So much news this week and more to come next week

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Dan Seifert sit down and don't know where to start so they bring in Paul Miller and Loren Grush to help them out. The gang talks Lenovo Tech World, Nest, WWDC, Game of Thrones and much much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  It's really weird to start this without the music. I have to, I have to be up.

• 0:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you, wait for it, by Scissor Vodka. There's that joke again. It's never gonna die. Scissor Vodka, a vodka brand that I made up. Someone just pay me for it and then these ads will be real.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Scissor Vodka.

• 0:28Nilay Patel?

  Cut through the night.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Cut through the night.

• 0:29Nilay Patel?

  You know, I instinctively still make scissor motions with my fingers when I do that.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Even though there's no camera.

• 0:34Nilay Patel?

  There's no camera. I'm gonna do it.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  I also noticed that you have no camera to look into, so you just stare me in the eye as you deliver your scissor vodka.

• 0:42Nilay Patel?

  Dan, here's what I want to know. You went to this Lenovo event, you saw this Motorola phone, or Moto phone with that headphone jack, and I don't have a video of you angrily spiking it into the ground because it's stupid.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, Motorola. And it's not Motorola anymore, right?

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, look. Hi, I'm Neil Appertel. I'm the editor of The Verge. This is a podcast from theverge.com that we talk about technology, culture, dumb product decisions. Dieter Bohn is here in studio.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  Back from Silicon Valley.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm going back to Silicon Valley.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Silly Silicon Valley.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  Dan Seifert is here.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  I'm here.

• 1:16Nilay Patel?

  What's up? Paul's gonna be on the show for a little bit later on. Lauren Grush is gonna be on the show for a little space adventure. That'll be, we're gonna shoot her into space on the podcast. That's gonna be great. But a bunch of news.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Tons.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  Tons of news, newsy week, newsy year, and next week even more news.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  You might almost say we're in the news business.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  Where, yes, uh, yes, I might. Let's make a hard choice here. Do you want to start with Alphabet and Nest? Do you want to start with Apple and the App Store and WC coming next week? Dan did a bunch of Moto phone stuff with, Nick Stat did a bunch of Moto phone stuff this week.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  E3 is next week.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  E3 is next week. Just, I mean, just the Code Conference was last week. We taught, we had a, I don't remember. We had like a PTSD.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  Code Conference podcast, but there's stuff to talk about there still. Like, we didn't even get into all of it last week. The Tribune Media Company renamed itself Trunk. Let's start with Apple.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Because I actually think the- Motorola, Google stuff is sort of of a piece and I'll explain why when we get there. But let's start with Apple. So WWDC is next week. My instincts about WWDC tell me it will pretty much be focused on Apple's platforms. I don't think they're going to do anything except talk to developers about how to build new kinds of apps on their platforms. I think all the sort of hardware stuff is going to be pushed out to back to school time, which sucks because I desperately want a new MacBook Pro. But that's just my guess. What's really interesting about it is for the first time ever that I can think about, Apple came out ahead of WWDC. Phil Schiller sat down with Lauren Good and said, we're making big changes

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  to how we do pricing in the App Store. They're pushing the entire App Store towards subscriptions. And there's a lot of, even though she spent, it's a great piece and you should read it. He also talked to John Gruber, he talked to

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Jim Dollarpole.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  Jim Dollarpole. He talked to Renee at iMoore. He basically said the same thing to everybody. You can like read it. It's like very interesting that the Schiller bot like turned on, like a chatbot and was like, and spit out the same information to everybody. There's a lot of questions here, but the the basic facts are they are not going to do paid upgrades, which is something that a lot of developers have asked for in the App Store. They're not doing it. They're not going to do trials or something else people really want.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  To an extent. If you do the subscriptions, there's some footnotes in there about if you

• 3:30Speaker 02

  You could subscribe and then unsubscribe and you only end up paying for like a month.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  I think they're in the in the documentation that I read yesterday.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. So there's all these open questions, but let's get out to sort of the high point. So instead of doing trials and paid upgrades, which is sort of the obvious thing people wanted, instead, Apple is saying the future of this is subscription pricing. And so right now, a bunch of apps like, I don't know, Spotify, whatever.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Well, Spotify is like, yeah, thanks, but no thanks.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, right. But like, you can subscribe to things in the App Store and Apple built Hulu.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Right. So previously it was like cloud services and like content, although there's a little bit of a question with this, but now Apple is saying basically any app, like for example, games can like move to a subscription model. So for us to say they're moving the whole App Store to subscriptions is, I don't know, a little bit of putting like words in their mouth because like the old Way of buying apps is still going to be there.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  But the need from developers to figure out a real sustainable business model, because nobody's downloading apps anymore, because the the growth of iPhone sales is slowing. It's still massive, but it's gonna it's gonna plateau at some point in the near future. Means that those developers need to figure out some way to continue to make money off of the App Store, because they can't just lean on the fact that there's X million, 10, 20, 50, 100 million new iPhones to sell to every quarter.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  I don't think I think it's it's it's it's more fundamental than that.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Well, so what I'm saying is like, the need is so high for some kind of model that is better than what they currently get from the App Store.

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  That I think it's a pretty safe bet that we're going to see a lot of people trying out this new subscription model.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, I sat down with Microsoft, I mean, it's ages ago now, because they since then, Office is on the phone and everything. But ages ago, I sat down with Microsoft and said, why isn't Microsoft Office on the iPhone? And the answer I got was, no one has built a software business in mobile. Like, the traditional, you pay 100 bucks for Microsoft Office, and a couple of years later, you pay 50 bucks for an upgrade, style of business did not happen in mobile.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  No one will pay those prices.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  At all.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  Just the idea of a $29 app on a phone, like.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Or even on a tablet.

• 5:41Nilay Patel?

  Like, boggles, like, tablet apps. Come on. So that's a big problem, right? Because the App Store was supposed to be the future of the software industry. What actually happened is that this combination of cloud services and Office has become a software as a service.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Subscribe to 365, you get the apps. You subscribe to, I don't know, Google Apps, you get all the apps for free, if you're a business. I'm trying to think, Photoshop, Creative Cloud.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  That's the one I'm thinking of.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Those are the big, the big two plus Google.

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  Those were, those were the massive software businesses that sold packaged apps in a box. And you like load 50 floppy disks or like four CD-ROMs. Anyhow, so Apple's saying, we got to figure out how to build businesses in the App Store. We can't, we don't want to do this old model where we charge upgrade prices, because what is the upgrade pricing for a $2 app?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't make any sense. So they're going to this model where, and the apps update far more quickly. There's an incentive for developers to constantly be rolling out updates, because the distribution's better. So it sounds like their plan is. The app, after all, it can say, we're gonna bill you $2 a year and just roll out updates all year, which evens out the revenue curve, doesn't piss off users because they're getting new stuff. Well, we don't know, but theoretically, won't piss off users because you'll just subscribe to an app and like, and you'll just constantly get updates and it, there won't be like Tweetbot 2 is out and it costs $12 and screw you, or whatever. That all seems like a good idea.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  We've seen some apps try, especially on the Mac, try to go to subscription and there, there has been like backlash. So I think that like some, some companies are probably gonna dip their toes in a little bit and see how it goes, but it seems like this is the only way to like, get out of the corner that developers are in right now. Especially like, middle-class developers.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  The example that I think of, uh, cause it just recently happened is, and it's a weather app, is Dark Sky launched on Android with this exact subscription model. You pay $2.99 a year and you get the full Dark Sky experience. And every year you're paying $2.99 again and it finances their servers and their, you know, continued updates or whatever. Now, as far as like the response from people, the biggest backlash was that Android users were pissed that they had to pay a subscription and iOS users didn't. But the reality is that like, Dark Sky probably would have launched a subscription on iOS, had they been able to by now.

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, my stupid alarm clock app has a subscription in it. I don't know why, but I'm paying $2 a year, so for, for different beeps. Sleep Cycle, by the way, is a great app. They just conned me and they're like, you can have this sound or a custom sound for $2 a year. And I was like, I love customizing things. I push the button and I use the default sound like a chump. So, okay. So if anybody wants to send me a sound for my alarm clock, I'm happy to take it. We'll see if it works.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  So my mind is, uh,

• 8:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh wait, we forgot the most important thing. The most important thing. They're changing the revenue share. So, the App Store launched in 2008. Steve Jobs is like, we're handling all your distribution, revolution, we, all we request is 30% of your price, which was great at the time, has come to be known as the App Store tax. Apple now saying, if you hold on to a customer for more than a year, we still want the 30% of that subscription price in the first year, but every year subsequent, we'll cut it in half and only take 15% and keep 85%.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Which is yet another incentive for, this is why I feel totally fine saying Apple wants to push everybody to subscriptions, because they're giving a real monetary incentive to developers to like, switch to this model.

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  Right. Yeah. And then Google immediately came out and said, well, what if we just do it right away? We only want 15% right away because.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Well, I will say that Google hasn't officially announced that though. Some intrepid reporting from our Recode colleagues dug up that story. But yeah, it looks like Google's going to do the same thing, but slightly better.

• 9:25Nilay Patel?

  Fucking Mark Bergen.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  Mark Bergen, I think is one of the best Google reporters out there. So whatever. So, okay. And now they're in the family. So we just ruthlessly link post his reporting on the verge.

• 9:39Nilay Patel?

  Which is great for everybody.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Which hey, we could aggregate it.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  It's all in the family. All right. Mark, if you're listening, just know that I'm clocking you. Keep doing a great job. Or I'll find you. I've got to stop threatening Mark Bergen.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Just can't stop threatening him. Someone get me out of this threatening loop.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Imagine renting your apps instead of buying them. Like, that's like the logical endpoint of this thing. That feels weird, but I guess it should feel fine. I don't know.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  I mean, we've gotten used to renting our music. We've gotten used to renting all of our content.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I'm not surprised that we're going to eventually, wouldn't be surprised if we shift to.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Are you going to enjoy like checking your manage my subscription screen twice a month because you're going to be subscribing to things at different points in the month?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Is that a fun, fun idea for you?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  This will work for most people is if it's a yearly subscription. I can't imagine most people wanting to spend a monthly subscription for average apps. Like a few bucks a month, but like a yearly subscription, you pay it and then it's like, oh, well, I kind of like got a whole year out of that. So I don't mind paying another five bucks.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  But like depends on the price that they pay. Like it's, it's like 99 cents per month. Like 99 cents is like the magic number that makes you just click buy, right?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. But that's like, that works out to like 12 bucks a year. Like that's expensive for an app. When you're used to paying 99 cents.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  It is, but it's also not like pay 60 bucks for an Xbox game.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Right?

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, I think it'll, it'll be monthly for games. I can see that.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  What I, you understand you said about renting most of our content. Usually what you rent is a huge bundle.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You pay Spotify and it's like all over the world's music.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:11Nilay Patel?

  You pay Netflix and it's all over the videos. Here it's just one app. I can't imagine that the next step isn't Apple saying, pay us $24 a month and get access to essentials. Or productivity. I mean, Dieter called it apps as cable TV.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Stealing my line. Stealing my thunder. I was working up to it.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to rewind? It's, we're pre-taped now. We can just, no, we shouldn't do that.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  No, so like the, basically like especially on like an Apple TV, like apps become like channels and you, I just, I can't do it because you just did the whole thing.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't, I disagree about the app channel thing.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  You, you're like renting access to the content of an app, basically. But the thing that like, I don't know.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  We have the whole same cable problem of like, I have to pay my cable operator for four channels I want. I get 60 that I don't want.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  And now it's like the best deal for me to get these apps is in this bundle, but I get like five apps I don't really care about.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's it. That's the move. It's absolutely the move. I don't, the Apple TV apps as channels things is different because when you, when you subscribe to the CBS Now app, you just get CBS content.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  The thing that's the same.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  You don't get CBS and NBC.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  With a channel that you pay for on cable, you know that if you stop paying for it, you don't get that channel anymore. And like, that makes sense. But typically with an app, if you like, decide to stop paying to not get the upgrade, app still works. Right? Like the idea that in order to use some of these apps, that you need to continually pay for them. And if you stop paying for it, the app suddenly goes away or becomes useless is a weird thing. It's like not the way that you like to think about your phone.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  And on top of that, if a bunch of your like most important apps all move to subscription, like your, your phone suddenly starts costing more month per month.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  It costs more to use a phone than it used to. It used to be, you know, in the aggregate, maybe it was the same because you buy the app and then you don't pay attention. And if you add up all the apps you buy in a year, blah, blah, blah. But now it's like, you look at your phone and you've got your phone bill and now you've got your app bill.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  I think there's, I think this bet is entirely about enterprise and professional apps.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  I think so too. But I think that everybody else is gonna, if it, if it works, it's the only, it's the only option they're giving to developers. If a developer wants to offer paid upgrades or if a developer wants to like fund the continued like bug fixes and changes to the game, there's no other option. Apple is not giving the other things that developers have been asking for. They're only giving subscriptions.

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm teeing you up. You received an email that I'd like to hear about.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I received an email. I emailed a game developer or their PR and I was like, eh, what do you think of this? You're gonna do it? And this person from this company, which I can't name, said that's the Verge story. Lauren's Verge story hit the mobile games world like a nuclear bomb.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because it changes their entire model.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, all that free to play stuff is like, they're gonna try out subscriptions. Instead of like trying to trick you into blah, blah, blah, they're just gonna, instead of like, I'm gonna spend a dollar for like 10 coins or 10 extra lives. So just like, oh, like, here's the basic game. And if you want all this cool stuff, pay us. There are some games that are free to play where like, yeah, I'm not gonna like spend a buck to like get 10 extra lives. Cause that seems really like cheap and I don't manipulative like, oh, this level's too hard. You made it hard on purpose. So I'd have to buy lives. I hate you. But if like you get a bunch of little, you know, spliffs for just paying a buck a month. Yeah, I'm totally gonna do that.

• 14:38Nilay Patel?

  What if we rename free to play as pay to cheat? What if we do that as a culture, as a society?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Pay to win?

• 14:44Nilay Patel?

  Pay, yeah, cause it, you're like, oh, this is really hard and you can pull it off if you wait.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  For me, that would be like pay to beat Dieter's high score.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, that'd be great.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  There are some games where I'm not like the king of the mountain anymore.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  So I'll have to go find those games. Yeah, what you're saying.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  I started playing Alto's Adventure the other day.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I am king of the mountain on Alto's Adventure.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, just don't look at Dieter's.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Oh, no, Heim, Heim Gartenberg, intern at the Verge.com, unbelievable high score in Alto's Adventure. Like he, he like kept a run going for like two hours. I think it's just out of bounds.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  We should fund more for Heim to do, right? First, I'm coming for Heim, then I'm coming for you, and then Mark Bergen, you're in my sights. So this is a huge change in the App Store. It kind of does set up the question though, and we should do this a little bit. What the hell are they gonna do next week?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, if they're, if the biggest news about distributing and monetizing software, which is what developers care about, is happening the week before. And then on top of it, and we've talked about this on this show forever, Apple doesn't really have an AI thing.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Well, they have Siri.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  So this is the, this is like, we should go through the rumors.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  They have a lot of yeah buts, right? Like, yeah, they have Siri, but they have.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  You should just say bunny.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  Bunny?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you can't pronounce rabbit. Nevermind. I don't know.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  That was a reach. I know where you're going with it.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  You can't say, you can't say rabbit. Yeah, but they have a lot of yeah buts.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Shout out to my high school girlfriend for coming up with that joke. This first chat took a real turn as soon as I started pre-recording it. So, okay, Apple's got a lot of, a lot of bunnies. VR AR. I haven't seen peep about VR AR at WWDC. They have the Apple TV, which. Is a buggy mess, right? It's a buggy mess and I don't think apps on the Apple TV are very discoverable, very useful, very shareable. And you know why? Cause the remote sucks. Yeah, I mean, it'd be amazing if the Tim Cook came on stage and held up the Apple TV remote and was like, this was a mistake. Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  We didn't learn the lesson about one-to-one control on a remote on a TV that we should have from the we, but we shipped it anyway. Yeah. Apple TV is a huge platform, TVOS. Mm-hmm. I would say it's probably the smallest of all of Apple's platforms. Questioned, Apple Watch, probably. Apple Watch, WatchOS. Man. You gotta do something there. They gotta do so much there. The default opinion of the Apple Watches, they like, they, they basically made like 10 mistakes. How much, how much of that, and I know the answer is some, but like, how much of that can be solved with software versus they just need more powerful hardware in the watch? Like, the biggest complaint is that it's slow. Then the second biggest complaint is that like, there's too many ways to navigate it, which they could fix. They made a bunch of bad bets, like Contacts button, bad bet. The app. The digital crown. The digital crown, bad bet.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  The seven different ways to interact. Seven different ways to interact with a bad bet. And there's only so many of those bets that they can walk back, right? Like, what's probably gonna happen is they're gonna keep iterating on it, it'll be a little bit faster, we'll wait for new hardware that speeds it up. But they're gonna like, stick with like, the core metaphors of it. But what they oughta do is they oughta just, like, hardware exists and we're just gonna rethink the whole damn thing. Yeah. But I don't see that in the cards. Maybe not for this W. They need a new watch. Yeah. Even when they do a new watch, they might do. Anyway, so they've, they've got two nascent platforms that they have to say something. Yeah. So that's out there. Then, obviously iOS, something will happen there. And they'll add capabilities to iOS. What is, what are they gonna add to iOS? And they could open up Siri, there's one. We've heard that rumored.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  But that is, is I, is like, the big question, because everybody else has announced all their AI, IA, intelligent assistant, artificial intelligence bot stuff.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Right? So like Apple's next and the rumor is that they're gonna open up Siri to with an API. And I don't know, like, maybe they'll call it apps because everything in Apple ends up being an app or whatever. So that's fine, but is Siri a different, is Siri a platform in the way that like iOS, tvOS, blah, blah, blah, are a platform? Because for Google, Google Assistant is a platform. For Microsoft, they're building up like, I don't even know if to call it a platform, but there's like Cortana. And then there's like this whole like middle layer and then there's the stuff that talks to it. And to me, like, especially since one of the other rumors of Siri is coming to the Mac. Like, they need to, they need to stop thinking of Siri as like a piece of iOS.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  They need to think of Siri as their next like OS, their like cloud OS or whatever you want to call it. It's not an OS, like the metaphors get fuzzy, but they need to decouple Siri from iOS in order to like make it work on the Mac.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Right, so you can log into Siri and say, I want to use this weather service.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  And it's open and you don't have to have that app on your Mac or whatever, right? The backend knows you. That's a thing. So that's a huge question there. What else are they gonna do with iOS? Will they do any VR, AR stuff with iOS? Seems like a no.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Seems like a no.

• 19:31Nilay Patel?

  Just seems like a no, but it's a question that the rest of the industry is pushing in that direction. OS 10, potentially renamed to macOS.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  And what, what, what does that come with? Is it gonna be?

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  Siri, they're gonna add Siri. I mean, that's the big.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  They're gonna add Siri and even.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  We think they're gonna, they're, they're probably gonna do some stuff on the Photos app on both iOS and macOS.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like the, the point that we're waiting for is we're waiting for iOS and macOS to like bridge together in ways that they haven't yet. And so is it too early for that or is that?

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they can do that until they make a touchscreen laptop. I don't think they're ever gonna make a touchscreen laptop.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the Android on Chrome OS stuff is so good because it's apps and you can use them sort of naturally. I think that's gonna prove the model much more so than macOS gaining some more iOS features.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  I used a Pixel two yesterday.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  And the whole time I'm like, man, why aren't, why aren't Android apps here yet?

• 20:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's exciting.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  For it.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  And also, I mean, it's mostly to school, so it doesn't really count, but Chromebook's outselling macOS computers.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:28Nilay Patel?

  In the United States. There's, it's a thing. They've, they've gotta come back to that market a little bit. Tablet stuff?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  What?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  I mean, that would be part of whatever the update iOS.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  They might try and further the stuff they've been doing with iPads in education. They had a thing not too long ago that they're better for multi-user.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  For education. If, if they can add like proper, actual multi-user support, especially to tablets, I'll be pretty excited.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Cause right now it's like limited in this like weird education zone.

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  I just, here's the thing. For the longest time, Apple's game was putting out a product that was complete with an obvious omission and then announcing the inclusion of the omission and making up by the new version of the product, right?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but now.

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  That is their game, right?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  But they've got a new game now and the new game is they have a complete product and they're going to start omitting things like the headphone jack this fall.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  Bergen, you're no longer number one on my list. I don't know why. So anyway, to finish this point about Apple, real quick. It's, this is the first WWDC in a long time where I can't tell you what the obvious additions to their two main platforms should be aside from Siri coming to the Mac.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Well, and Siri like leveling up.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Siri becoming open and having like, those are, that's the obvious thing they're gonna do.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  You think they're gonna announce a speaker?

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Damn. So I think, I don't, I don't, I don't think they are either.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  I think, I think they have to get.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Do, if they do.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Apple Music. That's what I'm thinking.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Oh, they're, they're gonna clean up Apple Music. Yeah. Okay.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Cleanup.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Burn it down and start over. But if they do do.

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  They're killing connect.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I mean, like the optimist in me thinks that if they do do a home connected Siri device, if it's a speaker or something else, uh, it's gonna be a one more thing. They show it on stage in a quick slide and then it's like, see you later next year or like end of the year, we're gonna tell you more about it. Like they did with the Mac Pro, right? They showed it really briefly and then it was months later that they actually formally.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  They could, if they, if they're really working on one, they might wanna try and get, get it out there before Google Home.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  No, they can't do that.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I don't think they care. Apple doesn't care about being first either. So like.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  No, but they can't, they can't. With the Mac Pro, tiny market. Old Mac Pro had been around for 400 years, I believe. I mean, it was literally like a walking skeleton of a dinosaur and it, I believe it ran on a Pentium chip at that time. I mean, it was like, it was so old. In the, in the market so small that Apple had nothing to lose by saying, we have a cool new product for you. We're, look at how sweet it is. And then we're gonna let that one age.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  We're gonna let our all in one computer outshine that one.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  This is true, by the way. I don't, I don't know if listeners know this. Our video staff edits on iMacs, not Pros.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, the only people that edit or prefer the Pro are the people using Final Cut or whatever. Like any, any Adobe House uses an iMac.

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyhow, so they were able to do that because they weren't cannibalizing any sales. They weren't making a promise they couldn't keep. I think if they're gonna do a Siri speaker, they'll announce it in classic Apple fashion. It will be real. It will work.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And you'll buy it in 10 days.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  And yeah, and the key, the key to that is they'll open up Siri now. Developers will be participating in it and then

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  Holiday time.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  The foreshadowing.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Well, they open up Siri enough so that you can actually just use it with Google stuff.

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's the thing that I want. Like I, I've got Siri on my watch and I've, sidebar, the thing that actually bugs me the most about intelligent assistants is crappy microphones. That's like, I'm getting more and more convinced that's the reason Alexa is so great is that it just, it straight up has good microphones. Because when the watch or your phone on either Google or Apple actually hears you, it's like, fine.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  It's good on microphones that are always listening to. The problem is that the, the phone or the watch have to spool up. And like, that's the problem. Cause you're not gonna stop talking.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, I just, they're gonna, the speakers are splashy product for holiday. If they do a speaker this year. Just like, I'm pretty sure they'll do new Macs for back to school because that's the obvious time to do new Macs. And they'll do an iPhone in September because

• 24:23Speaker 02

  That's when they do.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  The Lord hath decreed, an iPhone shall arrive in September.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Remember when it used to be in the summer?

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  That was a wild, wild time.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's just my take. It's, they're gonna do a bunch of software stuff. They're in a moment, for better or worse, they're in a moment. And we, we've talked about, you know, there's the, there's Google I/O, there's Microsoft Build, there's the Facebook thing. They're in a moment when everyone else has gone first and said, here's our 10 year vision. And mostly what they were saying is, the iPhone won, we understand the iPhone, that's great. It's over there. Apple's doing great with the iPhone. Here's our vision for

• 24:53Speaker 02

  What's next.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  And computing around you with artificial intelligence.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  But Apple's game is not to declare a grand vision, right? They're like, here's our next product. This is like, this, this next product is the vision. This lap, this is the future of laptops. This is the future of that. But they don't, they don't do what Zuckerberg or Google did where they're like, here's our 10 year plan.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Right? Like.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, to be clear, Steve Jobs would get on stage and say, today, Apple reinvents the phone.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  But they do it with like a.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  I'm saving the magazine industry with the iPad. Tim Cook did it with the watch. I mean, the watch event was as much a statement of where Apple thought the next 10 years would go as anything. They built a spaceship and filled it with celebrities.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  They sent a supermodel running through Africa to prove that heart rate tracking was valuable to you in a smart watch. This is a true thing that they did.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I'm just.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  It was very weird.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  Bono was there. He's always there. I don't know why I said that. He's omnipresent.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  He's just there. He's in your iTunes.

• 25:52Nilay Patel?

  I just.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  He's on your computer.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  But they don't do like, Apple doesn't do like Kitchen of the Future, like Microsoft did at CES every year. No, it's true. They do have a very different style. I just think in this moment, when everyone else is talking, for better or worse, about chatbots that don't work so great, and AI that isn't ready, they're not, they're not being expansive.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  This is an opportunity for them to be expansive. I hope they take it.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  I just hope they're exciting. I'm very nervous that this is going to be a very dry WWDC.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  Or it's going to be action packed because they rolled out the big news first.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  Why roll out the big news first if you're not jam packed in the keynote?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  I guess. I mean, yeah, that could be it. But it's also jam packed because they have what? An hour, an hour and a half to do this keynote?

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  They gotta cover all their platforms.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Seven different platforms to cover. So they gotta talk about all of them. They gotta talk about how great they are and how great, how many stores they're opening. And like, how many, you know, humanitarian and environmental things they're doing. So that all takes up time. So I don't know. I just, I just want, excite me, Apple.

• 26:48Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. And then, you know, Dieter and I are going to be there. Lauren Gittl will be there. Walt will be there. Walt's live logging. That's my favorite thing in the world. It'll be a whole thing. Also, the same day, again, is Microsoft's E3 event, Sony's E3 event. It's Monday's.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Monday's gonna be bonkers.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  Here's, here's what I want you to do, dear.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Take Monday off.

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  Take Monday off. If you're, you're not in school, I hope.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  If you're not in school and you don't work for The Verge, take the day off.

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you work for The Verge.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  You, you must work on Monday.

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  You, if you, yeah, you gotta be here. Everybody else, take the day off and read The Verge. Uh, okay, so here's what's gonna happen. I'm gonna read this ad for Eero. We're gonna have a little Paul Gadget moment. And we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about Lenovo. We're gonna talk about Nest and Google, then we're gonna do some other stuff. There's a lot more to talk about.

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  Our homes are coming online. There are speakers, thermostats, light bulbs, front door locks, security cameras, washers, dryers, and everything in between.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  They're alive.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  Increasingly, services like Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify where we turn for home entertainment, Wi-Fi, the foundation of it all. And it's probable that your Wi-Fi router, uh, sucks. Imagining for electricity didn't reach certain part of the house or was intermittent in others, that'd be ridiculous. But it is the status quo for Wi-Fi. There's dead zones, there's buffering, it's afflicting far too many of us. We've become used to it, except that bad Wi-Fi is right, just the way things are. But Eero was designed to change all this. The company manufactures a single device, a small elegant box about the size of an Apple TV. And with the help of their app, you put Eero's throughout your home. The first one replaces your existing router and is ethernet wired to your cable or DSL. The additional Eero's just need power from an outlet. They mesh network together and they blanket your home in fast, reliable Wi-Fi.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  If you've ever tried to give your, your router a boost with a range extender, then you've experienced true disappointment. That's because extenders can only stretch your signal a single hop. You can't connect multiple in a row like you can with Eero. Extenders often cut your bandwidth in half because they rely on a single wireless radio. But in contrast, each Eero has two radios, both of which communicate with your devices and sync with the other Eero's, so your connection's always fast. Range extenders also require an entirely separate SSID, so you find yourself having to continually switch from one network to another. This is true, this is how my parents' house is wired and sucks. But Eero operates on a single network name throughout your entire home. It's just one network. So, after all of that, what I encourage you to do, uh, is buy an Eero. Just buy one. See, this is why we're not live.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  For free overnight shipping, visit ero.com/verge.

• 29:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, there it is.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  That's E E R O dot com slash verge.

• 29:08Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I want you to do. Shut your mouth and buy an Eero. Stop complaining about your Wi-Fi. Get it done. You get free overnight shipping. Go to ero.com/verge. At checkout, select free overnight shipping, and then enter verge, and then it's free, the shipping. The Eero still costs you money, but then it'll be your house the next day. You plug it in, throw out your old Wi-Fi router, and then your life will be better because of Eero. That's it. Eero.com/verge.

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  Paul is here.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Hey.

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  How's it going, man?

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Good. How are you?

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm great. You're here now. It's gonna be a thing. I hear you are renaming your segment this week.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, this week it's called Gadget Surprise.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  Ooh. We're ready.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Does it have whipped cream on it?

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so as you know, oh my god.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  It's like a casserole. Is there corn in it? Cause I hate corn in casseroles.

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  Also, it's slightly boozy.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  No spoilers. No spoilers.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  No spoilers. Alright, Paul. Paul, as you may know, is the editor of our Circuit Breaker gadget blog. One of my favorite bits of The Verge. Paul?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:09Nilay Patel?

  Tell us about your surprise.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  This week, we have an iPhone case that runs Android. And it turns your iPhone into an Android phone.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Without just any old Android phone. A slow Android phone.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  A really slow, bad Android phone.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  But these are among your favorite Circuit Breaker items, aren't they?

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so there's kind of a larger story here. We might have like a greatest hacker alive situation.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  This is done by this guy named Nick Lee, who is also the person who put Windows 95 on an Apple Watch.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  Ooh. Putting things where they don't belong.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Dude just loves slow computers.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  But what can he do with HEC HD2?

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  Wait, the HEC HD2, we used to run like literally every operating system.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying. I wanna see WatchOS running on an HD2.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  You don't wanna see WatchOS running anywhere. Windows 95 and the Apple Watch legitimately more useful than WatchOS. Go ahead, Paul.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  We'll call him on his Android and iOS phone and make some requests. But anyways, yeah, so this, he got a reference board that runs Android. He wrote a bunch of custom software. This is why, he's not just plugging stuff together. Like, he's really doing some custom work here. He wrote a bunch of custom software that basically streams the screen over USB, over the lightning plug to the iPhone. So you run an iPhone app, and then you see what is on Android, and you send your touch events, and yes, it's slow and bad and useless. But also, you get a whole HDMI jack, because Android has that. And it's not even the biggest case ever.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty big, man. Isn't it like 3D printed?

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, but you know, it's about the size of like a big battery pack.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  But it destroys your battery instead of helps your battery.

• 32:01Nilay Patel?

  Paul, let me ask you a question. Greatest hacker alive situation. That's what I want to get into.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Who was the previous greatest hacker alive?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Steve Wozniak.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Ben Heck.

• 32:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I was gonna go Ben Heck. I went to Ben Heck's house in Madison years ago.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Well, and there's also GeoHot, but GeoHot went mainstream.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he was super mainstream. He took that VC money. He's driving Lexuses around with no hands. GeoHot, George Hots is the CEO of Kama.ai, the self-driving car company. They're gonna sell you a kit for a thousand dollars. It makes your car self-driving. We did a video with it.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  Watch it. Michael Zlanko did it this week. Was it this week? Action-packed week at the Verge. So Paul.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  I've been, I've been thinking about that a lot, and I think he's actually doing like a great, I, I doubt it's going to be the best self-driving car, maybe not even the top 10. But I love that, that GeoHot is, is giving, I don't know, if you buy a car, you should be able to hack it and, and put irresponsible software on it, just like the manufacturer does.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  That's true. How many, there is like two different car stories where an OTA update bricked cars this week, right?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Lexus had a problem.

• 33:08Nilay Patel?

  Was it Lexus twice?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:10Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, Lexus, Lexus has got bricks. So why not use GeoHot's software to control your Lexus? I'm with you. I can't wait to hack my car.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because you're just tired of punching it.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  I, I did punch it to fix it. It's at the shop right now. It's getting a whole thing replaced. It's a whole thing. So Paul, are you gonna stick around? Cause I want to talk to you. I want you around for this next piece of news, which is really interesting to me. And this is why I want to talk about Nest and Google and Lenovo all in the same breath. Here's my theory right now. Google bought Motorola.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  For a variety of reasons, patents, scaring Samsung, what have you, but they bought a hardware company, blew it, just like utterly blew it with that hardware company.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Lost something like 12 million dollars, 12 billion dollars.

• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  Kept a bunch of patents, did in fact scare Samsung into something with TouchWiz, de, de-Samsunging TouchWiz a little bit. Sold Motorola to Lenovo. Motorola no longer exists is now just like a label that's being glued on the Lenovo phones.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  They held on to the interesting part of Motorola and sold the rest to Lenovo.

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  So the actual part, the patents.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  The hell of ATAP too.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  ATAP, that's what.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Reagan is gone, right? So even the person who was there to make interesting hardware took off.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:17Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that Google and so Lenovo put out new Moto phones. Dan, you want to talk about those real fast?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's a Moto Z Droid Edition and Moto Z Force Droid Edition.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Force Droid?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Moto Z Force comma Droid Edition because they are launching as Verizon exclusives this summer. So.

• 34:35Nilay Patel?

  Nothing like a carrier exclusive.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Nothing like a carrier exclusive to bring you back to 2011.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Wait, is it actually called Moto Z Droid Edition?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  We're back, we are back in the world of phones that have like 50 words in their name.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:48Nilay Patel?

  Moto Z Force comma Droid Edition.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Doesn't say like 4G LTE.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  Come on.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  But.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

  Remember when everything was 4G Touch? That was just a terrible time in our lives. We're like, that's acceptable. Just put the word touch on the name of every name, just at the end of every name.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  So the pitch with these phones is that they have these attachable accessories that snap to the back through magnets and they can't communicate with the phone itself through these pogo pins. So you can add a battery or you can add an external speaker, you can add a projector, you can add whatever else they think of.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  The phones themselves are wildly thin with a big camera and terrible battery life, right?

• 35:25Speaker 01

  The Moto Z Droid Edition.

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  4G Touch.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Is 5.2 millimeters thick, so it's crazy thin, has a giant camera bump because it is so thin. And it also lacks a headphone jack. So you have to use the.

• 35:40Nilay Patel?

  Does the Droid Edition have a headphone jack?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  I don't think, I don't think the Force has a headphone jack either. Which is thicker, has a bit bigger battery, faster processor, stuff like that. But yeah, so that's the story with them. They are, they are smartphones with things that snap to the back of them.

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm into the snapping their back.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Lenovo legitimately thinks this is a huge innovation and this is the next wave of smartphones. And I think they are insane.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's better than the LG G5.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  It's a better execution on a similar idea, but it's also much simpler. And it's also like, the whole thing that makes modules work is when there's a whole ecosystem of modules being built and you can get whatever you want and it, and it works. What company is going to buy or build hardware modules for a phone that?

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  Is definitely not going to sell.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:23Nilay Patel?

  And yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  That like two Verizon customers.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  You know why they're not going to buy it? No fucking headphone jack.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  And it doesn't have a headphone jack. Maybe like, no, this is the move. You build a module that adds a headphone jack.

• 36:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh. Think about it. Yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I use Bluetooth headphones.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  You know, my favorite part of it is the phone itself charges over USB C, but the modules charge over micro USB.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Which is the bonkers thing.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  So.

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  Do you like adapters? Do you like phones with cumbersome names?

• 36:50Speaker 01

  This comes with in the box. I will say that they're very different from Ara in that Ara is like actual components, like camera modules and like other like hardware type of components that are interchangeable. These are like accessories that snapped to the back and it's a much simpler idea.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Like peripherals.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Peripherals, right. So like instead of a Bluetooth speaker, you just slap a more powerful speaker on the back of it.

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  Everyone loves that idea.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  My thought here is what if someone went the opposite direction and instead of a headphone jack, they put two USB C plugs? Because all of these things are just, they're just peripherals and you could just get like a battery bank and just plug it in over USB C, but keep another plug free for headphones or other stuff.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, what if you added the headphone jack that you actually want? I, so here, look, this happened, uh, last year, right? There's a rumor, Apple's going to build a smart watch. Everyone rushes out smart watches for better or worse. That happened.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Few years ago. Yep.

• 37:49Nilay Patel?

  No, I guess a few years ago.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Samsung has since released 14 smart watches.

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  Released two more today. You didn't even know that. The Gear Touch 4G came out today.

• 37:59Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. Uh, now there's a rumor Apple's gonna cut the headphone jack and do lightning headphones. Everyone's like, we'll make the same mistake as well.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  But first.

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  It's just, I don't get it. I, there's nothing about that idea that is friendly to the user. Here's what I'll say. I have been on a personal mission to kill IR blasters. It is the, it is the animating force of my career.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  Is for us as a species.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Came back for one generation of phones and then they went away again.

• 38:31Nilay Patel?

  To stop communicating in infrared with technology. That is not how we should do it. We should not send pulses of infrared light to televisions to change the channel. I can't win. It's so demoralizing.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  I just feel like there's so many other issues with these phones before you get to the fact that they don't have a headphone jack.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  It's really funny.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. It doesn't matter. It's like laser focused on the.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Phones are fine. They have the specs that are, the specs are fine.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  Dieter will literally buy any Motorola phone.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's that.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  He's just gonna do it.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  I mean, they're like every other Android phone in terms of specs that you can buy right now.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is the reason, the reason I can't win the IR blaster war is because the massive ecosystem of devices in the world that people have that they rely on needs IR to communicate because that's how the economy works. Taking the headphone jack away is a futile attempt to bypass the fact that headphones are a pretty good idea that most people like a lot. And the idea that you're gonna reinvent how headphones work, how plugging stuff in to make audio go from one place to the other with proprietary DACs.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  It's 5.2 millimeter stick.

• 39:39Nilay Patel?

  No, it's not. Have you seen the fucking magnet case?

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Use Bluetooth.

• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't wanna drain my battery and plug in another thing. All this is stupid.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  The, the future of headphones is definitely wireless and like any, anything else until then is just a stopgap.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  As soon as Intel finally releases that bowl.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Ones that I would buy.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  As soon as Intel releases that charging bowl.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  The bowl.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  The charging bowl.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Showed four times at CES.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Just drop your, drop your stuff into the bowl. Everything's fine.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Great idea.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:04Nilay Patel?

  But the.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  I, I still feel like the future is wireless. Anything else is a stopgap and there is growing in teething pains until we get to full wireless.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, Dan, we're gonna have those teething pains for the next 50 years.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, we will. Yeah.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So Dan, I think you're wrong for a variety of reasons. Paul, I count on you to be, uh, also disagree with me. Why are you wrong?

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Well, I, I guess I'll just disagree with you on principle.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  I like it when Apple gets rid of plugs that people used to like because it just, I don't know. I just feel like a lot of, there's like a lot of hijinks. It's an opportunity for like everybody to like go back to the sketchpad and come up with like a new weird peripherals.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  But headphones?

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Well, so headphones already, you know, like if you want to have, you know, audio and a mic, there's already like some weirdness. Like, like think about the, the volume button and the, uh, the clicker and the mic. Like there's some incompatibilities between plugging into an iPhone, plugging into Android and plugging into like a, a gaming PC or something like that. You know, a lot of like USB, there are a lot of gaming headsets come with like a USB plug. I mean, there, there, there is already a lot of weirdness in the headphone land. If we want headphones with more features, with built in amplifiers, with, you know, the need power for some reason.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Maybe have 3D, I don't know, like do newer, better, interesting things with headphones. You need more than that eighth inch jack.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  I get what you're saying, right? It's like squeezing the balloon, right? You, you, you take away the thing that everybody relies on. They have to invent stuff. All the innovation goes over there, but all the things that you just described, you could just do with the existing lightning port. And then not give the bird to your users by taking away the thing that they rely on.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, you can say that this, your argument makes total sense for the iPhone because people actually buy iPhones.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  People actually buy Android phones.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Android outsells iPhone worldwide.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Android phones, but you know what? There's a lot of Android phones that still have a headphone jack and came out this year with a headphone jack. Nobody's gonna buy these Moto Z phones. Who cares?

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Except for the people, there, it's so sad by the way.

• 42:10Nilay Patel?

  Verizon, like I want a droid. And they like.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  And they go, droid.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  It's like the one.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Their phone is blowing up in notifications.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  The one dude is just like, you remember those robot ads?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  What's so crazy?

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  Where the robots murdered people?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Do you remember how much we loved the Moto X? Both, both things. They're like, they, they, they just felt like friendly. They felt like.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  They were, they were personable. They, you know, I, I just feel like you look at these devices and they're, they're well made and they've got nice materials, but it just. Looks like Lenovo's design department just went ahead and like steamrolled all of like.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  That's why it's so thin.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  And that's why it's so thin. So I mean, like the fronts are funky looking. They're like weirdly unnecessarily thin. The backs.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  The best part about getting rid of the headphone jack, by the way, is that that will be yet another level of incompatibility between iPhone and Android users. Because Android will end up using USB C and iPhone will use.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Or everyone will go wireless because Bluetooth has no incompatibility issue. You know, like Paul was mentioning, the remote doesn't work on your iOS headphones. We plug into Android. Bluetooth works the same on both of them.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, Bluetooth doesn't work when your battery is dead. When your stupid headphones that you have to.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Look, there's.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  You still have to go into like a menu and do pairing and stuff.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but once it's done, it's done.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  This definitely cuts down on sharing. Like I, I hang out with people who have Android phones and iPhones. You know, I'm really open in that way.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Such an accepting person.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Cause this is real power play when it's, oh, you need an Android charger. Sorry. I only got lightning.

• 43:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Wow, that's very elitist.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  You can use my brick if you want.

• 43:49Nilay Patel?

  Did you bring your own cable?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  So explain to me again, the connection to Nest.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so here's the thing.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  I never got there.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  Google keeps buying hardware companies, fucking them up and ruining them over and over and over again. Motorola, maybe not a great hardware company at that time, but they were fine. Google bought them. We were like, yeah, that was stupid. And then flipped it and now Motorola is dead.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  I don't think Motorola would have lasted as long as it did if Google didn't buy it.

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  Great.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fine. They were dying.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  But so here's the, here's the actual question.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  Google bought Nest.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Google bought Nest.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  Terrible decision.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  But did Google blow Nest up or did Alphabet blow Nest up?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Or.

• 44:23Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Would Nest have imploded itself had Google never involved?

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, I don't think Nest would have imploded itself. So Nest, if you've been watching the news, on Friday, Nest's CEO Tony Fadell is out. There's a new guy, coincidentally, the guy who was the CEO of Motorola Home under Google.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  Who executed a bunch of layoffs and sold it. That guy, now the CEO of Nest inside of the Alphabet structure, literally. Really, everyone in the world called me over the past two days and yelled at me about things, which was really interesting, just sifting through all the conflicting information and like coming out with what might be the truth was like a fun process. The story I heard is Nest was basically fine as an independent company. They actually had additional funding lined up to grow. Silicon Valley VCs were very excited. There was Tony and a bunch of ex Apple people. Google wanted to bring in basically Apple's DNA into a hardware group. Tony and his co-founder Matt were totally entranced with the idea of using Google's money, Google's resources, Google's reach to accelerate their plan. They got bought by Google. They were whatever, somewhat happy Google.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  Google restructured itself into Alphabet. Nest was pulled out of Google, made it into its own company under a division of Alphabet known so lovingly as Other Bets.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  So is it fair, I mean, like the question is how, like in that time, before they were under Alphabet, how much was, were they actually integrated into Google?

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  Open question, right? Nobody knows.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Well, and also like if we're talking about Google failing, like it's also an open question of, you know, the general consensus is that if you say this, Nest will call you and yell at you about how many new products they released.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  But what actually happened was they, they bought Dropcam and they like, they revved a couple of products and that was it.

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And yeah, so they haven't, their roadmap got all messed up. Who knows? And now Fidel's out. He might be a huge jerk. That's the reports. Or he might just be the kind of person you need to run a hardware company. We don't know. Again, literally conflicting reports left and right. My point is let's hope Nest gets back on track. They say there's going to be a new product in a few weeks. Like hopefully Nest keeps working, but that bet inside of Google clearly didn't work out the way they wanted it to. But it was, that was their first, Motorola was their first attempt to have their own hardware division, kick it to the curb. Now they're making dumb phones.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Speaking of Motorola executives who make hardware at Google.

• 46:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they brought back.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Marwan Farwaz, and they also brought back Rick Osterloh to run Google's hardware division, which, by the way, is separate from Nest. Like, Google's got this whole thing where, you know.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Every other piece of hardware.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  We run hardware, that like, all hardware comes through here.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  Chromecast, Google Chrome.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Nexus Division.

• 47:00Nilay Patel?

  The Nexus TV.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Pixels.

• 47:01Nilay Patel?

  Barnstormer of a product that they have. Trumbo Pixels, very good though. Anyhow, but Rick Osterloh, ex-CEO, or ex-Motora president.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  Runs that.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  My point is, the Nest story aside, that's a deep, weird, crazy story. But Motorola, or Google has now bought two different hardware companies and managed them into or around disasters. And now they have their own internal hardware unit. And I just, I don't know what they're doing. Like, that, that's, I want Google to make hardware, right? I think it would be good for them to do. But then I look at the Pixel C, and it's like, why did you make this?

• 47:40Speaker 02

  There are so many questions.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  Who's responsible for that?

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  You, the Nexus TV, the Nexus Player.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  I'm optimistic that Google's main hardware division, now that it's all collected together and it's run by one person, but like ostensibly one team, you know, they'll be able to figure out and not make those Pixel C mistakes.

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, but so.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  But as far as Nest goes, like, oh.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  But it's like, the success of that hardware depends not just on the success of like, can you make good hardware? Not only do they have to make good hardware, they also have to get enough support from the rest of Google to actually sell the damn thing. So, Google Home will be fine, right? Chromecast is doing fine. Aura is a huge open question. How much effort are they gonna put behind actually making Aura a real thing that like, people buy en masse? Are they gonna give it to carrier partners? Or is it gonna be like a thing you buy in the Google Store randomly? Like, it's, it's a big question. And, sure, they've got plenty of money and plenty of runway to do whatever the hell they want and start small and experiment or whatever. But, you know, it's not like Nest was gonna run out of money, right?

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they were fine.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Having enough money to like, experiment is not the only thing that's gonna keep you going. You actually have to like, have wins and have like, public sentiment, like, on your side and like, build the brand.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  Which Nest had before.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know. It's just a very confusing. I it sounds like Google's gonna get more serious about hardware this year. But I just look at the Motorola thing and I look at the Nest thing. I'm like, you something, something about how you've tried this before. And maybe the answer is don't buy a company for a couple billion dollars.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Or don't set up those walls between the companies like they did, you know, the story that the Motorola was like.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  Walls. It has like competing Montessori's.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Right. Well, that's what the hardware division is designed to fix. Yeah, that's the point. Like, that's the point. Like, collecting the hardware division together, have it run on one team who, one person who like aliases with the other parts of Google and he's up high enough in the ranks.

• 49:27Nilay Patel?

  That's none of that sounds Googly. You can't do that shit while you're driving a team bike to.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Or while your CEO is trying to make a flying car down the road.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, we haven't even talked about that.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  I I just feel like Google doesn't have a middle ground between hobbies and like world changers.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  And they haven't had a hardware world changer, except maybe the Chromecast.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Right. And and the thing is, is most hardware isn't a world changer. Lenovo, you know, Lenovo bought a ThinkPad from, or the whole computer division from IBM. A long time ago and Lenovo wasn't like, finally, we're gonna take over all PC manufacturing. And we're gonna change the face of PCs. And they're like, no, we want to have one of the best or the best business focused laptops. So we're gonna buy this brand. And I don't know specifically what they wanted for Moto, but they're making phones and that's probably what Lenovo wants to do is, well, let's sell some phones and then.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  You know, Google has bigger idea. Like, what if, what if we controlled everybody's homes? Maybe Nest is our wedge into controlling everybody's homes.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I I think they bought Nest not to build thermostats. I think they bought Nest to have a great hardware division.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a talent buy, right? It was to get Matt. It was to get Tony. It was to get their hardware.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  Sixty percent of Nest employees at the time.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  And they lost them all.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  That Google bought at sixty percent were ex Apple employees, right? They were, and I think those cultures were just not compatible.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. You bring in the top down, secret, hard driving, Apple perfectionist, one product at a time culture into a company like Google that's like, here's a bad idea. Let's ship forty versions of it and see if it works like, and then kill it. See you, Google Reader. You know, like, I don't think that those things were compatible at all. And I think if they want to build a harbor business, it's the makes of the great product, they've got to do a lot more work. Paul, any final closing thoughts before we?

• 51:23Speaker 02

  No, I think that was really well put, Neil.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  Thanks, man. I hope that our listeners who put their stupid wireless headphones are enjoyed. Sorry, I'm so mad at you guys.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  Casper is a sleep brand that carried one perfect mattress, sold directly to consumers. It actually has a headphone jack, which I thought was very surprising, eliminating commission-driven inflated prices. Its award-winning sleep surface was developed in-house, has a sleek design, is delivered in a small, how do they do that, sized box? They folded it. That's the answer. In addition to the mattress, Casper also offers an adaptive pillow and soft breathable sheets. I know people who really like those pillows, by the way. An in-house team of engineers spent thousands of hours developing Casper. It combines springy latex and supportive memory foam for a sleep surface that's got just the right amount of sync and just the right amount of bounce. That definitely sounds like a rap lyric. Plus, its breathable design sleeps cool to help you regulate your temperature through

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  the night. Another Sean Paul lyric just slid into this Casper ad. Mattresses often cost over $1,500, but Casper mattresses cost just $500 for a twin-sized mattress, $600 for a twin XL, $750 for a full, watch it, watch it, Seaford, $850 for a queen, $950 for a king. Buying Casper mattress completely risk-free, they deliver it free, if you hate it, you can return it free after 100 nights, which is insane.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  It's a lot of sleeping.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot of nights. If you don't love it, they'll just pick it up and refund you everything. Casper understands the importance of truly sleeping on a mattress before you commit, especially considering you spent a third of your life on it, just fast asleep. So, get $50 off any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com/verge and using offer code, "SURPRISE", verge. Terms and conditions, I must warn you, apply. But I urge you to go to that URL, slash verge, type in verge, get a mattress, 100 nights, risk-free. Casper stuff.com. Casper.com.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  You know what time it is?

• 53:11Nilay Patel?

  Is it time for Science Corner?

• 53:12Speaker 02

  It's time for Lauren to start crushing it.

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  Bring in the grush. I'm just gonna call this segment "Science Corner."

• 53:21Speaker 04

  I like it.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  You into it?

• 53:23Speaker 04

  I'm into it.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  There are no corners in space.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  Are there?

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Is a black hole, is a black hole a space corner?

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  Look, Lauren is here after what I think was one of the worst introductions in the history of The Vergecast. But I want to talk to Lauren about a bunch of stuff. So, this is a little meta, but I'm gonna say this. Lauren, and one of our video directors, Miriam, made a video about the New Horizons Pluto flyby. We have never had a video be as warmly received on YouTube. It was like 7,000 likes, zero dislikes.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was a little unnerving, because I was like, is this a prank? Like, are people gonna, like, turn around all of a sudden and just kind of destroy us? But no, everyone was very receptive of it and...

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  Because it's a thing. So, because they flew by Pluto, and you explained how.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  It did actually happen, yes.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  So, tell me what happened there.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  Well, okay, we're, basically, we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the Pluto flyby, which happened last July, and that kind of dominated my first month here at The Verge. Yeah, so, we had the great opportunity to sit down with Alan Stern, who is the project investigator for the New Horizons, or the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Can I interrupt you?

• 54:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. Why that title? Because it's pretty awesome. Like, he's like, he's like a buddy cop.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  He's the principal investigator.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Principal investigator.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  There's a secondary investigator.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  He's hard-bitten. Anyway.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  Uh, that's a really good question, and one I don't know the answer to. One to ask Stern, when, when he comes back. He was very nice. Anyway, so we kind of went through, uh, how the New Horizons mission came about. You know, there, there was kind of like a struggle to actually make it happen. And then he talked about just kind of all the crazy logistics of how it needed to be pulled off, because they, you know, when it comes to NASA missions, it's a constant, um, battle between budget and how much you can actually put on the rocket, and, you know, you need it to go a certain speed. So, they opted for a, a larger, like, data storing memory bank, but a less, uh, powerful communication system,

• 55:22Speaker 04

  which is kind of why we, we're still getting, uh, New Horizons data to this day, is because they stored all of this stuff right away. And then it's like, oh, but I can only call you every week to give you, like, five seconds of... That information, you know? So that was neat to hear about. And also, just kind of like the crazy cross-solar system trek that it had to go through. I mean, it took nine years for it to get there. And it had to go through this one small window of space in order for it to work. So it was neat to hear how all of that worked out and also the emotions behind it. Because, you know, when we talk about space, we don't always think of the people behind space. You know, and there's a lot of work that go into these missions.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  And it's really neat to see them get so excited about it. And so I was asking him, you know, like, what did he feel like when that thing actually flew by? And we knew that it happened. And he said it was just like so emotional and everybody was so sleep deprived, but so excited. And it was just a crazy time, a crazy summer for them. So it was neat to kind of rehash all that, you know, a year later.

• 56:28Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, just the response to the video was like, I was like, we should have to learn about it.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:33Nilay Patel?

  So, but I want to do some newsy stuff with you too. So last week, and we talked about this in the Rush House last week, but it turns out we don't know anything about space. And you are a space expert, so I want to talk about it. Jeff Bezos was on stage at Code. This is basically a very simple question. Jeff Bezos was like, the Plan B for Earth should be Plan A because Earth is the best planet. Elon Musk was like, I need to colonize Mars because this planet is garbage.

• 56:55Speaker 04

  Right, but also Elon was kind of like, I never said we needed a Plan B. I think Jeff kind of like misconstrued what Elon said.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  I think they do that to each other on purpose. Yeah. But the point is, you had the two big sort of space billionaires who are space is a hobby kind of folks, talking about their vision for space exploration, why they're doing it. There are many similarities, many differences. What did you take away from this?

• 57:21Speaker 04

  First of all, I took away, well, I'm really glad that you asked your question that you did to Elon because he...

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  I asked him why he was always late.

• 57:30Speaker 04

  Why he's always late. And in that same talk, he said something that he's hinted at before. It's that he thinks that he can get people to Mars as early as 2025.

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  And I just think that is insane.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  And he also mentioned that he was like, I never put out a deadline that I think is wrong, or something. He was like, it may be delusional, but I always think I can adhere to it. But I'm just wondering if he's got some like, secret thing up his sleeve that he hasn't told us yet. Cause he hasn't told us-

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's like, it's like Contact, or-

• 58:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's gonna unveil one of those huge like-

• 58:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, spinning circle.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  Teleporters.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  Or like Martian, there's like, there's like always a extra secret rocket in Asia- In China. Ready to go. Well, Contact was Japan. Yeah, always, it's always Asia. But what I've learned from most science fiction movies is that giant spinning circles have enormous powers. Yeah. They can do almost anything. You build a big enough circle and set it spinning-

• 58:27Speaker 04

  You can go anywhere in the universe.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  Anything can happen. But you think, so you think that's preposterous?

• 58:32Speaker 04

  And, and for a few reasons. And one of my other, my friends who wrote, a space reporter who wrote about this, talked, Miriam Kramer, she was making the point of like, they haven't even launched people yet, you know? And, and that comes with a whole other set of risks. And I think if we want to get back into, you know, it's also my, getting close to my one year anniversary at The Verge, and when I first came here, I wrote that really great article about why we should stop saying, "Space is hard." And one of the things I mentioned in there is-

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  She says really great because, uh, literally all of Twitter decided Lauren should die.

• 59:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  It was like her first day here.

• 59:10Speaker 04

  They, I think people saw it as a slight on SpaceX, when it really wasn't, but that excuse is not gonna fly if you have people on board.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  You know, and you have a mistake. And so, there's gonna be a lot of more scrutiny around what SpaceX does when it starts launching people, which is happening sometime next year, probably late next year. And that's just a whole other ballgame in terms of space travel. I'm not saying they can't do it, but I think they're just gonna learn very quickly that there's a lot more that they're gonna have to do in order to transport people, not just to, first to lower Earth orbit, and then even further. And a lot of the things people don't talk about when it comes to traveling to Mars is just the sheer amount of things that still need to be done in order to get there, you know? Galactic radiation, huge thing. Unless, and this is why I'm not criticizing too much on what Musk is saying

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  just yet, because he hasn't unveiled his architecture for colonizing Mars, which he's supposed to do in September.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  But he did say that he believes Mars should be a direct democracy. I mean, he's in his mind, he's already there. He's like, I'll build a computer voting system and then all the people will go home at night and we'll run the government. I mean, like, yeah, he, I mean, I think the man smokes an enormous amount of weed. Like, why else do you need a self-driving car? It's to get fucking blazed on the way home.

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  I, yeah.

• 1:00:29Nilay Patel?

  The Elon Musk story.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  I, I mean, he does do what he says he's gonna do.

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  But

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Later.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  Just later than he says he's gonna do. And maybe there is something to that strategy of like, setting these kind of insane goals for yourself. You don't actually meet them when you say you're going to, but he has done them so far, at least most, some of them, most of them. So.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  So, but there's the two visions there. So Elon's like, I'm building the rockets. We're already ahead. We're delivering stuff. We're putting satellites into orbit. We're landing the rocket. Bezos is like, I'm building a roller coaster. Right? I mean, that's the Blue Origin goal is to take you up there. You can look around and it'll come back down.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  Right? There's no other goal there that they've really outlined.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  What about, what about the Earth will be zoned for light industrial and residential?

• 1:01:15Speaker 04

  Oh, right.

• 1:01:15Nilay Patel?

  But there, that's like the vision, but the thing he's building takes you up and brings you down.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. But the, he, he, they are working on an orbital launcher right now. But to say that Bezos and I would say Bezos is definitely the frontrunner in terms of, right, suborbital space tourism, which is a, a whole section of the industry. I mean, that's what Virgin Galactic was doing, but Blue Origin has like greatly pulled ahead, in my opinion. However, I don't see him on a level playing field with SpaceX at all, because that is like, that's another ballgame.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  Is SpaceX just far and away the winner right now? Like, are they just ahead of everyone?

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's in its own league in terms of the private spaceflight industry. We've got Orbital ATK, who also does orbital launches for NASA. But in terms of like the sheer ambition and the tools to pull that off, SpaceX is, I would say.

• 1:02:08Nilay Patel?

  Are they ahead of government space programs? That's, I mean, isn't that the real question? Like, the, the, what I heard both Bezos and Musk say was, the rate of innovation in this industry is zero. We've got to pump in private dollars to get to a place where we're actually going to achieve anything.

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  I think that it's just a different type of, like a different type of way of doing spaceflight. And they're ahead in some ways and they're behind in others. So NASA has a much longer history of launching people. Like, they actually know how to launch people. And SpaceX will soon, but NASA's got, you know, a lot of experience under its belt. They know how to do certain things, but they are dictated by politics. And that is constantly changing their direction or, you know, keeping them in a weird stasis. SpaceX doesn't have to worry about that. They're clearly, they, Elon can do whatever he wants, you know, as long as he has the money for it. So, um, yeah, I mean, I think it's just a different

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  type of paradigm, really.

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  Lauren's gonna blog the rocket launch, live in front of us, but prerecorded for you in your car. So just put your mind in that zone. We're gonna talk about E3 real fast.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  Uh, E3 Monday.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft's on the same day.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  What do you think is gonna happen?

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  We'll see a bunch of games. That'll be the other thing that happens. And like, we're, everybody's expecting like slightly revved consoles, which is crazy that it's happening so fast, but...

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  No, I think, well, because they had to do 4K.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  You gotta get there.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:03:31Nilay Patel?

  And I'm saying the second that they do PS4 VR...

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  You think the one they're gonna announce at E3 will be able to handle VR?

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying if they announce a PS4 VR, I'm gonna leave this office.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  Or leave WWDC, which is where we'll be. Uh, I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna go home to my apartment, I'm gonna pick up my Xbox One, I'm gonna throw it out the window and buy a PS4 VR.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:51Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I'm ready. I'm, I'm, I'm over the Xbox One.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  My Xbox One, uh, I have to like open the cabinet when I launch it now, because it gets too hot.

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Microsoft can, I, I don't think a new hardware generation from Microsoft is gonna change the basic narrative of what's going on with the Xbox, which is that it hasn't done as well as PS4.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  I, I just think it's gonna change the basic narrative. I think having a nicer Xbox One is fine, but to me, the PS4 is a, okay. I just think PS4 is like in a better spot.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, uh, the Xbox One has been in a terrible spot, basically, since the launch.

• 1:04:21Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, wait. Lauren, did the rocket launch get scrubbed?

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  It did, unfortunately.

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  Does that mean, does that mean we can screw this E3 talk and talk about Game of Thrones for five seconds?

• 1:04:28Speaker 04

  A hundred percent, yeah.

• 1:04:29Nilay Patel?

  So Lauren, I think, might be the hardest core Game of Thrones fan at The Verge.

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  I mean, Caitlin Tiffany rivals me pretty well, but.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  You just got a thousand yard predator stare on your face. She's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take her down. There's not a lot of threats on this show already, so just go with it. Tell me, there's three episodes left. Where, where's it going? What's happening?

• 1:04:47Speaker 04

  I mean, well, I am just in the dark as everyone else is now because we are in uncharted territory, as Dieter knows.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Cause yeah, we're, we're beyond, we're beyond the books, uh, which is great because the books are not great. Man, Lauren hates me so much for saying that.

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  I have studiously avoided the books because I am scared of bad writing.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there you go.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  It's not bad writing. It is amazing writing. Okay. Dieter doesn't like.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  Dieter is just coughing and hopping right now.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  Dieter doesn't like that, you know, he goes into authenticity and, and he talks about all the details of the scene. Sorry, he describes what you're looking at.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  I'm gonna go and, and I'm gonna count how many times he describes a roast pheasant in this series.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm just gonna, let's steer back.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Still be longer. Okay.

• 1:05:34Nilay Patel?

  Let's steer back.

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  What I like about it though, is not, is not the prose per se, it's the world building that he does. So there's just, it's just very complicated. And it's one of those things where you can tell he's either planned something very meticulously from the start, or that he's, he knows so much that he can wrap things in, in kind of connect characters that you just never thought.

• 1:05:55Nilay Patel?

  Is Daenerys Targaryen ever gonna make it over there? Cause she seems, she's just like literally just like wandering around, being vaguely racist.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  I wanna know why we bailed on Dorne.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  Cause Dorne fucking sucks.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Dorne in the show is the worst.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  I think it is so stupid.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  My question is, are the dragons gonna meet the ice wizard or not?

• 1:06:16Speaker 04

  I mean, I think at some point they have to, right? I mean, the only thing that can beat the white walkers is fire or things made by dragons. So probably should use the dragons to beat the white walkers.

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  Two dragons, by the way, they're just like hanging out in the cave. They got free to just sort of like chilling.

• 1:06:30Nilay Patel?

  You said that in like, you're like, duh, but this show steadfastly refuses. This is a show in which birds routinely carry messages.

• 1:06:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  With perfect accuracy in logistics, long distances, and no one has sent a bird to the dragon lady.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  Well, they don't know how to get there.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  The ice wizard is coming.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  It's they're like, they're like carrier pigeons. They only know how to get to certain castles.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  This is one of those moments when it's like, you definitely have the world building in your head. Yeah. And that could be a Game of Thrones fact, or it could not be, and I have no ability to challenge you on it.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  Okay, no, you know how, I'm, I'm pretty sure this is how carrier pigeons work. They.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  Noted space expert Lauren Grush.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  They, they know, they, they, it's like, you send them to one spot and then they know how to get to that one spot. And then you, they come back to the, so they, they know how to get between points A and B, and that's it. So like you have your, your river run.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I got it. There was literally a spy with Daenerys who was like reporting back. And they never thought to tell this, that guy, BT dubs, ice zombies just coming down the hills.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Nobody really believes in the ice zombies, except for the people at the wall.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  Fine.

• 1:07:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, fine.

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's a pointed commentary about how politics distract us from the things that really matter.

• 1:07:49Nilay Patel?

  Which, again, is reanimated corpses who can only be fed by fire.

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  Okay, if zombies started to roam the US, do you think we'd get our shit together and actually like stop them? No, we'd argue about it for a while.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  No, I think both candidates would angrily tweet at the zombies.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  Until they felt bad and quit the race.

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  My Skype dropped, so I missed the start of this conversation, but am I, am I correct to assume that Lauren's a book person?

• 1:08:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  And I'm a show person.

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  So I, I think.

• 1:08:21Nilay Patel?

  She just got real mad at me.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Hold in a, in a show, but the show has been designed about big reveals, flashy moments, wild.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  Like the real visual visceral part of Game of Thrones, which is an important part of the books too. But like Lauren's saying, like, the books, you really sit in this world. And yeah, you do get really detailed descriptions of the meals people eat, but you.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  It coheres a lot better because you're so in this world and it's completely understandable how one person doesn't know about what's going on somewhere else. It's pretty clear.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  I think another thing that the show is kind of pissing me off on too is like the books are all about how consequences, like the consequences of your actions are like what you do has ripple effects and and they last for like ages, right? But and that used to be how the show is like you had the red wedding, you had, you know, Ned Stark, sorry spoiler alert, get caught up by now. I don't feel like there are any consequences for what people do anymore. Like this past season, I'm spoiling everything, deal with it. The Dorn women just like killed the ruler and like they're nobody's angry about it, you know, or Euron killed Balon like in the Iron Islands and he told

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  everybody about it and they made him a king. Like, nobody's really like upset when like people get offed anymore. It's just like, okay, I mean, this is the world we live in. Like, people die, you know, like, and I think that that's kind of indicative of how the show and the books are diverging is like, there's no subtlety in the show. It's just like death and violence and.

• 1:10:01Nilay Patel?

  So here's my question. They're they're obviously racing to this season in particular is racing really fast. What are they gonna do for the next two seasons? Because they're not, they're coming to the point where the thing is gonna happen. Whatever the thing is, has to happen.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  That's gonna happen next season.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  You think it's gonna?

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  Definitely gonna happen next season.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  And then they're gonna have one more season of just like.

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  What, what thing?

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  What dragons versus zombies.

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  Oh, right.

• 1:10:25Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the show comes down to dragons versus zombies, right? I think we're agreed on that.

• 1:10:29Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  That that happens next season, presumably.

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  But then they got one more.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  I think they see the end game here. It's that, you know, Theon and his sister are taking all the ships to Marine. They're gonna go pick up Danny and her dragons. Apparently, they need her to come back here, fight the ice war, and then she wins.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  And then there's one more, so she wins.

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  And then there's one more season where it's just her being like.

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  And then it's all about her like tax plan.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  What if I wander around this country aimlessly?

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  Because I did that a couple of seasons ago and everyone loved it. Oh, a collection of people? I'm gonna burn you to the ground with my dragons and then be your ruler. I'm sorry, I'm bored and over the show.

• 1:11:13Speaker 04

  It's because it's gotten bad. I will agree with that. The show has gotten bad.

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  And that's the Vergecast, a metaphor for what's happening with our show. Dieter the Dragon versus Paul the Zom. That's it. Okay, there's so many other podcasts to listen to, just an endless amount of them.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Control, Alt, Delete.

• 1:11:30Nilay Patel?

  Control, Alt, Delete.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Virgesp.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Virgesp with Liz and Emily.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  Chris Plant has What's Tech.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:11:36Nilay Patel?

  A tightly focused, well-managed show. So if you didn't like this one, go listen to that one.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  Recode Decode.

• 1:11:41Nilay Patel?

  Recode Decode.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Recode Media.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  Recode Media, my favorite of the podcasts. And everything else. Dieter's at Backlon, Lauren.

• 1:11:47Speaker 04

  Just Lauren Grush. I'd get a cooler name.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm at Reckless.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, what would mine be? Rocketbloggin'.

• 1:11:53Nilay Patel?

  Rocket.

• 1:11:56Nilay Patel?

  Rocketblog.

• 1:11:58Nilay Patel?

  Excuse me, I have to look at something.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Paul's future Paul, Dan from earlier is a DC Seaford.

• 1:12:02Speaker 04

  Before anyone steals it.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  And that is our show.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  Rocketblog is taken. They have three followers. I'm sorry. That's our show. Please just go on to social media and share it. And just, please, please.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  Please.

• 1:12:15Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna try again next week. Goodbye. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  Paul.