HBO Max might get maimed, Apple might remove the headphone jack from the iPad

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss this week in tech news — including what's happening with HBO Max, Apple iPad rumors, some handheld gaming updates, and this week in EVs. Further reading: Apple might remove the headphone jack from its next entry-level iPad Apple might delay iPadOS 16 launch Apple says Mac sales are getting hit hard by supply constraints OnePlus 10T review: call it a comeback OnePlus’ 10T launch was a weird return to in-person events The Pixel 6A is getting an immediate update to make sure it’s moddable Logitech announces a new dedicated cloud gaming handheld device Nintendo reports Switch sales dip as chip shortage continues to bite The Orion looks like if Kirby swallowed your Switch The megamerger killed Batgirl HBO Max might get maimed A TikTok Music app could challenge Spotify and Apple Roku has a problem — its buttons aren’t printing enough money Lucid Motors will barely make any EVs this year as it slashes production goals again Tesla is the latest company to be drawn into the Elon Musk-Twitter legal mess Forget those Tesla crashes: GM says you can trust its autonomous vehicles GM’s Super Cruise will cover 400,000 miles of roads in North America, doubling coverage Twitter v. Elon Musk trial date set to start October 17th Google Meet meets Duo Meet, with Meet in Duo but Duo isn’t going into Meet A mysterious battery-powered Google device appears in FCC filings Sony InZone M9 review: impressive but flawed 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

  Today on The Vergecast, the slow motion car crash that is Stage Manager on the iPad. We'll try to read between the lines of Warner Brothers and Discovery's earnings call, and of course, the gadget news of the week. That's coming up right after this.

• 0:13Speaker 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.

• 0:58Speaker 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.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the streaming wars. It's another day in the streaming wars. War never changes.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm here for I'm a friend Eli Alex Kranz is here.

• 2:06Alex Cranz?

  I've been like, oh shit, war's hard, man.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm just thinking of all the lines from from the various Metal Gear games I've played and thinking that's too esoteric even for this show.

• 2:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  David Pierce is here.

• 2:17David Pierce?

  Hi, I'm on vacation and what I have discovered this week is that all you have to watch is hotel cable television and it's just long order SVU, modern family in the office and frankly, it's fine. I don't need anything else. That's great. I mean, I'm sold.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  David, where are you currently?

• 2:31David Pierce?

  I am currently in a phone booth on the fifth floor of a WeWork in South Beach, Miami. It's 40,000 degrees outside. The beach is literally right there.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:40David Pierce?

  I'm only here because I love you too and all of the Vergecast listeners. So it's, I'm happy to be here.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, also, we, we think, this is true, we think that while we're recording, Discovery is going to kill HBO Max. Like, that might happen during the court and David has to be here for that. We have to emotionally process that together.

• 2:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  But you're in Miami. You did like the Wednesday episode on the beach. Are you like super into crypto now? Are you?

• 3:04David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. So a fun fact is you get off the airplane in Miami and they just instantly hand you like 65 Bitcoin. And it's great. And then you're worth a lot of money. And then by the time you're out of the airport, you've lost half your money. It's just like a fun sort of game. And then at the end of your vacation.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  A circular economy.

• 3:20David Pierce?

  It's like, it's like Dave and Buster's in Miami, basically.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the W. This cucumber water is $400.

• 3:28David Pierce?

  That's real.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  I've been there. That's, that's how that felt for me.

• 3:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  All right. So we think the HBO Max news is coming because Discovery has earnings.

• 3:36Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  So we'll, we'll see what happens.

• 3:39Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:40Nilay Patel?

  But while that's coming, it's funny because you're going to listen to this tomorrow. You're already going to know.

• 3:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  Just hold on to this moment. You're in your car right now. Just close your eyes while you're driving and just be like, these three people I'm listening to don't know what's going to happen, but I do.

• 3:53Alex Cranz?

  What's the future like?

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What's it like? Email us. What was it like in this moment when you knew the future? We'll see. We are going to commit. If, if, if things go as sideways as we think, we'll, we'll have like an emergency pod tomorrow. Alex and I are very excited about it. But for now, let's talk about some news. We got some Apple stuff to talk about. OnePlus held an event in New York, which is super weird because everybody at the event already had the device, which is just a weird moment. Lightning round. There's a bunch of car stuff. Let's start with Apple. So there's like a bunch of like iPad stuff going on. So earlier this week, Mark German at Bloomberg had a report saying iPadOS 16 is going to get delayed. And it's kind of like, we all know why.

• 4:32Alex Cranz?

  It's David.

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  Stage manager is horrible and they should probably not do it. Like, I don't know how long it takes to just delete whatever. Like, I like, Craig Gregory is like, I don't know, Command, Delete, like, never happened.

• 4:44Alex Cranz?

  It's Command, A, then Delete?

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why that delays launch, but it sounds like they're really rethinking it because it's a, it's a mess.

• 4:50David Pierce?

  It's very bad. I mean, and I think the challenge is like, Apple kind of needs this to work, right? Like, in its relentless effort to make the iPad and the Mac more alike in how they work to the point where they can share apps and systems and all that stuff. Like, this stuff has to work and this is one way for them to get past everybody yelling about free-form multitasking on the iPad, which I'm just giving up on because it's never going to happen and Apple's just going to keep having new versions of bad ideas about how to not give us the multitasking we're actually asking for. But like, Apple's not going to get a ton of chances at this because it also needs developers to buy into this stuff. And there's this long history of like, if developers don't give it a chance, it's never going to get a chance and it's never going to work and it's never going to go anywhere.

• 5:33David Pierce?

  And I'm not convinced anybody is going to do the work to get on Stage Manager while Stage Manager is still this bad.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  But there's a flip side to this, which is now they've so tightly coupled all of their operating systems and told developers, "Hey, your iPad app is also a Mac app. Catalyst exists. There's 500 ways to make your apps work and all these things." That if you actually fragment the releases, you're making, you're making it harder for developers in another way. Like, it's a real trade-off that's kind of like vicious, right? Like, you're a developer, you want to make an app that works across all of Apple's platforms. They've got a way for you to do that. And then the iPad version just has to hold because Apple has an updated iPad. And there's not like a lot there, but there's stuff like the Home app.

• 6:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Nilay Patel?

  Where it's going to support Matter and they're like doing a whole reboot. And there's all this under the hood stuff that gets changed in these OSs now. Because Apple has usually committed to updating them all at once, developers are like reliant on that. And now there's a delay because they want developers to buy into a good version of multitasking.

• 6:35Alex Cranz?

  But it's not a good version.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think this is like one of those moments where the Apple's version of simplicity masks an underlying complexity and they're caught up in it now.

• 6:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, and Apple is so unusually good at like creating a moment around that software launch that is like it makes developers race to hit that moment and get their apps ready because a lot of people are going to be upgrading and looking for new stuff. It's when new devices come out. So there's like a lot of people on new gadgets looking for stuff. And then it's like, like, it seems like every year for the last couple of years, there's been like that one feature that isn't ready and comes out a few months later. And then by the time it comes out, we're all kind of like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And it feels like this now like maybe destined Stage Manager to be one of those things, which like might possibly be good news for Apple if it has finally realized that Stage Manager is bad and they'd like to secretly hide it behind everything else.

• 7:25David Pierce?

  But I kind of agree that this is like, it does, it fragments a thing that it has been really good for Apple for a long time that it has not been fragmented.

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. On the other hand, Stage Manager is such a disaster. Like they really should. The other choice they have is to release iPadOS without Stage Manager or anything and then add it back in a dot update, which it has been doing for years.

• 7:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Nilay Patel?

  Like the last few versions of iOS have launched without features and they've just added them over the course of a year.

• 7:51Alex Cranz?

  There's also like the suggestion that maybe this delay isn't necessarily because Stage Manager sucks. So although that's probably why, but because they want to have another, like an October event and do a bunch of iPad, make it like an iPad October event. And then part of that is like, and Stage Manager, fully formed. So it could be like building a moment. It's just, it's weird, man. It's weird.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you can reboot Stage Manager in a month.

• 8:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I don't think so either.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Short of doing Command A delete. I don't think you can pick Stage Manager in a month.

• 8:22Alex Cranz?

  David, just like standing in the crowd glaring at Tim.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  Liam is reminding us that last year they changed Safari on the Mac to have those horrible tabs. And they, they undid it by the time it came out.

• 8:35Alex Cranz?

  They give you the little, the choice, a toggle.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, but that's like, that's a solvable thing. Like they were like, okay, you don't want the bad thing. Well, add a toggle that lets you pick the normal way or the bad way. And we'll just see what everybody picks. Like we believe and everyone's like, no, I'm going to the normal way.

• 8:50David Pierce?

  That's literally what Stage Manager is. It's a toggle that lets you pick the bad way.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  But I think they want people to use it. They can't market how fancy it is if then you turn it, if you like flip the toggle and you're like, oh, screen bad.

• 9:02Alex Cranz?

  How will they market it? Like if they somehow improve it, how do you market it? How do you just market piles? Like, how is that a thing?

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  Thing, right? Like, I know people who are like iPad multitasking wizards, just swiping and pinching and sliding over. And it's like, I don't even, I don't do that many things at once. I don't know what you're doing.

• 9:24Alex Cranz?

  I was just like thinking of the commercial and it's like, what? A teenager and they're, they're getting ready to do, they're doing some drawing on their iPad. And then they're like, hold on, I gotta move this. And they start to swipe it and they're like, oh, no, no, I'm not just gonna swipe it in some other multitasking way. Swipe it to the pile. And then mom calls them for dinner and they're like, snap, walk away.

• 9:44Nilay Patel?

  And then a text shows up on screen and like, you know, Apple font and it's like piles.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  It's great. I don't know why they have an ad agency. They just call me.

• 9:52Alex Cranz?

  You got this.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  The thing about October, so October, right? Traditionally, they do two fall events. October is maxing iPads. We've got a leak. We don't know how accurate it is. The next entry level iPad will look a lot like the iPad Air. It's a case leak. You know, it's one of those, like, are we gonna talk about it or cover it? And I think we have to because of our historic obsession with headphone jacks. My historic obsession with headphone jacks. Look, I got one trick. It's my brand, right? It's like disclosing the Comcast isn't an investor in Fox Media and headphone jacks. That's who I am. It seems like they're gonna take the headphone jack out of the cheap one, which I'm just gonna tell you, every parent in America is gonna lose their mind.

• 10:33Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  Because the 329 iPad is like the thing that allows many meals to happen for parents around the world. Like you buy the cheap iPad and you put Disney Plus on it. And then maybe YouTube Kids, because you're just a gambler. Like, will my child be a serial killer when they grow up? Let's find out what YouTube Kids has to say. And then you just like get through your life. And taking away the headphone jack means that you've introduced Bluetooth to toddlers.

• 11:01Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  Which is not great. And I understand people have already been tweeting me. You can have a dongle, you could do a thing, they're kid Bluetooth headphones. You you want to you want to just simplify all of that.

• 11:13Alex Cranz?

  Can you imagine explaining dongles to a three year old who just wants to watch like Cocomelon? Can you imagine like teaching a three year old about dongles?

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I know my my now four year old would love the word dongle.

• 11:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so that's just another problem that you're gonna have. I just, I don't understand it. Like, they they keep them on the Mac. They know people want them on the Mac. They're not gonna take them away. The thing isn't running out of room.

• 11:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, that's the argument on the phone, is they wanted all the space back to add the Taptic Engine or whatever they needed to add. iPads are big. Like, what are they? Well, I don't get it. It, this is like the one where it's, you're really, you're really going sideways on trying to sell Wi- like, I don't know, you want to make accessory money? Make kid Apple headphones. People will buy them.

• 11:58David Pierce?

  Or make $20 dongles that connect to kid headphones.

• 12:02Alex Cranz?

  And look like a little animal, like a little mouse.

• 12:05David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 12:06Alex Cranz?

  Little tiger. That's Amazon's tech.

• 12:08Nilay Patel?

  Apple's not gonna make anything that looks like a little tiger. Are you kidding me?

• 12:10David Pierce?

  Daniel Tiger branded AirPods are gonna be enormous.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  I just don't know, like, they took them off the iPad Pro and I was like, fine, like, this thing's really expensive. If you come back to Stage Manager, right? On the software side, they keep pushing this thing towards the Mac. On the hardware side, they keep pushing it towards the iPhone.

• 12:27David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, Macs are really good because they have a lot of, like, the Mac has tons of ports. Remember when everyone cheered when you were like, we added a good keyboard and SD card slot?

• 12:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 12:38Nilay Patel?

  Don't you want to feel that way again?

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  You can, whenever you want.

• 12:43Alex Cranz?

  I I don't think they want to because like, when a small child will fling the iPad and shatter it and replace the glass, that they cheer about that because that's a nice little revenue bump they get when they have to repair that. It like making them more or making them less repairable is a very compelling business strategy that Apple has repeatedly said is part of their thing.

• 13:05David Pierce?

  I will say I'm I'm super skeptical of these leaks and this is like this is the kind of thing that we see a million of all the time. And it's basically it's like the things that casemakers use to make their cases and a lot of it is sometimes they have previous knowledge. Sometimes they're just making educated guesses. Sometimes like they know less than we do about what is going to be in the next devices. So this is like, there's a big grain of salt here. And I think the reason to think it might happen is that like this is just what Apple keeps doing is getting rid of headphone jacks. And so like in that sense, sure, there's a decent chance that at some point this iPad will be gone. And the thing that sucks about this is what's really going to happen is this is going to normalize playing stuff on speakers out of your iPad in the world in the way that like, that like

• 13:48David Pierce?

  my mother in law, who hopefully does not listen to this podcast, because I bring her up a surprising amount, likes to walk through the grocery store on speakerphone. And I think that is the worst. And this is just like societally acceptable. And what's going to happen next is like YouTube Kids on full blast at Olive Garden is just the world that we are going to live in. And I hate it already. I hate it. I'm done.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  We'll all fall down the YouTube radicalization funnel.

• 14:12David Pierce?

  Together on one iPad.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  In the Olive Garden. Reports are that this Olive Garden got super racist. We don't know why a child was spotted watching YouTube Kids unsupervised. It's just one of those things. It's America in 2022. We'll see. We don't know. It is a sketchy leak. Look at it. The Mac sites are believing it. That's like part of the reason we and five believes it like at the end of the day, the casemakers just have to stamp a hole in their cases. So they've got it out.

• 14:39David Pierce?

  Right.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  But it's it's saw as a home button, which is really interesting. The iPad Air design with a home button is really interesting.

• 14:44Alex Cranz?

  I really love that. Most of the people who had it didn't notice the missing headphone jack. They were like, look at these CAD files. I cannot believe they're doing a redesign. And I think it was like Chris Welch was like, hey, there's something missing.

• 14:56Nilay Patel?

  We've got a brand here.

• 14:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Nilay Patel?

  We've got a checklist of they were like, is headphones? All right, it's there.

• 15:00Alex Cranz?

  All right. Yeah, he saw it and he was like, nope, we gotta block it.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  All right. Other news, other gadget news. OnePlus 10 T came out. Alison reviewed it. She likes it.

• 15:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  Good processor Snapdragon eight generate Snapdragon eight plus generation one. Not only one of the, I think the best processor in Android phone, one of the most words in a name per processor on the market today. Very important. Really good screen, high refresh. Oh, camera, no mute switch. It's just like 649, right? It's like the most power you can get for that money.

• 15:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  Which is cool. Very OnePlus. We did get a tweet from someone. You guys saw it. Someone was like, I'm the person who plays games on their Android phone.

• 15:40Alex Cranz?

  The one.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, I play them on Stadia. And I was like, but then you don't need the game phone.

• 15:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, then what's the point?

• 15:46Alex Cranz?

  Don't get it.

• 15:46David Pierce?

  That's why Stadia exists.

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  But we got one. They were like, on my commute home. It's the only time I get to play video games.

• 15:52David Pierce?

  They're also the only Stadia user that exists. This is like a unicorn of a person.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Dieter, if you're listening, find them. They have many things to tell you.

• 16:00David Pierce?

  It was soon to our pitch eyes burner account, for sure.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  But the launch is really weird. So they held the OnePlus held a launch event in New York. They invited a bunch of people. We don't take junkets, but you know, the world of tech influencers arrived in New York City for a tech event. The first in-person tech event, kind of in a long time. Like, Apple had one. It seems like the doors are open to it again. Just strange, I think, is Allison's. Like, no one knows what they're doing. Like, it's like everyone's first day of school again.

• 16:27David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  We'll see if we have more of them. But I think the funniest part of this is all the people there already had the phone. They'd had review units. So I'm not sure what the event was for.

• 16:35Alex Cranz?

  They were taking pictures of the event with their review units.

• 16:40David Pierce?

  I mean, this is like the thing now, right? Because we're like in this place where if you're not Samsung and you're not Apple, everybody has decided that the only move is to try to outshine Samsung and Apple and like, be cooler and create cultural moments and have fandom and influencers. And it's like, we're on this weird, like, I don't know, lifestyle brand kick among all of these smartphone startups trying to take over the world. And it just, it feels like maybe there was like a time when that was a thing that was going to work for a lot of people. And we've all like forgotten how to be humans.

• 17:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was 2012.

• 17:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was like a good time. And then the pandemic happened. And now I don't remember how to go outside. And so it's like, how, how much is this going to work anymore?

• 17:25Alex Cranz?

  I think like, we were moving away from this even before the pandemic, right? Like, Apple is very, very good at this. And everybody else, even Samsung, is very bad at it. And they all want to make the moment, but they also want to give everybody the embargo. And like, the reason the Apple thing worked, no PR person, take notes, please. Put away your notebook. But the reason the Apple has always kind of worked is because it is a surprise for everyone. And then Samsung will go and give all of us early access. So that's wonderful. We, we have time to be very thoughtful about what we write about it. We have time to work with these products and see them. And it gives us a much more nuanced take when we write about it. But at the same time, the mystique is gone. It's just not there. And like, they just keep doing that.

• 18:09Alex Cranz?

  And I don't know who that is for. Cause I don't think, I think that translate, that lack of mystique for the journalists covering it, translates to the audiences.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. But I also think like, it's a mid-range phone. I say that it's a mid-range priced phone with a nice processor. And like, what are you gonna do? Like, there's not a lot of ways to get attention for that thing anymore.

• 18:32Alex Cranz?

  Well, you put LEDs on the back.

• 18:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's how you do it. You're like, the ringtones make the backlight up, which worked.

• 18:37Alex Cranz?

  It did work.

• 18:38Nilay Patel?

  We made a TikTok about it.

• 18:39Alex Cranz?

  It was cool.

• 18:40Nilay Patel?

  The phone's great. You should read the review. Austin did a great job. The camera, it really seems like it has some wacky doo focus problems. This is like the OnePlus story.

• 18:48Alex Cranz?

  The macro is just beautiful.

• 18:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, OnePlus's ability to like, almost do it every single time continues to amaze me. And it's like, there's just little stuff every single time that it's like, okay, OnePlus is on all the right roads. And then right at the very last minute, just like flipped his car into a ditch. At that, like, right before the finish line. This is just, there were like a decade of this now, and it's, it's very impressive.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's why they left to do nothing.

• 19:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. But I think one more thought on the, the, the like, event thing. One of the strange things to me about this is it seems like, like the advantage that Apple has is that there's this like, giant list of people who already care about the next iPhone, right? Whereas I feel like even Samsung now, I don't know that there is like a huge amount of pent up demand to know what the Galaxy Fold 4 is gonna be like. Maybe there is, and I'm wrong, but I, I just like, people are showing up to be like, what is the next iPhone? Because I'm probably gonna own it at some point in a way that like, no one else is doing. And I feel like this idea that I can like, get people to care with an event is just not true. I'm not sure it ever was, but like, if people already care. You can do a great event and a lot of people care and pay attention.

• 19:52David Pierce?

  But if people don't care, I'm not sure that like a splashy presentation is the way to get people to care. The way to get people to care is clearly like ringtones and LEDs. But it's like, do cool stuff with your device. Don't just like make a device and then have a splashy presentation about it.

• 20:07Alex Cranz?

  The lights need to be on the phone, not on the stage.

• 20:10David Pierce?

  Oh, I'm sorry. That's good.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  That's the title of your PR manual. Lights on phone, not on stage. Well, I mean, I think we've had a version of this conversation lots and lots of times. I've had it with Tony Fidell, right? Like every year, Apple just changed the shape of the iPod. And the underlying software was the same. But like one year it was skinny and one year it was fat and one year it was tall and one year it was colored. And one year it had little videos and the next year they made the screen bigger and had big videos. And then one year it was the iPhone, right? And they like, they just kept changing what it looked like because that gets more attention than anything any software capability can do.

• 20:44David Pierce?

  True.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  And like Apple has somewhat learned this with the iPhone. Like every couple of years, they're like, it looks different. And everyone's like, I gotta, I gotta get that one. And like until foldables really hit, I don't think that moment is coming. I think that's why all the Samsungs of the world are like chasing after foldables.

• 21:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  Cause it is a better differentiator from the iPhone than anything they can ever do on software. Like Bixby isn't, no one has ever bought a phone because of Bixby. As far as, if you were that person, did you buy a phone because of Bixby? Email Alex Cranz at theverge.com.

• 21:16Alex Cranz?

  Maybe it was the Stadia guy. It was the Android gaming guy. That's him.

• 21:22Alex Cranz?

  It's him.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  This poor man.

• 21:23Alex Cranz?

  This poor guy.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  It was a very sincere note. Thank you for sending the note. But did you buy your phone because of Bixby? Someone out there has to have, and I just want to meet you. Okay, little Pixel 6A update. They're immediately updating the software to unlock the bootloader, which is cool. But I think also says a lot about the Pixel.

• 21:39David Pierce?

  It's also already on sale.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  But the hackers add it, we'll see what happens.

• 21:42David Pierce?

  Google is just like systematically deciding to not really care if anyone buys its phones. They're just like, we're going to keep making them. They're neat, but oh, it's cheaper. It's like, it's on sale on Amazon like 15 minutes after it launches and we're unlocking the bootloader. And it's just like, they're like, we've made these things basically as development tools anyway. So just, you know, have at it, knock yourself out.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  I will say, we had, we talked a lot about Zuckerberg and Meta and Zuck turning up the heat and sending out a note. And poor Gary from Chicago. Gary, if you're out there, man, I hope you found a friend with a boat. Soon, I sent an email to Google being like, we need to get better at this. We're not as productive as we should be. They're doing this thing called simplicity sprints where like Google employees are being asked to simplify how Google works and like be more productive. Like the heat's on at Google, too.

• 22:33David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  And I think some of this like flailing around the pixel is going to become a casualty of it. Because there's no point to it right now. Like, I don't think Samsung is afraid of the pixel. Just don't like, it's not a useful hedge against Samsung doing Bixby, which is like, kind of what it existed for. And they spent, what, a billion dollars on HTC? Has that paid off? Have they made it? Have they made that money back in pixel? They have.

• 22:58David Pierce?

  Probably.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  So I think over the next couple of years, or however long this not a recession recession lasts. Right? This is where you would expect people to squeeze because all of their money is in search in YouTube. They make no money and like basically anywhere else.

• 23:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Nilay Patel?

  Like their cloud division doesn't make money.

• 23:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. And there was a great, I forget who wrote it, but somebody made a very convincing case in a, in a blog post that Google is smart to keep throwing money after cloud because it's like, this is the sort of land grab moment and market share is really easy to get right now and is really hard to lose over time. So it's like, okay, Google's probably correctly going to continue to lose a lot of money on cloud for the foreseeable future. But it does this thing every once in a while as a company. Like there was that, I think it was Larry Page who wrote a thing forever ago that was like more wood behind fewer arrows or something. It was like this big blog post where they essentially announced the same thing, right? They're like, Google is this giant sprawling company full of people who do basically whatever they want all day. And then we ship it no matter what. We're going to stop being like that. And then they sort of slowly become that company again.

• 24:00David Pierce?

  And now they're going to try to stop being that again. And they're like combining all of their many messaging apps into a slightly more confusing, but smaller set of messaging apps. And like.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  I will say thank you to them. We got to write the headline of the year because they did it. It's very polite. Uh, I'm just going to read it to you now. Google meet meets duo meet with meet and duo, but duo isn't going into meet.

• 24:21David Pierce?

  It is a perfectly accurate headline, too. Every word of it is exactly correct. It's so good.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  That's a hundred percent what's happening and random like Google people like were tweeting it being like, it's happening.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you want what happened was like a thunderous dunk on this strategy.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  It was very strange, but yes, Duo is becoming Google Meet and they're killing the meat app over. I don't know. Chris Grant, who's the, you know, he's like the SVP of the Virgin Polygon. He called me that and he always calls me on Google Duo because he has Android phone. The service in half the bed, he always calls me into it, whatever. Usually my phone rings. This time every Google Home in my house rang and my phone did not ring. And I'd like run across the room and answer him on a Google Home and be like, I don't know what's going on. And he calmly goes, oh, this happens all the time. Just call me back.

• 25:13Alex Cranz?

  And he still does it.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  It was great. Loved it. Love every minute of it. Last little bit of gadget news, kind of like a hot week for handheld gaming.

• 25:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  Alex, like a lot of gaming, handheld gaming news went down.

• 25:25Alex Cranz?

  There, there, there was a lot. Logitech announced exactly what I've been wanting, which was a dedicated cloud gaming handheld device. We, we know almost no details about it, but it's coming. And if Logitech is doing it, a lot of other people are probably going to do it. Unless it's like the last great idea they had, which was remotes for your home theater. And then they killed them. So hopefully it's not that, but they're working with Tencent Games. It's Logitech G, which is like the smaller kind of sub-brand from Logitech that does all of its gaming hardware and stuff. Usually pretty affordable gaming hardware.

• 25:58Nilay Patel?

  So this makes perfect sense to me, right? If you are like, okay, it's a cloud gaming product, then you don't have to worry about your GPUs.

• 26:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Nilay Patel?

  Your mega hertz, your RAMs, you're like, whatever, we're just going to pump Stadia or Luna or Xbox Game Pass into this thing. And all the hard work isn't happening on their servers.

• 26:17Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  So we need a pretty good display. We need enough connectivity to make it go. Which is like pretty commodity stuff now. Like you just call Qualcomm or whoever up.

• 26:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  MediaTek is foaming at the mouth right now. On this thing. And you know, we need great buttons. You can see like the Logitech G division is like, dude, we're really good at buttons.

• 26:36David Pierce?

  We're so good at buttons. They're like the perfect company to make this. I'm so excited about this for that exact reason. It's like, I'm very curious if it ends up, there's like the Switch look, there's like the Steam Deck look, and then there's, there's the 3DS look, and then there's the thing where it's just like a basically an Xbox controller with a little screen above it. There's like a million ways you could skin this, and I'm very curious how it goes. But I feel like if anybody can do this very simple, just stream the thing to my buttons thing, like, it should be Logitech.

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm like, they were probably like knocking on the door of a CEO, like Bracken Daryl, the CEO, they're like, dude, the button thing is gonna pay off.

• 27:08Alex Cranz?

  We did it.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  We've been waiting. The button people are freaking out downstairs. They wanna come talk to you.

• 27:15Alex Cranz?

  I bet it could, like, they could just gut a bunch of old PS Vita's, and that's it. That's all they need. Just gut it and put in like, a good wifi chip.

• 27:24David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 27:24Alex Cranz?

  It's got a nice display.

• 27:25Nilay Patel?

  That would be amazing, actually.

• 27:26David Pierce?

  Yes, that's such a good idea.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  Were you a Vita person?

• 27:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. I've got one.

• 27:31Nilay Patel?

  What'd you play on your Vita?

• 27:32Alex Cranz?

  The thing that's like Tomb Raider, but with dudes. Uncharted.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  That's also an accurate description of Uncharted.

• 27:44Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 27:45Nilay Patel?

  I was never a Vita person. I always wanted one, but there was nothing there. It was like, these, none of these games are for me. I don't know.

• 27:51Alex Cranz?

  I bought it, like, used for like a hundred bucks with that, and I think Gravity Rush came with it. I played both of them, and it's still sitting in a box somewhere. Like, I did it, and I was like, okay, yeah, that was a cool use of a hundred dollars. Hack it up, put it away. I think it even has like 3G on it and stuff. Never used it.

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  You should figure out, this is like a very Alex Hands project, figure out if you can like hack it and get it to run Plex.

• 28:15Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  And then you should run your entire Plex system off your PS Vita.

• 28:18Alex Cranz?

  I don't wanna do that.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's what you need. Like, it's like in a place of honor, you're like, that's my Plex server now.

• 28:25David Pierce?

  And you can call it a Logitech Harmony Remote.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  The Logitech thing comes in an interesting time because Nintendo's saying Switch sales are dipping, mostly chip shortage, but it's also about that time, right?

• 28:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  We've been expecting a Switch Pro for a minute. There were lots of rumors last time around, it didn't happen. It's like, it's about that time. I would also say Breath of the Wild 2 coming out in March.

• 28:48Alex Cranz?

  Hopefully.

• 28:49Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. On the other hand, they've got this thing called the Orion, which is just one of my favorite hacky peripherals. We should just do the full, the rest of the show on the Orion.

• 28:58Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's so silly. It's basically just a display that clips onto your Switch.

• 29:04Alex Cranz?

  It eats your Switch.

• 29:05David Pierce?

  It's like a television that you put on your Switch.

• 29:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're all describing the same thing. You take your Switch, which has a screen, and then you plug it into a bigger screen and like clip it in there.

• 29:18Alex Cranz?

  A bigger, worse screen.

• 29:22Alex Cranz?

  720p, but it's bigger, so it's gonna be uglier. And it's like noticeably a cheaper screen than even the original Switch.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  Look, America loves a big, cheap screen. Also, it's 768p, my friend.

• 29:36Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  There's 48 more Ps in this thing that you had better account for. It looks very silly. I love it. I love a, I love a silly hardware hack. This reminds me of those old magnifying glasses people used to put over their gay boys.

• 29:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:50David Pierce?

  Do you guys remember the Asus Transformer, my favorite gadget of all time?

• 29:54Nilay Patel?

  Was that the phone that went into the computer?

• 29:55David Pierce?

  No, it was the phone that went into the tablet. It had a little flap on the back of the tablet that you literally stuck the phone into and then you had a tablet. Uh, this is that, but good and not stupid and bad. It's very exciting.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  It's not that, really.

• 30:11Alex Cranz?

  Is it, is it not stupid?

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  What it is, is a big, cheap screen. It's like an HDMI monitor with a sillier form factor that you can plug your Switch into.

• 30:20Alex Cranz?

  I do like that it's got, it's got places for the handles. You can, or for the Joy-Cons.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but then it has handles for the Joy-Cons, so you can hold it, because it's a big, cheap screen.

• 30:28Alex Cranz?

  And it's also two pounds. With the games in it, it weighs over two pounds. So you can just do like little presses, little, little hammer curls while you're playing. Get those biceps working.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, all right. I mean, tiny little biceps.

• 30:44Alex Cranz?

  Tiny little biceps with your.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  I've got some Nintendo Switch Orion biceps.

• 30:49David Pierce?

  But wait, can I just complain about the Switch for a minute here? Because I've had a, I have a Switch that I've had for a while and it like sort of periodically reenters and leaves my life depending on games. Like, I'll get very into Mario Kart and then stop playing Mario Kart for a year. But so I dug it out the other day and was like, okay, what I'm gonna do this time is I'm gonna dock it into my, I have, I have a. Monitor with two HDMI ports. One is my computer. I was like, I'll dock it in the other one. And then when I have, you know, five minutes to kill, I'll switch it over and play some Mario Tennis. Love this idea. Huge win. I bought a third-party dock that just flatly didn't work. Then I bought another third-party dock that didn't work. Then I eventually like conned Nintendo into like letting me buy a dock from the official Nintendo store without buying the entire new

• 31:32David Pierce?

  Switch. I was able to actually buy a dock, which is very exciting. But that dock doesn't come with the Nintendo-approved AC adapter, which is apparently crucial to the integrity of the Nintendo dock. And now I have to buy that, which is also being complicated. And I've just, I've just gone down this road where it's like, it's just, it's a USB-C port that plugs into the wall. Like, I have 100,000 of those in my home and I'm not allowed to use any of them. And it's just driving me absolutely insane. Like, this is the kind of thing that it's like, it should plug into an HDMI port, and it should plug into a USB-C port, and everything should be wonderful. And instead, it is the opposite, and it is driving me absolutely insane.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  USB-C is the future, David. And I won't have you denigrate it on this program. It works perfectly every time. And every port, regardless of function, should look like a USB-C port.

• 32:19David Pierce?

  It is the universal cable, for sure.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  Definitely always does exactly what you think. Alright, that's enough. We're gonna take a break, and then we're gonna figure out what happened to HBO Max. When we come back, we'll talk about it.

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• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Warner Brothers Discovery earnings are up. They lost some money.

• 33:57Alex Cranz?

  A little money.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  HBO Max lost some domestic subscribers, gained some international subscribers. They've got a screenshot of the flight attendant here, so I think the flight attendant's safe.

• 34:05Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  They got a screenshot of the Batman in here, one of the silliest movies ever made. They're making a sequel of that. Joker 2 got a casting announcement today. All right, so like, the basics are in place.

• 34:17David Pierce?

  I'm sorry, how did you skip over 90 Day Fiance? You can't skip 90 Day Fiance.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  Or, you know, Street Outlaws was one of their, that's what this says, Street Outlaws was one of their best launches. So I need to apologize to everyone karmically. Last time on this program, I said HBO Max is ticking closer to zero on the Go90 scale than 90, and then immediately all hell broke loose.

• 34:39David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, that's just clearly my fault. So if you don't remember, the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services, you start at zero, and then you can go 90, which means you die. Like Go90, the dead streaming service from Verizon, it started with an idea that teenagers would form gangs on their cell phones to make YouTube videos. I don't know, it was a bad idea, they died. They went 90. Quibi went 90. HBO Max was doing great. Like, I think it was people's favorite streaming service.

• 35:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, despite being bad app. Like, the app itself is garbage.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  But the content is good. People, people like the shows. F-Boy Island, a great show. And just putting that energy in the universe, it is hilarious. So we said we complimented HBO Max.

• 35:22Alex Cranz?

  We shouldn't have.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  Little did we know, the new corporate overlords, Discovery Communications, now known as Warner Brothers Discovery, tagline, "The stuff dreams are made of," that's their real corporate tagline. It's true. I'm not even remotely kidding, would realize that they had spent a bunch of money on HBO and the rest of Warner Brothers, which you might remember was purchased by AT&T for some reason. Do you remember what it was?

• 35:49Alex Cranz?

  No, to kill film struck.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  Uh, to kill film struck. No, AT&T bought Warner Brothers because their idea, this is true. They said this to a judge in the trial that the Trump DOJ filed to block the merger because Trump was mad at CNN. They were like, this is a deal about the vision of the future where we're going to take Game of Thrones and turn it into bite-sized content for cell phones. And then they quickly realized, no one on any side of that equation thought that was a good idea. And they were horribly in debt.

• 36:19Alex Cranz?

  Jeffrey Katzenberg thought it was a good idea.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  No, even he wasn't like, we should do that to Game of Thrones.

• 36:25Alex Cranz?

  But he tried on with Quibi.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Quibi was like, we're going to turn the phone sideways. That shit went 90, you know? Like, fine. So then AT&T is like, crap, we're in a mountain of debt. Uh, also our various 5G promises came to nothing. Whoops. Uh, so they flipped Warner to Discovery in a secret deal. Underlying this, by the way, the old CEO of AT&T had left. And the COO who did all the deals for him became the CEO. And that guy, John Stankey, immediately started selling all the things that he'd been made to buy as COO, which is incredible, right? Like, your boss is like, go buy DirecTV. And you're like, fine. And then you become the boss, like, that was stupid. Like, real things that are happening at AT&T.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  So now Discovery owns Warner Brothers. They own HBO Max, the whole big bet on the future of streaming. And then like this week, chaos starts breaking loose. Because the Discovery people have taken over. So like the first thing they did was they canceled the launch of CNN Plus like 20 minutes after they launched CNN Plus. So that's a mess. And then the rumors this week are like, they're going to CNN Plus, HBO Max.

• 37:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  And then Alex, they did a bunch of like attack stuff, right?

• 37:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, they've been doing stuff for a while, like David Zaslove, who is the CEO, he was the CEO of Discovery. He basically built Discovery, acquired History Channel. Like he made that the big giant empire it was, it is now. He was part, he like helped create the deal, obviously, to acquire Warner Brothers. And for him, it was always like, I want to get HBO because he's a linear TV guy. So he wants like HBO is like a big crown jewel if you're still one of the three people in linear TVs. And he's one of them. So he's like, I want that. And he didn't really understand streaming, as evidenced by the fact that they launched Discovery Plus and about 20 something million people have subscribed to it, even though it's

• 38:15Alex Cranz?

  $5. Like they, and they like throw it at you, I think, if you're on T-Mobile. They're just like, here, have some Jeff. What is his name? It's Chip and Joanna. Have some Chip and Joanna. Just enjoy. So he, he bought it and then he, he obviously killed CNN Plus. He thought it was a stupid idea. And like as soon as the merger was closed, he was like, all right, you're done. Then he went and he started killing all these shows on CW, which is a joint venture between Viacom and Warner. So he started killing all those shows, which also had the added effect of hurting Netflix, because a huge part of Netflix and CW's revenue stream was their relationship.

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  That's an ice cold move.

• 38:52Alex Cranz?

  So like kills off all these shows. Just like, oh no, Riverdale's ending. I guess they're going to stop a comet with superpowers. That, that really happened on Riverdale.

• 39:01Nilay Patel?

  Riverdale quickly lost the plot, I would say.

• 39:04Alex Cranz?

  They use superpowers.

• 39:05Nilay Patel?

  One guy got murdered. At the end, they're like, we are teenagers and we are definitely fighting a comet.

• 39:10Alex Cranz?

  And like, I think there's another season still left, but

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good.

• 39:13Alex Cranz?

  But it's, that's the end. Then it's gonna be over. And then this week, they killed Batgirl. Like, I mean,

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  How dare they?

• 39:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, how dare they? But they were gonna do HBO Max. It was gonna be on HBO Max. It was gonna be part of this big DC Universe. They were bringing Michael Keaton back to play Batman. And they were like, gonna introduce him into the whole wider universe to basically replace Ben Affleck. And there was gonna be a whole bunch of stuff in the flash about why they were doing that. But it was all gonna start with Batgirl. But they, they got rid of it. And it was really weird because they were super inconsistent on why they killed Batgirl. Because they're just putting it in a vault. It's basically done. They've spent like 90 million dollars on this film.

• 39:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the movie's over.

• 39:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  They've, they've shot it.

• 39:55Alex Cranz?

  They shot it. They were in editing. They weren't finished, but they'd already done like some screenings of it. It was in like a fine place. I think it was like an adequate film, it sounds like.

• 40:06Nilay Patel?

  But they made it to stream.

• 40:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was specifically made to be a streaming film. It was never gonna be a theatrical release.

• 40:12Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 40:13Alex Cranz?

  And so they then put it in the vault and they initially say, well, we're putting it in the vault because it's such a bad film. It is so awful that no one can ever see it. And it's like, but we, we've seen so many terrible Warner Brothers films. Like,

• 40:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:27Alex Cranz?

  Batman versus Superman exists in the world. You can watch it right now. And I really find it hard to believe anything can be as bad. But that was the original thing. And then Deadline reported a couple hours later that, no, it wasn't because it was bad. It was fine. It was actually because they wanted to do some weird tax stuff. Because they're in a lot of debt. Like when they created this merger, they, they acquired over 55 billion dollars in debt. And their stock isn't trading where it needs to be when you have also 55 billion dollars in debt. Like normally, okay, a company wants to have a bunch of debt. And as a publicly traded company, fine, it can do it. But if it has too much debt, then people will get scared. So they're trying to get rid of a little bit of that debt. There's like three billion of it they want to get rid of.

• 41:09Alex Cranz?

  And so everybody is claiming now that like getting rid of Batgirl was helping with that. And that canceling this stuff is going to help with it.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  You're in this world where we don't know what the future of movie theaters is going to be. But we know reliably, the big superhero movies will make people go to movie theaters. Why in that world would you say, we're going to make Batgirl a tiny streaming movie? Instead of a blowout theatrical release that'll make a billion dollars?

• 41:37Alex Cranz?

  Well, that was part of like Jason Keilar, who was the the former CEO of Warner Media. That was his strategy. His strategy was, we're going to have really, really big movies, but we're going to put every single movie we make, big or small, on to HBO Max because we're not just competing in theaters.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Day and date.

• 41:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, day and date. Because we're not just competing with theaters, we're also competing with Netflix. And so if we want to have like, if Netflix is going to go do The Gray Man and do these big theatrical releases, but just on streaming, we want to do that too. And we also want to build out our entire like universe because we still have like, they've been struggling for years to compete with Marvel.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  So this is where I will disclose that we made a Netflix show.

• 42:19Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm an EP of a Netflix show. I will say this disclosure, then I will also say The Gray Man is bad. And is like the ultimate definition of like the tent pole streaming movie.

• 42:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like, streaming movies have a vibe and The Gray Man is the most that vibe.

• 42:35Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like it, they were just like, whatever, you're going to be looking at your phone. So like this exposition, we didn't finish writing it. You know?

• 42:43Alex Cranz?

  Look up when there's loud explosions. You'll have a great time.

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like you can tell like movies made in the theater are designed to like, hold your attention the whole time because they assume you don't have your phone. And movies made for streaming are like, you probably have your phone.

• 42:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  Like you left the room to go to the bathroom. These three minutes didn't really matter. Like. It's the stuff between explosion, like every streaming movie is like this.

• 43:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  But like, why would you make Batgirl, which theoretically could drive people into the theater? I don't know. That's a weird decision.

• 43:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think it was like a weird decision at the time because I think their calculus for like Jason Keilar was, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna make this and people are gonna be so excited about Batgirl because she's, she's a big superhero. Like her, her comic books sell very, very well. Like she was, she's kind of, when you think of DC comics and you think of like women superheroes, you're like Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Harley Quinn.

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like, like she's big. And so I think they were like, oh yeah, we're gonna do like tent pole, but cheaper and on a TV. And so they shot basically a very expensive TV movie. Like by all accounts, it looked like it was for TV. And so it was too small to go into theaters. And Zazlov was like, well, let's just get rid of it. Let's just put it in a vault.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  And so, but then they, they took in a bunch of other stuff off the service.

• 43:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a bunch of other stuff has disappeared from the service, but it's still available. If you want to go buy it and watch it, or you want to go rent it and botch it, you can still do this. There's a lot of rumors that like part of this was also to get back at Jason Keilar. Cause like Zazlov apparently didn't like him. And so part of this is like, well, I just want to like stick it to the last guy.

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  That's some real Hollywood stuff.

• 44:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So there's like some Hollywood backstabbing, plus the accounting stuff. Plus apparently it was like a deeply adequate film.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough. So those are like the pre-shocks of the earthquake, right? All this stuff is like early in this week is like Batgirl went away and you're like, I'm, I'm gonna drag myself into caring about Batgirl because I care about the streaming industry. And then yesterday into today, when the earnings came out, but it hasn't even happened yet, the rumor mill goes wild.

• 44:45Alex Cranz?

  Absolutely wild.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  Zaz is gonna shut down HBO Max.

• 44:49Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  Or like fire a bunch of people on the HBO Max originals development team. Put all the money into like Street Avengers or whatever reality shows he's making.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  And then he's going to merge the apps into a super app. But then you don't have to worry because Casey Bloys, who's the head of HBO is actually going to have more power. So he's not going to kill all the good stuff. I'll tell you, the Westworld subreddit went nuts yesterday.

• 45:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  The Westworld has one season left and they're like, do not cancel the show. It's a mess. Fewer people are watching it. This season's very good, I will say that. But they're just like, the Westworld people are freaking out that they will, this mess will not come to a conclusion because no one knows what's going on.

• 45:31David Pierce?

  We should say, one, one useful piece of context here is that Discovery has basically been telegraphing this move for six months.

• 45:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:37David Pierce?

  Even before the merger was finalized and Discovery wasn't like allowed to say out loud what it was definitely for sure going to do with this new combined company. It was like very loudly hinting, uh, to the point of not really hinting at all that this, their, that their ultimate plan was to, their CFO at some conference basically said, we think the future is a combined app. Like it has been, it has not been unclear that this was the plan all along. And I think it's sort of a branding mistake to think that Discovery is like a cooler, shinier thing than HBO, if indeed that is where this goes. But like their whole pitch was always, we think we can do the like appointment television and do the like while you're watched, while you're folding laundry stuff in one service

• 46:20David Pierce?

  and that that's going to be the thing that like most closely mirrors how people actually watch TV and might be a huge hit. And there's like a version of that that makes a lot of sense to me. It's just that now they seem to be running around killing everything that costs more than $15 an episode to make.

• 46:34Alex Cranz?

  Well, I don't think they really are. Like I think, I think Zeslov is like, he's been very clear from the beginning what he was gonna do. He's, he was very clear, like, we're gonna cut back on this content. We are not going to spend as much content as our competitors. That's a dumb thing for us to do, especially when I can like throw $5 at somebody buying a new house and get a season of television out of them fucking it up. So like, uh, he, that's not a direct quote.

• 46:58David Pierce?

  There's literally a show on HGTV called Help, I Broke My House. It's a thing.

• 47:06Alex Cranz?

  But like, so, so they knew that they were, like, he's been saying for months what they were gonna do here. And I think what really scared people was this Batgirl thing, because this is super unusual to put a film back in the vault when it's that close to being finished. And the last time we saw that happen was in another merger, when Disney acquired Fox, they get ahold of the new mutants, and they're like, what the hell is this? It's like a horror film, and it's got like X-Men references, but it's not really X-Men, and they're fighting a bear. This is stupid. We're throwing it in the vault. And then they eventually released it, and it was fine. But that doesn't usually happen. And for them to say, we have zero plans, there is no chance this is ever coming out, this is going in the vault, it will remain unfinished, it's gonna sit here for eternity, is really,

• 47:50Alex Cranz?

  really, really uncommon. And I think that's what started to scare people. Because like, yeah, everybody knew that this merger is coming. They knew that like, Discovery Plus and HBO Max are eventually gonna become one super app. Presumably HBO will be the primary point there, because it has, like, almost three times as many users as Discovery Plus.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  But we don't know if they're gonna keep that name.

• 48:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, so we don't know the name.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  It seems like unlikely that they will. So after all of this, HBO Now, HBO Go, HBO, HBO Max originals, Cinemax, which existed and had its own platform called Max Go, this is a real thing, they did all this work and made people understand that HBO Max existed, and they're like, we're gonna take it away.

• 48:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And they're just being super confusing this week, too, right? Like, like, he also said repeatedly, we're gonna do this, we're gonna merge this together, but we don't, we have like nearly 100 million subscribers, and we don't want to confuse them. And instead, we're going to cancel our show, like, cancel stuff, start quietly pulling things, be like, well, yeah, I mean, we're probably gonna merge them together, but now Chip and Joanna Gaines from Fixer Upper's, which is this huge part of the Discovery empire. Are now gonna, they're gonna have a bunch of their stuff on HBO Go, or, excuse me, on HBO Max. And it's just like, it's super confusing and it's super, I think scary for a lot of people who have watched these things happen before, who have watched these like films get pulled and, and lost and

• 49:19Alex Cranz?

  stuff they really like get canceled. And usually the stuff that's getting canceled happens to be the stuff that's, I don't know, the cast is primarily people of color, or the, the filmmakers are primarily people of color. Or the subject matter is especially like about more diverse communities and that marginalized communities. So I think there's a lot of that like general anxiety. And the guy's just not talking. I mean, presumably he's gonna talk.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  So they, they can't talk before earnings?

• 49:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  So now earnings are out. So you would expect in the next couple of days, there's gonna be the big announcement that HBO Max and Discovery Plus have been merged into Disco Max Plus.

• 49:57Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 49:57Nilay Patel?

  Whatever they're gonna call it. It's gonna be great. And we'll see what happens. There are deeply conflicting rumors about the, whether there's gonna be like layoffs inside of HBO.

• 50:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we've seen, we've seen some people say there's gonna be like 70% layoffs. Most of the people saying that I would not usually say are like hit home runs every time. I would take that with a grain of salt, but then I would also take the people who are like, nothing will change with a grain of salt. I think change is coming, change is already happening. We're seeing it. We're seeing these plans be put into place. And we're seeing like, I think if you liked HBO before this, it is not going to be the same service. Whatever name it gets, whatever con, like the content is about to start radically changing. You're gonna start seeing a lot more fixer upper.

• 50:44Nilay Patel?

  If they don't finish Westworld.

• 50:46Alex Cranz?

  You will burn it to the ground.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna lose my mind. I'm gonna lose my mind.

• 50:51Alex Cranz?

  It's like, I think if they cancel that, Our Flag Means Death is another one where like teen girls from Tumblr will just appear outside of Zaslav's house, ready to murder him if they cancel it. Like this, there's some, some high stakes drama.

• 51:06David Pierce?

  The thing about this that's so weird to me is like, this is now the second company in a row that has taken HBO and been like, wow, so cool. You make amazing shows, your hit rate is better than anybody. Congratulations. Let's systematically destroy the systems that allow you to do that. Like when Stanky became the CEO of AT&T, he was like, okay, HBO, y'all are awesome, great work. I need you to do three times as much stuff with much less money. Can you do that? And they were like, well, no, that's not, that's not how HBO works. And now Discovery is going to be like, okay, we want to be just like HBO, still just as shiny, but with more Chip and Joanna Games.

• 51:43David Pierce?

  Like, why do you, why buy HBO if this is what you're gonna do?

• 51:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, they didn't buy HBO, they bought Warner, right? They bought the fancy movie studio and CNN and HBO and TNT. Like HBO is like one, just like tiny, expensive thing, whose entire revenue stream was like premium cable subscriptions. And that's going away. And so they, like, to compete with Netflix, they did need more volume. But they like, all the AT&T stuff aside, they executed on that strategy. This is why, like last week, I was like, they're, they've ticked their way away from 90. I think we put them at like 20 or 30 last week. Little did we know.

• 52:20Alex Cranz?

  Like they're the third largest, I mean HBO Max right now, third largest streamer in the, in the United States. It's doing very, very well. And Discovery Plus, nowhere near the third largest. It's behind, I think even Hulu and, and like.

• 52:33David Pierce?

  Well, on that point, one, one thing to note here is that, uh, already Discovery is not breaking out the subscribers between the services. It is only reporting a combined subscriber number, which is like, gonna start to make whatever it wants to do with all this weird stuff. That is one useful thing to do if you want to make the numbers look better than they actually are for your weird streaming service that you just folded a much more expensive streaming service into.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. Okay, two more quick things on streaming than we had to take a break. One, trademarks for a TikTok music app, which is really interesting. Obviously, music is huge on TikTok. The music industry loves TikTok. That's how they break songs. You'll notice songs are getting way shorter because they're just TikTok length now. Fascinating. We'll see. This reminds me of when Sujan Wajewski at YouTube ran or used to run around saying YouTube was a music service. Because the data inside of YouTube showed that people were watching tons and tons of music videos. But that did not mean that they wanted YouTube music. So like the the view of the data inside YouTube was like, we're a music service. And then you would like say it to normal people and everyone would be like, what are you talking about?

• 53:41David Pierce?

  Well, wait, okay, hold on. I would, I agree with that, except that A, YouTube music is more successful than anything. And B, YouTube never connected the dots. They built this thing that it's like, if you go watch them, if you go watch a music video on YouTube, your ability to then like save that album to your YouTube music library does not exist. It's like, they like, they built the two sides of the thing and then just kept them as far apart as they possibly could. And what I've heard from people in the music industry over the last couple of years is that like, TikTok is this amazing music discovery engine that doesn't convert at the rate that they want it to. That like Lizzo being the biggest thing on TikTok doesn't transfer to people streaming the whole album in the way, like on Spotify, in the way that those people would want it to.

• 54:24David Pierce?

  And so if TikTok can actually be the one to bring those things together and be like, oh, you like this song, here's this album. That becomes like a hugely powerful thing. No one has done that successfully. So I'm not positive it'll be easy. But like, there's a, there's a big win to be had there if you can be the one to actually put those two sides together.

• 54:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but TikTok also just burns a track to the ground. Wait, I don't need to hear that Lizzo song for a while.

• 54:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, but that's that's culture now. That's what we do. We listen to one song at a time and we all listen to it 24 hours a day until we're done.

• 54:56Nilay Patel?

  It's just very linear. All right. Here's this week's song. That's all you get. Move on. Um, I saw a stat, I was talking to Ariel, uh, who writes Hot Pod for us, catalog music, which is like songs that are older than 18 months, ever increasing share of all music streams. So people are listening to older music and less newer music. So the music industry is desperate. Like it's like 70 something percent up from like 50% a few years ago, like crazy jump in people just listening to older music, partially because like TikTok can also break a Stevie Nicks song. Like Fleetwood Mac is hot again. It's like, where did that come from?

• 55:30David Pierce?

  Kate Bush, man. Running up that hill is like the biggest song in the universe.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like Kate Bush was like, oh, TikTok, that happened to me. Stranger things. Like it all just like combined. But it means that old music now is as discoverable or valuable as new music. New music is harder to break. TikTok is how new music breaks because it's just the way it goes. So we'll see. I think it's fascinating. I would not say Spotify or Apple have like innovated on the music listening experience since they came out. Maybe a little competition would be good. Uh, last one, this is just for me personally, very funny. Just because Roku is such a complicated company. Roku is an advertising company. So Roku makes the boxes and then like every dollar that flows through the box, Roku gets a cut of, just like Apple on the phone or Google on the phone. Roku actually just hired its first lobbyist

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  to go lobby against the privacy bills and the antitrust bills because it has the same problems as Apple as in Google, which is really fascinating. Um, but their numbers are down because they sold fewer boxes. But because they sell the boxes for nothing, because all the money is in advertising, their actual revenue hit when they sell fewer boxes is they get fewer license fees for the buttons on the remote.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  So they're like, revenue is down in hardware because they're not selling as many remotes and thus collecting fewer fees from Netflix, Apple, Hulu, whatever, for the buttons on the remote that those services buy.

• 56:53David Pierce?

  You mean the like dedicated app launcher ones, right? Like those four at the bottom that are like?

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  That's their hardware revenue. Their hardware revenue is not in the hardware. It's in the buttons. And they actually had to call it out being like, our button revenue has suffered this quarter because we've sold fewer boxes. Incredible. Very good. All right. We gotta take a break. I'll come back. We're gonna do a little, little lightning round. We'll be right back.

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• 58:26Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Lightning round. First, I gotta call this out. I really put this Lucid story here so I can just complain about the Jeep. So Lucid Motors, high-end EV company, really fancy car, Lucid Air looks great. They slashed their forecast like by 50% for production. They're gonna make 7,000 cars this year.

• 58:44David Pierce?

  Did you see Elon Musk tweet that he had more kids in Q2 than Lucid made cars? Like really genuinely like an all-time great Elon Musk tweet.

• 58:52Nilay Patel?

  That's great, actually. That's like a great Elon tweet.

• 58:54David Pierce?

  Really good.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Whatever, like they make 7,000 cars and they cost like $120,000. Again, I want to say the Jeep Grand Cherokee Hybrid with battery.

• 59:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  They announced this thing last year. It's still not out. It just won an award from a German magazine for best off-road vehicle. The car doesn't exist.

• 59:13David Pierce?

  It's very off-road.

• 59:16Nilay Patel?

  It's so far off-road. They keep announcing the thing. I'm in the forums, people are like holding candlelight vigils to get their plug in hyper Jeep. One day it's gonna come out. It's gonna be great. Speaking of Tesla, Elon Musk, Twitter, A, we got a trial date. They're gonna start October 17th in Delaware. There's gonna be a fight to the death on the Verge team over who gets to go to that trial. It's gonna be great. We're gonna livestream it.

• 59:45Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  Not the trial, but the fight about the trial. The pre-fight, the pre-trial fight to cover the trial. Great. Get your popcorn ready. So that starts on October 17th, but now because Elon's money is so tied up in Tesla, Tesla is now drawn into it. It's just a mess. This thing needs to settle. Like Twitter wants all of Tesla's docs and like they're doing discovery in Tesla because all of Elon's money is Tesla. Messy. Everyone should settle. Okay. And then a little GM news. GM, which has also shipped approximately zero electric cars. Just putting that out there. They've got a couple of bolts, but you remember the bolt had some fire problems.

• 1:00:27Alex Cranz?

  You know.

• 1:00:27Nilay Patel?

  It's back.

• 1:00:28Alex Cranz?

  Batteries are hard.

• 1:00:29Nilay Patel?

  Discounted the bolt to try to move it. They've got like two or three hummers floating around. They got a renderer of the Silverado. Anyway, GM says by next year, they're gonna be shipping more in Tesla. But as they build up to this, they're announcing all this stuff. And they're saying their autonomous vehicle strategy is superior to Tesla's Super Cruise. They're doubling its coverage to 400,000 miles of highways. They've got Ultra Cruise coming next year, which will cover 95% of driving tasks. So they're out on LinkedIn saying that their approach to safety with Super Cruise and Ultra Cruise is superior to Tesla.

• 1:01:02Alex Cranz?

  I mean, if they don't do a public beta, then they're correct. Like if they're not putting their autonomous driving as a public beta that anybody can can do and drive around with, that is significantly safer than what Tesla's been doing.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, there's so there's this great term in the industry called autono-washing, where you pretend you're autonomous, you pretend your car is an autonomous vehicle. It's just a great word. Like honestly, we should just use it more. We should be like, that's a ton of washing. And basically, the argument boils down to Tesla called it full self-driving and GM called it super cruise. And so people understand it's just fancy super like cruise control. It's a great interview. Andy Hawkins did it with the GM folks, the chief engineer of autonomous vehicles, GM, like all this stuff is like happening, but it's all a lead up to GM saying very soon it will become the number one supplier of EVs. And so they're just picking their spots, but they've not, nothing. They just ship it. Nothing exists. They've got to ship some cars.

• 1:02:03David Pierce?

  And then Cruise is out there doing its like robot taxi thing in San Francisco. It's like, it's, it's been like slowly bubbling for a long time and you kind of keep waiting for it to be like, this is the moment. And GM keeps kind of being like, it's almost, it's almost time. It's almost time.

• 1:02:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17David Pierce?

  And at some point, it's going to have to be time. Can I just say, by the way, that measuring the number of miles available to your system is like maybe my new favorite meaningless statistic of all time. It's like, in terms of like what that means to your actual life, that means nothing. We're, we have 400,000 miles of roads, literally could not mean any less to my ability to actually use this feature. It's nothing.

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, also your comp is Tesla, which is like, I know, it'll work on any road. Like, let's see what happens.

• 1:02:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, it either will or it won't.

• 1:02:50Nilay Patel?

  Your life is in your hands. The Tesla experience. Yeah, well, I mean, I just think it's funny to see the traditional carmakers come at it, but I think it's hilarious. There's nothing. I cannot act on this information. I cannot be like, yes, that sounds great. I'd like to buy a GM vehicle, a GM EV with super cruise. You cannot do that. You can buy an Escalade with super cruise, the opposite of an EV. Like, I'd like to burn one Tesla's worth of carbon to go two miles, but it drove itself on 400,000 miles of roads by itself. It's just very, like, the Jeep thing is like, to me, the funniest. It's just hilarious. It's the same drivetrain as the Wrangler with ships. The Wrangler, by the way, the

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  most popular hybrid in America, and it's so popular that people are making serious money buying them from dealers and immediately flipping them on Carvana. And it's like, It's a good idea. The engine in the other car.

• 1:03:45David Pierce?

  Okay, so counterpoint, if you're already winning awards, what's the point of shipping your car? Like, isn't it just all downside for Jeep at this point? It's like, never ship it and be legends. Like, it's, that's the dream.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  We should start giving car awards for most announced cars.

• 1:03:59David Pierce?

  That's a very

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  The Cybertruck is America's most announced pickup truck. Who can like send an award to Elon?

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  Last couple of things, some weird FCC mysteries this week. We got a battery powered Google device in the FCC and what looks like a new Echo device from Amazon. You know, we're coming up on the holidays. Seems like refreshes for home stuff from the ambient computer companies are coming.

• 1:04:26Alex Cranz?

  October will be so fun.

• 1:04:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's the matter moment. I like, one of the things that I think is that because matter is coming, there's going to be a like level of public interest in this stuff because just a lot of people are going to be talking about smart home. So even if all you have is like a teeny tiny upgrade on the thing that you already make and the thing that you already make perfectly supports matter, just like having a new thing. I suspect a lot of these companies are going to like gin up new things to have at this moment because it's like the first interesting smart home moment in a really long time. That's and that's what all this stuff seems like to me is Google's like, what if we took our speaker and changed it ever so slightly? Would you be interested in that?

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And now it's better. It's smart home stuff.

• 1:05:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Nilay Patel?

  Same with the Amazon, the Amazon one we had, it's been like, we spent hours on this with our team because Amazon files for its FCC listings with fake companies. It has like shell companies it uses to hide things from us. It didn't succeed this time, Amazon. The shell company was called Flake LLC. So we'll see what that is. It's called a digital media receiver and it has a power plug and a Zigbee radio. So we'll see. I think you're right. I think the matter moment is here and a bunch of new hardware is coming out. As soon as Apple releases its next set of devices, you know, like we're all in on matter. Like the ecosystem is there and Google, which theoretically supports Thread, at least in the hubs, with the newer hubs, like everyone's just going to race into it and be like, new hardware is here. We got to change the way it looks to support the software because

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  no one cares, whatever. Last one, I think David, you added this. We reviewed the Sony Inzone M9. Which is a gaming monitor that's like really a TV. I have but one thing to say about this.

• 1:06:04David Pierce?

  Go ahead. I mean, I basically put this in here because I think like we we've talked about it a couple of times on the show, but it's like, this is a moment where people are making good monitors and trying hard to make good monitors. And I think we should celebrate that here on the Vergecast. Like, we get a lot of shitty screens here on the Vergecast and people who make good monitors should be celebrated for trying to make good monitors.

• 1:06:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is like a fine monitor.

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  Well, this is, I think the big deal here is Sony hasn't been in this space, right? Like Sony doesn't make monitors. They make really, really good TVs, but they don't make monitors and especially gaming monitors. And this was one of their first like big ones. It's similar to the one I'm in fact using right now from LG, which is similar specs, similar price. Mine's great, by the way, very uniform color, no vignetting on the sides, whereas this guy has a bunch of vignetting. It's, it's, it's got some, some bad color uniformity. And if you're spending $900 on a monitor, it should look nice.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  It should look nice.

• 1:06:58Alex Cranz?

  It should look nice.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  But it does have HDR, it does have 144 Hz VRR, it has low latency. Like, it's TV stuff, spec for a monitor.

• 1:07:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And it sounds like Sony used some of that, like their smarts in the TV space for processing and stuff to do better processing on this monitor. So like, the HDR is a lot nicer than you would normally see on like, I do not have the HDR on on my LG monitor because it's garbage. It's like just useless to use it. Whereas this would actually be useful. So if they can like improve the quality of the panels themselves, that's cool. Go Sony.

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So this is my one thing that I have to say about this monitor. For this price, Sony was able to deliver full array local dimming with multiple, multiple zones, right? Like 96 dimming zones, which Apple was not able to do at like $1,700 on the same size panel in the studio display. And like, that, it's just like, this is the feature you need.

• 1:07:54Alex Cranz?

  But it doesn't have an iPad built into it.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  It's true. It did, it does not have a mediocre camera built into it.

• 1:08:01David Pierce?

  Well, this, I will say, this review gave me hope that like the second version of this might actually be pretty good because there's a bunch of little things like Cam was annoyed that they didn't ship video cables in the box, which for a $900 monitor, I absolutely agree with. And there's, there's little things. It's like the stand isn't great. It doesn't do good enough pass through. The stand looks ridiculous. It looks like a little baby PS5. And then because that isn't enough to hold it up, they like, and also some other little tripod legs. Yeah, it's insane. It's like they designed it and then it fell over and somebody just like propped it up with the first things that they could find. And they were like, that works, ship it. But then, so like, all that stuff is like stuff you saw of in the second one, right? Those are like first monitor weirdness. But the, it's, the panel thing

• 1:08:43David Pierce?

  is weird. Like Sony knows how to make good displays. So the fact that this one wasn't better was, was a bummer. Because you would think if Sony is going to get one thing right, it would make a good screen.

• 1:08:53Alex Cranz?

  Sony doesn't always make its own displays. Like, its OLEDs are really, really good, but they're not making the OLEDs themselves. They just have far superior processing and stuff on, on the LG OLEDs. And we saw like, kind of the same thing when Sony started getting into that OLED space really aggressively. The first few iterations of the Sony OLED was like, not worth your time and money. Just way too expensive for what you were getting versus the same thing from LG. And then it improved a whole lot. It got really, really good. And now like, you should probably consider a Sony OLED instead of an LG OLED. And that could be the same thing with this. Like, the LG monitors are perfectly fine, but there is not, like, the monitor space in general, there isn't a lot of thought given

• 1:09:35Alex Cranz?

  to processing. There isn't a lot of thought given to like, local array dimming, any of that fun stuff that we're seeing in TVs. So having that trickle down and having somebody who's proven that they're good at it, doing it is like, I'll be optimistic about that. I'll be excited for round two.

• 1:09:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:51Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be fun.

• 1:09:52David Pierce?

  I mean, for so long, it was like, do you buy the really expensive LG screen or the really crappy Dell screen? And just the fact that there's more things to do now in computer monitors makes me very happy. Like, competition is a good and valuable thing.

• 1:10:04Nilay Patel?

  The scent looks ridiculous. And I'm just saying the competition should be adding more full array local denning to computer monitors. That's all I really want.

• 1:10:10Alex Cranz?

  What do they want you to do? Do they want you to put the PS5 next to it? And how do you put the PS5 next to it?

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  Look, if you're pull over in your car right now and just like, look at this thing, be like, why did they make this choice? It's very confusing.

• 1:10:21David Pierce?

  The power move would be to make it so that you can take that part out and put your PS5 in, and it's also the stand for a monitor.

• 1:10:27Alex Cranz?

  That would have been cool.

• 1:10:28Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 1:10:29David Pierce?

  And then you can carry it around with you with the Joy-Cons.

• 1:10:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, we've gone over. That's enough of this.

• 1:10:38Alex Cranz?

  That's it. We're done. Goodbye.

• 1:10:40Nilay Patel?

  Calling it. If HBO dies before Wednesday, we'll do an emergency podcast. If not, we'll cover it on Wednesday. Speaking of Wednesday show, this last Wednesday, y'all talked sailboats, solar generators and Starlink, which is pretty good. About working from anywhere.

• 1:10:54David Pierce?

  It's very fun.

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  It's work from anywhere week at The Verge. So like, there's lots of cool coverage on the site on how to work from different places and what working from home means in this very weird post pre next pandemic time.

• 1:11:06Alex Cranz?

  Monkeypox.

• 1:11:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this mid pandemic period that we're in, pandemic interstitial. And then our homeland package is back with the second round of stories. It's very good. We've got a great story called "The Most Revealed Place in America", which is about the wall and just the enormous amount of cameras and sensors that are pointed at this like one strip of America. It's really, really great story. Go check that out. And then next week on Decoder, I talked to Tarek Amin, who is the CEO of Rakuten Mobile in Japan, the world's only functional ORAN network. They sell some components of it as part of the thing called Rakuten Symphony, Rakuten Symphony, a vendor for Dish Network. So I asked him, how does ORAN work? Like, what's going on here? What does it mean to be a cloud-based 5G network? He is a very charming man, and my dude loves some ORAN technology.

• 1:11:53Nilay Patel?

  So that's next week on Decoder.

• 1:11:54David Pierce?

  That episode is 11 hours long.

• 1:11:56Nilay Patel?

  It's very rarely that I'm like, five minutes into an interview, I'm like, I'm already out of time.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  I've got to stop this train. But it's a great episode. It's like the right mix for Decoder between like think fluency business stuff and then like in the weeds hardcore product stuff. Do you know Rakuten Mobile, their operating cost because of a run 40% cheaper than the other networks in Japan?

• 1:12:21Alex Cranz?

  Are they part of the Rakuten who does the books?

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  Yes, they're like, you know, they're basically like the Amazon of Japan. So their model is like you buy Rakuten stuff, you get points and you can spend Rakuten points on other parts of the Rakuten ecosystem.

• 1:12:34Alex Cranz?

  Get your Kobo e-reader.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  Neelai, you just, you just let Alex talk about Kobo. We have to end the show.

• 1:12:39Alex Cranz?

  You did this.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm ending this.

• 1:12:41Alex Cranz?

  You did this.

• 1:12:42Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's it. That's enough. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless, Alex is Alex H. Krantz, Pierce is at Pierce. Again, if you are a hardcore Android phone gamer, let Alex know. That's all she wants to hear.

• 1:12:53Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 1:12:54Nilay Patel?

  We'll see you next week or assuming HPMX was up on our Verge podcast. That's it. That's our chat. Back to you.

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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