Pod Insights The Vergecast Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked August 2022 biggest announcements About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler to discuss all the announcement from Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event this past week.
Further reading:
HBO Max will be replaced next year by a new service combined with Discovery Plus
Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked August 2022: the five biggest announcements
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 gets a little extra polish, but it’s still $999
The new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 is a little better and still too expensive
Here’s how the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 compares to last year’s Z Fold 3
Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked is a foldable party of one
Samsung still hasn’t given us a good reason to buy a foldable phone
Samsung goes big on battery with the Galaxy Watch 5 series
Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 2 Pro: more comfortable design and hi-fi audio
Google tries publicly shaming Apple into adopting RCS
Disney Plus’ Premium streaming price is rising to $10.99 per month
Disney Plus’ ad-supported plan will launch in December
Disney Plus and Hulu are getting steep price hikes
Gmail is now officially allowed to spam-proof politicians’ emails
Ethereum’s big proof-of-stake blockchain switch could happen on September 15th
Apple’s next iPhone might be more expensive
AirPods cases with USB-C could be in the cards for 2023
Battery percentage finally returns to iOS 16 and it’s hideous
Sonos has delayed the release of its next product — likely the Sub Mini
LG Display’s 97-inch OLED panel vibrates to create ‘cinematic’ 5.1 sound
Call 866-VERGE11 (866-837-4311) to ask The Verge about this week's Samsung announcements. We may answer them on Wednesday!
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Transcript 17,432 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Today on The Vergecast, the team breaks down the Galaxy Unpacked event, and we're sorry to inform you, Disney Plus not winning the streaming wars. Of course, we'll get into all the gadget news from this week. That's coming up right after this.
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.
1:53 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast with folding phones. You wanted it, you got it. One hour. Phones that flip in half. Phones that open up back up again. Phones that turn into tablets. That's all we're... No, we're going to talk about a lot of things. I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here.
2:10 David Pierce? Hi, I'm just here to tell you that phones are cool that don't fold. My whole phone doesn't fold. I'm good.
2:19 Nilay Patel? Alex Cranz is here.
2:20 Alex Cranz? I'm your friend that loves to open the phone with just like one thumb.
2:24 Nilay Patel? Just like do a.
2:25 Alex Cranz? Just boom, pop.
2:28 Alex Cranz? I'm trying to think of what the noise is.
2:30 Nilay Patel? Okay.
2:30 Alex Cranz? Cause I haven't used a flip phone in so long.
2:32 Nilay Patel? In 1999.
2:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
2:34 Nilay Patel? I purchased a cellphone called the Sony Zuma CMZ 200. It's the best phone ever made.
2:40 Alex Cranz? Okay.
2:40 Nilay Patel? It was. Sounds like. It was amazing. I bought a used one. I have one at my house, like a perfect condition one. Do you know how you talk about this all the time? It had a stock to open. Like the mic flipped down from the body of the phone.
2:53 Alex Cranz? Yes. Never mind. This is a good phone.
2:56 Nilay Patel? And so when it had the Sony jog dial, so it had like a, you know, had a multi-element LED display to like.
3:02 Alex Cranz? I love it.
3:03 Nilay Patel? The text. So you'd like scroll to a name and then if you could get it exactly right, you could make the call by flipping the stock open.
3:08 Alex Cranz? Yes.
3:09 Nilay Patel? And then when you were done, you'd be like.
3:11 Alex Cranz? Oh my gosh.
3:12 Nilay Patel? And I practiced that move so many times.
3:15 Alex Cranz? Like in the mirror? I gotta look cool.
3:17 Nilay Patel? I was like scroll and flip, baby. And my friends in high school were like, one, why are you the weirdo with the cellphone? And two, stop saying scroll and flip.
3:28 Nilay Patel? But I have it again. It was the best. No, look, scroll and flip. Let's do this. And my all-time top five cellphones.
3:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
3:35 Nilay Patel? Sony Zuma CMZ 200. Just putting it out there. Scroll and flip. I feel you. Richard Lawler is here, by the way. I do exist and I have bad news about streaming.
3:47 Nilay Patel? It's true. So we have been remote for a million years. We're all together in the studio today, which is crazy. It's literally never happened. It's gonna be the one we were.
3:55 Alex Cranz? The first, the first time.
3:56 Nilay Patel? We were just sternly told that we can't talk over each other because Andrew can't fix it in post like he can when we're all apart. So this one's gonna be nuts. But Richard is actually in town. I don't think he's been with us in person since you started at The Verge. Over a year now. That's crazy. But if you want to go all the way back to like Engadget Podcast days, Richard and I worked together at Engadget. I used to see you in person all the time, but it was at like CES at like three in the morning. I'm like, there's Richard. My feet, I need to lean over and touch the ground. Richard is here. But it's good to see you in person. We're all here. There's a lot going on. I want to start with a little update.
4:33 Alex Cranz? Okay.
4:34 Nilay Patel? There's a Samsung event we got to talk about. There's folding phones. There's Disney is happening. There's a little gadget lightning round, but we got to start with an update. Last week, we talked about HBO Max, maybe dying, maybe living. Who knows what's going to happen? We said, when there's news, we'll have an emergency podcast. You had may have noticed, we had no such emergency podcast. Because the news was like just a devastating nothing.
4:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
4:55 Nilay Patel? It was devastating and they announced that they will eventually kill HBO Max.
4:59 Alex Cranz? Right.
5:00 Nilay Patel? Sometime next year, but for now, everything is cool.
5:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's all going to go on Discovery Plus's stack. So if you hate the HBO Max app, good news.
5:10 Nilay Patel? So does the CEO of Discovery.
5:13 Alex Cranz? He also hates it. If you hate the HBO content, bad news. He also hates it.
5:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
5:18 David Pierce? No. It's so expensive.
5:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
5:19 David Pierce? It's so much cheaper to just like rebuild houses in Texas than to do other things.
5:25 David Pierce? Game of Thrones is way more expensive than that.
5:27 Nilay Patel? They did have this slide where they talked about their franchises and they were like Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and then the 90 Day Fiance Universe. This is a real thing they put on the slide. It was incredible.
5:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah, those were not good slides. There was like the male skewed males, apparently. You guys, you guys love plots.
5:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
5:47 Alex Cranz? You love scripts. Female skewed. We, we just love reality. That's not true, though.
5:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
5:54 Alex Cranz? I got to send a note, but it was great.
5:56 David Pierce? If nobody's getting married this episode, Alex is not.
5:59 Alex Cranz? I'm out. I, I, I turn the TV off, fling the remote.
6:02 Nilay Patel? So what they've decided to do is they are going to merge HBO Max and Discovery Plus. They haven't decided what it's called.
6:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
6:08 Nilay Patel? They're going to have a new app. It's like all the content from HBO Max on the technology of the Discovery Plus app.
6:16 Speaker 05 Is the Discovery Plus app good? Does anyone know?
6:18 Nilay Patel? No, see, the thing is, it might only be perceived as good because it never crashes, but that's because no one uses it.
6:24 Alex Cranz? Yes.
6:24 Nilay Patel? That's like, I, I think that might be the mistake they're making. But they seem to like it.
6:28 David Pierce? It's fine. Yeah, like it is definitely possible that there are just 12 people using it and so it's not a problem. But like the app is fine. It's not the like trash heap that HBO Max is. So that's good.
6:38 Alex Cranz? Well, we think that, right? Because HBO Max, people actually use it.
6:42 David Pierce? No, but the thing when you go to load HBO Max and it's like, oh, would you like to see some thumbnails for the shows you're watching? Come back in 30 to 40 minutes. Like at least Discovery Plus doesn't do that.
6:51 Alex Cranz? Right. No, I'm saying that's because no one uses it. Like if you
6:55 David Pierce? Maybe.
6:55 Alex Cranz? If it has 50 more million users, everybody, get everyone you know and everyone else you know to subscribe.
7:02 Nilay Patel? Pull over your car and subscribe to Discovery Plus right now.
7:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah, log in.
7:05 Nilay Patel? Promo code is decoder.
7:08 Alex Cranz? See if it works. Let us know. Report back.
7:10 Speaker 05 Could it, could it actually hold up to a Game of Thrones premiere night? Ever?
7:14 Nilay Patel? We don't know. They think it will. So like I said, it was, this news, as you can hear, was not worth an emergency podcast.
7:21 Alex Cranz? Yes.
7:22 Nilay Patel? But it is true that they're going to kill HBO Max, the app, and then relaunch it, maybe still called HBO Max on a new technology platform. And then that will also have the content of Discovery Plus.
7:30 Alex Cranz? I think it's going to be HBO dough.
7:33 Nilay Patel? I mean, they do love the stupid names. Again, this is a company and they decided that their new corporate tagline is the stuff dreams are made of. Which is the Discovery Plus app.
7:42 David Pierce? Just call it 90 Day Fiance, the streaming service.
7:45 Nilay Patel? We'll come back to streaming because we got to talk about Disney, Disney, all kinds of stuff happening with Disney and Disney Plus. But let's start with the gadget news of the week. Big Samsung event, Unpacked 95 or whatever it was called.
7:57 David Pierce? A lost track.
7:58 Nilay Patel? Unpacked August 2022 is the actual name of it.
8:00 Alex Cranz? That's 95 is better.
8:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
8:02 Alex Cranz? Send a note. Samsung.
8:04 Nilay Patel? Unpacked 1000. They announced a bunch of stuff. David?
8:08 David Pierce? Yeah. So it was, this is like, they do two unpacks every year. And the one is like, here are all the phones that regular people want to buy. So they're like, here's the Galaxy S and here is when like the Note is no longer a thing because that used to be their off time. But anyway, so the February event, I think it's February, is usually the one where they're like, here's the phones for regular people. And then this is like, here's the weird stuff we're building in Korea. And that's essentially what this was. So they announced the Z Fold 4, which is the phone that folds open. There's the Z Flip 4, which is the flip phone. Go on, I'm ready.
8:42 Alex Cranz? It folds open?
8:44 David Pierce? It folds open.
8:44 Alex Cranz? They both fold open?
8:45 David Pierce? They do both fold open. One folds and one flips, technically.
8:48 Alex Cranz? Okay, sorry, sorry.
8:49 David Pierce? There's the Z Flip 4, which is just a flip phone, because the clamshell flip phones are coming back, as Nilay said, you can scroll and flip.
8:55 Nilay Patel? Scroll and flip, baby! It's back!
8:59 David Pierce? And then there's the Z Fold 4, which is the one that's like a big, long candy bar that opens up sideways into a tablet. And that's like when people talk about foldable phones, the Z Fold is basically the one that everybody talks about. It just like is the foldable phone that exists in the world.
9:13 Nilay Patel? I don't know about that. I see more flips.
9:15 David Pierce? Really?
9:15 Nilay Patel? Because they're so much cheaper.
9:16 David Pierce? They are a lot cheaper. So yeah, the Z Fold 4, I think, is 1,700 bucks, and the Z Flip 4 is $1,000, which is like not a lot in the fancy smartphone world, but for the Z Flip is, for like a foldable phone, is kind of cheap, but it's like the same price as an iPhone. But I don't think I've ever seen a Z Flip in the wild. Do you see these?
9:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, uh, for Samsung. I was at the doctor's office, the reception had a Z Flip 2 or 3, unclear which one. And I was like, "Oh my god, you got a Z Flip." And she was like, "I hate it."
9:46 David Pierce? Oh no.
9:47 Nilay Patel? Instantly, no thought.
9:48 David Pierce? Why?
9:49 Nilay Patel? "Why?" And she's like, "Well, I have TMO, well, there's not good service here." And I was like, "Well, that's not the phone." "Do you hate the phone? Do you like the phone?" And she's like, "Oh, also it loses all my text messages, and my daughter has an iPhone, she can't text me." And like, we never really talked about the phone. We talked about the
10:01 David Pierce? Right.
10:01 Nilay Patel? the universe of feelings that networks and messaging platforms have, which really is like what we always talk about. I was like, "Oh, you should come on the Vergecast." Uh, but it was like an immediate, like, "I hate this phone." Like, "I wish I had an iPhone on my Verizon."
10:16 David Pierce? Fair. Yeah, I mean, somewhere someone at Samsung is like, "None of this is our fault, we're so sorry."
10:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that
10:20 David Pierce? Take it up with Google.
10:21 Nilay Patel? 1,000%, right. Like, I was like, "But do you like the flippy?" She was like, "Yeah, it's fine, but I don't have any service, and I can't text my daughter." Like, at some point, that stuff is way more important than whether you have like a sky-blue metallic folding phone, which is like, I would be like, "That's all I want."
10:36 Alex Cranz? Isn't that why, like, the iPhone does so much better?
10:39 Nilay Patel? Right, because it has a proprietary messaging service.
10:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like everybody's like, oh, it just works.
10:43 Nilay Patel? We'll get to that.
10:44 Alex Cranz? Sorry, sorry.
10:44 David Pierce? Literally will get to that.
10:45 Nilay Patel? The Dieter Bone Memorial RCS segment is coming on the Vergecast. So those are two phones. I will say that the Z Fold 4 is like still ridiculously expensive.
10:55 David Pierce? Yes.
10:56 Nilay Patel? It's like $1,800.
10:56 David Pierce? Yes.
10:57 Nilay Patel? And it's a very iterative improvement.
10:59 David Pierce? Yeah, it's like, it's in sort of a weird spot where it's like now the Z Fold 4 like basically is as good as Samsung's other phones, which sounds like a small thing to say, but it's actually kind of a big deal. Like it has, it has good specs. It has like a slightly less good camera than like the S22 Ultra, which is it's, you know, the note replacement's super high-end, 6.8 inch, it's a monster of a phone. But it's like roughly as good as the rest of Samsung's phones, which has not been true of the Fold before. You used to have to make like weird sacrifices for, you know, durability and the camera was a lot less good and they've like slowly but surely brought that stuff up. And now it's like, it's funny that we're to the point where foldable phones are just like iterating every year, but this seems to be where we are. It's like, they're like, yep, we did it. It folds now. It doesn't break
11:44 David Pierce? the first time you try to open it like it used to, so that's good. But then, yeah, it's just weird. It's like before anybody even started really using these things in a mainstream way, we're already at like a mature foldable market. It's very strange.
11:56 Alex Cranz? It's just Samsung though, right?
11:58 David Pierce? Of one, yeah. It is, yeah.
12:00 Alex Cranz? And that's because it's, there's still like a little crease when you open it, right?
12:05 David Pierce? Yeah, the crease doesn't really bother me.
12:07 Alex Cranz? Is the film still there? Like if you remove the film, does it still explode?
12:11 Nilay Patel? No, you are not meant to remove the film.
12:13 Alex Cranz? I know.
12:14 Nilay Patel? I think they've, they've landed on a treatment of the film that does not suggest it is removable.
12:19 David Pierce? Right.
12:20 Alex Cranz? Excellent.
12:20 Nilay Patel? And that is the solve.
12:21 David Pierce? It no longer looks like a screen protector in the way that it used to.
12:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
12:24 Alex Cranz? Shrimp.
12:25 Nilay Patel? But the screen replacements are much cheaper now. It's like $29 if you have the Samsung plan. It used to really, whatever the Samsung extended warranty is. So like they've entered into a territory where they're, to David's point, they're just normal phones.
12:39 David Pierce? Yeah.
12:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
12:40 Nilay Patel? And I think especially the Flip 4, which is $1,000, it's got flagship specs. It's got an S22 camera in it, the right processor, a bigger battery. It's like, oh, that is kind of like Samsung's flagship phone.
12:54 David Pierce? Yeah.
12:55 Alex Cranz? That's the one I'd get because you can put it in your pocket.
12:57 Nilay Patel? You can put it in your pocket, but the fold, the fold four still exists is like the monster that will usher in a new paradigm of computing. And I think actually all the attention belongs in the flip four.
13:08 Alex Cranz? Yes.
13:08 David Pierce? I totally agree. I think the flip four is like what phones should be. Like I'm, I'm, I want my current phone to stay the way that it is, but also be smaller and not be annoying when it's sitting on a desk. I want to be able to close it. That makes me very happy.
13:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:21 David Pierce? Whereas the like, I got in a bunch of trouble because I wrote this story yesterday about, uh, I just don't really think there is a point to the fold as a thing. It's like, you can have a big phone or you can have a slightly bigger phone that's also much thicker and way more expensive. Like, can I interest you in that? No, I just, I, but then a bunch of people got really mad at me because they were like, no, it's, it's a big screen. You don't understand. Big screens are magic.
13:44 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but it's an Android tablet.
13:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah. If it was an iPad mini that you folded it in half, I would buy it in a heartbeat for less than $2,000. I would probably not buy it actually for $1,800.
13:57 David Pierce? So it's kind of like, do you want, do you want an iPad mini that folds to be the size of an iPhone? Or do you want an iPhone that folds to be the size of an Apple Watch?
14:03 Alex Cranz? I want both because they're different things.
14:06 David Pierce? Fair.
14:07 Nilay Patel? Wait, okay. Walk me through the, I want an iPhone that folds into an iPad use case.
14:12 Alex Cranz? That's what Dan does with his. So Dan Seifer.
14:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah, he's got a fold three.
14:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And he just like sits there and he opens it up and then he watches like all of Halo on it. Because his wife is like, we are not watching that on the TV. You can watch it as you go to bed at night. And that's, that would be my use case. Like, I just want to be able to be like, have it in my purse.
14:31 David Pierce? You can do that on is every other phone that exists.
14:34 Alex Cranz? But big.
14:36 David Pierce? Not really. It's the, so when you fold out the fold four, it is a, it's a 7.6 inch screen.
14:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:43 David Pierce? Which is like bigger than your phone for sure.
14:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:46 David Pierce? But is it like life changingly differently big from your phone?
14:50 Alex Cranz? I'm gonna, so I've got a bunch of purses.
14:53 David Pierce? Liam, our producer is nodding vigorously at you right now. Liam, who I would remind you bought a Z fold and then instantly returned it.
15:04 Alex Cranz? Twice.
15:05 Nilay Patel? It's like not life changingly enough.
15:06 David Pierce? Yeah, exactly.
15:07 Nilay Patel? Like life changing has many stages.
15:10 Alex Cranz? But but you can put it like if you have the fold, you can fold it in half and then you can put it in a smaller purse.
15:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
15:17 Alex Cranz? Then you could a regular tablet.
15:19 Nilay Patel? But the reason you'd want it to be an iPad.
15:21 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
15:21 Nilay Patel? Is because then you would get the world of iPad software.
15:24 Alex Cranz? Right.
15:24 Nilay Patel? And instead, what you get is the world of Android tablet software.
15:28 Alex Cranz? That's why I don't have one.
15:29 Nilay Patel? Okay, just like, okay, so then walk me through the I have a regular sized phone that folds into half that size.
15:37 Alex Cranz? Pockets.
15:38 Nilay Patel? Pockets.
15:38 Alex Cranz? A lot of us do not have pockets that like work. I'm wearing some pants today and they work and it's great. You guys didn't have to hear me talk about it because I bought these pants not yesterday. But anytime you get a pair of pants and you can put your phone in it, it's like a huge event. Like you text your friends and stuff.
15:54 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
15:55 Alex Cranz? And so like having a phone that you don't have to text your friends because you got new pants. Game changer.
16:00 Nilay Patel? Okay, I mean, I buy all of it. It's just to me, the I have effectively stopped using my iPad because my phone is so big.
16:07 David Pierce? Same.
16:08 Nilay Patel? I'm like, there's not a lot that I want to jump up to iPad size on. And the last time I did it, I was like, all right, I'm gonna there. You know, there's a TikTok iPad app. So I was like, all right, like I scroll through this a lot. I'm gonna put this on this iPad. And I was like, oh, TikTok compresses the video for phones. So this is an objectively worse experience.
16:25 Alex Cranz? Oh, yeah.
16:26 Nilay Patel? The video looks horrible.
16:27 Alex Cranz? And I will still spend I had to delete TikTok because I just like opened my iPad mini and just like whoop.
16:31 Nilay Patel? Oh, so I didn't try it on a mini. I tried it on like a nine point seven inch iPad.
16:35 Alex Cranz? Even worse, even worse.
16:37 Nilay Patel? It's like a garbage iPad we had lying around.
16:39 Alex Cranz? And you have to like flip it to the right side. It's terrible. I hate it.
16:42 David Pierce? Richard, you have spent today talking about the two laptops that you use and the 49 inch monitor that you sit in front of all day. So I feel like you are a person who appreciates screen real estate.
16:53 Speaker 05 I love I love screen real estate, not necessarily on my mobile device.
16:56 David Pierce? Okay.
16:56 Speaker 05 And I'm fine with it being small. What I would like in a foldable phone is number one, what if it gave me iPad like battery life if I didn't have to charge it every day?
17:04 David Pierce? Okay, into that.
17:06 Speaker 05 You hit that mark.
17:06 David Pierce? Fold doesn't do it, but I'm into the idea.
17:08 Speaker 05 Or better yet, if it folded two different ways and it had a keyboard and it was called the Motorola MPX.
17:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
17:15 Speaker 05 And you would sell me one right now, I would give you all of the money I have for it.
17:19 Nilay Patel? Or the Nokia communicator.
17:20 Speaker 05 Yes. That I'm into, but what they're doing, the flip is interesting. I like being able to close my phone and hang up a call. That sounds good.
17:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Also, the flip, when you close it, you open the camera, the selfie camera, because it's got that screen on the front back. There's a screen next to the cameras. It has a name that I'm blanking on, but there's a screen on the back. That becomes their selfie camera, and you can preview on that screen. And I love the idea of a high-quality selfie camera.
17:48 Speaker 05 And the way it kind of carries it around its own stand, that you can have it mounted, you know, you can have it just sitting on the desk, like an L shape, sort of. Like, I like that idea. I don't know how good that is in practice, but the idea of it sounds good.
17:59 Alex Cranz? Wasn't that the entire thrust of the presentation from Samsung? They were just like, you know what's cool? L shape.
18:06 Nilay Patel? No, this is like every company that makes anything that can fold is like tent mode.
18:12 Alex Cranz? Where was the tent mode?
18:15 Nilay Patel? Like, all those, like, Intel two-in-ones for the longest time. Like, what you want is a tent.
18:20 Alex Cranz? Because you're cooking?
18:21 Nilay Patel? The future of computing is a tent shape. We need you to believe this and buy an Intel base two-in-one.
18:29 Speaker 05 I bought the XPS two-in-one. It folded. I used it in tent mode once. It was bad. It overheated. The battery life wasn't as good. It was a bad idea.
18:39 Alex Cranz? Why did you use it in tent mode?
18:41 Speaker 05 I was in the kitchen. You're supposed to be able to use it that way. You should be able to have a recipe up, and you can scroll through it with the touchscreen. It's going to be great. It wasn't great.
18:49 Nilay Patel? And what if you had a smaller phone in tent mode, huh?
18:53 Alex Cranz? No, it's L mode. They don't do tent mode. So it's a little L mode. So you have to, like, get down there, squint at it.
19:00 Nilay Patel? So it is true that Samsung is like the only mainstream provider of mobile phones in this country. They've got the two. Like, carriers discount the flip all the time. Like, that's the, you can get discounts on the fold, like, but they are mainstream products. Like, this is what they're launching. It's funny, because Moto was really, remember they did that whole Razer stuff with all the influencers and the thing? It didn't flop. And so this week, at the same time, Moto has, like, launched a new Razer only in China.
19:28 David Pierce? And we missed it. This is how, like, it launched and we didn't notice.
19:32 Nilay Patel? They didn't tell us. They were like, ah, like, a few hours later, like, by the way, we launched a new Razer in China.
19:39 Alex Cranz? Does that, like, how many phones did they have to sell in the United States? You'd just be like, no, we're not even going to tell anybody.
19:45 David Pierce? Six.
19:47 Nilay Patel? By the way, the new Razr has a flex view mode, so you can open the screen halfway.
19:51 David Pierce? Yes.
19:53 Nilay Patel? This thing kind of feels like it's a flip. So it has a bigger screen in the front, 2.7 inch cover screen. The flip is, that's the name of it, by the way, the cover screen. Well, the flip is a 1.9 inch. Because it's bigger, it has like a full notification interface. It's got a widget on here that looks exactly like an iOS widget. But same sort of like 50 megapixel camera with optical stabilization, 13 megapixel ultra wide. It's like, this is another flagship phone. It just seems like, it seems like only Samsung is like willing to make this bet and maybe not get market share because they've got market share all the way at the low end. And all the competition here is at the low end of the market now.
20:33 David Pierce? Yes.
20:34 Nilay Patel? This is kind of depressing.
20:35 David Pierce? There's just no upside to trying to pick the fight anywhere else. Like, it's, it's just, everybody is set in what they have. And it's like, part of the reason I think flip phones are interesting is it feels like most people who are not that interested in like reinventing their phone experience are not gonna go for the phone that folds into a tablet thing. But if it's like a phone that looks and feels like my phone, but I can close it and put it on my desk, like, that's a thing I think people will like intuitively understand and it doesn't blow up my life to use it. So I feel like if I was gonna bet on either one of these to like actually make noise in the like world of phones kind of across all of the different price points, that's the one I would bet on.
21:14 Alex Cranz? Is a flip phone less breakable? Like, when you throw it? Like, if I threw my phone at something, like, ah, I'm scared, and threw my phone at something, it would shatter. But if I had a flip phone and it was closed and I threw it?
21:25 Nilay Patel? I think in general, anything with more moving parts is like more delicate.
21:29 Alex Cranz? But the screen is now protected.
21:31 Nilay Patel? It's true, the screen is, but the hinge is now exposed.
21:34 David Pierce? Why are they having to use all that, all those crazy new materials to get the screen that folds? Like, I wouldn't try it, is what I'm saying.
21:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:42 Alex Cranz? Like, the, that's, I guess I can't get a flip phone because the urge to do that.
21:45 Nilay Patel? To try out throwing it.
21:48 David Pierce? You need to buy one of those, but also a Nokia 3310 that you can just huck across the room anytime you need to.
21:53 Nilay Patel? Exactly. It's a test.
21:54 David Pierce? Yeah.
21:54 Nilay Patel? This would be a great video. These are basically only renders that Moto released about this thing, but yeah, this one looks great. It's not like a real...
22:01 David Pierce? This is the thing. Like, I get flip phones. I want one. I can't explain why.
22:07 Nilay Patel? You shouldn't have one. You certainly can't have this one.
22:08 David Pierce? But I want one.
22:09 Nilay Patel? But this is the thing. Like, we should talk about, this is the Dieter Bohn Memorial RCS segment. So, uh, Google this week, full-on shaming blitz against Apple. Like, by-name campaign. It's time for Apple to fix texting. Ford Dieter did his first, like, Google executive tweet. People were like, "You work for Google now." Um, we love you, man. Uh, but like, Google's like, it's Apple's fault. Like, full-on, this isn't like a carrier thing. We ain't gotta push it. It's like, Apple needs to support RCS to improve texting. Here's all the things they're broken. It's not just green bubbles. But then there was another part where like, also the green bubbles are hard to read. Ooh. It's true. It's true. But, ooh. Fundamentally...
22:51 David Pierce? That's not the problem.
22:52 Nilay Patel? My theory has always been that foldables are, because they're a different hardware form factor, they can command interest. Like, I've probably said this on this show 100 times. Things that look different always get more interest than
23:02 David Pierce? Yes.
23:02 Nilay Patel? things that look the same with slightly different software.
23:04 David Pierce? Right.
23:04 Nilay Patel? Just true. So like, it looks really different, so it commands your attention. And then people get to the point where they're like, "Wait, I can't text my daughter. Wait, it doesn't work like my iPhone that I'm really comfortable with."
23:15 David Pierce? Yep.
23:16 Nilay Patel? "Wait, I don't, it doesn't have AirPlay." Like, whatever bits and bobs the Apple ecosystem that you're aware of suddenly don't appear for you. And you're like, "Ah, it's too hard to use. I'm gonna stick with this iPhone."
23:25 David Pierce? This is why people don't switch, because it's just not worth the effort anymore. Like, the things are, they're close enough, but not exactly the same, and it's just not worth the effort to switch.
23:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah. 100%. Do you think that if Apple went to RCS, like, this is what, I think the limit of my theory is being tested, right? That, we've talked about iMessage lock-in on the show a million times, and we've talked about people like, looking at new kinds of hardware form factors a million times. If you give them a new hardware form factor and Apple goes to RCS... Do people switch to Android in any meaningful way? Or is all the other stuff just pure lock-in?
23:56 Alex Cranz? No, because you still need iMessage. Like RCS isn't gonna fix all the problems. It'll fix some of the problems.
24:01 Nilay Patel? It'll fix group texts, it'll fix picture messaging. It'll fix a lot of things.
24:06 Alex Cranz? When somebody says congratulations and you suddenly get fireworks on your phone, it won't fix that. People will be so upset.
24:11 Nilay Patel? I mean, Google can add a... I mean, that's just like recognizing one word. Like, I feel like there's enough AI inside of Google to be like, can you detect the word "congratulations"?
24:21 David Pierce? The tap-back thing is the perfect example of that. Because it used to be if you were on a group chat with anybody on Android and you would do the like tap-back thing and hit "love", it would be like, you know, so-and-so loved, and then just quote your message, and that was a horrible nightmare. And Google just fixed that. Right, so there's like, that's the same kind of thing. They could solve some of that stuff. But no, I cannot imagine the answer is yes to your question. Like RCS does not change enough to really matter. Like, I think what RCS does is make Android better. It makes like being an Android owner in an iPhone world better. It doesn't make... It doesn't change anything about being an iPhone owner, which is, I think, why Apple doesn't really care.
25:02 David Pierce? And it doesn't change enough to make a meaningful difference to people, I don't think.
25:08 Nilay Patel? Right, because of all the other stuff.
25:09 David Pierce? Yeah, it's like, people stay on iPhones because they've paid for apps, they use like platform-specific things, they like AirPlay, they like know where the browser is, like how the notification shade works. It's like the thing, the muscle memory of using a phone is so intense.
25:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they love the feeling of getting an Android feature two years later and then saying "Apple invented it". People love that.
25:30 David Pierce? Oh, it's so good.
25:31 Nilay Patel? It's like 100 and 120-inch screens, amazing. Tim Cook invented that.
25:36 David Pierce? Games that actually work, those are fun. Love those.
25:39 Nilay Patel? You know what my current lock-in feature is? It's not true lock-in. People are gonna quibble with me that I'm like saying lock-in. It's a thing that I'm like, oh, I can't keep this up. When you copy something on an iPhone and paste it on your Mac.
25:51 David Pierce? Oh, amazing.
25:52 Nilay Patel? It's like, oh. Oh, you should just hold me tight. I'm gonna just open the garden walls and then bring the gate down and padlock them. I'm staying right here.
26:00 David Pierce? You know what's weird about that, though, is that, at least in my experience, works perfectly and it's amazing. And every other thing that Apple does where they're like, try to move stuff between your device, is garbage.
26:09 Nilay Patel? Right, because that's just moving like text.
26:12 David Pierce? But the thing where it's like, I have a browser tab open and the little thing pops up on the Mac and it's like, would you like to open this? And I say, sure. And it's like, how about a different webpage? Or it's like, I turn my headphones on and it's like, do you want to connect to all of your devices except the one that's currently ringing?
26:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
26:26 David Pierce? And it's like, hmm. But then the copy and paste thing is magical.
26:29 Nilay Patel? The copy and paste thing works. I will say the what do you want to answer your phone on intelligence? It's like rival Siri in terms of great idea, completely useless execution.
26:40 David Pierce? Yes.
26:40 Nilay Patel? It's like, what if everything in your house was ringing?
26:44 Nilay Patel? It's like, what if just my phone was ringing? But then you can't turn off because you had to turn off the little phone. I could talk about this all day.
26:50 David Pierce? We should finish Samsung, though, because there were a couple of other things announced. Speaking of headphones, there was the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro. People love the Galaxy Buds. They're like a deeply underrated set of headphones, I think. And these are 230 bucks, which is, I think, $30 more expensive than they used to be. But by all accounts, seem to be very good.
27:12 Nilay Patel? What's the Bixby integration like?
27:15 Alex Cranz? That one, that one person.
27:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah, John Bixby. Bixby made one for me.
27:20 David Pierce? Bixby appears zero times in our story about the Galaxy Buds.
27:24 Nilay Patel? I think Bixby appears zero times in Samsung's presentation.
27:28 Alex Cranz? You're worse at sneakers.
27:29 David Pierce? Samsung studiously avoids the word Android every time, which I find very funny. And I think this is true in all of these. Like, Apple says Siri less and less every time, and Samsung says Bixby less and less every time.
27:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
27:41 David Pierce? And Amazon just says Alexa more times every, every time you turn around.
27:46 Alex Cranz? Are we moving away from where they all were like, we have to compete and show our stupid AI digital assistant is the best one?
27:53 David Pierce? I think so.
27:54 Alex Cranz? We finally passed that point.
27:55 David Pierce? Well, they all now, they all now treat them as like, like if you ask Apple, Siri is not like a voice assistant, it's just like a generalized intelligence. And they're like, oh, this is what they say. They're like, the thing when you pull down the notification shade and it recommends which apps you should open, they're like, that's Siri. And it's like, no, it's not, that's my phone. Like, I don't, I don't care. We can cool about what it's named, but like Siri is the thing that searches the web when I ask for a timer. Like, that's what Siri is.
28:20 Nilay Patel? Remembering which app I open the most is not artificial intelligence, that's just a counter.
28:28 David Pierce? But yeah, so, okay, so there were the buds, which I believe Chris Welch is reviewing, and I suspect will turn out to be very good, because the Galaxy buds have been very good for a while. And then there was the Galaxy Watch 5 and Watch 5 Pro, which are, I think, 280 bucks and 450 bucks respectively. And the big thing here was more battery life.
28:47 David Pierce? I actually think the Galaxy Watch is super fascinating, because like, especially now that they've gone back to like, working with Google and doing Wear OS stuff, like the Watch 4, by all accounts, was like, really good.
28:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
28:56 David Pierce? And people really liked it, and it was like, the first thing that was like, okay, if you are an Android person and want something kind of like the Apple Watch, here is something kind of like the Apple Watch. And the 5 Pro just seemed, or the 5 and the 5 Pro seemed to just like, push that slightly forward, like, more sensors, more health stuff, because everybody's in on health stuff. The Watch Pro, I think, is enormous.
29:16 Nilay Patel? It's enormous. And it has like a touch bezel, right?
29:19 David Pierce? Yeah, they both do.
29:20 Alex Cranz? Forty-five millimeters. That's like, that's a big, chunky, chunky watch.
29:25 David Pierce? Yeah.
29:26 Alex Cranz? I used to have, I used to have like a 42 millimeter my dad gave me, and I would wear it to soccer practice in like, 6th grade, and it just took my entire wrist up. It just looked like I was wearing a large bracelet, like a cuff bracelet, it was great.
29:39 David Pierce? You used a phone on your wrist, basically.
29:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I could stop bullets with that wrist. Watch.
29:44 David Pierce? But yeah, and I think especially, like, this is coming, and there's presumably going to be a new Apple Watch soon, and the Pixel Watch is coming, and it's like, this, this is like a cool moment, where it kind of felt like everybody was giving up on smartwatches, except for Apple. And now it sort of feels like there's, there's real stuff out here happening again, which is cool.
30:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I will say that the 45 millimeter size, I'm just looking at our photos of this on our wrist, it's just like.
30:06 Alex Cranz? The one on Allison's wrist?
30:07 Nilay Patel? Monstrously huge.
30:09 Alex Cranz? You can put like, multiple fingers. I think you could probably put her whole other hand. Between, that's just huge.
30:15 David Pierce? Oh, Neel, I have great news for you. Uh, Vsong, who wrote about the, the watches, um, writes, and I quote, "After months of waiting, Samsung Galaxy Watch owners can finally use Google Assistant on their devices. Don't panic, Bixby lovers. Samsung promises all five of you that Bixby is still available on the Watch 5 and Pro."
30:31 Nilay Patel? Yes.
30:31 David Pierce? So.
30:33 Nilay Patel? If you love.
30:33 David Pierce? Neel and four others.
30:36 Nilay Patel? It's a dog with shoes. It's just here to help you out. Remember when their pitch was like, Bixby will just do settings for you?
30:41 David Pierce? Mm-hmm.
30:42 Nilay Patel? And that was the, the idea that like, our settings are so complicated that an AI dog will help you go through the settings.
30:49 David Pierce? Bluetooth.
30:51 Alex Cranz? Richard's just shaking his head over here.
30:53 Nilay Patel? Don't you have an Android phone? Do you have Bixby?
30:56 Speaker 05 Uh, I do not have Bixby. I have unfortunately never had a modern Samsung phone. The last Samsung phone, I think, was the Galaxy S2 Epic 4G.
31:04 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah.
31:05 Speaker 05 If I'm not getting it wrong.
31:05 Nilay Patel? The Epic 4G Touch 2.
31:06 Speaker 05 Yes. It was, it was a wonderful phone, but no, it did not have any AI or any dogs wearing shoes.
31:14 David Pierce? Missing out.
31:15 Nilay Patel? I think Samsung should have just taken our lead and branded Bixby as like helpful dog butler in shoes. And like, straight gone Clippy with it. And like, every time you push the button, like, here's Bixby.
31:27 Alex Cranz? That would be branding. People would talk about that.
31:29 Nilay Patel? They did. I did. I made it up and then we all talked about it.
31:34 Alex Cranz? No, but I'm thinking like Clippy, like, like.
31:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
31:36 Alex Cranz? The, the wider realm would, the realm?
31:39 Nilay Patel? The realm.
31:40 Alex Cranz? The realm.
31:40 Nilay Patel? The realm of Samsung.
31:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah, people would talk about it. They'd be on TikTok all the time. Bixby dog.
31:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
31:46 Alex Cranz? Be like a character. It'd be a meme. Get on the Samsung.
31:50 Nilay Patel? I've been telling them for years. They won't.
31:52 Alex Cranz? Paying Eli.
31:53 Nilay Patel? I know that they are aware.
31:54 David Pierce? It's your IP.
31:54 Nilay Patel? Inside of Samsung, they are aware that I think it's a dog with shoes. And like, it's just like, turn like, what do you have to lose?
32:01 Alex Cranz? Stop.
32:01 Nilay Patel? Three people are using this thing and you're giving up to Google Assistant.
32:04 Alex Cranz? Come on, man.
32:04 Nilay Patel? Just go full cartoon dog.
32:09 Nilay Patel? People should not put me in charge of any tech companies. I think that should be very obvious.
32:12 Alex Cranz? I disagree. I want the dog.
32:14 Nilay Patel? Everyone wants the dog. It's very obvious.
32:17 David Pierce? When you own the Green Bay Packers, you can make it.
32:19 Nilay Patel? You should ruin Pinterest.
32:20 Speaker 05 I own two shares of the Green Bay Packers, sir. And then we'll know what to do with our Pinterest page.
32:26 Nilay Patel? We'll figure out our Pinterest page. All right, we should take a break.
32:29 David Pierce? Before we do, one thing. So we, we're going to talk more about Samsung and foldables and gadgets and why the internet is mad at me about big screens on next Wednesday's show. And if you have questions, call the Verge hotline, which is 866-VERGE11, which is 866-837-4311, but it's just Verge11. Don't worry about it. And call us and ask us all your Samsung and foldable and phone questions and we'll get to a bunch of them next week.
32:55 Nilay Patel? Tell us your Bixby stories.
32:57 David Pierce? Yes.
32:58 Nilay Patel? Call us and be like, "One time, I couldn't figure out how to turn on a feature on my Samsung phone, and I asked Bixby to do it, and Bixby helped." I just want to hear one story like this.
33:09 David Pierce? And if you have a drawing of a dog with shoes named Bixby.
33:12 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah, please.
33:13 David Pierce? Please send it.
33:14 Alex Cranz? Email that.
33:15 David Pierce? Meow is reckless on Twitter. We all need to see it.
33:17 Nilay Patel? Hit me up. We'll just do a whole run of them on our TikTok. It'll be great. All right, we're going to take a break. When we come back, Richard's going to tell us what's going on with Disney and the streaming wars. We'll be right back.
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34:34 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Richard. Rich. RJ.
34:40 Speaker 05 I have many names.
34:41 Nilay Patel? Rick Dog.
34:44 Nilay Patel? Disney earnings this week. Good news, bad news. I was on CNBC today and they were like, "Stock is up," which means like, good news.
34:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:50 Nilay Patel? I don't know why they let me talk about stocks. It's great. But, uh, stock is up. Trey Pac, you know, he's one of the Bobs.
34:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Old Bob.
34:59 Nilay Patel? He looked as happy as he could, which is like, a medium amount of happy.
35:03 Alex Cranz? He's got that theme park money now, man.
35:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so, they're doing great. Subscribers are up, they have more subscribers now than Netflix. Disney 221 around the world, Netflix 220. Disclosure, The Verge made a Netflix show, of which I'm the EP. Fox Media makes shows with all of these companies. Comcast is a minority investor in Fox Media, whatever.
35:23 Alex Cranz? Media.
35:24 Nilay Patel? If you've listened to the show, you know that it doesn't work. The money has not dissuaded us. Disney's in a weird place. Like, they're raising prices with the subscribers are doing great. I gotta call out, Bluey, season three just hit Disney Plus, which means if you have a child, you're never unsubscribing. But it's a weird moment for them.
35:42 Speaker 05 The question of who, of whether or not this is good news, I think, uh, depends on whether or not you're a Disney investor or a Disney Plus, uh, customer. If you're a Disney investor, great news. They have more customers, they have a plan to make more money, they have a plan to be profitable on streaming by 2024, maybe. These are all the things you love to hear. If you are a Disney customer, I have bad news. You are the reason that they will be profitable by 2024, because they're raising prices on everything. They've discovered that people will pay for, I don't know, Marvel movies for all of the Disney Kids stuff. People love to watch the properties that they have. They will pay for it. Maybe they won't pay for Netflix if they keep raising the price, but they will keep paying for Disney every single time. It's great news for Disney and that they're taking advantage of it.
36:24 Alex Cranz? Well, it's still cheaper than Netflix, too. And like, I think a big part of this is they care about these bundles. These bundles are really actually good deals. Like, I looked at the bundles and I was like, oh, that's what I'm gonna do. Because you can get the Disney bundle with Disney Plus, Hulu.
36:40 Speaker 05 Is that with ads or without?
36:41 Alex Cranz? Both of them without ads.
36:42 Speaker 05 Okay.
36:42 Alex Cranz? ESPN Plus with ads.
36:44 Speaker 05 Sure.
36:44 Alex Cranz? Sure, for 20 bucks. And that basically, who cares about ESPN Plus? I'm sorry to you and my brother.
36:51 Speaker 05 PTI and me.
36:53 Alex Cranz? And I guess, oh my god.
36:54 David Pierce? Yeah, you're actually podcasting with three ESPN Plus subscribers, so...
36:58 Alex Cranz? Well, then this is a great deal for you guys, because I'm over here being like, wow, I don't care about that. That means I'm getting both of these services I do use for $10.
37:06 Speaker 05 But that's the pitch, is that they can tie together all of these things. They cover everybody. Whoever you are, they have some stuff for you. And that bundle's going to be a pretty good deal. They've really recreated the parts of the cable bundle that people wanted at a cheaper price.
37:18 Alex Cranz? At the same price that Netflix premiere bundle, or premiere just service.
37:23 Speaker 05 And if you're looking at that versus Netflix, and you're looking at what you get, and you're thinking, I'm going to pick one, you're probably going to pick the Disney one.
37:31 Alex Cranz? If you are one of the people who's spending $20 a month on Netflix, I am one of them.
37:35 David Pierce? I was gonna say, same.
37:36 Alex Cranz? Same. But if you're one of those people who's like, ooh, do I want this bundle, or do I want Netflix? And you chose Netflix, please, I mean, don't call me, but like...
37:45 Speaker 05 Well, there's a number they can call.
37:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah, call that number.
37:47 Speaker 05 866-VERGE-11. Just hit the number.
37:49 David Pierce? There it is.
37:49 Alex Cranz? Tell us why. I wanna know why you're doing that. Yeah.
37:52 Speaker 05 So here's what I'll say. The ESPN Plus thing is like, it is valuable in very short windows. Right? Because it's not really ESPN. However, the World Excel Championships were recently broadcast. This is a true story. You watch them on ESPN Plus. In football season, weird right stuff. NFL primetime, which is like the best NFL clip show that happens at the end of every day before the Sunday night game, or end of every Sunday before the Sunday night game.
38:16 Nilay Patel? ESPN doesn't have the rights to broadcast it because NBC has the rights to all highlights on broadcast on Sundays, but they got the rights to stream highlights. So it's on ESPN+ So that alone is worth it for that one chunk of time.
38:32 Alex Cranz? Do you, like, what about the actual games?
38:35 Nilay Patel? Right. What you're doing during the games on a Sunday is napping. You're in the dull roar of a football game.
38:42 Speaker 05 Or if you're a Lions fan, crying.
38:43 Nilay Patel? And then you wake up and you, while you eat dinner.
38:48 Alex Cranz? That's not how we do it in Texas. Like, that's like a three hour event. If I call my dad at any point during a Cowboys game, he gets so mad. So I do it multiple times and then like, oh, I'm sorry. I forgot the game was still on.
38:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
39:00 Alex Cranz? I know it's at least three hours.
39:02 Nilay Patel? But ESPN has just figured out how to, it's definitely three hours. If you call me at any point during a Packers game or Richard during Lions game, there's a lot, there's a lot of screaming.
39:09 David Pierce? Giants are awful. You can call me.
39:12 Nilay Patel? But like, they have like very cleverly found their way through this like highlights rights problem and added value to the streaming product.
39:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
39:21 Nilay Patel? Even though it's only for like however many months of the year. And they're kind of doing that around the line with sports.
39:27 Alex Cranz? Right.
39:27 Nilay Patel? Or they're kind of doing that down the line with sports where it's like they're adding value to the cable subscription.
39:33 Alex Cranz? Right.
39:34 Nilay Patel? But it's still like, it's only valuable. I would never pay for that on its own.
39:38 Alex Cranz? Right.
39:38 Nilay Patel? It's something that comes in a bundle with Hulu and Disney Plus. This is the greatest value out of all time.
39:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Like, this is, I think it's just a really good value. So everybody's complaining rightfully that they've raised prices, but also they said when they launched the service, they were going to be raising prices. They're like, no, these prices won't last. And they didn't. They raised it like, what, two years later?
39:57 Speaker 05 They said almost explicitly that they were planning to lose money for the first few years. And then when they have the plans to become profitable, that they would raise prices. And that's, that's what they're doing. They raised the price on ESPN last month. They announced the ESPN plus the price raised there on the standalone plan. And now the bundles are getting a little bit, a bit more expensive. They've also been talking about bringing about how you can get full ESPN on streaming.
40:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
40:18 Speaker 05 More openly than ever.
40:19 Alex Cranz? That'll be.
40:20 Speaker 05 Clearly that comes someday. Now, that's probably going to come with charging more money. But we're looking at it.
40:27 David Pierce? I would say the only thing that surprised me about this was that Disney just kind of did it all at once. I feel like the thing we've seen with the streaming companies over the years is they all just like raise their prices a dollar at a time and like, hope you don't notice. Like Netflix basically raises its prices every three months and they just like, hope you're not gonna notice.
40:43 Speaker 05 Disney knows something about trying to do this that I think maybe Netflix is learning. Like Disney has sold bundles. They have changed pricing so many times. They've got, they have an advertising business that actually works. Netflix, not yet. So they're not learning on the fly with these things and they kind of know which buttons they can press and how hard.
41:00 David Pierce? That's fair. And it does seem like, like we talk about the, like, who's the zero on the go 90 scale?
41:06 Alex Cranz? I think it's Disney. Yeah.
41:09 David Pierce? Like Marvel alone is like...
41:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but Marvel's real shaky lately. There's no guarantee that if, they don't make better movies than they've been making. Like, there's no guarantee that the next phases will be sticky.
41:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I mean, right. Marvel is like in a weird place because it is this big behemoth. It does still make a ton of money even though the films are getting worse and worse. Like, Shang-Chi accepted. That was a really good movie. Go watch it if you haven't. But it's still a huge franchise for them and they've got Star Wars and they have everything Disney's ever made and they have everything Fox has ever made. So they've got, what, The Simpsons? They've got all of the princess movies. I'm so sorry, the Disney princess movies? Whatever you want to call them? Like, they've got...
41:55 David Pierce? All the Pixar stuff.
41:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
41:56 David Pierce? I mean, the library is unbeaten.
41:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they have like, they have all, most of the IP, right? Like Warner Brothers is, is recognized that they have IP and they think it's 90 Day Fiance. That's weird.
42:06 Nilay Patel? But, so the difference...
42:07 Alex Cranz? Like...
42:07 Nilay Patel? That's really weird.
42:08 David Pierce? The 90 Day Fiance universe.
42:10 Nilay Patel? I love it.
42:11 Speaker 05 It's real.
42:12 Alex Cranz? Right up there with it.
42:13 Nilay Patel? If you're not in it. So actually, I think the difference is that HBO still programs itself like a TV network, right?
42:19 Alex Cranz? Right.
42:19 Nilay Patel? There's a new season of something really high-end that comes out on a regular cadence.
42:23 Alex Cranz? No, Disney's doing that too. Like Disney Plus.
42:24 Nilay Patel? Disney's like, we farted out another Star Wars thing. Do you want to live in it?
42:28 Speaker 05 We started the show and you were talking about, what is that, The Beast?
42:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
42:32 Speaker 05 On FX, on Hulu?
42:33 Nilay Patel? The Bear.
42:34 Alex Cranz? The Bear. The Beast.
42:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, but that's like FX on Hulu. Like, that's a TV network that went to Hulu. Like, Disney Plus, the app, is not quite programmed this way yet.
42:44 Alex Cranz? Disney Plus is very much programming. Like, they're doing it. They specifically are moving shows around, so they have like a night that you're watching Disney Plus. So you're watching your Star Wars and your Marvel overlapped, and you're just tucking in for the night. They're like, that is very much part of their plan. And I think it's pulled from the Hulu, ABC, like, realm. And I think they're doing it better than HBO Max.
43:06 David Pierce? I think I agree with that. But the other thing Disney has done really well is integrate that stuff with an app that shows you old things. Like,
43:15 Alex Cranz? Yes.
43:15 David Pierce? And this has always been the problem that like Amazon has had, where Amazon has this massive library of stuff that they just absolutely refuse to show you. And instead, they're like, would you like to watch Jack Ryan? And you're like, no. And they're like, ah, well, we don't have anything else for you.
43:28 Alex Cranz? The other day, I finished watching something. I don't even remember what. It wasn't Miss Marvel, but I finished watching something on Disney Plus. And it was like, do you want to watch Captain Marvel? And I was like, yeah, I haven't seen it in a bit.
43:36 David Pierce? Exactly.
43:37 Alex Cranz? Play.
43:37 David Pierce? Wow.
43:38 Alex Cranz? Let's go. And like,
43:39 David Pierce? And then every once in a while, they'll just throw in, be like, remember all those animated movies you made 40 years ago that you love? Like,
43:44 Alex Cranz? You want to watch it?
43:45 David Pierce? You want to watch that? And I'm like, yeah, I do.
43:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And whereas Netflix, I'm like, you finished watching Stranger Things. Do you want to watch anything remotely related to that? And I'm like, sure. And they're like, okay, instead, we're going to show you another like Cake Wars episode. I'm like, no, that's, you've misunderstood. You've missed something here. And Disney's like, I don't know, they've got a really strong app. They've got all of the IP, which is like, is that ethically, morally right? Probably not. But they got it. They got the money. They got the, what, $50 billion or whatever they made from, from theme parks this year. They're doing great.
44:17 Speaker 05 The Fastpass, the Lightning Lane, the Genie Pass, I'm sorry, bringing in tons of money in the theme parks. Turns out that charging people for convenience is a good businessman.
44:27 David Pierce? Yeah.
44:27 Speaker 05 And their ad-supported plan is launching in December.
44:29 David Pierce? So, again, I was on CNBC today, Bob Chag was being interviewed by Julie Borst. She asked him, can you raise prices in the theme parks? And he was like, yeah, we'll see.
44:38 Nilay Patel? He was basically like, here's what we do. We like, we see how much the consumer can tolerate and then like, you know, we push it. I'm not, he's like, we have no plans to at this moment, but like, we're always looking. And it's like, yeah, you're.
44:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they, they figured out they can nickel and dime you and we'll all be like, yeah, okay.
44:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
44:52 Alex Cranz? I want to do the, the Guardians of the Galaxy, right?
44:54 Nilay Patel? I disagree with you about the, the, which the, the $5,000, like, no, that's the Star Wars one.
45:00 Alex Cranz? Oh, the, the big place?
45:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
45:01 Alex Cranz? And you get the, the lightsaber. I'm gonna buy one. Very excited.
45:06 Nilay Patel? Two MacBooks. That's how you measure these experiences. Do I want two MacBooks or do I want to go to a spaceship?
45:12 Alex Cranz? MacBooks.
45:13 David Pierce? Then, then Richard would have four laptops.
45:17 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna, I, it's true. I think they have the, the best app, right? They built on BAMTech. They had the best stack all the way along. Hulu is, now it's theirs. They're programming it with more compelling stuff. I'm just pushing back. I think Disney is so big and they're so addicted to their franchises that they are, they're losing sight of like, making good stuff.
45:35 David Pierce? I would, oh, Star Wars is dying for that exact, like, Star Wars is, is bad now.
45:38 Nilay Patel? They're just like milking that thing. And then I think they're milking the MCU in like a.
45:42 Alex Cranz? But they're doing good stuff on Hulu. Like Hulu is where they still actually have people who know TV, programming it. So that's why you got the, the bear. That's why you're getting, what is it? Little fires? The, the.
45:53 David Pierce? Little fires everywhere?
45:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah, little fires everywhere. Like, you're getting really good stuff on Hulu. I watch it, I think, probably, it and HBO Max are my two most watched services. And it's because it's got stuff like FX where they've done really, really good programming and they're putting it almost exclusively oftentimes on Hulu and it's just like, super watchable.
46:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I'm sure, like, to Richard's point, like, you're an investor, this is great. It's all just money in Disney. From a Disney, like, brand perspective, Hulu app, not as good as the, even the HBO Max app in some ways, right? It's like, a very confusing situation.
46:27 Alex Cranz? Remember their linear TV, built in part of the Hulu app?
46:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah.
46:31 Alex Cranz? And how they, they decided that they didn't want to do a menu like everybody else does, where it looks like cable TV. And instead they're like, no, we're gonna like, decide what you should watch. On on live TV and you're like, no, that's
46:41 Nilay Patel? No, they all do this. This is like catnip for product designers. So like, we're doing a live TV app and I'm like, let's reimagine.
46:47 Alex Cranz? But they got yelled at so much that Hulu was like, sorry, we're working on it. We're gonna do a really good app now.
46:51 Nilay Patel? This is the hill they all want to climb. Like, can you, this is Steve Jobs just gaslighting this entire industry. By saying on his bed, he cracked the user experience for TV without any further explanation. And now everyone thinks they have to crack the user experience for TV and the entire consumer base is like, we just want a grid. It's the spreadsheet. We want a spreadsheet of TV shows.
47:12 Alex Cranz? What if he cracked it by just being like, I changed the font?
47:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's what he meant. He was like, I made it look nice. Have you heard of retina screens? Add more pixels. Yeah, I think the danger for Disney is that it's real sticky right now because of the catalog. But if the shows and movies are bad over time.
47:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
47:31 Nilay Patel? You're gonna run into the same problem.
47:32 Alex Cranz? I mean, yeah, but they have so much runway.
47:36 Nilay Patel? Hulu shows is Disney shows. That's what I meant by the brand thing.
47:38 Alex Cranz? Totally. And Disney, at least in America, wants you to keep that separation, right? Like, they very much said, we're not gonna put Deadpool, we're not gonna put all this like racist stuff on Disney Plus. We're gonna keep that for Hulu because that's for adults. And Disney Plus is like general Sunday night Magic Kingdom, whatever that that thing we all had to watch on Channel 8. Sorry, none of you are from Texas. Remember Sunday nights, there was always like the Disney hour of content? Come on, y'all are old. You know this. There was like a Disney, there was like, there was always like special movies and stuff.
48:16 Alex Cranz? There you go. But but like, they're, that's, Disney Plus is their family friendly stuff. And they know as well as we all do, little kids have trash taste for the most part. So like, they can pump that stuff out for a while. I think they are gonna see diminishing returns. I think they are already like poisoning their own franchises over and over again because they're not, they're thinking about the money and not about the quality of the content. But everybody else is also kind of thinking the same thing.
48:45 Nilay Patel? That's true. I buy that.
48:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Warner Brothers last week was even like, yeah, we don't care about the money. Like, we want the money. We're gonna put out stuff that'll make the money.
48:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah. We'll see. Okay, let's do the good 90s film.
48:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:57 Nilay Patel? So we think HBO Max, after, after we complimented HBO Max.
49:02 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
49:02 Nilay Patel? It is like.
49:03 Alex Cranz? It's 90.
49:04 Nilay Patel? Well, it's not yet.
49:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
49:06 Nilay Patel? It's like a preemptive 90 on the tech side.
49:08 Alex Cranz? It's a 60.
49:09 Nilay Patel? So it's like, okay, halfway between 45 and 90.
49:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
49:13 David Pierce? It seems right.
49:13 Nilay Patel? Oh, it's so depressing.
49:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah. It's a bummer.
49:15 David Pierce? It's not HBO Max's fault.
49:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
49:18 David Pierce? It's just, it's, it's being, this is happening to HBO Max.
49:22 Nilay Patel? This is why mergers should be legal.
49:23 David Pierce? Yeah.
49:25 Nilay Patel? Disney Plus is zero.
49:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
49:27 Nilay Patel? By the way, the Go90 scale of Zoom streaming services, zero is alive, 90's dead.
49:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Hulu, I don't know, Hulu's higher because I think at some point, like Hulu doesn't exist in a lot of other markets, right? It is pretty much an American market thing. Other markets, everything just is on Disney Plus. And in the United States, they're like, no, no, we must keep these two things separate. But I could definitely see them at some point be like, nah, smoosh them together.
49:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Hulu has like a long history of people trying to kill Hulu.
49:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
49:56 Nilay Patel? Like at any moment.
49:57 Alex Cranz? It's immortal at this.
49:57 Speaker 05 It might be the last streaming service to go.
49:59 Alex Cranz? Cause it was one of the first, right?
50:01 Nilay Patel? It's unkillable.
50:01 Speaker 05 It is.
50:02 Nilay Patel? Like so many people have tried to kill Hulu.
50:04 David Pierce? Yes.
50:05 Alex Cranz? I know.
50:05 Nilay Patel? Like at any moment, some Disney executive gets a promotion and they're like, finally.
50:09 Alex Cranz? Disney tried to kill Hulu. They're like, we're gonna buy you and destroy you. I guess we're gonna use you because otherwise everybody's gonna pirate our stuff.
50:17 David Pierce? And then somebody at Hulu was just like, we've signed deals to have next day shows until 2068. Like, what are you gonna do about it?
50:26 Nilay Patel? All right, so, so Richard, you're making the call that Hulu is like a permanent zero, unkillable.
50:30 Speaker 05 Can, it, it can, it can never die.
50:32 Alex Cranz? Wow.
50:33 David Pierce? Hulu's not even on this.
50:34 Speaker 05 It's, uh, what, the, the drowned house, or what, what, what does not live can't, can never die? There, there you go, that's Hulu.
50:39 Nilay Patel? Okay.
50:39 Alex Cranz? All right.
50:40 Nilay Patel? Uh, Netflix?
50:42 Alex Cranz? 15.
50:42 Speaker 05 They still have 220 million subscribers.
50:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they're still huge.
50:45 David Pierce? I think we, the last time we did this, I think we landed like high single digits, which feels about right.
50:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
50:50 Nilay Patel? All right. Any other streaming services on the, on the scale this week?
50:53 Alex Cranz? Paramount Plus, zero. You knew I was gonna say it.
50:57 David Pierce? Wow.
50:57 Nilay Patel? Greatest streaming service.
51:00 Nilay Patel? Paramount Plus is a zero, uh, all the way through the release of Top Gun Maverick.
51:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:05 David Pierce? Yeah.
51:05 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, and then it will be the most popular streaming service for a couple of weeks, and then it'll be like 90.
51:12 Alex Cranz? I think as long as Star Trek exists, like, or as long as people who watch Star Trek exist, we're dying out, apparently. A friend of mine, she teaches college, and she's like, "All right, who watches Star Trek?" And it used to be, all the hands would raise. And she teaches like, video game history. So it's like, these are nerds, right? And she's like, "Okay, everybody raise your hand if you watch Star Trek." All the hands raised. Nowadays, she's like, "Raise it." And there's like, one person in the back of the room, who's wearing like, a Star Trek shirt.
51:37 David Pierce? She's like, "You get an instant A+."
51:39 Alex Cranz? You pass. Everybody else fails. So like, it's slowly dying, but like, as long as there are all those fans, and it's kind of, it's not as big as Star Wars, but it's got a very, um, active community, it's, it's a zero.
51:51 David Pierce? It's gonna be interesting to watch Paramount Plus bleed that to death.
51:55 Alex Cranz? Yes.
51:55 David Pierce? Because in the same way that Disney Plus bought Star Wars, and was like, "We're gonna make eight Star Wars things a year until all of you."
52:01 Alex Cranz? And I'm gonna let them do it.
52:02 Nilay Patel? Somewhere in the Paramount Plus office, there's an accountant with a spreadsheet, and they're looking at it right now. She's freaking out, because the spreadsheet has like, a row in it labeled "Data Center Costs." And there's another column labeled "Churn," and they're modeling out how many people are gonna sign up for a seven-day free trial to stream Top Gun Maverick and then leave.
52:26 David Pierce? Yep.
52:27 Nilay Patel? And spike the data center costs and never pay the $1.00. And they're just hoping they can, enough of those people forget to cancel. And I'm telling you, she's like, freaking out. Like, she's like, "Someone, someone needs to look at my screen right now."
52:39 David Pierce? She's like, "Our payment processing systems are gonna go down."
52:41 Nilay Patel? She's just zooming random people, being like, "Can I share my screen? I need to share this screen with you."
52:46 Alex Cranz? Are they doing, how, is it gonna be 4K? Is it gonna be Dolby Vision?
52:50 Nilay Patel? If they do not stream Top Gun Maverick in 4K HDR, like, I will drive over there and be like, "I'm taking the tapes, I'm starting my own streaming service. It's 90 all the way, but it's gonna be glorious for a day."
53:03 Alex Cranz? Top Gun.
53:04 Nilay Patel? There's no way that-
53:05 David Pierce? It's called Tom Cruise, the streaming service.
53:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Tom Cruise is all about like, he wants you to turn off.
53:11 David Pierce? Tom would never let this happen.
53:12 Alex Cranz? He's probably good. It's like in his contract, if you stream it, it can only be streamed at 4K with Dolby Atmos. And if you detect somebody has is using headphones or watching on a mobile device, their device will explode.
53:24 David Pierce? And he's figured out how to automatically change your TV to turn off motion smoothing. He's like, Tom gets it.
53:29 Nilay Patel? Oh, no, there's gonna be a long prelude before Top Gun Maverick runs on the stream.
53:33 David Pierce? Oh, there probably is.
53:34 Nilay Patel? He's like, I'm moving my hand right now. Does it look too smooth? I'm gonna keep doing this for one hour.
53:40 David Pierce? I'm gonna read you the manual of every TV that exists.
53:42 Nilay Patel? He's like, skip to five minutes for Samsung, seven minutes for LG. I'm here with you.
53:47 Speaker 05 There will be a series of blinks in this video. Just your TV, just sit back and let it happen.
53:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah, he's very serious about this. In the depths of the pandemic, by the way, I looked, I looked at how much it would cost to buy one of those like only in Hollywood dedicated high end streaming boxes.
54:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
54:05 Nilay Patel? Cause I was like, whatever, I'm never leaving this house again. It was like $15,000. I was like, I don't, I care a lot. I don't care this much.
54:15 Alex Cranz? You could get such a nice like projector for that.
54:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but you need content.
54:21 Alex Cranz? Just plug that, that Roku in.
54:23 Nilay Patel? And then I almost fell down the Chris Well troll of being like, I'm gonna start buying Blu-rays.
54:28 Alex Cranz? I did that. I do that.
54:29 Nilay Patel? Oh, my God. You like, you're in your Plex box and your Blu-rays.
54:33 Alex Cranz? I get the Blu-rays, I rip them.
54:36 Nilay Patel? Wow.
54:36 Alex Cranz? Because that's, that's legal, right? Like, I'm using it for my personal use only.
54:40 Nilay Patel? I quit being a lawyer. I ain't your lawyer.
54:41 Alex Cranz? Quick, quick.
54:42 Nilay Patel? No, no, no, no, no.
54:44 Alex Cranz? It's probably, um, someone I know provides me with copies and I put them on my Plex server.
54:50 Nilay Patel? That's more illegal.
54:52 David Pierce? I meet a guy in an alley.
54:54 Nilay Patel? Here's what I do. I buy pirated movies. You want to stick with, I buy the media, I own the movies and I rip it.
55:03 Alex Cranz? There we go.
55:04 Nilay Patel? For archival purposes.
55:07 David Pierce? That's my lawyer talking if anybody asks.
55:10 Nilay Patel? As everyone does.
55:11 David Pierce? Yeah, as one does, yeah.
55:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
55:13 David Pierce? I think if you were like, David, can you rip this DVD? I have literally no idea what I would do.
55:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah, what's your process for ripping a Blu-ray?
55:21 Alex Cranz? You know, you stick it in.
55:23 Nilay Patel? To what?
55:24 Speaker 05 Okay, wait, Microsoft is bringing CD ripping back to Windows 11.
55:30 Nilay Patel? Wait, really?
55:30 Speaker 05 This ripping is coming back. Yeah, they're testing it in the betas now, it's a whole thing.
55:34 Nilay Patel? Wait, tell me about this whole thing.
55:35 Speaker 05 It wasn't in Windows Media Player, but they are beta testing it again. In the beta versions in Windows 11, CD ripping.
55:41 David Pierce? Are you supposed to just like wave the CD over your computer?
55:44 Speaker 05 I don't know where you will put the disc, but if you have somewhere to put it.
55:47 David Pierce? You just slap it on your keyboard and then something happens.
55:49 Nilay Patel? Like automatically?
55:50 Speaker 05 Sure.
55:51 Alex Cranz? Oh my god.
55:52 Speaker 05 But I don't think the feature is in the media player that exists in Windows 11, like the retail version right now.
55:58 Nilay Patel? But in the beta.
55:58 Speaker 05 But in the beta version, if you have it installed, you have a version that will rip a CD for you. I just don't know where you're going to get a CD drive.
56:04 Alex Cranz? Sick.
56:04 David Pierce? Or a CD.
56:05 Nilay Patel? Do you think this is like, Nadella himself is like, I have a number of CDs.
56:10 David Pierce? My Blu-ray collection is out of hand.
56:12 Nilay Patel? Add this back for me. Okay, first of all, that's incredible. Love that. The Plex community freaking out. Walk me through your Blu-ray ripping process.
56:22 Alex Cranz? Okay, you can buy for like $50 now, it's so cheap. You can just get a little player and yet you plug it into.
56:29 Nilay Patel? A USB-C Blu-ray player.
56:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
56:31 Nilay Patel? Is it USB-C?
56:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah, well, no, mine's USB. Mine's USB, but they got USB-C ones now too, because I had to walk my sister through buying one.
56:38 Nilay Patel? Oh, okay, okay, okay.
56:39 Alex Cranz? Because she still.
56:40 Nilay Patel? Because she's also a player.
56:42 Alex Cranz? She still listens to CDs.
56:44 Nilay Patel? Okay.
56:45 Alex Cranz? And I was like, I was like, you don't need a disc player. Like, she held on to her iBook for years, because she was like, I need a CD player. And I was like.
56:52 Nilay Patel? Your sister's my favorite person.
56:53 Alex Cranz? No, she's the worst, but.
56:57 Alex Cranz? But, no, so you plug in your little cheap Blu-ray player.
57:01 Nilay Patel? Sure.
57:01 Alex Cranz? You put the disc in, you have to have, I can't remember the name of the app, but you have to have this one, because it's been like at least a year since I did this. You have this one app that like removes any, um.
57:10 Nilay Patel? DRM?
57:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah, any barriers.
57:13 David Pierce? What year would you say this app was most recently updated?
57:18 Nilay Patel? It enables media freedom.
57:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, exactly. And then you just use handbrake. Like, you rip it and then you put it into handbrake.
57:28 Nilay Patel? So you're further compressing it with handbrake?
57:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
57:31 Nilay Patel? So you're accomplishing very little for all this effort.
57:33 Alex Cranz? Because when I did uncompressed, it was great. And then I put it on my Plex server. And my Plex server is like, what are you doing to me?
57:40 Nilay Patel? Video Shield started smoking.
57:41 Alex Cranz? It's like on fire. It was like, I'm coming to kill you right now.
57:45 Nilay Patel? Why not just play the Blu-rays?
57:47 Alex Cranz? Because I have to like stand up.
57:50 Nilay Patel? This is why I have dozens of Blu-ray discs that I have never watched. And I only see them when I move and I have to pick them up and carry them. And I'm like, why do I have these? Yeah, but you keep buying them. I need the best quality. For media freedom. For archival reasons.
58:03 Alex Cranz? What happens if you lose internet? You go somewhere without internet?
58:09 Nilay Patel? I just want to point out that you described your process for this. And you are recompressing the Blu-rays.
58:16 Alex Cranz? It's not as good, but it's still better than if I watched it on Netflix or any of the other places.
58:21 Nilay Patel? If you've ever tried to watch Justified on Amazon Prime, then you know why you would do this. The video quality on the stream is just terrible.
58:27 David Pierce? I feel like you're doing a lot of work that you could just buy it like on iTunes and download it to your computer and you've done the same thing.
58:34 Alex Cranz? It's not quite as good a lot of times.
58:36 Nilay Patel? All right. Well, Tom Cruise, if you're listening and you want to come on the show unless you're Alex about piracy and why that's hurting Hollywood, doors open.
58:44 Alex Cranz? He would be on my side because I'm still getting the Blu-rays. Sometimes I watch them.
58:49 Nilay Patel? You think Tom Cruise would be on the side of you should buy a $50 USB-C Blu-ray drive?
58:54 Alex Cranz? Yes.
58:55 Nilay Patel? Remove the DRM and then recompress Top Gun Maverick.
59:00 Alex Cranz? I got this. Like, Tom and I would vibe. It'd be fine.
59:04 Nilay Patel? I'm excited for Tom to be on the show. If anyone out there knows Tom, I'm sure he's listening. If anyone out there knows Tom, tell us what DRM removal tool you use and then we'll let you come on the podcast.
59:13 David Pierce? And if you'd like to come do a 30-minute PSA about how to turn off motion smoothing on your TV ahead of watching Top Gun Maverick, we're here for that.
59:21 Nilay Patel? One of my favorite parts just about like modern life at this moment is like everyone is constantly using computers. And every now and again, I like to imagine Tom Cruise like confronting stage manager on his iPad.
59:33 Nilay Patel? Like it's just like you can't, none of that works together, you know? Like, he's like, uh, I gotta send an email. And like, oh, he's looking at the same weird Gmail interface as the rest of us.
59:44 Alex Cranz? Wait, you think Tom Cruise sends emails?
59:47 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah.
59:48 Alex Cranz? No.
59:48 Nilay Patel? Unhinged, all caps.
59:50 Alex Cranz? Oh, absolutely.
59:51 Nilay Patel? Three sentence emails.
59:51 Alex Cranz? Absolutely not. He has somebody he tells.
59:55 Nilay Patel? No.
59:56 Alex Cranz? Like, no, he shouts at someone.
59:57 David Pierce? No, I'm with Eli. He shouts at Siri is what he does. Tom Cruise is a voice dictation monster.
1:00:02 Nilay Patel? So he uses Mail App. Just play this game. It's incredibly fun. Imagine any Hollywood celebrity you can think of.
1:00:08 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:00:09 Nilay Patel? And be like, Kim Kardashian sometimes is like, these Google search results are full of ads because everyone is having the same experiences all the time. Like, it's all the same. Kanye West is like, huh, I gotta get on Instagram. It's all videos now.
1:00:26 Alex Cranz? They have assistants who do that. They have a Google assistant.
1:00:30 Nilay Patel? No, Kanye is like out there being like, I don't have OnlyFans, I have Reddit. Like, I've heard him say those words. And it's all the same. I just, it's, we should just do an entire episode of the Verchess where you imagine celebrities using one. All right, Liam wants me to wrap this up because I said OnlyFans. We gotta take a break. We're gonna come back. We have a little lightning round. We'll be right back.
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1:02:19 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Lightning round. A lot of little news this week. I just mentioned Gmail, so I gotta mention this one. So politicians want to send you emails. You may have gotten these emails and you might have thought to yourself, wow, these emails are all written like scams. Turns out, Google's filters have agreed with you for many years and politicians' emails have been filtered into your spam.
1:02:41 David Pierce? And some politicians think Google is perpetrating a giant scheme to send some people to your inbox and some to spam. Shadow ban. Exactly.
1:02:51 Nilay Patel? This is like a real thing that happens. So they yelled at Google enough, and so Google concocted a plan by which politicians could request to be exempted from Google's spam filters. And today, the Federal Election Commission said, yep, that's fine, you can do your plan. This is like one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Like, what emails do I want the least? Any politician asking me for money.
1:03:14 Alex Cranz? I still get asked by Wendy Davis for money and to vote in Texas. Still, I don't want those emails. I marked them as spam on purpose.
1:03:24 Nilay Patel? Now they're gonna get through. And it's like the worst political pressure campaign you can think of.
1:03:28 David Pierce? I think if politicians should be able to request not to be spam, we as users should be able to request not to be emailed by them. Like, if Gmail can control this that cleanly on one side, it should be able to give us a toggle that says, no, thank you politicians, goodbye.
1:03:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah, filter all politicians.
1:03:45 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:03:45 Alex Cranz? All politicians.
1:03:46 Nilay Patel? I would push that button in a heartbeat.
1:03:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, 100%. The texts, like if I could do that on my phone, like, oh, we know that this is somebody texting you to donate money to your local senator.
1:03:57 David Pierce? Somehow I got on Nancy Pelosi's list as a person named Freddie. And I get a text message probably five times a week being like, Freddie, this is urgent. Give me $6.
1:04:07 Nilay Patel? A real clever online harassment gambit is people try to sign me up for like all the things. And now they're all filtered. And so they still try to do it. I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. This was five years ago.
1:04:19 Nilay Patel? No, you don't understand. I was already signed up as Freddie for Nancy Pelosi's email list. Like, you can't hurt me anymore.
1:04:27 Nilay Patel? All right, Richard, you wrote about proof of stake this week. This is like a true line, and we're just bouncing around. Ethereum for years has promised a switch from proof of work, which uses a lot of energy, to proof of stake, which is a different method of mining and validating transactions in the network, so it's more energy efficient. I forced Richard to listen to a hardcore Ethereum engineering conference call today. What did you learn?
1:04:47 Speaker 05 I listened to an hour and a half of people talking about the blockchain and blocks and everything they... I don't even know what words they were using. None of them were in the Bible.
1:04:59 Speaker 05 I think the... I think what they ended up saying was that they've completed their last test merge of a network, and it mostly worked. There were a few glitches that they're still working out, but they think they're ready to do it for real, to move the full network over to this proof of stake system that's going to use so much less energy. And they have basically a date.
1:05:17 David Pierce? Haven't they been saying almost exactly that for like three years?
1:05:20 Nilay Patel? Five.
1:05:20 David Pierce? Five years, okay.
1:05:21 Speaker 05 For years and years and years. But now they have a date for the final, final, final, final, final merge.
1:05:29 Alex Cranz? When? When is it?
1:05:30 Speaker 05 The terminal date, the TTD, is September 15th or 16th, depending on when the block gets mined.
1:05:38 David Pierce? Perfect.
1:05:39 Nilay Patel? So maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. I think everyone knows I'm on record saying this will never happen. Too complicated, never gonna do it. If it does happen, here's the wild part. That is horrible news for AMD and Nvidia.
1:05:51 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:05:51 Nilay Patel? The requirements for mining validating will go down. A bunch of Ethereum miners will flood the market with used GPUs. The demand for GPUs will go down, but then that's also like when AMD and Nvidia will have their new GPUs coming out. And then everyone often make a big decision about whether you want to use a GPU that's been used for mining for years, which maybe you don't because things have been rotten, red hot for so long. But like already like the analysts, like Morgan Stanley is like, bad news coming for GPU vendors, for chipmakers, because Ethereum is going to proof of stake.
1:06:21 Alex Cranz? Didn't like Nvidia?
1:06:22 Nilay Patel? If they ever do.
1:06:23 Alex Cranz? Didn't Nvidia go out of its way to be like, stop using us? Did I make that up?
1:06:27 Nilay Patel? They put in the flag, but.
1:06:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but people just ignore it.
1:06:30 David Pierce? That accomplished nothing.
1:06:31 Nilay Patel? I think it accomplished nothing.
1:06:32 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:06:32 Alex Cranz? Okay. Sorry Nvidia, sucks for you.
1:06:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think they got around that in like a day. Yeah.
1:06:37 Alex Cranz? They tried.
1:06:38 Nilay Patel? So we'll see. But I would just say like that's, to me, it's, there's the Ethereum story, which would be cool. And then like, I'm happy if anything uses less energy, but then like the main complaints about NFTs, of which Richard has many.
1:06:53 Nilay Patel? Right. The big one is like, this is a lot of power to use for Pokemon. We should cool it. And that, that thing goes away, which I think is interesting.
1:07:03 David Pierce? Yeah. I mean, the, the switch to proof of stake is, has like, everyone in the crypto community is like, any problem you have, anything you don't like about crypto or Web 3, proof of stake fixes it.
1:07:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:07:13 David Pierce? It's like, this is like the magic bullet that will make all of this work and be viable.
1:07:18 Speaker 05 Well, if it weren't an environmental nightmare, the thing that would be left is that all of their applications are useless and do things that no one wants. But they would get rid of this one problem.
1:07:28 David Pierce? Yeah. That's, now it's environmentally friendly to have an app that no one uses or wants.
1:07:32 Nilay Patel? Yes.
1:07:33 David Pierce? It's perfect.
1:07:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:07:34 Alex Cranz? Beautiful.
1:07:34 Nilay Patel? It's, we'll see. We're gonna keep tracking it. I think I'm with Richard, even money on they push it over six months.
1:07:40 Speaker 05 It, it, it has always been delayed. There's no way that it doesn't get delayed at least once.
1:07:43 Nilay Patel? We will eat crow if it, we'll have Richard back on and he can announce that Ethereum has switched to proof of stake. You're, you're here with me. Look in my eyes. You have to come back on and announce that it's switched.
1:07:52 David Pierce? We will force him to buy an NFT on air.
1:07:55 Nilay Patel? I don't think we could do that. I think what we will do is we're starting my NFT era.
1:08:00 Speaker 05 I'm going to become a web three booster.
1:08:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:08:02 Speaker 05 I'm going to all the conferences.
1:08:03 Nilay Patel? There we go.
1:08:04 Speaker 05 I'm one of those guys.
1:08:05 Nilay Patel? A bunch of Apple stuff. Rumors, rumors, rumors. Sounds like the next iPhone might be more expensive.
1:08:11 Alex Cranz? Like 15%. But, but that number, the 15% is like all the iPhones together. So some iPhones could be way more expensive. Some could be like $5.
1:08:21 Nilay Patel? I bet they do a super expensive iPhone Pro.
1:08:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:08:24 Nilay Patel? Like if you're looking at Samsung being like $1,800, you're like, yeah, we could, we can charge.
1:08:29 Alex Cranz? What's an $1,800 iPhone?
1:08:31 Nilay Patel? It's Pro, dude. It's huge. Nine inch screen, but they call it an iPhone.
1:08:37 Alex Cranz? It's just the iPad mini with more cameras on the back.
1:08:40 Nilay Patel? They'll do like a riff on the A series processor that like makes it more like an M1. They're like, add another camera lens, like.
1:08:45 Alex Cranz? Ugh.
1:08:46 Nilay Patel? You can see how they could just get you to $1,800 phone.
1:08:49 Alex Cranz? I just, I'm upset because I always try to justify why I need a Pro and I always do. And if they do that, I'll be like, that's stupid. That's too stupid. I can't do that.
1:08:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:08:58 Alex Cranz? And that's a bummer for me personally, because I like to be like, yeah, it's my Pro.
1:09:01 Nilay Patel? Well, so the rumor this year, right, is that they're gonna do a max size regular iPhone? Because everyone loves a big, cheap screen. Mm-hmm. And so for the longest time, you ended up buying the Pro because you just wanted the bigger screen. So you gotta really scoot something over there to make it worth it.
1:09:13 Alex Cranz? I would buy the Pro because it had the smallest screen, too. That just the regular Pro is always smaller than the others.
1:09:19 Nilay Patel? I'm just gonna put out there that revealed preferences say, people say shit like that all the time.
1:09:24 Alex Cranz? Where's Allison? We gotta get Allison.
1:09:25 Speaker 05 No, my wife owns the Pro specifically for that reason. Because it's a slightly smaller phone for her hands.
1:09:32 Nilay Patel? Say that over again.
1:09:33 Speaker 05 My wife, my wife owns the iPhone Pro specifically for that reason. She, she needs a phone that is slightly smaller to fit her hands and bought it.
1:09:39 Alex Cranz? Thank you.
1:09:40 Speaker 05 I was, I was surprised, but it, it works better for her.
1:09:43 Alex Cranz? If we're not getting Allison on the line, we can get your wife on the line to support me here.
1:09:47 Nilay Patel? Everyone says they want a small phone. Some people buy small phones. Most people are like.
1:09:51 Alex Cranz? Three.
1:09:52 Nilay Patel? They get into the store and like, what's the biggest, cheapest screen you have? Liam is holding up his phone like.
1:09:57 Alex Cranz? It's small. It's a small phone.
1:10:00 Nilay Patel? He will presumably return it in two weeks. I'm just.
1:10:03 Alex Cranz? Don't do it.
1:10:03 Nilay Patel? He's doing the full John Cusack in the window right now with his phone above his head.
1:10:07 Alex Cranz? It was very romantic.
1:10:10 Nilay Patel? AirPods cases with USB C, not this year, but next, it sounds like.
1:10:15 David Pierce? Seems perfectly logical.
1:10:16 Nilay Patel? If they move the iPhone to USB C, then they have to move the AirPods.
1:10:19 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:10:19 Nilay Patel? That seems obvious.
1:10:20 David Pierce? Even if they don't, I mean, it's like, Apple has rapidly moved everything else to USB C. And there's no like giant accessories ecosystem for the AirPods. So that seems like a really easy switch for them to make. Like, the case they're gonna make, the case they've made for not switching from Lightning is like, we have a big ecosystem, people have chargers, people have stuff that they like to use. It's a total nonsense argument, but that's the argument that you cannot make that argument about AirPods. Like, I have cool stuff, I plug my AirPods case into, is like, not a thing that people say.
1:10:48 David Pierce? So like, it does seem like we are headed towards a world where the iPhone is also on USB C, but I don't necessarily see this as like a harbinger of that. This is just like a thing they're gonna do.
1:10:57 Alex Cranz? Is this related at all to the EU saying everybody's gotta go USB C?
1:11:01 David Pierce? I assume so. I mean, that's like, that's gonna be part of where this all has to end up, right?
1:11:06 Speaker 05 Even if they go portless on the iPhone, which I don't think they would do, you would still wanna move the AirPods to USB C because you would have no reason to ship Lightning cables anymore.
1:11:15 David Pierce? Exactly.
1:11:15 Alex Cranz? Well, you would if you kept the AirPods on it.
1:11:19 David Pierce? No, they'd rather sell you really, really expensive USB C cables.
1:11:23 Alex Cranz? That's true. Hundred dollars.
1:11:25 Nilay Patel? Speaking of Apple, one last thing. iOS 16 has added a battery percentage meter.
1:11:31 Alex Cranz? It's a go.
1:11:32 Nilay Patel? It's, it's really weird. So you can, you can always get it. You can get it right now in Control Center.
1:11:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:11:37 Nilay Patel? But they took it away because of Notch on the main screen, so now they've added it back. But the thing stays full all the time, it just has a number in it.
1:11:42 David Pierce? Yeah. So it'll say, like, in the, in the photo we have in our story, it says 49, but the thing is all filled up. It literally makes it look like you have 49 batteries.
1:11:54 Nilay Patel? Something's going on with Apple design right now that is deeply unsettled. Like, hardware design on a real high note.
1:12:01 David Pierce? Yes.
1:12:01 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, laptops are better than ever, M1 chips, M2 chips, they're like, Apple hardware engineering can do no wrong. And the software engineer's like, we're drunk.
1:12:10 Alex Cranz? Piles.
1:12:11 Nilay Patel? Piles of windows. Have you ever thought about 49 batteries on your phone? I don't know what's going on there. But it's back, which is good. Talking about Sonos ever so slightly. Bad quarter for them. Here's the fascinating part. They delayed their next product, which Chris Welch believes would be the sub mini. That kind of makes sense.
1:12:30 David Pierce? Yeah, which Chris Welch has been leaking relentlessly for months.
1:12:35 Nilay Patel? But this is really interesting. So Sonos' sales are all TV accessory sales.
1:12:40 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:12:40 Nilay Patel? TV sales are down, which means Sonos' soundbar sales are down. So like, there's just a lot of thinking like, maybe all the upgrades happened already? Like, all the work-from-home pandemic upgrades happened? And these companies are all going to be hurting for the next couple of years because there's no more upgrade cycle for any of this stuff.
1:12:56 David Pierce? I've been thinking a lot about what Adam Mosseri said, I think, last week, that like, the assumption that all these companies made during the pandemic was, it accelerated these trends, but we're never going back to the way that we were before. And actually, what might be happening is we are currently in the midst of going back to the way that we were before.
1:13:12 Nilay Patel? Even farther.
1:13:13 David Pierce? A hundred percent. Which is super interesting to me. And I feel like, is like, this is the kind of thing I think we're going to see a lot of places. Where it's like, people either bought stuff that they're not going to upgrade for a long time. Or they're just going to go back to the way that they were when they were allowed to go outside again. And that like, the amount of time we spend using these things is going to go down. That we're not, people don't use Zoom as like a normal life behavior. Now we use Zoom because we have to. And now that we don't have to, people are going to stop.
1:13:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:13:39 Alex Cranz? We saw that with like Netflix. That was part of their earnings narrative. Is that like, yeah, everybody subscribed. And now they don't subscribe because they can go outside and see people.
1:13:48 David Pierce? Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like, I think you're right, that like, the Sonos thing is just like, everybody who was going to buy one of these, just did.
1:13:56 Nilay Patel? And now that you have one, like, you don't have anywhere to put anymore. It's like the Amazon problem, where you buy one thing, and suddenly it shows you advertisements for only that product. Every single time you go to Amazon. But I bought new speakers. I bought a racing wheel. I bought a keyboard, gaming headsets, progressively better headphones. I have them all now.
1:14:13 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:14:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:14:14 Nilay Patel? I, for like, the next four years, I don't need to purchase any other things. But I know you, and you will.
1:14:21 David Pierce? You will.
1:14:21 Nilay Patel? Well, yeah. I've known you for a long time.
1:14:23 David Pierce? I have one racing wheel, and you can have two racing wheels.
1:14:26 Nilay Patel? When am I expected to carry it from upstairs to downstairs?
1:14:31 Nilay Patel? I think that's like actually a real hard part for Sonos, right? Like they're in this big patent lawsuit with Google. Google just filed another version of the patent lawsuit for really dumb stuff. For how, when you have multiple speakers in a room that you detect which, which one's closer to you. And that's when you light up the voice, that's Google's patent they're filing in Sonos. They should all just sell these lawsuits. But Sonos suing Google, say Google tried to crush them, they're on, so all this stuff. That's like one big distraction. And then on the flip side of it, you've got maybe all the TV upgrades happened and our, the biggest part of our business is selling upgrades on their TVs, which are soundbars. So now you gotta like get more speakers in more rooms or figure out more service revenue on the speakers. You have, Sonos owners famously persnickety about being asked for additional money. It's, I think it's just a hard place.
1:15:15 Alex Cranz? Or make better stuff.
1:15:17 David Pierce? I think it's not even that. I think it's, they, they need to make new stuff. Like, like Sonos' thing has been to basically, they're like, we're gonna make a soundbar and then our next product is gonna be a cheaper soundbar. And then our product after that is gonna be a more expensive soundbar. But if everybody who's gonna have a soundbar already has a soundbar, like you have to go, you have to go invent a new market of things that people are going to do.
1:15:34 Speaker 05 They're also in a situation where the TV manufacturers-
1:15:37 Alex Cranz? That's all I wanna buy.
1:15:38 Speaker 05 Suddenly don't wanna sell TVs anymore. They wanna make money on the services and the commissions of streaming, streaming services and advertisements. And selling TVs is suddenly not the biggest part of their business.
1:15:48 Alex Cranz? I mean, they've been, TVs have been dealing with this problem for a while, right? Like they had this big, everybody went out and got, moved to high def and then nobody wanted to move to 4K because it was stupid. And so they kept being like, what are reasons to get people to move to 4K?
1:16:00 Nilay Patel? It was HDR.
1:16:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And then that was kind of successful, but not totally successful. And so they're, they're always, they've always been looking that we need a revenue stream besides just selling TVs because selling TVs is not enough to keep the TV lights on.
1:16:15 Nilay Patel? You missed a turn there, which is they all tried to convince us for a long time that 3D TV would drive an upgrade.
1:16:19 Alex Cranz? We don't talk about that time.
1:16:21 Nilay Patel? Richard and I lived through that time together.
1:16:22 Speaker 05 3D TV was underappreciated. It's a great way to watch NBA games.
1:16:25 Alex Cranz? That is incorrect.
1:16:25 Nilay Patel? What are you talking about?
1:16:27 Speaker 05 You can see the angle, like the, the three quarter angle of the courts. So that when people pass and when people shoot, it's very difficult to see in 3D.
1:16:33 Nilay Patel? How many NBA games are ever broadcast in 3D?
1:16:34 David Pierce? I watched all of them. Are you the person now-
1:16:36 Nilay Patel? Was it six?
1:16:37 Speaker 05 It was a few.
1:16:39 David Pierce? So now all these leagues who are like, put on your Oculus Quest and you can watch it like you're on the site. It's you, you're the one watching.
1:16:46 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:16:48 Alex Cranz? The confidence, like, just the sureness of that.
1:16:51 David Pierce? Yeah, we'll hang out a virtual All-Star game next year. It'll be great.
1:16:55 Nilay Patel? It's gonna be sick. Yeah, I will never, this is my favorite CS story, and then we'll wrap this up because we're way over. Do you remember the CS where Sony had Taylor Swift perform? It was years ago, and this was before Taylor Swift was like Taylor Swift.
1:17:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:17:08 Nilay Patel? It was early on, so I go in Vegas in the convention center, I sit down, and they're like, Sony recording artist, Taylor Swift. And they gave us all glasses, and we were not meant to watch actual Taylor Swift. We were meant to watch 3D TVs broadcasting Taylor, who was right there. And they're like, look at this incredible demonstration of Sony's end-to-end 3D broadcast capabilities. And I was like, I'm gonna watch Taylor Swift, like, she's right there.
1:17:40 Alex Cranz? How was it?
1:17:41 Nilay Patel? It was incredible, but like, they were like blowing glitter everywhere, like, the whole thing. And like, literally, they were like, please watch the TVs. I was like, no, absolutely not.
1:17:54 Alex Cranz? They should have had her behind like a curtain, and then slowly raise the curtain. You're like, oh, she's been here all along.
1:18:00 Nilay Patel? It was like one of the strangest periods in all consumer technology, and they were like, people are gonna buy the shit out of 3D TVs.
1:18:07 David Pierce? Do you think they told Taylor? I'm just trying to imagine the pitch where they're like, Taylor Swift, so you're Taylor Swift, right? You're Taylor Swift, do you want to come perform? But we're going to actively tell everyone to not watch while you perform.
1:18:20 Nilay Patel? It was utterly, this was like the
1:18:21 David Pierce? She's like, deal.
1:18:22 Nilay Patel? This was the high point of Sony CS, like, they never, after that, they're like, yeah, we've got a handful of new action cameras.
1:18:31 Nilay Patel? If you like PlayStations, there's one over there.
1:18:34 Alex Cranz? That short throw projector they show every year.
1:18:37 Nilay Patel? They love the short throw projector.
1:18:37 Alex Cranz? It's the same one every time, they're like, is this a new one? No. But look, it's cool, isn't it? No. It's been there for five years.
1:18:45 Nilay Patel? They have that, they have that special room.
1:18:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:18:48 Nilay Patel? It's like dolled up like an ultra minimalist living room, and they're like, this projector is only eight inches from the wall, and it's like, I don't know who has rooms like this. And it costs a hundred thousand dollars.
1:18:59 Nilay Patel? I will never forget that. It was just like one of the strangest moments.
1:19:03 Alex Cranz? How much do you think she got paid for that?
1:19:05 Nilay Patel? Enough so that they had no budget for anything for years to come.
1:19:08 David Pierce? What do you think, what do you think it's like when Taylor Swift sends emails?
1:19:12 Nilay Patel? This is what I mean. She's on Tumblr. Like, she occasionally is like, why haven't they ever updated the Tumblr interface? Like, she has to be.
1:19:20 Alex Cranz? She definitely has like a custom signature. Like, she thought about that. She put effort into it.
1:19:24 David Pierce? With like a picture at the bottom?
1:19:25 Alex Cranz? Oh, yeah.
1:19:25 David Pierce? And like a, like a really nice inspirational quote.
1:19:29 Alex Cranz? Oh, no, I guess probably the inspirational quote.
1:19:31 Nilay Patel? Taylor Swift buying a new MacBook to check out Tumblr and being like, why is there so much garbage in the dock? I'm never gonna use numbers. Like, everyone has to have these experiences now.
1:19:41 David Pierce? She's probably mad at Catalyst. She's like, my apps, they don't work like they're supposed to.
1:19:45 Nilay Patel? My god. She's like, these electronic apps use so much power. Everyone has these experiences.
1:19:51 Alex Cranz? Just sitting there when her Chrome tab hangs.
1:19:54 Nilay Patel? Liam really wants us to stop doing celebrities using computers. I've never seen him want us to talk about something else.
1:20:00 Alex Cranz? Well, we're, we're stealing from the episode we're gonna do all about that. Sorry.
1:20:03 Nilay Patel? One full, Liam, one full hour of just us imagining celebrities doing mundane shit with their computers. People, he's, he's the rapid up.
1:20:13 Alex Cranz? Do you think she put it in tent mode at any point?
1:20:17 Nilay Patel? I'm sorry. He's just like Barack Obama, being like, hey, Google. And Google's like, I've set a timer for you. Like, these things happen to everyone now. All right. That's enough.
1:20:27 Alex Cranz? The common denominator.
1:20:29 Nilay Patel? One, yeah.
1:20:29 Alex Cranz? It's universal.
1:20:30 Nilay Patel? The common denominator is like shitty user experience. Like, you can't escape it. It doesn't matter how famous you are. All right. I think we're way over. I mean, there's other stuff. I mean, I want to talk about this 97-inch OLED from LG that they claim can produce 5.1 audio.
1:20:47 Alex Cranz? Sure.
1:20:48 Nilay Patel? By vibrating the screen. But I think we have to go see it in person to believe it's true.
1:20:53 Alex Cranz? I think we have to do a lot more than that to believe it's true.
1:20:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:20:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Sure. It's like soundbars.
1:21:00 Nilay Patel? I have a Sony screen TV that does that thing.
1:21:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I mean, soundbars are always like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, the Sono Soundbar is great. It'll do 5.1. No, it's three speakers in front of you. It'll do three speakers in front of you. That's what it'll do. It's three. 3.0. Don't lie.
1:21:19 Alex Cranz? I mean, yeah.
1:21:20 Nilay Patel? I want to believe it. I want to believe it's real. All right, we're way over. Liam is incredibly mad at me and I've run out of celebrities that I whose names I can't remember. If you can think of a celebrity that uses technology, please email Liam directly. He wants to hear about it more than anyone in the entire world.
1:21:35 Alex Cranz? Maggie Smith accidentally hitting the touch bar.
1:21:39 Nilay Patel? Right.
1:21:39 Alex Cranz? And activating.
1:21:40 Nilay Patel? This is what I'm saying.
1:21:41 Alex Cranz? Sorry. Sorry, Liam.
1:21:42 Speaker 00 If you do a good impression of a celebrity using technology, please call the Verge hotline and do that impression for us. We will play it on the show.
1:21:49 Nilay Patel? Dame Judi Dench accidentally engaging control center. Like, this has definitely happened.
1:21:55 Nilay Patel? 1,000%. She's like.
1:21:57 Speaker 00 She just walks around with her flashlight on 24/7.
1:22:01 Nilay Patel? She's like, oh my God, what are our focus notes? Like, it's real.
1:22:06 Nilay Patel? All right, we're wrapping this up. It's all over. We've gone way over. Richard, thanks for being here, man. He's real.
1:22:11 Alex Cranz? He's real.
1:22:12 Nilay Patel? He's a real person.
1:22:13 Speaker 05 I exist. You can find me on the internet at RJCC. I have mediocre Apex Legends highlights clips to show you.
1:22:19 Nilay Patel? There you go.
1:22:19 Speaker 00 There it is.
1:22:20 Nilay Patel? You can tweet Alex. She's Alex H. Krantz. David is at Pierce. I'm at Reckless. That's it. That's the Vergecast tracking.
1:22:34 Speaker 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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