You can always

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  just build them. They're getting better and faster. And I started laughing. He's like, why are you laughing? I was like, my whole house is OLEDs and mini LED. Like, there's four TVs in the house. Three of them are, or one of them is plasma. There's two OLEDs in my, you know, my laptops and my LEDs. And he's like, how are you? I tell your readers, don't buy the TVs I'm buying. It was just like the harshest burn I've ever heard.

• 18:06David Pierce?

  His whole case is just, we're gonna keep making LCDs. That's it?

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  He was like, plasma is a flash in the fucking pan. And, you know, this OLED stuff, they're never gonna get brighter. They're all gonna die. People are gonna realize it was a disaster. LCDs, that's, that's always the future. And I was like, you know, I got, I like, like my LGL. He's like, tell your readers, don't buy what you're buying. I was like, god damn.

• 18:29David Pierce?

  Wow. See, this is the stuff that happens at trade shows. The, the like, it's like some Sharks and Jets stuff. Like, there's like, the OLED crew walks into the bar that the LCD crew is already in and it's like, things get quiet and there's, it's like, it's a scene. This is what happens at Computex every year.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Every year at Computex, there is a musical theater gang fight. Display manufacturers.

• 18:52David Pierce?

  They're just hammering TVs over each other's heads.

• 18:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about these two, this super bulky Chromebook. I just think the fact that Chromebooks are, they're starting to hit new form factors outside of the, we made a $300 one to throw in your kid's classroom and get destroyed. So now they've got Acer's got this Chromebook Tab 510, which has LTE, which is fascinating for a Chromebook for many reasons. It's also just like super rugged.

• 19:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, the idea is basically like, I think it's 400 bucks and it's not a particularly like impressive looking or super powerful device. It's running on a, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7C chip, which is basically, this is designed to be a much more like mobile thing. And in their press release and stuff, Acer talks about it as like a mobile, like video conferencing system.

• 19:40Nilay Patel?

  So it's a mobile device, running a Google operating system with a cell radio that's designed to make calls.

• 19:51David Pierce?

  Kohan.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying like, they made a seven inch Android phone.

• 19:56David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  But it runs Chrome OS.

• 19:59Alex Cranz?

  It's 10.1 inches.

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  It's 10.1, it's sorry, it has the, the exact same aspect ratio as the Nexus 7. And I've assumed that it is exactly that size in every picture.

• 20:09Alex Cranz?

  Much larger pixels.

• 20:11David Pierce?

  Well, and it's, it's weird that, that others are doing this because like Google, as we talked about on the show is, has this very specific idea about what Chrome OS is for. Right. They see it as like an enterprise thing and an education thing. And like Rick Osterloh basically said exactly that to me. And they think of Android as the mass consumer main thing. And also Android is so much better tuned to like mobile systems. Like you can also make video calls on your phone, which has LTE. Some of them even have a stylus and a keyboard, like it's crazy. But yeah, so the, the existence of this thing from Acer, I think is A, nobody throws computers against the wall like Acer does. So I sort of love it for that anyway.

• 20:51David Pierce?

  But also just the idea that everybody is still out there experimenting, even as Google is trying to like segment Chrome OS into this teeny tiny little box is really interesting to me.

• 21:00Alex Cranz?

  How is it supposed to be the, the video Chromebook when it's, it has a five megapixel webcam?

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. Cause I mean, have you seen any Apple webcam? People crash shop in this room, like whatever it's cheap, I can shoot a gun at it.

• 21:16Alex Cranz?

  You could probably shoot a gun at this and it would be okay.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  It's got a stylus.

• 21:20Alex Cranz?

  It's so thick.

• 21:21Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's a chunk.

• 21:22Alex Cranz?

  It's got a garage for the stylus.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  I like the little pinstripe texture on the back. I mean, I don't, I don't, it's not that I like it so much that I'd purchase it. I'm just saying it's better than the normal thing.

• 21:32Alex Cranz?

  It's very 2014.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Alex Cranz?

  Like it, it just looks like this would have been super cool in 2014.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Alex Cranz?

  And eight years later, it just is existing.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  Eight years later, it's like, we have LTE guys. Have you heard about the fourth G? Cranes, I want to talk to you about the sort of chip situation, all these, but lastly, we should talk about the framework, which David, you dove into. This is a modular laptop that we've covered for a long time. It seems like they're, they're living up to their promise in some ways.

• 21:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. So the framework laptop launched a little over a year ago and its whole thing is basically, it's a relatively normal laptop. Like not, no crazy ideas about laptops, no super new specs, but its whole thing is being modular and repairable and upgradable. So their, their whole idea is you shouldn't have to buy a new laptop every time you want a new laptop. And they came out this year with, they call it a new framework laptop, but basically all it is, is a new mainboard. And it has the 12th generation Intel chip. It's faster. It has all this stuff. You can buy it in a new body if you want, but you could also just slot it into your existing framework laptop. And that is a really big deal. Framework made the same promises that a million other companies have made over the years, right?

• 22:41David Pierce?

  There's Project Dara. Intel has done this a bunch of times. Everybody has tried to make modular gadgets and everybody gives up on them immediately. And framework at least is like out here doing the thing.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  They made the one.

• 22:51Alex Cranz?

  It's different than like Alienware and MSI and what all those guys were doing a couple of years ago where they were putting like I9 processors, desktop processors into laptops. Like these are actual laptop processors.

• 23:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. Basically they're, they're taking the like the Intel, you know, the 12th generation, the I5s and the I7s. And they'll just sell you the mainboard and you just, you just stick it in where everything else is. And all the stuff that you can screw all the parts in and out, they have little ports for expansion stuff. So if you want an HDMI port, you put it in ethernet, you put it in. It's just, it's a little box that you fill with all the computer parts that you want. And it's kind of cool because it's like, it's a new computer, but it's also just like new parts for your old computer that make it a new computer, which is this like wacky new paradigm of thinking about how people buy computers that I think is very cool.

• 23:35Alex Cranz?

  Old paradigm.

• 23:36David Pierce?

  I mean, fair.

• 23:37Alex Cranz?

  There was the best laptop ever made did this.

• 23:40David Pierce?

  The Motorola Atrix.

• 23:43Alex Cranz?

  The Apple G3 PowerBook Pismo.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, where you could pull the keyboard right off?

• 23:48David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  This was a particularly weird era of Johnny Ive keyboards. Like, we think that we lived through the butterfly era and that was really bad. But that's because all of you are just too young to have, like, lived through that era, where he was like, what if it was a tiny wafer of nothing? And you could also remove it completely, resulting in the springiest keyboard ever made. Also, it'll be slightly translucent. So, right, it was like translucent brown.

• 24:14Alex Cranz?

  Ah.

• 24:15Nilay Patel?

  But so when you pulled it off, you could do the airport card, you could do RAM.

• 24:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and you could do the processor.

• 24:20Nilay Patel?

  You could do the processor?

• 24:21Alex Cranz?

  So, other world computing.

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  Right, okay, so some, like, other people did the processor.

• 24:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, some other people made it so you could switch it out. Because I had that laptop for like, four or five, like, I had it for over 10 years, because I could just replace the old crummy G3 with a slightly less crummy G3.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Alex Cranz?

  And then a G4. And then the internet started to exist and the computer died.

• 24:44Nilay Patel?

  Did you have the moment of upgrading that laptop, where like, starting it up every time was like, a little bit of an adventure?

• 24:51Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  Because I had a, I had a G4 Tower, and I upgraded like, all the RAM, and I swapped out the processor and the video card. And by the end, I'd be like, I can't turn off my computer. It might never turn on again.

• 25:05Alex Cranz?

  Like, you just did never restarted it. If it restarted, you were like, well, time to go buy a new laptop.

• 25:10Nilay Patel?

  It might be it, like, you'd look at the jar of change, be like, I hope that there's enough in there. Speaking of Macs, it does look exactly like MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, right?

• 25:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, and they're like, I think, basically okay with that idea. Like, the, when I talked to Nirav, the founder of Framework a while back, he was basically like, we've, the industry has gotten a lot of things about laptops right. Like, we don't need to screw those things up while we try to also do this other thing. Like, let's just make a laptop that is nice and looks nice, but also does these other things, which I 100% think is the right approach.

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  And they changed the the top cover. Can you replace the top cover if you have the old one too?

• 25:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, so Framework will actually sell you, they call it an upgrade kit, and I think it's 580 bucks or something. That is basically the new mainboard and the top cover. And the big knock on the first version was just that it felt kind of, I don't know, flaky. Like, it just didn't feel like a particularly solid laptop, which is a possibility for something that is basically just a bunch of pieces screwed together. Like, they didn't do any particularly impressive building. So to have it be a little more rigid, like, it just took them time. But the idea is now they've like, I don't know, done something to the process. So the top cover's a little more rigid, and they'll sell you that too, if you want. Or you can just buy, like, the whole new package, which comes with that new top.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  Lots of new laptops, lots of new chips. The Framework is interesting, right? It's a new, more powerful chip in the same cooling setup as the old one. Alex, what should we be thinking about chips in all these new computers?

• 26:34Alex Cranz?

  I mean, we sold these chips, like, what, back in February, I think, is when they announced all of this stuff. So it was kind of like exciting to finally see them in the things. I think right now, though, the question is, how good actually are they, right? Like, how good are they doing on battery life, how everything else? Acer historically is one of the first, like, folks out of the gate with with new processors and stuff. So these will be some of the first ones.

• 26:56David Pierce?

  They'll try anything.

• 26:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they'll try any. I mean, that's the thing. It's like Acer in particular loves to just try anything. They love to do anything. They're just like, let's see, because they have just such a huge business. They can afford to do this. They're like, what? I think they're fourth now, as far as laptops go. But I think there's, right now, it's just, there's a lot of questions. We're seeing them in stuff. We're not seeing laptops that are a lot thinner, or a lot chunkier. We're not seeing big changes in battery size. So there's definitely some questions to be had about how much faster are they actually? How much better is the battery life? But we have to actually get a hold of them and start testing them, I think.

• 27:33David Pierce?

  Am I right in thinking that how that turns out is like kind of huge and important for Intel? Because I feel like we're at this moment now where AMD is doing really interesting stuff. Qualcomm is coming along and it feels like Intel has been making noise about we're getting back to winning at this stuff. And it feels like the Alder Lake stuff is coming out kind of slowly. And it feels like how it turns out and how some of these reviews go feel like it's going to be a really big deal.

• 27:57Alex Cranz?

  I think they would like it to be a big deal. I don't know how big a deal it is actually going to be, right? Like, I think Intel has been so behind the curve for so long that it's just like, we'll all be like, oh, my God, they caught up. But I think it's a real question of are they going to absolutely surpass? And I think we saw that with the last generation, right? The 11th generation, we started to see like, oh, they're doing good work here. They've caught up with AMD. So ideally, this is like, are they continuing to do it? Was that just a flash in the pan or can they continue to stay ahead of AMD?

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  And they keep making this noise about using TSMC as a fab.

• 28:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  So if they can actually decouple their designs and make a five nanometer design, which is like, I mean, like if you're at Intel and that's what proposed to you, like decouple design from manufacturing and make a five nanometer design for TSMC to make. Like, that is just so far outside of the DNA of Intel that like, that company could just have like an allergic reaction to this idea. But that's what they're threatening to do.

• 28:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, I mean, they kind of have to, right? Their foundries just aren't capable of producing the chips that they need to produce to stay competitive in the market. And they said, well, we're going to build our Silicon Sun Valley or whatever they're calling the thing in Ohio.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  It's the Silicon Heartland.

• 29:14Alex Cranz?

  Excuse me, the Silicon Heartland. Like, they said they're going to do all of this stuff, but that's still years away. And I think we're kind of stuck in a spot for them where they're like, yeah, the really cool stuff is coming. Like, we kind of have it right now.

• 29:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. I think the answer is we'll see, especially if that Ohio factory comes online. But great, what are we going to do when we test these laptops? We're going to pit them up against a bunch of M-series chips. And say, where's the performance versus the battery life? And I think the battery life is actually more important.

• 29:42Alex Cranz?

  I would 100, like, battery life is where everybody's going. And they've all kind of started to change their philosophy on battery life, too. Right? Intel, for years, their whole idea was, we get through the processes as quickly as possible. So we save you battery life because we're just doing it so fast. And then you realize that that's not actually like, that doesn't scale well. Because you're using so much power to get it done quickly, that you're still sucking up the battery. Which where this whole big little core thing came from. Where it's like, we're going to use these really efficient cores. So they're, they're really changing, like, not only are they changing how they're like, okay, we're going to decouple, we're not going to build the chips ourselves. But also, our entire fundamental philosophy of how we make chips go fast and save battery life. We're going to change that, too.

• 30:25Alex Cranz?

  So there's like, a lot of stuff they've got to prove consistently. I think they've proven it like, once. But they have to repeatedly prove that they can do this. And it's not just a one off. Because Apple's already doing it.

• 30:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was going to say, you, you say we're going to put these things up against a bunch of M-series Max. And I feel like, I, you know, I don't want to write reviews before they get done. But I have an odd feeling we know how those benchmarks are going to go based on how this stuff has worked out relatively well.

• 30:49Alex Cranz?

  Just lapping everybody else in the industry right now.

• 30:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, Apple is just so far ahead at the moment. It's crazy. Like I said, just buy a MacBook Air.

• 30:58Alex Cranz?

  Wait, please wait.

• 31:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, don't buy a MacBook Air now, but like, in general.

• 31:04Alex Cranz?

  June 6th, wait at least until June 6th.

• 31:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a good call.

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  We got to take a break. Liz is going to join us. We're talking about Elon.

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• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Liz Lapata, welcome to the Vergecast.

• 32:30Speaker 06

  Hi, thanks for having me. Good to be back.

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  This is a segment that we are duty bound by law to call This Week in Elon. We will be at some point in the future relaunching our newsletter that Liz started called This Week in Elon. We will take three Verge reporters to support that newsletter at this time.

• 32:52David Pierce?

  I was saying to somebody earlier that I really like the idea that This Week in Elon is going to be way more than weekly. Like, it just feels appropriate that that's how it's going to work.

• 33:00Speaker 06

  This hour in Elon.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  This moment in Elon history. Okay. Let's discuss where Elon and Twitter are now. And then Elon has done and said a number of other things this week that connect to this deal, don't connect to this deal, provided provoked a range of reactions. Well, let's start with the deal.

• 33:20Speaker 06

  Well, I just want to be super clear is that the deal's still happening, no matter what Elon Musk says about it. Like, look, I think you all know that I'm like a longtime reader of Matt Levine. I've been reading him since the financial crisis when he was at Dealbreaker.

• 33:34Nilay Patel?

  Matt Levine is a columnist at Bloomberg.

• 33:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's right. There's a thing that he said about this that I like can't get out of my head, which is like, if you have to look at the contract for the deal, you've already lost.

• 33:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 06

  And so I'm seeing all of these people on Twitter who are like, oh, but he can't disparage Twitter. And it's like, it's Elon Musk. He's gonna do what he's gonna do. The only entity that can enforce the non-disparagement clause is Twitter. And they seem desperately to want to get this deal done. They've filed their proxy. They've said multiple times, they think the deal's getting done. It's getting done at this price. They're not renegotiating, and Elon is just doing whatever.

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So let's just start chronologically this week. There are many ways to come at this conversation. I feel as though chronologically is the only one that will provide us sanity. And even then, it's kind of dicey. That might be too high a bar.

• 34:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think we're gonna get to sanity.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 34:28Speaker 06

  We can try.

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  Let's try.

• 34:29Speaker 06

  So for those of you who haven't been paying attention to the stock market, prices have been falling. It's been kind of ugly. And so now, the amount that Elon was planning to pay for Twitter, which was 5420, blaze it, just seems high, if you will. So he's been tweeting a bunch of stuff about bots on Twitter. And he's like concerned that there might be too many fake spam bot accounts, that might be as many as 20% of Twitter's users, that the deal can't move forward until Twitter proves the accuracy of its actual estimate, which is like 5%, I think. And I just want to pause here and note that in

• 35:12Speaker 06

  normal deals, these kinds of things get ironed out without me watching in a process called due diligence, which Elon Musk did not do on this deal.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  Declined to do. He actually said, I'm relying on Twitter's public statements. He said this publicly.

• 35:28Speaker 06

  People just don't want to do due diligence, and I don't understand why. Because then they're like, oh, I was surprised by this thing. And it's like, You didn't have to be surprised.

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, also, I will just, this is more Matt Levine quoting, because his newsletter on this stuff is great. And he also keeps referring to Elon Musk as his boss, because he keeps trying to go on vacation, and then something happens, and he's like, my boss Elon Musk made me write the column. It's a very funny bit. But his point was Elon constantly and consistently complains about bots, because Elon's mentions are a disaster. He replied to me last weekend, and then my mentions were a disaster of crypto spam. It was like bizarre. So Elon is like deeply aware of the bot issue. He thinks the number is high. Then he says, I'm gonna buy Twitter to fix the bot problems. And now his excuse is, I don't want to buy Twitter, because I don't believe that their reporting of bots is accurate. And so Twitter,

• 36:23Nilay Patel?

  for years, like eight years or something, right, has, in their quarterly reports, are like, less than 5% of our monetizable daily active users are bots.

• 36:32David Pierce?

  Which they have said is not a perfect number, we should say. Like, they've always said, they say something about like, applying significant judgment to it, because there's no way to like, perfectly poll who is real and who isn't on your platform. But their extremely educated guess, over and over and over again, has been under 5% of users.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  Less than 5%. But the number, and this is like a weird number, right, in the industry, is monetizable daily active users, which doesn't map, like, when you try to compare and contrast the size of Twitter to any other platform, you kind of quickly realize that no one else uses that number, that you can't compare dailies to monthlies, because monthlies are always higher, more people show up in a month. You can't compare monetizable dailies to dailies on other platforms, because Twitter's only counting monetizable dailies, which means if you're on Twitter on other platforms, you can't be, they can't serve you ads, so you don't count. So it's just this one tiny group of users, and they're saying less than

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  5%. For all we know, Elon is like, using his own home world Twitter client, and he doesn't count, right? Like, so there's just like this weird numerical problem, where there's no like to like comparison to anything. And then there's Prag Agarwal, the new CEO of Twitter, doing lengthy thoughtful threads about how they calculate the thing, to which Elon just replies with a single poop emoji.

• 37:56Speaker 06

  Listen, he understands how to use Twitter. This is more than we could say for certain other technology moguls out here, you know? I will say, though, I just, I don't buy any of this shit around bots. I don't buy any of it. I think this is a negotiating tactic. And like, you know, Matt Levine came out and called Elon a liar. And I think it's worth mentioning that Elon has directly lied to us at The Verge at least once. So like, it's not like this is out of character for him to be, you know, disingenuous, let's say.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  He should say what the lie is, Sabrina Lee.

• 38:28Speaker 06

  Do you remember, it was like a Sean O'Kane story. I'm sorry, this is gonna take a second. I'm gonna need to bring the headline up. But we had asked him some question about whether this rocket launch was true and in our, in his DMs back when we talked to him. And he said, no. And then we corrected our story, which we had gotten from other sources. And then we had to correct our correction because our first story was right.

• 38:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that seems right. I mean, just like, why do you think we changed our background policy? Like, we just need to attribute the things to people who say them.

• 39:00David Pierce?

  So I have a question about this. One of the things that I've been trying to figure out is like, I think I buy all of that logic, right? Which is that none of the shit he's stirring is actually about issues that he has. And it's actually about him trying to get a lower price on Twitter. That makes a certain amount of logical sense. But the part that I don't understand is if that's what you're gonna pick, why would you pick bots? Like, why, it's such an odd hobby horse to use to be like your wedge in this fight. Like, why would it be bots?

• 39:27Alex Cranz?

  Aren't a lot of his followers bots? Like, we've heard about Elon's bot army. Like, they've inflated his, like, reach in a lot of ways, right? They've inflated his perceived reach. So like, bots have been good to Elon. Like, maybe they've been bad to his mentions, but they've been good to him overall. So I was kind of surprised that he is now anti-bots.

• 39:49Speaker 06

  I have a theory about this, and it has to do with cryptocurrency spam. We know that as of last year, Elon Musk impersonators had stolen more than $2 million in cryptocurrency. It's just that, like, a lot of these bots seem to be crypto scammers. And for whatever reason, when they reply to Elon Musk looking like Elon Musk with the name Elon Musk, but without like actually being Elon Musk. People really do think that there's some kind of crypto giveaway that Elon is doing and click. Yeah. And I can certainly imagine as Musk is like super protective of his army of fans,

• 40:30Speaker 06

  that this is the kind of thing where saying, hey, bots are a real problem and I really want to deal with them is kind of for them, right? Okay. They're the ones who get hurt. And they're also crucially the ones who need to be reassured that he's on the level. Because I found the story that Musk lied about. It's from December 1st, 2017. And the headline is Elon Musk told us he was sending a car to space, then said he totally made it up. And you may all remember that he did, in fact, send a car to space. He did.

• 41:00Nilay Patel?

  Which ruled. I just want to put that out there. I know that was very controversial at the time. The car in space was awesome.

• 41:08Speaker 06

  It looked very cool.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  Hundred percent agree. We should just be clear about that.

• 41:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. If I sent a car to space, I would tell everyone the truth about it forever.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  What are you lying about?

• 41:18Speaker 06

  So, you know, like, I do think that like some degree of this is about his fandom, which he like really does seem to care about a lot. And like, he needs to have a good excuse for why he can back out of the Twitter deal. Not for Twitter, because I don't think he gives a shit about Twitter, but for them. So he's still the good guy.

• 41:37Nilay Patel?

  So he isn't a little narrative?

• 41:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so like, I think this is a transparent lie. Like, I think it's an obvious lie. But I also am not, I'm not a member of the fan club.

• 41:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, so this is all happening in the context of a number of things. So as Liz pointed out, the stock market overall is down. Ever since he launched the Twitter bid, Tesla's stock is coming down, both because of the market and because a huge part of his financing is tied to Tesla's stock. He's out there in the world trying to find other people to finance the bid with him. Maybe he'll be successful, maybe he won't. If I had that amount of money, I wouldn't be like, yeah, Twitter, that's where I'm going to get my return on investment. But who knows?

• 42:19David Pierce?

  In fact, a lot of very rich companies have made that particular decision in the past not to buy Twitter.

• 42:25Nilay Patel?

  It's true. Like, I don't know. Bob Iger is like, I don't know. We're not doing that. Like, I think Apple kicked the tires, Salesforce kicked the tires. And Salesforce will buy anything.

• 42:37Nilay Patel?

  That's a joke. But it just seems like that's, you know, I buy a lot of dumb stuff. And if you have that much money, like a piece of Twitter might be how I think about one more PS5 game that I'm not going to play. You know, like, who knows?

• 42:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  I don't have that much money, but you can, I can, you can see how the thought process would scale. But it's a lot of money that is depressing his Tesla stock as he continues to basically take the freshman core curriculum of a liberal arts college on Twitter live in person, which is like, it's just a thing he's doing. Right? He, he tweets some like asinine thing about what if there was a more moderate party in the United States? And literally Dan Dresner, this is happening right now. Dan Dresner, who was my political science professor in college, he says, I beg you to add a political science expert to your tutors.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  See, Jeff Bezos, if you were better at Twitter, this could be you.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's just like crazy. He's driving everybody insane. Every one of his content moderation ideas, as I've said, is baby tweets for babies. Corin wrote a great piece this week. Obviously, there's extraordinarily tragic shooting in Buffalo. On the big platform side, Casey made this point in his newsletter. The big platforms did like perfect content moderation of the live stream. Twitch had it down in two minutes. Facebook had its sort of usual Facebook stumbles because it is huge. But it started clamping it down, right? Identify it, Twitter clamped it down. Like, it was little platforms, like streamable, where things got out of hand and they, because they don't have the resources, they don't do.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  The teams or the scale, that's where it went. So the big platforms, if you think about it, there was a bad guy, he livestreamed the shooting, this horrific racist motivated shooting. He said he was gonna do it on Discord. All of this stuff, when the platforms saw it, within minutes, they took action, which is a really hard thing to do. Twitter is obviously doing it too. Elon hasn't said a word about this, right? If Elon's, Elon's conception of what the content moderation standards on Twitter are, or should be, is all legal speech, then your first test case is the video of the shooting, right? You've said, if people want more tight content restrictions, they should pass a law, otherwise I'm doing the First Amendment. Problematic for any number of reasons. This is his like

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  core class's education. But this video is legal speech, right? It doesn't meet any of the exceptions. It's just morality and like, honestly, as an ad-supported business, like being a place where advertisers want to put their ads, leads you to blocking this video immediately. Yep. This is just one of those spots where like, you have to be okay with it, because you're okay with the First Amendment, or you're saying, no, we have to take it down. In which case, you have left your principles behind, and now you're saying, we're gonna make judgment calls.

• 45:33Alex Cranz?

  That's why he's talking so much, right? Like, like, that's why we're seeing so many stupid, inane tweets from him this week, is because, like, he's distracting us. Like, there's a very real question everybody has for him is, you want to buy Twitter, you want to change how it moderates. Here is your first test case, and he is pointedly ignoring it. So by like, being like, I'm gonna drop a poo emoji, I'm gonna declare I'm a Republican, which is a shock to absolutely no one. Like-

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, dude, you moved to Texas.

• 46:04Alex Cranz?

  Like, come on. Like, you don't have that much money and not be. But whatever, like, he's just doing all of this stuff to distract us from the fact that he had this test case and he blew it.

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, he didn't blow it. He just didn't say anything.

• 46:16Alex Cranz?

  He didn't say anything, because what he would have said, like, if, if he held to his, his principles, quote unquote, of being like, the First Amendment guy, the First Amendment would require it to stay up.

• 46:26Speaker 06

  I want to be clear. He said a number of things, but not actually about the shooting because he did talk about like content moderation again. And like this time he was like, oh, you don't want to be manipulated by the algorithm. You should get chronological feeds instead. And then he had time for Matt Taibbi, so congratulations to Matt on that, about corporate regulation in California. There were images of a SpaceX launch. There was a royal portrait of King Louis XIV of France. And then he, the next day, decided it would be cool to talk a little bit more about the importance of open source code. So it's just, it's, it's a lot of stuff to say nothing that you could engage with if you want, I guess.

• 47:09Speaker 06

  Although I don't think anybody here needs to have chronological tweets on Twitter explained to them.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  The future of this existed for years, by the way. You just pushed that button.

• 47:17Speaker 06

  You know, it, it does feel disingenuous when you've come out as like a free speech advocate. You have this very public test case and what you're tweeting about is the algorithm? Like, I would understand this if the algorithm you were tweeting about was the one that helps you locate and take down this kind of content, maybe. But that's not what was going on.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  There's a parallel here, and I feel all, like, all four of us have probably done our best to avoid this. But like TikTok and YouTube are being taken over by the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial, right? And that I would, I would just call that like, this is, the algorithm sees demand. There's a lot of demand for it. And then like the underlying material is in public domain because it is just state media. Like the government is streaming the trial so anyone can use it. That means content creators can use it. So like there's, they're filling this gaping amount of demand for this trial and all kinds of bad things are happening. Like, I think BuzzFeed had a great headline today or yesterday that was like, I can't wait to watch the movie about how we were all wrong about Amber Heard.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, and it's just spiraling on, like, that's the bad algorithm, like at play, like you can see it happening in real time. Like, there's demand for this. People are filling it because they will chase the YouTube algorithm or the TikTok algorithm. They actually have no idea what they're talking about. People are watching all of it. The algorithm sees even more demand. The cycle continues. There is Kat Tenbarge at NBC News did a great piece about an Elden Ring video game streamer who has pivoted to Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial coverage and his goal is it's building his views. And he's like, when it's over, I'm going to pivot back to Elden Ring. This is how you get in the partner program. That's what he was saying. He was like, this is how I get enough views to get in and then I can go back. Then I can go back and now my video game content will monetize. Like, that's just

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  ice cold. Like, that's the most cynical thing I've ever heard. And if Elon's criticism of the algorithm was pointed at that, it would make sense. His criticism of the algorithm is like Twitter is manipulating you into only seeing the far left stuff that Twitter employees want you to see. At the same time, that there is a hard right racially motivated shooting in our country, like in the state that I live in. Like, that to me is, it's not that we need Elon to talk about every mass shooting in the country or weigh in on every public event. It's literally the thing that he wants to do would materially change how Twitter responds to these events.

• 49:47Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 49:48Nilay Patel?

  And so like, understanding what he would do in this moment is actually really crucial to understanding how serious his free speech philosophy is. And I don't think that he wants to explain that to anyone.

• 50:00Alex Cranz?

  I feel like we already understand how serious this free speech philosophy is. Am I wrong?

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. You know, it's, it's Elon. So it's chaos. And I think the character of Elon is more chaotic than the person of Elon, right? That appears-

• 50:13Alex Cranz?

  Like, the dude was fairly smart. Like, how he set up this deal to begin with. A lot of the original machinations of this Twitter deal, you're like, okay, I mean, however I feel about you, this was like, kind of cool and smart. And, and now it's spinning out because like his funding situation- He's like, we've now had this horrible event happen and it's very pointedly pointed out, a massive flaw in his philosophy for moderation. All this stuff is happening and he's just like, I know what I'm gonna do, erect a billion straw men to distract you from all the things we actually need to be talking about with this deal.

• 50:49David Pierce?

  Well, and I think part of the reason this stuck out to me so much is that there's like, the thing I have always struggled with is like, the difference between Elon Musk, like, the person and @ElonMusk, the Twitter personality, right? And @ElonMusk is just like a low stakes shit poster, right? Like, he doesn't, he mostly doesn't engage on things that actually matter, except to just like, sort of talk shit in all directions and like, giggle as everyone freaks out. This is one of those things that, A, is very high stakes, B, matters to Elon Musk, the person, who is theoretically gonna own Twitter and will at some point have to make a decision like this, and C, is gonna make an enormous number of people incredibly angry no matter what you pick.

• 51:29David Pierce?

  And he does not actually tend to engage on that kind of stuff directly all that often. But in this case, if he buys Twitter, he's gonna have to. That's the, and that's why I feel like the silence from him was so strong, where it's like, I don't generally care what CEOs have to say after events like this, right? Like, I don't, I don't know that it helps anybody to like, get thoughts and prayers from Bill Gates after the shooting in Buffalo. I don't know if he did that, I'm not picking on Bill Gates specifically. But in this case, it's like, at some point, someone is going to walk into a room and say, Elon, what do we do? And he's gonna have to decide, and like, God help us if he is like, the person he is on Twitter. But I think, at some point, you would wanna see that actual person be on Twitter, rather than just whoever this character is.

• 52:14David Pierce?

  And it feels like we're, we still haven't gotten any of that.

• 52:16Speaker 06

  The other thing that I would just add to this is that, like, adding to that specific kind of pressure, is that it's very like, at the front of my mind, that like, moderation on YouTube at one point led to a mass shooting. Like, that's a real thing that really happened. And so like, this is actually a very, very fraught area that like, I don't know that Elon Musk can weigh in on without making things considerably worse. Because, again, like, think about who his followers are. If he decides to criticize Twitter for taking down links to this shooting, that seems gross and wrong, and a bunch of people are gonna be mad.

• 52:59Speaker 06

  But if he says, hey, I've reconsidered, you know, my thoughts about free speech. I've got a more nuanced plan now. That potentially freaks out everybody who wanted to bring back Donald Trump to the platform. And also, like, potentially, like, not for nothing, puts Twitter employees at actual physical risk. So I just feel like it's a super ugly place to be. And like, it's when we talk about how difficult it is to moderate these platforms. This is specifically the thing that we're talking about. And, you know, there was that thread from the former Reddit CEO about how he was like, Elon, you don't want this, like, this is gonna break you. This is gonna be the worst thing you've ever, you've ever seen. Like, this was what he meant.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  The thing I'll add is, this is like, inside baseball journalism, but I think it's useful context here. We're good at this story now. Like, The Verge is good at it, and like, kind of the broader media is good at it. Like, the thing happens, we're like, what are the platforms gonna do? We reach out to the comms team at the platforms. We hear from the head of policy. We hear from the head of trust and safety. They've made a decision. The decision has been like, reasonably disseminated to their teams. They tell us the timeline on which they made the decision. This is how we know Twitch did it in minutes. Like, in one very abstract way, it's like, an exchange of form letters. Right? We're like, what did you do? And like, here's what we did. And it all, it all makes sense. And we've like, we've learned how to communicate about content moderation between professionals at like, a pretty high level.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  And like, that requires a comms apparatus, and a policy apparatus, and a trust and safety team. And then maybe they got it wrong, or maybe they didn't, but like, whatever, we know how to have the communication. Elon's companies don't have press departments. They don't have comms. They don't like communicating about what they're doing. He literally opened this by starting an online harassment campaign against Twitter's top lawyer, Vijaya Gade. Like, just crazy. Like, it's like, it's not gonna work if he takes over and he doesn't have that functionality. Because if you're running the town square, the town square has to be accountable to people. And so, like, we should wrap this up. But like, one of the funniest parts about this whole week is that Twitter had an all-hands this week.

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  And they told staff that there's no such thing as a deal being on hold. Twitter saying they want the deal to be completed on the agreed-upon terms, which, by the way, they have a binding contract. A long road to Elon into buying Twitter, which is like a crazy outcome. But, you know, you know who Twitter's head lawyer, who would make those decisions and do those things are, is Vijaya Gade, who is in charge of content policy. So now he pissed off the lawyer, which is just one of those, like, classic errors.

• 55:39Alex Cranz?

  How much of this Twitter deal is just Elon Musk, his ego getting away from it? Like, how much of this is just hubris? We're just watching, like, hubris happen?

• 55:48Speaker 06

  I would say at least 95%.

• 55:52David Pierce?

  I was gonna say a little lower, but I think you're probably right. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like he thinks he can just chaos his way into whatever he wants. And Twitter holds all the actual cards here.

• 56:04Speaker 06

  I will say that, like, one thing that I've been reflecting on for a while now is that the reason why Elon Musk thinks he can do this is because he's caressed his way into a lot of things and out of a lot of things, just without consequences, or with consequences that are so minimal for him, like, for instance, a $20 million fine from the SEC, that, you know, it's a slap on the wrist. And so, on some level, I think he genuinely believes the laws of the United States of America don't apply to him. And I am very interested in finding out if he's right. Because if that's true, we have a problem.

• 56:44Nilay Patel?

  We need to end the segment before our producer Liam like literally jumps through the zoom and chokes me out. He's been writing in all caps in red, we're over in the doc. This is a real thing that's happening. The one thing I'll say, two decisions out of the Fifth Circuit, which represents Texas this week. One, they let the horrible Texas social media bill go through, which is now being appealed to the Supreme Court. Hilarious backstory to that. They weren't expecting to win that. And now they have to find lawyers to argue their case in the Supreme Court and they can't find any lawyers who want to. It's very funny. And then two, Fifth Circuit, same crazy ass Fifth Circuit. You want to see some wild, you want to see judges losing their minds. Fifth Circuit, they reversed

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  an SEC enforcement order this week, saying that administrative, the administrative state was not appropriate in this case, which is a real, if you're Elon and your federal appellate court is saying the SEC can't do stuff to you. All right, we gotta take a break. Liz, I'm sure we will have you back on for this week and Elon for many weeks to come. This is like the story of the year. It's very entertaining for a variety of reasons. Also, I think it might end with Twitter being gone, no matter what happens. That's my current prediction is that no matter what happens at the end of this, Twitter is gone. Like they might, like Jack Dorsey might be like, delete. I'll do it on the blockchain. Like you never know. We'll see. All right. Thank you so much, Liz.

• 58:09Speaker 06

  All right. Thanks, guys. Bye.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back with a lightning round.

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• 59:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. There's gadget news. It's time for a gadget lightning round. We're opening and closing the show. It's an Elon sandwich with gadgets.

• 59:33Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  David has been thinking about like, you know, what are the, what are the default structures of the Vergecast as we read, you know, refresh the show? Elon sandwich with gadgets. We should start naming them and putting on the, on the wall like a deli.

• 59:46David Pierce?

  It's actually like, if, if you were to perfectly describe every episode ever done of the Vergecast, an Elon sandwich with gadgets is like about as close as you could get.

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  Pretty good. All right. I will tell you, I'm looking at the rundown and in parentheses, it just says, we're just gonna let Cranz be excited for like 20 minutes here. So go ahead, Alex.

• 1:00:05Alex Cranz?

  I don't know if I can do 20 minutes. I could probably do 45.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  There we go, yeah.

• 1:00:09Alex Cranz?

  This is gonna be heavily edited for you listeners at home. So, Apple is reportedly testing a foldable phone that has, as a secondary display, the outside display, an e-ink display.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:00:25Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's Ming Chi Kuo, who, who we've talked about a lot on this show, usually really good at like picking out what Apple's working on, what's probably coming, usually kind of considered to be spot on. I refuse to believe they're spot on in this case, as much as I want them to be, as much as I want an e-ink iPhone, I just don't see how it happens.

• 1:00:49David Pierce?

  Well, so, okay, we, we should say, like, this is one of those things that, like, the longer you cover this stuff, the, the more you come to realize, like, the word "testing" is very important here, right? Because like, Apple is testing everything. Right? Someone at Apple has bought everything that exists that is an electronic on planet Earth and has tried to build something with it. Like, it just has happened. And so I think the part of what's interesting about leaks like these is they tend to come from the supply chain, which likely means someone has bought, you know, more than three of them. But the idea that Apple is testing a foldable with an e-ink display makes me very excited. Also means almost nothing about Apple's actual, like, future plans. This is the device that I want in my life, more than maybe anything else in the entire world.

• 1:01:31David Pierce?

  But there is absolutely no indication that it's real, other than that, like, somewhere in the giant spaceship in Cupertino, someone is, like, standing at a desk goofing around with an e-ink screen on a foldable display.

• 1:01:44Alex Cranz?

  Enough e-ink screens that it got back to quote, to talk, to like, be like, this is happening. This is being tested. And like, we don't know what kind of, as we've discussed in the past, there are multiple types of e-ink electronic paper. E-ink is the company. They get very testy if you use e-ink to describe all electronic paper. Electronic paper is the actual display technology. There's a whole bunch out there. Was very excited a couple of weeks ago, because there's a new, like, rollable color one. And like, just in no way, maybe, oh, no, there's a 5% possibility. I can see a 5% possibility of this phone existing in the world, right? Because 95% of me says, Apple will never go with this

• 1:02:27Alex Cranz?

  display technology that feels really immature. They typically go with very mature technologies.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  Or they, like, Apple Watch it, and they're like, what if we just didn't have a display for most of the time?

• 1:02:37Alex Cranz?

  Right. And that's the 5%. I'm like, okay, if they put, like, they get a really good artist to do a really good e-ink wallpaper, and they're just using it for, like, notifications and the clock, and it will look really, really pretty, they'll be like, look at our artsy-fartsy e-ink display. I could see that.

• 1:02:57Nilay Patel?

  I've been thinking about this in the context of the Google AR glasses concept, where they, like, got closer to a useful product by making it do far less.

• 1:03:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  Even though it's just a concept, you know, whatever, we'll see if they ever ship anything. But right now, what the Z Fold 3 has a big e-ink, a big OLED screen on the front, there's other foldables that have big OLED screens on the front. And so basically, you get, like, you look at that screen, and you know it's running Android, and then, like, your expectation is like, now I have a tiny phone. Like, what if instead of unfolding my phone to use it, I just use the tiny shit version of my phone?

• 1:03:34David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:03:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it's like, I kind of understand it, but you can see why you'd say, well, we'll just change that expectation by doing ink, we'll save the power, we'll let it do what time, maybe a notification of like calls or like number of iMessages, but to actually use the phone, you gotta unfold it.

• 1:03:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, to me, I think the, the, what the Apple Watch looks like on your nightstand is an interesting analog there, because it's become like a really useful use case for the watch, that it's like, it's also kind of your bedside clock, and it'll show you like, just teeny tiny bits of information. And I feel like that kind of thing where you can have this thing that is always on and uses almost no power, but can tell you like, sort of the bare minimum that you need to know, especially if Apple is invested in the idea of not making you look at your phone 1,000 times a day, giving you more proactive information, all this stuff, like, that's where a very basic thing that doesn't require you to open or even necessarily like, touch your phone, gets super interesting to me.

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  What was that thing, the chumbi? Remember the chumbi? I think ruled. It was like a little, it was like a little soft guy with like a-

• 1:04:40David Pierce?

  It's a little fluffy alarm clock, yeah.

• 1:04:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and you could like, do Linux apps on it.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  The future of the iPhone is really the front is a chumbi. I, uh, has Apple bought chumbi? Is that, is anything, what's, what's, what's Ming Shi Quo have to say about Apple buying chumbi? Mark Gurman, where you at? Get on the chumbi story. I just see, I can see them cutting it down. I'm with David, like, you reduce the expectations of what that front display can do by using a different display technology, maybe you get some battery life back, because like, the little dumb Android phone on the front of a Z Flip is just like, fully ridiculous.

• 1:05:14David Pierce?

  Bad, yeah.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Right. You don't need that anyway. Uh, Apple is announcing they're gonna bring live captions to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, they're adding some gesture control to the Apple Watch. I saw a bunch of people read this, is this is a, live captions in particular are like a step towards AR.

• 1:05:28Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:29Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because then you can like, you can like, listen to, immediately understand text.

• 1:05:33Alex Cranz?

  It'll be like the Google glasses.

• 1:05:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, in an interesting way, a lot of Apple's accessibility features have been kind of leading indicators for some of that stuff. Like, it was doing really high-end screen reader and voice stuff with, as an accessibility feature, before it brought it more broadly. It's been doing the, the like, gesture control that you can get on the watch is an accessibility feature that also like, you don't have to squint that hard to see it as how you might control something on your phone by like, pinching twice to answer or hang up a call. That kind of stuff, like, I think the live captions is probably just a genuinely useful accessibility feature, which I think is obviously a thing Apple cares a lot about. But like, if you're gonna do AR, you gotta have something like that that works, right?

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, man, it, it seems like the first key thing, right? You gotta be able to listen and understand the text, so that you can like, translate it to other text or something. iOS 15.5 came out, the new version of macOS came out. We're basically just in the run-up to WWDC here.

• 1:06:29David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  The thing that is important about these updates is a thing that I failed to do, which is the Studio Display. God, it's update, it's final update. And Dan's like, are you gonna plug it in and change the review? And I'm like, do I have to? So I promise that, like, today or tomorrow, I'll plug it in, I'll give it the final update, and it's still gonna be a six or whatever we gave it, because it's, it still looks bad.

• 1:06:53David Pierce?

  I look forward to you looking very slightly less sunburned.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57David Pierce?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  Unless they radically change the crop. I don't, I think it's still gonna look bad. A bunch of headphone stuff. Chris Welch continues to curl around the vents at Sonos. But he got hugely, actually, congratulations, Chris, he's been leaking all kinds of Sonos stuff. We got the Sub Mini, which is a product we've all wanted for a million years, because the existing sub is $750, which is too much money to pay for a subwoofer. It does not say how much it's gonna cost, but it's gonna be cheaper. It looks cool.

• 1:07:31Alex Cranz?

  I hope it sounds as good, because the current sub is really nice.

• 1:07:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Alex Cranz?

  It's just not $800 nice.

• 1:07:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38David Pierce?

  Did either of you also look at this render and think, oh, Sonos bought all of the old Mac Pro trashcans and put a speaker inside of them?

• 1:07:47Alex Cranz?

  Just repurposing them.

• 1:07:47David Pierce?

  Because that's where I went.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. It has a real, um, uh, early 2000 Sony vibe to it as well.

• 1:07:54David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, I can see that.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56David Pierce?

  It's like, what if it was furniture, but also sound?

• 1:08:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That, that does sound like a Sony marketing campaign.

• 1:08:03David Pierce?

  Would you like to sit on your ottoman and play music through your butt?

• 1:08:07Alex Cranz?

  That's like very party speaker adjacent.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  If you want to talk about party speakers on the Verge, I'm here for it. We can go a full other hour. Here's what I want to know. If you work at Sony or JBL or whatever, and you're in the Bluetooth party speaker division, just leak me your P&Ls, right? Cause we're on like 14 generations of these things. And they're, from what I can tell, a big business. Like, let me know. What is the budget for LEDs? What is the bill of materials for extremely garish LEDs on party speakers in your division? When you have your product meetings, does a PM come up and say, you know, we've, you know, team, we've been looking at the research from the third generation of party speakers, which we just launched. And, you know, the data really tells us that in frat houses around America,

• 1:08:55Nilay Patel?

  we need to add even more cup holders to these speakers. Like, you know, like, let me know. I'm, I've wanted the inside story of the party speaker explosion for many years.

• 1:09:05David Pierce?

  We're like four generations away from them just accidentally building a self-driving car around the speaker.

• 1:09:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's more innovation happening in party speakers than almost any other area in tech.

• 1:09:18Nilay Patel?

  They're great. We've had some amazing ones, like float through the Verge office.

• 1:09:21David Pierce?

  One more music thing this is, it's not party speaker related, but there's one, I think Chris Welch also reviewed this week. The OnePlus Nord buds review, which are these like $40 wireless earbuds. And I've also been using them for the last week after like a tour of every cheap pair of wireless earbuds you can buy, because I've lost four pairs of AirPods and just can't justify buying more AirPods. And so he landed basically in the same place that I did, which is like, it's the, the case is a little big. The microphone's not amazing, but they're 40 bucks and they pair really fast and they're pretty comfortable. And they're, they're pretty good. So my new like mega cheap pair of like, I just need some headphones to wear while I'm walking the dog is these.

• 1:10:04David Pierce?

  So if you're looking for something stupid cheap that won't hurt when you lose, these are the ones.

• 1:10:08Alex Cranz?

  How are you losing them?

• 1:10:09David Pierce?

  Okay. So I'm convinced my mother-in-law stole one of my pairs. That's, let's start there.

• 1:10:14Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:10:14David Pierce?

  Absolutely. A hundred percent convinced. She didn't have AirPods and then I lost mine and then she had AirPods.

• 1:10:20David Pierce?

  Just saying, there was one pair that I still have, but I got caught in the rain. And so now the battery lasts like the time it takes to put them on and then they die. A third pair I traveled with and I think left in San Francisco. So those I'm never getting back. And then a fourth pair is just gone. I have no idea about it. And all like, like a shockingly quickly, like a couple of weeks later, they were just gone. So I'm just now I'm at a point, it's like AirPods and fancy sunglasses. I'm just not allowed to buy anymore because I will lose them.

• 1:10:48Nilay Patel?

  The Sony LinkBuds S, the case looks suspiciously like an AirPods case. So here's how you would know, because you'd never buy those around. So you gotta leave that lying around and be like, that's good. Really what you come on the Verchess for is ways to trick your mother.

• 1:11:04Nilay Patel?

  You gotta wear a wire, David.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  A bunch of new smart home stuff. I will say that one that's most interesting to me, Samsung is going to start testing Matter on the SmartThings platform. It's like in beta, we'll see if it works, but it's the first big company to do it. And SmartThings is real, you know, like a lot of people have it.

• 1:11:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's the first one to go past the like, we are launching it soon thing into like, this is now a thing you can do.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  And they're actually like, good. They went from launching a press release to launching a webpage where you can sign up for a partner early access program that will come soon. So they've gotten to the forum.

• 1:11:41David Pierce?

  Is it only coming soon? Okay, that's a bummer. I thought, I thought at least the partners could already early access.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  All right, then we gotta end this thing. We, we have to talk about Eric and Pebble and the man, go ahead, David. The man wants a small Android phone.

• 1:11:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay, so Eric Mijakowski, who was the founder of Pebble and has since done a number of things. He's currently the CEO of Beeper, which is a cool multi messaging app, messaging app that I kind of dig, like really, really badly wants to make Google, I guess make Google make a small Android phone. He wants a small Android phone to exist and he seems to want Google to make it. And basically what he seems to want, and by what he seems to want is like, he explicitly said this many times over and over again, he wants an iPhone mini running stock Android. And the theory behind it is like, small phones are good. Not everyone wants the big monster giant phones. And he doesn't necessarily want it to even be like, super, super fancy.

• 1:12:38David Pierce?

  Just like, small, good, useful phone at a reasonable price. And he's trying to get 50,000 signatures. I'm not sure what he's gonna do after that. Just like, mail it to Sundar Pichai and see what happens. But that is his quest. And I guess it sounds like, according to his website, over 10,000 people have already signed the petition. So he seems to be well on his way.

• 1:13:01Alex Cranz?

  Am I allowed to sign it? I'm gonna go.

• 1:13:02Nilay Patel?

  You can sign it. I will say that Eric DM'd me the petition and was like, let's see if we can get Dieter and his new bosses to build this for us. Dieter, you got your first. Eric was at the screening of Spring War that we did at the Computer History Museum. So we saw him there and we were talking about it. But I believe it. I just, here's what I know in my heart. People say they want this thing. And then they go to the store and then they look around furtively. And then they gravitate towards the cheapest, biggest screen they can buy. And they buy that one and they take it home. And they open Twitter and they say, why won't anyone make a small phone? And I swear to God, this is like, the cycle of iPhone 3 phones.

• 1:13:35Alex Cranz?

  And it's because they never actually give us a truly good, small phone.

• 1:13:40Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone mini is a truly good small phone. What are you talking about?

• 1:13:43Alex Cranz?

  The battery life sucked for the first.

• 1:13:45David Pierce?

  That's because the phone is small. That's like, that's the thing. Like, do you know what they do when they make the phone bigger? Is they put more batteries inside of it. It's a miracle.

• 1:13:55Alex Cranz?

  You wouldn't have to, you wouldn't have to do that, though, if it was an e-ink display. Then you could have small phone.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Alex Cranz?

  And battery for years.

• 1:14:01David Pierce?

  Okay. Bring back the iPod classic.

• 1:14:03Nilay Patel?

  People want.

• 1:14:04David Pierce?

  As an e-ink.

• 1:14:05Alex Cranz?

  That's what the people want. Eric, call me.

• 1:14:08Nilay Patel?

  The Pebble was an e-ink display?

• 1:14:10Alex Cranz?

  See? See? Synergy.

• 1:14:14Nilay Patel?

  All right. We gotta end this here. Sign the petition. Let's see if we can force Dieter to do something.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what kind of disclosure you need that to be. If someone could tell me what the Dieter disclosure needs to be. Disclosure, Dieter's my boy. Like, I don't know what you want me to say. That works. Dieter's our co-founder, but now it doesn't. I will say that Dieter and I are, we're learning what we can talk about because we want to be very respectful of the fact that we can't just share a brain anymore. And so mostly, it's me threatening to buy him increasingly hard to use old digital cameras. I bought him an Apple QuickTake 100. And I was mistaken because I thought that, I thought it was a Sony Mavica that shot to floppy disk, which is its own set of challenges. I just wanted to be clear. But no, Apple actually had licensed it from Kodak, and it only works with a special cable. Yes.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  That you have to plug into a power Macintosh. Wow. The software is never updated, and it only spits out eight VGA quality photos in a proprietary image format, or 32 320 by 40 image formats. So Dieter just sent me a list. He sent me like an invoice of all the cables he has. This is what, this is who we are now. I'm going to buy him that Mavica next, though. If you're listening, man, the second you solve the QuickTake 100, you'll be solving a camera with a significant number of motors inside of it to operate a

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  floppy disk. It's going to be great. All right, that's the show. A wild one. Thanks to Liz. You can tweet at all of us. You know this. You can tweet at David. He's at Pierce. Alex is Alex H. Cranz. Liz is MSLapato. I am at Reckless. There's a bunch of stuff to call out on the site this week. Great story about how fears of electromagnetic radiation have spawned this entire industry of like snake oil RF protectors. It's very good. And then Mia did a great story on the content moderation challenges of the Buffalo shooting livestream. If you listen to that part. During our last conversation, you wanted to know more. It's all in there. Me, I did a great job pulling it apart. Decoder this week was Nebula CEO Dave Whiskas. That was

• 1:16:31Nilay Patel?

  actually a great conversation. Yeah, he was great. I really enjoyed that one. Usually creator company conversations are like how they're going to take over Disney. And this one was like, no, here's just how we're going to get people paid a healthy amount of money so they can live balanced lives. Like, I appreciate it. And then Alex, you got, what's the mini-series?

• 1:16:49Alex Cranz?

  This is the last episode of the mini-series, and I spoke with Ben Heck, who was one of the first guys to really like start modding Xbox 360 controllers to make them more accessible. And I spoke with Bryce Johnson from Microsoft, who's one of the co-creators of the adaptive controller. It was very, very cool.

• 1:17:07Nilay Patel?

  It was a good episode. It was wild.

• 1:17:08Alex Cranz?

  It's all good. Yeah, we just talked a lot about like PCB boards and contact points and kind of the challenges of making controllers accessible.

• 1:17:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Ben Heck is a Madison guy. I've had beers and burgers in Madison with Ben Heck in the past. Because he is a character. That's what I will say. The purest character you will ever find. Great episode. Listen to that. Other than that, that we've gone over, as always. So that's it. That's Verchast. Rock and roll.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. And if you liked the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:18:03Speaker 08

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• 1:18:50Speaker 01

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