Pod Insights The Vergecast Google's mysterious lack of app updates / Apple’s rumored VR headset / Microsoft’s Surface Duo price drops to $999 About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Adi Robertson discuss Google's mysterious lack of iOS app updates, the rumors around Apple's potential VR headset, and the rest of this week's gadget headlines.
Further reading:
AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine has been confusing from the start
FDA officials are off on a three-week sprint to review J&J COVID-19 vaccine data
PSA: Don’t post your coronavirus vaccination card selfie on social media
Why the FDA is taking 22 days to look over J&J’s data
PSA: Please wear layers to your vaccine appointment
Google’s own iOS apps were begging for updates that don’t exist, but the company says it was because of a bug
Google is weighing an anti-tracking feature for Android, following Apple’s lead
iOS 14.5 lets you set Spotify and others as Siri’s default music service
New North Dakota bill would force Apple to allow alternative app stores and payment systems
An iOS developer wants Apple to know just how bad App Store scams have become
This may be our first look at Google’s new Android 12 OS
Apple’s rumored VR headset could cost $3,000, feature 8K displays and over a dozen cameras
Apple’s former hardware leader reportedly now overseeing AR and VR devices
Apple reportedly developing next-gen ultra-thin displays for AR devices with TSMC
Hyundai and Kia downplay Apple car rumors
Hyundai is getting serious about building a ‘walking car’ with four legs
Microsoft’s foldable Surface Duo price drops to $999, arrives in Europe next week
Sonos FCC filing hints it’s coming for the UE Boom and other small Bluetooth speakers
This laptop has seven times the average number of screens
Amazon reportedly building an Alexa ‘command center’ that mounts to the wall
How Sony put 40,000 PlayStation symbols under your fingertips
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is accepting $99 Starlink deposits amid ‘deep chasm’ of red ink
Tesla’s $1.5 billion bitcoin purchase clashes with its environmental aspirations
Miami mayor says Elon Musk will tunnel under the city for just $30 million
The Biden administration is working to help address global semiconductor chip shortage
Section 230 is 25 years old, and it’s never been more important
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Transcript 13,498 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? This week on the Vergecast, Addie Robertson joins us. We talk about Google's mysterious lack of app updates, a bunch of Apple rumors, including AR, VR in the car, and then a little bit of the gadget lightning round that's coming up on the Vergecast now.
0:13 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:58 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:47 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of postmodern theory. So you did that for you, Dieter?
1:53 Speaker 02 Thank you very much.
1:54 Nilay Patel? That's really what we've been about the whole time.
1:56 Speaker 02 It's technically modern. I personally think that postmodern is basically modernized by another name, but we can get into that later.
2:02 Nilay Patel? It's gonna be a weird episode, everybody. I'm your friend Eli. Dieter Bohn is here.
2:06 Speaker 02 I'm your, um, your, your, I don't know. I'm your postmodernist theorist.
2:10 Nilay Patel? There you go. Addie Robertson is here. Hey. We just have a lot going on this. It's a very quiet week. Like, we're out of the beginning of the year CES tech news cycle. There's an impeachment trial going on. Like, there's a lot of headlines, but not a lot of news is how I would categorize this week. That's fair. That seem about right? Yeah. So there is a lot of stuff to talk about. We're going to talk about all of it. There's some Apple rumors. The car stuff continues to heat up and cool down simultaneously. There's a cookie war on the internet going on. Elon's doing some stuff. There's lots to talk about. But I want to start where we always start, which is the pandemic, the biggest story in
2:51 Nilay Patel? the world. Science Desk has been on a tear this week at The Verge with vaccine news, vaccine coverage. We're in the thick of it now. I think Dr. Fauci was saying today, by April, he expects everyone will just be able to get it, which would be remarkable. Yeah, I was like, I forget the quote. It was like, he said, it'll be a free for all.
3:10 Speaker 03 Definitely the word you want.
3:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah, he said open season, actually, which Open season. For a thing that involves needles is like, not exactly the right framing. But, you know, we're on, we're on a good trajectory. A little bit of hope there, but also a little bit of chaos. So I'm just going to run down some headlines. This is all on theverge.com/science. Again, that team is doing incredible work. But there are three vaccines, basically, that are worth talking about. There's the Pfizer vaccine, which is sort of the one that most people around are getting. There's the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is another mRNA vaccine. And then there's the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. The Pfizer one is out in the world. People are getting it. AstraZeneca has been a little more controversial. We've got a
3:53 Nilay Patel? long report on just, it's been confusing from the beginning of its process. It doesn't seem to be as effective against some variants as some of the other vaccines. There's just some complication there. It's worth reading about. The Johnson and Johnson vaccine is not yet approved in the United States. And the FDA is embarking on a three-week sprint to review the data and get it approved. I really like that terminology because it makes me think of product managers in tech. Like they they have a can band board and they're just like do it. I don't I don't know. Throw it down. Our science test goes. So we have a long story on why it is taking three weeks. The J and J vaccine is very important because it's a single shot vaccine that does not require a cold chain to transport. So that logistics of that vaccine and its development
4:38 Nilay Patel? are are just more favorable to a wide spread rollout. So we've got a lot of coverage on that. And then I keep talking about second order effects of the pandemic. There's also second order effects of the vaccine. So everyone is taking selfies of themselves getting it, which is great. We have one story about world leaders who are just increasingly appearing shirtless as they get vaccinated. A short sleeve shirt is like available to you. It's almost everybody in the world.
5:04 Speaker 02 You can never argue that Vladimir Putin isn't an influencer because now we're just seeing all sorts of world leaders without their shirts on.
5:09 Nilay Patel? He does a great renegade. That's what we're looking for. And then actually, we have a story about why you should not, if you get vaccinated, you get a vaccination card, you should not actually put that selfie with a card on the internet on social media for a variety of reasons. It should be obvious. Same reasons you wouldn't want to put your airline ticket, your passport. People can take that stuff. So just lots of coverage on the science test. Again, the vaccine, it you know, it's a system. Like the way I think about the Verge's coverage is like we cover buttons and we cover systems. Like who has the buttons, who gets to press them, when do they press them is like a whole category of Verge coverage. And then how does this system work is a whole other category of our coverage. And the vaccine stuff is very much in the in the zone of here's a system.
5:53 Nilay Patel? Is it working the way that we want it to? And how should we better design it? So check that out. It's all over there. Okay. Dieter, there's a I don't know how to begin with this, except to say, Google usually updates its apps every five minutes. And on iOS, they have not updated the apps for a very long time now, in a way that kind of ladders into the entire privacy debate happening on the internet. So do you want to walk us through this one?
6:13 Speaker 02 So iOS, I think they like said it would be in 14, but it's now coming for really real and sort of is really real now, has a thing called a nutrition label, which is On the App Store, it has to disclose all of the tracking and data collection it does. And then in addition to that, I believe starting with iOS 14.5, because it got delayed, apps are going to have to put up a pop-up in the app itself saying, "Hey, is it okay with you if we track you for ad purposes or whatever?" And so Facebook
6:51 Speaker 02 put up its new version of its app, and it had the super, super, super, super-long disclosures about all the stuff that it tracks. Speaking of disclosures, my wife works for Oculus Division of Facebook, snuck that right in there. But Google has not. And so it's like, are they avoiding trying to figure out what they want to say? Do they not know how many different ways they track you? What's the deal? It's unclear. But it seems really obvious now that this isn't just a, "Oh, well, it's a coincidence." Because for a hot minute this week, Google's own iOS apps were putting up a bug that says, "Hey, your app is out of date. You should update."
7:34 Speaker 02 Which is a common thing. I get to see this stuff on Chrome all the time, and we're administered by our company, and it demands that you update it to keep it up to date. So somewhere in Google's cloud system, it was saying, "Hey, you need to update your app." So they fixed that cloud side, but they still haven't figured out, they still haven't put out updated versions like in the App Store itself of all of their apps. Because when they do, they're going to be required to put in that nutrition label. And so it's just a complete mystery as to what is going on with Google's iOS apps, and if they're like having a full-on, months-long
8:14 Speaker 02 fire drill about how they're going to approach tracking in iOS, or there's just like, I don't know, an argument about the language, or some other completely unknown, mysterious reason that they have chosen not to update their apps at the cadence that they used to.
8:30 Nilay Patel? So I think we too often Treat Google like an unruly toddler.
8:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:36 Nilay Patel? That doesn't know what it's doing. And like, sometimes it acts that way. It would just be.
8:40 Speaker 02 Sometimes it's like the best, the most accurate Hamon's razor style explanation of what's going on there.
8:45 Nilay Patel? Right. Like, my favorite example of this is one time, one department at Google scheduled a press conference with us. And then another department scheduled a press conference and they didn't, we had, we were the ones who told them.
8:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:57 Nilay Patel? Hey, you're having two press events. And it's like, okay, that's just like, big company miscommunication. We haven't updated any of our apps on one of the most popular platforms that our apps run on. Right. It's not just like one team hasn't done. It's all of them.
9:11 Speaker 02 Yep.
9:12 Nilay Patel? That suggests to me, okay, there's a, there is a coordinated response at Google to a policy change in iOS.
9:19 Speaker 02 Yep.
9:20 Nilay Patel? It can't just be that they're sitting around.
9:23 Speaker 02 No, definitely not. And
9:26 Speaker 02 Google, one, one thing that we often say about Google, and it's often right, is they just start just shooting themselves in the foot. They're just like getting in their own way. If Google were to put out an app update, like this week, when there's not a lot of headlines, but there's, there's, there's a lot of headlines, but not a lot of news, like, is anybody going to be paying attention to Google's nutrition labels when there's another impeachment trial going on? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.
9:50 Nilay Patel? I think one of the questions, like, there's like a longer term, there's a nutrition label, like, here's all the data this thing collects. And for an app like Gmail, it's a lot of data.
9:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:59 Nilay Patel? Right. Just because of the nature of what Gmail is, right? Like, it gets your key, like, you're writing emails, like, it, all of the things that a thing, an app can do on your phone, Gmail can do it. It knows your location. It can access your camera and your microphone, because it can add photos and take pictures. Like, it can just do everything that an app can do. Okay. Like, is anyone going to say no? I think Facebook has raised this huge fuss about the labels. They're saying Apple's acting anti-competitively. They're saying it's bad for small business, which is, I Okay, like you can say whatever you want, but they're making this like full throated argument that Apple's tracking changes are bad.
10:43 Speaker 02 Yep.
10:43 Nilay Patel? And Google's just remaining silent.
10:45 Speaker 02 Yep.
10:46 Nilay Patel? But Google actually has a bigger problem, which is like Cookies and Safari in its entire ad business.
10:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:52 Nilay Patel? That has nothing to do with the advertising tracking happening in its apps.
10:56 Speaker 02 Or maybe something to do with the advertising tracking that's happening in its apps because it probably wants to connect whatever tracking it can do in an app, which is going to soon require a pop-up acceptance to whatever tracking it's doing on the web and on its Google properties on the web. And the larger context, like I can't speak to the cookie stuff inside apps. That's like really complicated. There's user identification and there's like a special number that the iPhone would allow you to attach to somebody for ad identification. And a lot of people turn that off. And are there other kinds of identifications that are not supposed to be? And so if you do some kind of tracking that doesn't use Apple's official number, you get in trouble. Like I get lost there. There's an even more complicated,
11:39 Speaker 02 but I can speak slightly better to it, argument over what's going to happen on web browsers. Because Apple's just straight up like, we're blocking third-party cookies and like let the chips fall where they may. If it turns out that destroys the ad industry, we don't care. And Google is like, but, but, but no, we can't destroy the ad industry on the web.
11:57 Nilay Patel? We are the ad industry.
11:59 Speaker 02 That's a problem. And so they're trying to create this system, an entirely new system for ad tracking that doesn't involve cookies with Chrome. And they've created this whole thing called the Privacy Sandbox where there's like a threshold above which you can't be tracked, but as long as you can do stuff inside the sandbox and it's a whole thing that doesn't use cookies to track you, but does use other methods because they want to make sure that they give the ad industry some way to track you because if they don't... They're going to use nefarious means to do it, like browser fingerprinting, which can't be controlled or blocked or whatever.
12:38 Nilay Patel? Didn't Apple roll out some version of blocking fingerprinting where it was just straight up lied to web servers about what the browser was?
12:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:47 Nilay Patel? I swear they did this.
12:48 Speaker 02 There's lots of little tricks that Apple does and now Chrome is starting to to stop fingerprinting. And it's important to do that because blocking fingerprinting matters because once you get fingerprinted, it's the sort of thing that you can't turn off. There's no controls. Once you're pegged, you're pegged. They got you.
13:04 Nilay Patel? By the way, browser fingerprint is like your IP address, the viewport size of your browser, what version of the operating system you're running, like a bunch of unrelated metadata that is somewhat unique to you.
13:17 Speaker 02 Put it all together and they can identify you.
13:19 Nilay Patel? And then they can turn that into identifier.
13:21 Speaker 02 This ostensibly is one of the reasons that Apple was not allowing Bluetooth access in browsers for games initially, like game controllers and other things. Like, does Apple hate web apps and they don't want web apps to be able to do cool things like access Bluetooth or the camera? Or is it a fingerprinting issue? Because if your browser reports, hey, I have access to Bluetooth, that's yet another piece of metadata that they can add to the stack to create a fingerprint for you. So it's wildly complicated, but Google is basically trying to recreate the entire infrastructure for tracking in a way that is a little bit friendlier. While Apple's like, we don't care. The ad industry figured it out. And so this is the cookiepocalypse, right? Third-party cookies are going to get stopped on Chrome sometime soon.
14:06 Speaker 02 And what will the ad industry do? And I have to assume that there is some connection between all this iOS tracking stuff and the cookiepocalypse and the privacy sandbox in the browser. And there's just like, there's no longer smoke-filled rooms, but maybe there's like vape-filled rooms where...
14:27 Nilay Patel? Vape-filled Zooms.
14:28 Speaker 02 Vape-filled Zooms. That's perfect.
14:31 Speaker 02 Where Apple and Google engineers are just like having a staring contest over where all this stuff is going to land.
14:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but so but here's my I that's what I believe, right, that they're Apple is saying we're going to turn off all the stuff. Google is saying that will wreck our revenue platform, the web. We don't want you to do that.
14:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:48 Nilay Patel? And then the leverage they're creating is we're not going to update YouTube.
14:51 Speaker 02 That makes no sense. Yeah, I don't know. Like, there's no leverage there. But like, it's weird because like their tactic versus Facebook's Facebook's tactic is to be super loud about it. Google's is to not like, are they just waiting for all their lobbyists to like have their first meetings with the Biden administration before they like pop off?
15:08 Nilay Patel? Well, so I actually, this is the thing I want to ask Addie about. So Addie, you're on our policy team. We've had you on the show to talk about antitrust a lot. I really just wanted you to hang out, but here we are. And I'm immediately asking you about antitrust. Google is in a different position than Facebook, right? Facebook has its own antitrust problems, sure, but everybody already hates Facebook, including most of the policymakers. They're already in a lot of trouble and they don't have a phone platform. Like, they don't have the same category problems in antitrust as Apple and Google do.
15:36 Speaker 03 Right. All the complaints about Facebook are mostly they bought a company five years ago and they did it wrong.
15:42 Nilay Patel? Right. And they were too good at buying companies. But if you look at Google and they if Google follows and Apple's moves with Android and they start blocking cookies and pushing you towards a tracking system in Chrome and they start using its own identifiers for the ad network that it controls that runs most of the web, that is a real antitrust problem for them. Actually, Dieter and I have heard from various Google executives in the past, we would love to be better at privacy, but that means locking down cookies on Chrome in X, Y, and Z ways, and we will immediately get dinged by the European regulators for locking down Chrome and blah, blah, blah. Do you do you see all this and say, oh, Google just is out of moves like they're waiting for the Apple cover to to come along?
16:27 Speaker 03 I guess I'm just not necessarily clear on how much the nutrition labels matter is the thing like I just as somebody who clicks through a GDPR or this site is asking for cookies, can it track you label like 50 times a day?
16:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
16:42 Speaker 03 I just I'm genuinely wondering like not rhetorically, why it is such a big deal to Google.
16:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't I just I can't figure out what leverage they're creating by not updating these apps. Like, the other antitrust issue is that like, most of their things are monopolies. Like, what if they just put up the dire warning for the YouTube app? What do you what do you mean, watch Vimeo? Like, you're like, you're still using YouTube. Like, are you really going to not use Google, the Google search app on your phone? Like, it turns out your browser is defaulted to Google anyway. Like, I don't know how harming the user experience is helping them get leverage with Apple or with a regulator in this way.
17:19 Speaker 03 Although that is actually kind of a classic company, like, big company move is to just degrade the user experience by like banning YouTube on a smart TV or something until you're able to broker some kind of deal.
17:33 Nilay Patel? It would be amazing, but Google's like too, is this what I mean? Facebook is like, whatever, we're Facebook. For billions of people around the world, we are the internet, we're going to do what we want. Screw you. Google like wants to be a lot cuddlier than that.
17:47 Speaker 02 See, this is why I'm I'm surprised you're thinking of them not updating their apps as leverage in some antitrust standoff with with Apple or with whatever. I think it's it's more likely that they're not doing it because they're out of fear of like regulators paying attention. They're not doing it out of fear that they'll stop cease being seen as cuddly, you know?
18:08 Speaker 03 I just feel like they stop. I feel like regulators are already incredibly aware of everything that Google is doing. There are already, there's a giant case against them.
18:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
18:17 Speaker 03 There are just tons of suits like this is just, I feel like it's not adding new information.
18:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Anyway, so we don't know is the ultimate answer here. It seems like Google should probably update its app soon. We will continue poking at it and figure out why. But it is, I would say it is, right now, it's a small mystery in tech. But if it keeps going for another week or so, it will become a gigantic mystery in tech.
18:42 Speaker 02 Maybe they just want to add Google Meet buttons to every single Google app instead of just Gmail, and it's an internal fight over that.
18:48 Nilay Patel? They're gonna, actually, every Google app is being merged into a messaging service.
18:52 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Okay, got it.
18:53 Nilay Patel? That would actually be great if you know what's going on with Google's apps. Like, we got email addresses. Just let us know. We're, we're, we're available to hear you at. Other stuff going on. Speaking of antitrust, iOS 14.5 is in beta now. It is slowly but surely, Apple is opening up the defaults on its operating system. So when iOS 14 came out, there was a beat and then you could set Chrome as a default browser and Gmail or other browsers and other email apps as the default. Now, in the new beta 14.5, you can set Spotify and other music services as Siri's default music service. I don't know why, but this to me feels like the biggest capitulation of all.
19:30 Speaker 02 Really?
19:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like the default browser and default emails, like, people who work at Apple had to have been annoyed by that. You know, like, it's just, it's like an annoying reality of the iPhone that, like, for a long time, the, the flow from clicking a link in Safari, opening the weird mail app instead of Gmail. Like, they had to know that this was confusing people, so they just made it better. Letting you set Spotify as the default is like a lot wonkier, right?
19:54 Speaker 02 It's wonkier, but also, like, maybe, maybe this is wrong because Apple is, got just the worst code for Siri ever, but it's probably way easier, right? Than it is to, like, figure out the infrastructure for, like, completely undoing default apps in iOS for core stuff like the browser and email to just like...
20:14 Nilay Patel? No, it's, it's, it's, it might be easier technically, but it's harder emotionally.
20:17 Speaker 02 Right, no, that's what I'm saying. You could already say via Spotify. So like, they just needed to, like, let you, like, turn that off and, like, add a setting somewhere. You know, there's a, there's a kajillion horrible settings for the Google Assistant, but like, there's settings for that stuff. So, yeah, emotionally, they had to, one, accept that they were gonna, like, let Spotify have this one. And two, they would have to put a setting somewhere.
20:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so that's good. It's in beta. We'll have to see how well it works when it actually comes out. The new beta also lets you use your watch to unlock your phone if you're facing it and you're wearing a mask, which is, I think we talked about this last week, they had to reverse the authentication flow.
20:55 Speaker 02 Yep, yeah, and I also, like, strongly believe that if you do this, you should make sure that you add a couple more digits to your watch unlock process, because for a four-digit PIN is way easier than a six or eight-digit PIN.
21:08 Nilay Patel? I have to, I need to take a break and play with my watch. Okay. And then two other like still in kind of the antitrust zone. Nick Sat wrote a story. There's an iOS developer who's just been all over Twitter pointing out the app store is rife with subscription scams. So you sign up for an app, it says pay us 14 bucks a month. It looks like it's just a $14 purchase, but then it just bills you every month. And these apps are crowding out legitimate apps and legitimate developers. And Apple doesn't seem to be quick on the draw and turning it off. So there's a long story. Many of these apps exist and that somehow in my mind is paired with this situation in North Dakota. I guess it's not really a situation. There's a bill in the North Dakota legislature.
21:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, you can call it the Nodakian legislature, by the way, for Nodak and yeah.
21:58 Nilay Patel? I feel like there's a deep Minnesota story in there. It's like that door is cracked open. I don't know.
22:05 Speaker 02 There was a Viking, I forget his name now. I think he was a tight end and he was from North Dakota. And so we just called him Nodak and I was using, yeah, anyway.
22:14 Nilay Patel? I definitely thought you were talking about a real Viking and this was going to be like.
22:16 Speaker 03 I also, yeah.
22:21 Nilay Patel? Terrific. Anyway, there's a bill in North Dakota that would basically prohibit self dealing in app stores. David Hanna Meyer Hansen, who is the, one of the founders of Basecamp, actually testified to the North Dakota legislature. Nick watched that testimony. He wrote that up. This is one of those like Dieter, you before he came on, Dieter was asking like, how did the North Dakota state legislature land on this bill? I don't know the answer, but the bill is good. It's like a well-written, like if you run a platform, if you run a store like this, it actually calls out, it exempts console game stores.
23:02 Nilay Patel? But if you run a general purpose app store, you cannot require that other people on your platform have to use that app store. You cannot like all of the things that you want from the platform regulation bill, it's in this like state level bill in North Dakota, which is pretty, pretty wild.
23:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, although we're like, we're used to that with like Illinois privacy laws. Like it's accepted that there's going to be a state that's really good at a specific kind of bill that's going to affect national politics.
23:30 Speaker 02 Like California emissions, basically.
23:33 Speaker 03 Maybe North Dakota is the Fortnite V bucks state.
23:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so the, um, uh, it, I'm just reading the story here. Three key restrictions for any digital application distribution platform that notably exceeds 10 million in revenue annually. You cannot require a developer to use a digital application distribution platform as the exclusive mode of distributing a digital product, which means Apple would have to allow other app stores. You cannot require a developer to use your in-app payments as the exclusive mode of accepting payment. So that's the V bucks thing, like Epic would just be able to take payment for V bucks on iOS without going through Apple's payment system. And then notably, you cannot retaliate against developers for choosing other stores or payment systems. This is like basically what people want.
24:21 Speaker 02 Let's say this thing passes and in North Dakota, these things become illegal. Does Apple capitulate and change the rules across the planet for North Dakota? Or do they just say North Dakotans don't get iPhones?
24:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't know. So, uh, we've had Casey on a few times and he's used this word that I've always thought about in terms of like the United States and China. He's like, the splinter net is here, where there's one internet for the United States. But now we're gonna have like one internet for North Dakota or like one iOS for North Dakota and for everybody else?
24:51 Speaker 03 They're gonna geofence the App Store?
24:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like, can you imagine like people from South Dakota driving to North Dakota to buy V bucks with their own credit card?
25:01 Nilay Patel? That would be incredible.
25:02 Speaker 03 That's more or less how I grew up. You drive to Oregon to avoid sales tax.
25:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah, people drove to Wisconsin by fireworks.
25:09 Speaker 02 Yep.
25:09 Speaker 03 So that but for the internet.
25:11 Nilay Patel? That but for the internet. That's amazing. I would, there's like a business in here, right? Like the North Dakota parking lot for buying digital products.
25:19 Speaker 02 So does it become illegal to export iPhones out of North Dakota then? Like it's illegal to like send Playstations to Iran. It's now illegal to send iPhones from North Dakota to California?
25:30 Nilay Patel? I'm always torn on this, right? Like the argument against all internet, right? Like everything in my mind comes back to net neutrality. I'm very sorry, but I'm just using it as an example. The argument against state level net neutrality laws was always you don't want a piecemeal internet. You want one federal law that like everybody understands. And we didn't get that. So now there's a bunch of state level net neutrality laws and like, we don't know how they're going to play out. Now there's Biden administration, whatever. This is very much the same argument, and I have different feelings about it, which is a bunch of state level app store restrictions seems completely bonkers to me.
26:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:08 Nilay Patel? Like, our ability to just even describe how the internet works, if these platforms vary from state to state, will just go completely sideways. Like, you won't be able to talk about iOS as a product because it will be different depending on where you are.
26:21 Speaker 03 I mean, practically, Neil, like you're a lawyer, what are the odds that Apple just sues and then gets a preliminary injunction because they're like, this is bonkers? And then we drag it out for years in court.
26:31 Nilay Patel? Um, I mean, anybody can sue anybody for anything, which is a thing I like to remind everyone. Like, you can file a bad lawsuit, like.
26:38 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. I'm not in doubt about the Apple filing suit part. That part's obvious.
26:42 Nilay Patel? I don't, I mean, what would they, the arguments here would have to be fundamentally, North Dakota has exceeded the power of a state to regulate interstate commerce, which is exclusively given to Congress. And you would make some argument that the app stores fundamentally interstate commerce, which is a, like, it's like a galaxy brain argument.
27:04 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, the app developer is not in North Dakota, therefore the app is crossing a state line, therefore, PK.
27:11 Nilay Patel? But what if the data center is in North Dakota? Like, you can like, you can fall down into the weeds of like where the bits are.
27:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:17 Speaker 03 Well, this also concerns payment processors, right?
27:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
27:20 Speaker 03 So I don't even know how that plays out.
27:22 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So there's like, there's a whole argument here that the internet is fundamentally interstate commerce, and then you can like fall down that hole. Um, just write other, Apple will make other arguments, like.
27:31 Speaker 02 Apple could also just buy North Dakota, right?
27:33 Nilay Patel? Incredible. Anyway, I'm, I think this is one to keep an eye on. Like, it's well-written, it makes sense, along the lines of the Illinois privacy bills or California emissions. Like, it's one of those things where. It will at least be a lodestar for how the rest of the conversation goes. But I think paired with like, the level of interest in Apple is an antitrust target, which exists with the amount of stories coming out around scams in the store that it's not well pleased, even though it is a monopoly, like Apple's own arguments for why they need the monopoly, don't hold up to this, to direct scrutiny of the store. And just how frustrated developers are, like, you could get rid of the interstate commerce argument by saying, okay, we should, like, Epic Games should be located in North Dakota.
28:18 Nilay Patel? And then like, maybe that's how you attract developers to North Dakota.
28:21 Speaker 02 Oh, my God, just like Delaware is the home of all credit cards, all corporations.
28:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's, there's, like I said, there's a lot of headlines right now in news, like, they haven't passed the bill, they're having hearings about it, but it's interesting to see it's filtering down now what we used to be, like, a year ago, this was a relatively wonky and technical conversation about App Store fees. And now we're like, Republicans in North Dakota are proposing bills about it. So it's moving fast. Last thing, do you know there's some leaks of Android 12?
28:48 Speaker 02 There appear to be. There's a chance, dot, dot, dot, that these aren't accurate, but they seem, it seems pretty clear, both XDA developers and Android police are like, yeah, this, this seems legit based on what we know of screenshots that were shared to like partners to get themselves ready for it. There's like four things to say about these screenshots. Number one, there's now a little green indicator to let you know if the microphone or camera are on, which sort of seems to be copying iOS, although people will warn you that Android was developing these indicators before they appeared in iOS. Who's copying who, blah, blah, blah, blah. Number two, it looks hideous.
29:28 Speaker 02 I mean, but people will say that there's like theming systems coming for Android 12, and that's an extension of what already exists in the Pixel. And so maybe this is just like, a sample theme, or a theme that was intentionally made to like, not be representative of what Google really wants, its version of Android in the Pixel to look like, they're just trying to like, make options for other people. Who knows?
29:50 Nilay Patel? It's very beige.
29:51 Speaker 02 It's very beige. Like, if you look at the the notification center, there's like the rounding around the boxes, but also a carrot for a dropdown that really shouldn't like be there in a circle. It looks horrible. Squares and circles for different quick setting notifications. Like whoever made this theme was clearly either just didn't know what they're doing, or was like saying, here are all the possible ways it could look, and we're going to put them all in one set of screenshots that you can see. So that's the next thing. The last thing is, it appears as though Google is going to be trying to like, refresh or reinvigorate
30:31 Speaker 02 its widget system by creating widgets for conversations instead of pop up bubbles, and maybe making it easier to create widgets, maybe creating like a templating system for widgets so that they're a little bit more identifiable as widgets, and there's not such a crate like Winamp style widget land, which is what Android is like right now.
30:52 Speaker 02 And on top of all that, the one piece of the UI that shows the these widget selectors is a big drawer that slides up from the bottom, which is pretty, pretty iOSy there, isn't it?
31:03 Nilay Patel? Well, first of all, I'm looking at screenshots, and it took me a long time to realize that all these are characters from Friends.
31:08 Speaker 02 What?
31:09 Nilay Patel? In there.
31:09 Speaker 02 Oh, my God.
31:10 Nilay Patel? All the examples are Friends characters.
31:11 Speaker 02 Oh, my. How did I not see this?
31:13 Nilay Patel? And then I cannot think of a widget that is less useful than an oval that says Rachel two weeks ago chatted.
31:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:20 Nilay Patel? Like, I chatted with somebody two weeks ago. I need that on my home screen at all times.
31:26 Speaker 03 I mean, that is representative of what any Google communications product looks like now for me, because it used to be how I communicated with people. But then they switch, like, they switch it over so often that if there's just this slow process of attenuation. And now I have like a call, a chat with my husband from like a year ago.
31:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. I have a handful of friends who work in banks, and they all still use Gchat, because it's the, it's the one messaging service they can get to on through their bank's firewall. And it's like, it's just definitely 2008. It's like, my banker friends using Gchat. And they should just bring back Gchat. Okay, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about some Apple rumors. We'll be right back.
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33:24 Nilay Patel? All right. So there's two Apple rumors that I would say are just on like a sine wave of attention. One is the car. We talked about the car a bit last week because we had, we had Sean and Becca. So last week, we'll just do the car first. The last week's rumor was Hyundai's going to build the car in Georgia. And like Hyundai's stock price was like shooting up. And maybe it wasn't going to be Hyundai and they were going to make Kia do it because Hyundai didn't want. And then this week Hyundai and Kia like released a statement being like, we're not going to do that.
33:51 Speaker 02 One presumes that maybe Apple made a call and was like, yo, don't care what your stock price is, prices, you're going to put this press release out.
33:59 Nilay Patel? I will say that next to this, now there's a rumor that Nissan's going to do it. So I'm hoping that we just go through every carmaker. And like every time whatever executive is working on the car like gets off the plane. Like so we, like, so we know BMW already said no.
34:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:13 Nilay Patel? We know Hyundai and Kia have downplayed it. Nissan's just riding the lightning right now. They're just having a great time. Toyota, Toyota's got to be, I'm just hoping we like get to the place where like. Jeep is going to build the Apple car and it's going to be a wrangler. We'll just go for it.
34:28 Speaker 02 My galaxy brain take on this is this is a conspiracy to ding the stock price of every major car manufacturer so that Apple can just ride in and make its own car and people will think it's legit.
34:39 Nilay Patel? I think we just learned that making a car is hard.
34:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:43 Nilay Patel? Like if the Tesla story has taught us anything, it's like if you're at the point where you're like, you built a tent in the parking lot to make a Model 3 and then Elon is showing up on YouTube, talking like ex-car engineers and being like, yeah, our cars are built kind of shoddily for a while. That's not how Apple's going to do it. But that is just a, I keep calling it a sine wave, like the noise about the car, which even the most aggressive rumors are like four or five years out.
35:09 Speaker 02 Yep.
35:10 Nilay Patel? That it just keeps coming and going in ways because I think they do need a manufacturing partner because Apple's not going to build a car factory. They don't even own a phone factory. I doubt they're going to build a car factory.
35:19 Speaker 02 Yeah. You know what they could do though is they could build a TV if they wanted to.
35:23 Nilay Patel? Let's just bring that noise back. What if they use the Foxconn factory to build cars in Wisconsin?
35:29 Nilay Patel? Think about it. There was an old AMC factory in Kenosha, like one of the stories of Wisconsin is they used to build AMC Eagles. I'm old. There was a very ugly car in the eighties called the AMC Eagle.
35:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:42 Nilay Patel? And they used to build it in Kenosha and like everyone around me in the eighties like would proudly have an AMC Eagle. It was not a beautiful time for car design in Southeastern Wisconsin. And that factory left and that's like the whole, it's like one of the inciting incidents in my Wisconsin is way to say, but what if like Apple rolled in and they're like, we're going to have cars in this orb.
36:04 Nilay Patel? All right. So that's one rumor. It's on a side when you're crazy. Addy, this is a rumor I really want to talk to you about. The rumor about the Apple VR or AR headset or mixed reality. I've now heard it called all three things. That's accurate. Extremely high level of noise and we kind of, we still, I don't know. Do you have a sense of what's going on?
36:23 Speaker 03 I mean, I have absolutely no idea in the sense of what Apple is actually doing, but the rumors are super high resolution display like 8K per eye. And it costs a ridiculous amount of money, like $3,000. And the idea is that you get this thing that is kind of like a proof of concept for what Apple could do for both augmented and virtual reality. Like it's mostly a VR headset, but it has these LiDAR cameras that will let you like track space and you can maybe turn on pass through video and kind of see what the real world looks like, that it's like this proof of concept that it sells as nominally a consumer product, but mostly to developers to build an ecosystem.
37:04 Speaker 03 Sort of like Magic Leap, which is a phrase that if anyone utters it in relation to your plan, you should think hard about your plan.
37:12 Nilay Patel? So they have reassigned one of their executives, Stan Richeo, to oversee these devices. He is legit. We like know him. He's been around for a long time. He is generally successful. What I'm stuck at is there isn't a display technology for AR that works well. That's actually the Magic Leap story in some very important way is about the failure to deliver a display technology. Right? And I keep thinking about that Wired story about Magic Leap from years ago, where they weren't allowed to describe the thing, only the feelings it produced. It was like a Kevin Kelly cover story.
37:51 Speaker 03 It was a good piece. Ah, it was a very representative of a particular period in tech piece. I'm glad that piece exists. It was like a nightmare when I actually was covering Magic Leap and I had no idea what this thing was.
38:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I feel like just depending on your point of view, that that piece is either it's held up or not, but the inside of it was a description of a display technology where Magic Leap had this idea that. It was, the quote was like, "It's gonna hack the GPU of your brain." Right? And we puzzled over what this meant. And eventually, they shipped a thing, and it was just an LCD screen in front of your eyes. No GPUs were hacked in any way, shape, or form.
38:25 Speaker 03 It was a waveguide, yeah.
38:27 Nilay Patel? But the core display technology was an LCD with a waveguide, right? It wasn't... But the idea was they were gonna shoot photons at your retina in some crazy way that would make you actually perceive depth.
38:37 Speaker 03 And the idea was basically, yeah, that they had managed to never... They had managed to get this as like a giant machine, but they never miniaturized it.
38:44 Nilay Patel? Right. And what I'm... All I'm getting at is like, I'm pretty sure the story of AR is a big consumer product that is expressed as like, "The cool glasses you put on your head, they're lightweight," is really the story of, "Can anyone develop this display technology?" Right? Like, you don't wanna wear see-through LCDs on your eyes. They are a little power hungry. Like, we just kinda know what LCDs can and can't do. You can make a really high-res VR headset, festoon it with cameras, and then have pass-through video, and like, make something that sort of feels like AR. If that seems more possible than any AR display tech that I've seen so far. Have you seen any promising AR display tech? Because that... It seems like the blocker that all of these ideas have run into.
39:27 Speaker 03 It depends on like, what you mean by promising. If all you need is a really specific smart display, then you can... There's technology that like, looks really good when you look through it as a hologram, but it has a super limited field of view, and it's also just makes you look ridiculous, which, okay, that's everything. And it's not like, it's still not totally solid. Like, it's a thing that's really limited and that has really high expectations around it. Whereas pass-through video is... Has the disadvantage of like, not actually letting you see the real world. It's feeding you a video feed of it. But you can control the experience so much more. Like, Apple's not the first company to do this. Varo is a like, enterprise-focused VR/AR company,
40:11 Speaker 03 and they have this headset where the idea is it's one incredibly high-resolution, tiny, tiny, tiny display in the middle of a larger, like, 2K display for each eye. And so, you're getting... In the part of your face that you're usually looking in... Into, you're getting a super like, real eye-resolution image. And then everything around you is like, "Yeah, it's pretty good." So it simulates like foveated rendering, which is a tech that lots of AR VR headsets use.
40:41 Nilay Patel? So this is like your peripheral vision is not so great, but what you're looking dead on is
40:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's really, it's really good. And that headset is more than the Apple headset is at this point. But again, they're marketing it to businesses.
40:54 Nilay Patel? I mean, that's, but that's where we've seen a lot of sort of MR and AR get marketed, right? Like HoloLens is marketed at businesses right now, at enterprises, Google Glass, which appears to continue to limp on.
41:07 Speaker 03 I don't think it limps. I think it like scuttles. It's like it got very small.
41:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but it, but it's an enterprise product. Like, yeah, it's pointed there. And that to me is like, it's because if you can come up with a good enterprise use case to wear something bulky on your head, you might convince your employees to wear the headset on your head.
41:25 Speaker 03 Also, businesses just operate at a really different money scale than normal people.
41:30 Nilay Patel? That's true. We should start a, we should sell something to businesses. Okay.
41:34 Speaker 03 Business t-shirts.
41:36 Nilay Patel? It's right up there with my idea for a parking lot in North Dakota where you download apps. So the reason that they would put out a VR headset to build an ecosystem is to overcome their inability to ship the consumer product they really want to ship. But the only reason you would want to accelerate a developer ecosystem is to have a first mover advantage, right? So all they build all the apps for you instead of, I don't know, the Oculus or whatever.
41:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, the thing that is totally wild speculation on my part is that Apple has been, this has been rumored for like five years. It's just perennially a rumor and that is that Apple is scared that they're going to lose out the develop in the developer ecosystem because Facebook has like, it has just an incredible first mover advantage at this point. It created a really cheap VR headset that has relatively wide adoption. Like it's making a fair amount of money and they're going to release something that's like a quasi AR smart glass with Ray-Ban this year. So they've got VR and AR covered. They're sort of starting to introduce what their AR headsets can do. And they already have a bunch of developers on board. Facebook has gotten really good at buying VR studios or just throwing money
42:42 Speaker 03 at other VR studios. Whereas Apple just doesn't have that yet.
42:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah, where Apple has the LiDAR sensor in the iPhone and AR gimmick demos at every keynote, right? And they, I think their strategy was we'll just have the developers build it on the phone first. And then when the product is here, there'll be a ready to go ecosystem in classic Apple format, right? They would, they would bring the developer on stage at the keynote and that person would be like, I took 48 hours and reconfigured my app from the iPhone to the new headset and now it's great and you can buy it today. Like
43:10 Speaker 03 Which is just a nightmare. Like who's, the best AR apps are like a measuring tape.
43:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I will say, um, I think I, I've said it on the show, like we bought a Quest on a whim. My wife absolutely loves the supernatural workout app. And then we have just, anybody who has seen it or heard her talk about it, like we have just sold four more quests because they're cheap. Like it's $2.99 and people are like bored and at home and that it, you can't get a PS5 anyway. So they're just like, screw it. And they, they buy a Quest and that is like, once you get that installed base, the question is whether Apple can come in with a substantially better product.
43:48 Speaker 03 And I just like, want to be clear, I'm not even being flippant, like AR apps are bad. It's just that they serve a really specific need. Like the measuring tape is great on a, like a tablet or a phone, but it's really hard to translate your iPhone app to an AR headset. Like phone AR doesn't translate great to AR headset. And that's a really weird strategy for them to adopt if they're going to do it.
44:09 Nilay Patel? Wait, describe that more. Why doesn't phone, because I think most people listening to this have probably experienced phone level AR, right? Apple does a lot of demos. There's a lot of gimmicks, like even their event invites have phone AR gimmicks in them now. Why doesn't it translate well?
44:21 Speaker 03 Because the thing that actually matters with AR is not the image that you're seeing through the screen. It's the way that you interact with it. So for example, one of the big things that people really want out of AR glasses is I don't have to have a monitor because I can just pin a virtual screen to my wall. That's a use case that makes absolutely no sense on a tablet because why would you hold up a tablet to look at a screen on your screen? Like that's ridiculous. And conversely, if you have say an AR game where a bunch of it is still based on tapping the screen or like doing things where you're still interacting with it like a smartphone, then suddenly you put on AR glasses and you just, you have a completely different interaction system based on your hands. It's also a thing where it is designed for you to not have to take it off really. Like you're just supposed
45:06 Speaker 03 to be wearing these things all the time. And the thing that's valuable about that is that you get persistent contextual information. There are things that definitely work on both systems, like auto translate is a really great idea that I think would translate great over to glasses. But like the way that people in VR, they started like, oh, we're gonna put quake on this. Quake's gonna be awesome. If you played Half-Life, imagine Half-Life in VR. And then everyone realized that was actually a terrible idea, that like putting, just porting first-person games over to VR was way less successful than playing with a VR headset and figuring out what worked and making a thing for it.
45:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Also, every one of those shooter games makes me second VR. It's like, that's the line. The second the game starts moving in like that space and Z-space, I'm like, I gotta take that stuff.
45:52 Speaker 03 I mean, the thing is, they reverse engineered it pretty well at this point, though. Like, there's a really good Half-Life game in VR now, but it's because they took that intermediate step to figure out what worked in VR first.
46:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And so maybe the idea is you're gonna put out the expensive headset that is an approximation in VR of what AR could be like, and then the developers will make the AR things?
46:13 Speaker 03 Maybe. I just can't help, like, I can't shake the feeling that what this is saying is just, hey, this is the best we got. Or Apple, buy it.
46:24 Nilay Patel? I mean, people buy Mac Pros, they buy expensive Apple products for all kinds of reasons. Like, it's not bad for them to have a concept car to get people in the stores. That is a well-recognized model for getting people to go to a store again when it's time to go to a store again.
46:39 Speaker 03 The thing I'm actually most excited about is that it mentions a thimble-like accessory. Like, interface is so much the most interesting thing about AR/VR. I wanna know what the thimble does.
46:50 Nilay Patel? It's probably just like a digital crown. I will say, this is like the most Apple part of it, right? Apple's very proud of reinventing user interface paradigms. And I'm making fun of the digital crown because it's the last one they tried to invent. But like, the mouse, the click wheel, the touchscreen, those are gigantic Apple paradigm shifts in human-computer interaction. And then when they put out the watch, they put up the digital crown next to those things, and I'm like, we did it. Less, I would say, less successful than multi-touch, or the mouse.
47:28 Nilay Patel? Maybe a controversial opinion. Maybe there's some digital crown stands out there. So I think a good question is, what will they think is the paradigm shift of interaction for AR? And is it just a button you wear on your thumb?
47:40 Speaker 03 I mean, I was thinking before the show, like, yeah, if anybody can make hand interactions, like just hand tracking work, it probably is Apple. Like, they've got a pretty good track record there.
47:50 Nilay Patel? But Apple's really into haptics, right? Like, the one of the, like, if one of the stories of the iPhone over time is that the haptics have improved so much, they've been able to remove buttons and just fake you out. Story of the Mac 2. If their AR ideas, you're just gonna stab at buttons and not receive any feedback, that would be really weird.
48:06 Speaker 03 Maybe the thimble is like a rumble pack.
48:09 Nilay Patel? Amazing.
48:09 Speaker 03 Like, a really good rumble pack.
48:11 Nilay Patel? All right. Well, we have arrived at predicting an Apple thumb, thumb sleeve that is a rumble pack. I think it's time to take a break. But these are the two rumors. Like, it's weird, Dieter, I would say, it's weird that we haven't heard peep about a TV. We haven't, they have a TV service. We haven't heard about a new Apple TV. Like, this thing they said they were gonna do has all but died on the vine. The most natural consumer product for them to make. They've just let it go. And all we are hearing about is rumors about things that seem either insanely hard, like a car. And I, we could probably talk about that car for another hour. Like, I don't know why they want to make a car. It just doesn't seem like a, a good, like, what, how many cars are they gonna make? Are they gonna make one crossover and be like, we're just competing with this? Like, Apple likes
48:56 Nilay Patel? to make expensive things. It's gonna be expensive, and they're gonna leave out the enormous market of $30,000 cars. Like, it's just a very complicated thing for them to want to build.
49:06 Speaker 02 When there are simpler things that they're not building?
49:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah, just make a TV. I wonder if in a meeting, there's like one Apple executive who's just like doodling, "We should just make a TV." Like, circling it over and over again. He's got his iPad out, and it looks like he's diligently taking notes, but it's just a picture of a TV.
49:22 Speaker 02 He's drawing a rectangle over and over again. Like, "What's that rectangle you're drawing? Oh, it's a display for a, um, a, uh, car. Yeah, it's a display for a car. Oh, yeah, we should make a car. That's a great idea."
49:34 Nilay Patel? There's gotta be like the set of accountants who are like, why are we, we could just make it, we already, you just glue it to the back of an existing TV. Like, we just buy Samsung TVs and put Apple TVs in the back of them and like, put them in aluminum and sell them for $8,000 and people would buy it. Well, if you're out there, please send me your screenshots.
49:51 Speaker 02 I can maybe connect that to the VR thing, full disclosure, et cetera. Apple has a tendency to refuse to make things that they think, they think are cheaper junky, right? Like, there's a very famous Steve Jobs quote that, you know, we just don't make junk. And so it may be that the explanation for why is Apple rumored to be making a $3,000 headset is that they just think that all the other headsets aren't up to the level of quality that they think is the right level. And so that's, there's like no more complicated explanation than that. They think it's good. They think what they've got is good. It ends up costing this much, so they're gonna find a use case for it. But they refuse to make, like, you know, the trio, right? They refuse to, they could have made something cheaper, but they, they think that there needs to be a certain
50:31 Speaker 02 level of something, visual fidelity, the rumble pack thimble, you know, whatever it is. And that, that's, that's like, the actual explanation here. I don't know.
50:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that totally makes sense, except that the, there is a leaked image from the information and it looks so janky.
50:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like the one thing they should definitely copy from Oculus is like, the clicky headband.
50:55 Speaker 03 Oh, God, yeah, no, that, it's
50:57 Nilay Patel? You hate the clicky headband.
50:59 Speaker 03 Weird, like, it looks like an Oculus Go. Like, I really, I genuinely do believe, yeah, Apple's thing is like, they make stuff that looks really, really good. And it's not necessarily technically revolutionary, but it has amazing ergonomics and it does something just like, that makes it magical to use. I'm hoping that screenshots, that image is just wrong, because I would like to believe that.
51:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And then you find out that like, to charge it, you have to turn it upside down and put like lightning in the top. There's just, it's Apple. Alright, we're gonna take a break and we gotta grab bag of gadgets to talk about. We'll be right back.
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52:44 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Dieter, there's just a lot of, a lot of little gadget stuff to go through. Do you want to start with the Surface?
52:50 Speaker 02 So Microsoft dropped the price of the Surface Duo, their two-screen Android phone thingamajig, in the US, and they're also releasing it in Europe next week, and it's still in Canada, and like it's like full price in those places for some reason. It still has not fundamentally changed from when I reviewed it, so the software is still chock full of incredibly good ideas, incredibly badly executed. The camera is still terrible. The processor is still outdated now, and it was outdated kind of when they released it. So great that it's coming to more regions, but I don't know what's going on with it. Actually, Windows Central did a story not too long ago, they missed, they missed one of their promised software updates in their cycle of software updates. So I would like to know what Microsoft's big plan is for the Duo and for Android in general.
53:35 Speaker 02 I'd like to know what the big plan is for the Neo, if that's still coming, and like Windows. 10x in general, there's a lot of questions that Microsoft needs to answer in 2021, ranging from can you make Windows on ARM good enough to compete? Can you make a Windows machine on one of Intel's new chips that feels like it's on par with the M1 chip and whatever Apple's coming up on the new MacBook Pros? Intel just released a bunch of cherry pick benchmarks to say that they're just as good as the M1 and I'm like, okay. No. So like Microsoft Surface products have actually got a ton of questions and it's sort of like all riding on Panos Panay, who is like basically running all of their consumer stuff from software to anything that's not Xbox, basically that you can go buy. And I have no idea what is going to execute well and what is not going to execute well
54:20 Speaker 02 this year. But the biggest question marks for me are what's going on with Windows 10x and the Duo? And I mean, the answer for the ARM stuff is, it won't be great. And the answer for the Intel stuff is it'll be good enough. I think this is pretty clear, unless there's a shocking surprise somewhere in a chip foundry that I don't know about.
54:39 Nilay Patel? Well, Intel has a new CEO.
54:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, but I mean, he just started.
54:42 Nilay Patel? He actually hasn't started yet. He starts in four days.
54:46 Speaker 02 Okay.
54:47 Nilay Patel? I know this because we're trying to get, his name is Pat Gelsinger, we're trying to get him on Decoder and they're like, we can't put him on your show until he starts.
54:53 Speaker 02 That's fair.
54:54 Nilay Patel? Which is a good excuse. But like, I'm all, you know, the backstory of booking a podcast is you send a lot of annoying emails, which is how you do it.
55:02 Speaker 02 Can I admit something here, speaking of the Duo?
55:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
55:06 Speaker 02 I was gonna buy one. I was gonna see if I could buy one cheap or something and they're hard to find cheap, which is surprising. But with the price drop, I was like, maybe, because I just, I want to watch what they do with Android, because I think Android UI is a really fascinating thing on dual screens and folding phones and whatever. So I went to buy one and Microsoft's website doesn't work at different zoom levels, at different browser widths, their breakpoints are broken, so the buy button just disappears unless you like resize your browser. But the admission is I eventually found a way and I bought a Surface so I could play around with the Surface, even though I know it's objectively a bad phone and don't do what I did.
55:45 Nilay Patel? Did you buy it before the price dropped?
55:46 Speaker 02 After the price dropped. The price drop is what inspired.
55:48 Speaker 03 I genuinely, I kind of want one.
55:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:51 Speaker 03 I really want a folding phone so bad.
55:52 Speaker 02 As a physical object, it is the best thing. And even if I just end up using it for like reading Kindle books and like doing the crossword, I mean, that's not value. You could do that with a $30 Android phone. But like, I do wanna, I do wanna sort of continue to like, play around with their software paradigms. Same thing with like, the Z Fold 2. Like, those are the two things. And the big question for me with folding phones is like, is Google gonna like, take Samsung's pretty good execution, and Microsoft's pretty good ideas, and like, just put them together into a version of Android that actually is really good on more different kinds of screens?
56:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I feel like these screenshots of Android 12 indicate that Google's priorities lie elsewhere, but we'll see. Sonos had a monster quarter. You know, every time we have Patrick Svenson at the show, I always tease him that his business model is like millennials buying ever bigger houses, so they can buy more Sonos speakers. Turns out, in a year when everyone stayed at home, people put Sonos speakers in more rooms there. So they had a great year. And it sounds like they're putting out a tiny little Bluetooth speaker.
57:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, he also said on their earnings call that they're, they're, they're planning on hitting like, a two-product a year cadence, or continuing that cadence. And so if you're gonna do that, like, eventually, eventually you run into like, doing the thing everyone's wanted you to do in the first place, right? Which is make a little Bluetooth speaker. Here's my question. What can Sonos do in a more portable Bluetooth speaker that makes it a Sonos speaker, besides like, it connects to the Sonos network on Wi-Fi? Is there some sound quality thing? Is there some, like, to me, if they, if they just like, make a UE Boom, that like, hurts the Sonos brand, because it's like, just not good enough to be a Sonos speaker?
57:39 Nilay Patel? No, I think it'll be fine.
57:40 Speaker 02 Yeah?
57:41 Nilay Patel? And they'll just, they'll just make it seem a little bit nicer, and make it more expensive, and people will buy it.
57:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:45 Nilay Patel? They, they have that, this, it's, this like, why is Apple making a $3,000 headset? Like, Sonos is like, well, that one costs $150. Ours costs $200, and has this logo on it, and people will just buy it.
57:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:56 Nilay Patel? That's my theory. And, you know, shaky Google Assistant implementation.
58:00 Speaker 02 I'm not bitter.
58:01 Nilay Patel? Tell me about this laptop with seven screens.
58:03 Speaker 02 It's a laptop with seven screens. What else do you need to know?
58:06 Speaker 03 It's so cool. No, you need to know that they like fold on each other like, I don't know, the robot in a cartoon or something that is trying to attack you. And so it just folds an increasingly bizarre amount of weapons out of its body. Like this isn't like the razor thing where it's very neat. Like, oh, it's a piece of paper and it folds out. No, this thing just like proliferates.
58:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So it's a expand scape has made it. It's called the Aurora seven. It is gigantic.
58:32 Speaker 02 It even has a like cartoon name. That's great.
58:34 Nilay Patel? I mean, it looks like a think pad from the eighties. I honestly thought this is a prototype when I first saw it. It's amazing. You should just go look at a picture of it. I think is all the more we need to to say.
58:43 Speaker 02 Also, I love that it's called a laptop. Like, who's gonna put this on their lap?
58:47 Nilay Patel? Uh, Daytraders. I mean, this is like the ultimate GameStonk laptop. That's all I can say to you. There's rumors that Amazon's gonna build an Alexa wall controller.
58:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, finally. I'm sorry. Like, if you talk to anybody in the la- like five years ago, be like, what is the future of the smart home? They'll be like, oh, there's like a cool screen on your wall that like controls your whole house and does all the things. And instead, we got a cylinder speaker. And then we got little screens. And then we got a screen that now is coming soon. You'll like turn and face you. But no one ever like went back and said, oh, that Creston panel on the wall. We're just gonna make that, but with our cool UI and a big colorful touchscreen. I'm sort of shocked that it took them this long to come around to just making this thing.
59:34 Nilay Patel? It's weird because there's a lot of ways to put iPads in your wall. And that is just not a great for a variety of reasons that ever works. Well, I wonder if Amazon is basically doing like a Fire tablet in the wall situation.
59:45 Speaker 02 Well, that would be bad.
59:46 Nilay Patel? That's what I'm saying.
59:47 Speaker 02 Well, actually, what do Amazon Echo screen devices run on? Because I don't think it's Fire OS.
59:53 Nilay Patel? It's not Fire OS. It's a weird custom.
59:55 Speaker 02 They've got the same situation Google does, where Google's got a whole bunch of like Chrome smart screens, Chrome based smart screens for the Google Assistant. But they've got, they've got, you know, Android and Android Things. We used to like have knock down, drag out arguments with Google executives of why isn't this running Android or Android Things? And why is it running a variant of Chrome and Chrome OS? And what's the story? And will you ever merge the things? And that that kind of went nowhere because it turns out nobody cares what's running behind your smart screen.
1:00:22 Nilay Patel? That was their answer. I mean, I think we did this on the show with Rishi, who runs all that stuff. And he's like, you are the only people who care.
1:00:29 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:00:30 Nilay Patel? I, he was like, I applaud you for caring. You're the only people who care.
1:00:33 Speaker 02 But the reason to care is you can like hack on it. Like the Nintendo Switch is just, uh, there's a hacked version of Android 10 that you can put on it now, which is, you know, better than a lot of cheap Android phones are getting. Like it'd be fun. I don't know.
1:00:46 Nilay Patel? Last little grab back things. Uh, Sony, we have a great story about the PS5 controller, which I now have a PS5 and I didn't realize this, but there are, the controllers are injection molded with 40,000 little PlayStation circles and X's and squares. Just read that story. It's just a fun manufacturing story. I want to talk about the Tesla Bitcoin thing in just this way. Uh, so Tesla's buying 1.5 billion dollars of Bitcoin, which Tesla is a company founded for environmental reasons, right? Like Musk thinks we should electrify the world and be better at the climate. Bitcoin sucks a lot of power. We have a story about those two competing priorities. And also to point out that giving, if you have Bitcoin, what it's doing right now is appreciating. And if you have a car,
1:01:29 Nilay Patel? what it is doing is depreciating. So you should not trade your appreciating Bitcoin for a depreciating Tesla. I think if Musk gets people to buy cars in Bitcoin, he's, he, he will be cemented as the greatest business genius of all time. Like absolutely. Musk also has promised the mayor of Miami, uh, that he will build a Hyperloop under the city for, for $30 million, which is like an incredible promise that will never come true, but I appreciate that he makes the promise.
1:01:57 Speaker 02 I'm also increasingly angry at the Hyperloop and the tunnels. Like, like just put a train down there. It can, it holds more people.
1:02:03 Nilay Patel? Do you remember when, uh, the city of Chicago said that there was going to be a Hyperloop to the airport?
1:02:07 Speaker 02 I do.
1:02:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah. My sister still asks me when the Hyperloop to the airport is coming. Like it's not, just not talking about it. And then Addy, I want to run through, uh, before we go, there's like four little, again, headlines, not really news, but just some policy things. We are tracking this. We don't really know what's going to happen yet. Uh, there's a global chip shortage, like a semiconductor chip shortage. Ford actually had to stop making the F-150 because they ran out of chips for it. GM has had to stop making cars. It has hit the car industry first. The Biden administration says they're going to do something about it. Do we have any sense of what they could do?
1:02:42 Speaker 03 I'm not sure. I'm, this is like, I should just say that this is, semiconductors is not my area. I mean, Trump ended up in a trade war with a bunch of companies that work in semiconductors. So that presumably doesn't help.
1:02:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, this is one way we just have to keep trying. Like I said, headlines, but not news. But it is true that Ford has had to stop manufacturing its most profitable vehicle right now. We talked at the beginning about net neutrality when the Trump administration or the Trump FCC, I should say, undid the net neutrality rules. There were a bunch of state level net neutrality rules, California among them. The Trump Justice Department sued California over having net neutrality rules. Biden administration is dropping it. That feels connected to the fact that the Biden FCC is probably going to just reinstate net neutrality in some way.
1:03:28 Speaker 03 I mean, it definitely seems like it's not going to challenge state net neutrality laws. I think that I'm not really sure what its priorities are going to end up being just because net neutrality was kind of a knock down, drag out fight years ago. But yeah, it's not out of the question.
1:03:39 Nilay Patel? And then lastly, Addie, you wrote this week, Section 230 turned 25 this week and you wrote, you wrote a great piece which kind of lays out the big tensions in any reform effort. And we've got a live event coming up. You have some names. I can't say who yet.
1:03:55 Speaker 03 You can say next week. Next week, we can say who. Next week, I believe you can also say when.
1:04:00 Nilay Patel? Yes. This is how you do it. You gotta build the hype. It's like selling a sneaker. Only it's a
1:04:04 Speaker 03 Correct.
1:04:07 Nilay Patel? But I just, give us a sense, you know, you wrote this piece, but it turned 25. There is a new administration. There's a lot going on. There's a bill, the Safe Tech Act, Safe Tech Act that came out. What is the current status of 230 reform?
1:04:24 Speaker 03 Current status is everybody hates 230. The Safe Tech Act, wow, no, I can't say it either, is wild because it is just like there are huge categories of things now and we're going to make sure Section 230 doesn't apply to them. Like categories like harassment, where the entire bill just reads like they took a bunch of unpopular cases from like the last five years, like a Grindr harassment case or anything that Facebook has done in Myanmar. And we're just like, how can we write a law that's going to let us prosecute those things? And that's like a weird way to write a law because it turns out that they may have accidentally just cut Section 230 off for anybody who runs a commercial website, depending on how you interpret it, because they were going after like ad placements. So yeah, they're just, there's this
1:05:09 Speaker 03 giant nuke on the table now. And we already knew Biden didn't really like 230, but now it seems like Facebook is putting its weight, it seems like really clearly toward, we just want everybody to have to issue transparency reports. They put out a transparency report this morning and were like, so Congress, you should look at this. And so it like, section 230 is weird because every bill does something completely different. It's not like neutrality where, oh yeah, you're kind of looking for different ways to get to the same place. So there's just going to be this really weird array of legislation that we're going to have to look at over the next year.
1:05:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I would connect that to a story, actually, I kind of put up right before we came on, where he kind of watched like QAnon hop from platform to platform. So there was a lot of QAnon on Twitter and Facebook, and then it all got banned, and they all moved to Parler, and then Parler was shut down for all of its reasons. And it moved, QAnon moved to another platform called Clapper. And the Clapper CEO today was like, well, we're banning QAnon. And it kind of doesn't, even if you are, even if you say you're the platform that's not going to moderate, you absolutely end up moderating. It is a thing you need to do. And the reason they can all do it right now is 230. I am hoping that, you know, as these bills come through,
1:06:23 Nilay Patel? we don't just hear from Dorsey and Zuckerberg, but like, the poor CEO of Clapper is like, I'm trying to run the one that you all want. And like, I need to moderate the crazy, like, we don't hear enough from those people. We don't hear from, I think every time you're on, we talk about the knitting forum. Like, we need to hear from like, that broad array of service providers that are much smaller that depend on this law just to exist.
1:06:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, especially if you genuinely do think that there are problems with 230, because, say, it enables platforms to not police harassment enough. Like, whether or not I agree with that, if you think that's a real problem, like, the small players are the people you should be talking with to figure out if there is a solution that doesn't hurt them.
1:07:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Well, we'll see. We have a live event coming up, TBD, guest TBD. Well, we know, we just can't tell you. It's hype. We're going to be releasing it 4am on Clubhouse in an exclusive livestream. I'm trying. I'm trying to be like a business person. Uh, I'm just not good at it. Okay. We are, we're sort of on time. We didn't go over. Right? Isn't everybody proud of us? Yeah. We did it, everybody, for once. Thank you for listening. You can tweet at us. Addy is at the dextrarchy. Dieter's at backlon. I'm at reckless. On Tuesday on Decoder, John Fort, the co-anchor of Squawk Alley on CNBC, is on the show. We talked about GameStop. It's me and a CNBC anchor talking about, you see, because of stocks. We did it. He was great, actually. He was a good one. And then we'll be back next Friday with more Verchess. That's it. Rock and roll.
1:07:51 Nilay Patel? Wear a mask, maybe two.
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