Sonos loses to Google, and Threads takes on Twitter

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the Meta Quest 3 review, Google gadgets, and Threads continuing to compete with X. Chris Welch joins the show to discuss the result of Sonos' legal battle with Google. Further reading: Google Pixel Watch 2 review: better battery, better watch Pixel 8 and 8 Pro review: in Google we trust? WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub Threads is getting an edit button — and you don’t have to pay for it @mosseri • We’re not anti-news At US v. Google antitrust trial, the Apple search deal takes center stage Judge blasts Sonos for abusing patent system and throws out $32.5 million win against Google Google is already bringing back the software features it removed because of Sonos’ lawsuit Sonos vows to keep fighting Google for the benefit of smaller companies – and its own revenue Ruling pdf: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/znpnznkjgpl/GOOGLE%20SONOS%20TRIAL%20ruling.pdf Google has fixed its recent history of terrible speakers with the Pixel 8 Pro Alameda’s paper trail leads straight to Sam Bankman-Fried Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple Sony’s new PS5 with a removable disc drive launches in November Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the Rich Cast, the flagship podcast of CSS Elements. Top, bottom, left, right. We've got them all here in the Rich Cast. It's good. This is, I promise you that will be relevant. I'm your friend, Neil. David Pierce is here.

• 1:23David Pierce?

  Hi, I should confess that I don't know the difference between margin and padding in CSS. And if someone would please email and explain that to me, that would really help a lot.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  You just opened a door, my friend.

• 1:33David Pierce?

  They create more space. That's, they both do that. Very differently. I'm confident it is different.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  You have to, okay, here are the two rules. You have to limit yourself to 500 words and you can't use chat GPT. But then you can email David the difference between margin and padding in CSS.

• 1:46David Pierce?

  And I will recite several of those emails on this podcast.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  Sounds good. Alex Trans is here.

• 1:50Alex Cranz?

  I have a confession to make in that I thought the phrase big naturals came from a Gandalf.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  Already? Oh, wait, did you just say Gandalf?

• 1:59Alex Cranz?

  I thought it was a Gandalf meme. That's all I'm going to say about it. I just want to get that out there. I thought it was a Gandalf meme.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  I realize now that you've opened this horrible door. This is the most of our chats that's ever happened. We've gone from CSS, but I realize now last week I said, I have this bad idea of an example because of a meme and I didn't say what the meme was.

• 2:18Alex Cranz?

  Was it also the Gandalf meme?

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  It was Kevin James.

• 2:22Alex Cranz?

  Similar, very similar.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  And you can just go back and listen to what I was talking about contextually to understand why that is a horrifying idea. You can find it, Casey posted it in Platformer. I'm just saying.

• 2:33Alex Cranz?

  Just DM me, I'll send it to you.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Don't do that. All right, here's why I was talking about CSS. This is a thing that just got fixed on our website. I think is one of the funniest things that has ever been fixed on our website. We have a lot to talk about. There's some threads news, David reviewed the Meta Quest 3, we've, Sonos got just blasted by a federal judge for patent abuse, Chris Welch is going to join us to talk about that, maybe a lightning round. But there's a thing that happened on our website that is so silly, it is my favorite bug that we have ever fixed. So we had published articles in like one of our fancy layouts, and we'd get all these comments that were like, "How dare you have black text on an orange background?" And we'd be like, "What are you talking about? Like, that's just the headline. That's fine."

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  And after a while, I was like, "There's no way this many people are this mad about the headlines being on an orange back..."

• 3:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, we should say, the way it's supposed to look is there's like a colored banner at the top, right behind like the image and the headline and the subhead and the author's name. And it's like, it's a banner that says like, "Big important story." And then it ends, and then you read the story, which is black text on a white background.

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  And we were getting all these comments that were like, "How dare you." And I was like, "That's weird." But you know, it's a redesign, everyone's mad about everything in the redesign, so for a while, we were just like, people are just mad that we picked this color or any color at all, which is a real thing that happens when you make a website. "How dare you use a color." Fine, we used some color, I promise we ran the accessibility checkers. But after a while, the sustained anger that there was black text on an orange background, we were just like, "There has to be something going on here." And we finally figured it out. It is the silliest bug in the entire world. All of those people, as best as we can tell, were using the Brave browser, which has a number of tracking blockers, and it is implemented...

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  In the most shotgun way you can imagine, they just block all instances of the word bot, which in their implementation just means the string B O T gets blocked, which means CSS bottom got blocked.

• 4:39David Pierce?

  Which, by the way, the fact that that works for Brave is deeply hysterical.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  So all these users, just like imagine trying to debug this. So that all these users were in fact seeing a full page of an orange background with black text. We had, we couldn't tell, but it was because of this approach to tracking prevention, which is just brute force enforcement.

• 5:05David Pierce?

  Wait, let me just make sure I'm understanding this correctly because this is amazing. So Brave is just going in and anything that it's, anytime it sees the letters B O T is just like nah.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  That's a bot. Get rid of it.

• 5:14David Pierce?

  And we had, we had a thing meant to define the bottom of the red.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  It was breaking our CSS because it was blocking the word bottom somewhere in there. Yeah. Both our product manager and our senior engineer are both named Tara. And I demanded just now in a meeting that they write about this because it's so silly. Because they had to fix it.

• 5:32Alex Cranz?

  So good.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  So we fixed it. This is what running a website in 2023 is like. It's great. Please keep visiting our website, no matter what browser you're on. But if you are seeing something completely bananas, it might be that your browser is doing something. Just maybe is what I've learned.

• 5:50Alex Cranz?

  Check another browser always.

• 5:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a good.

• 5:53Alex Cranz?

  So that's a web design.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  That's why Safari is there on your computer.

• 5:56Alex Cranz?

  I never use it, but every once in a while.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  See if it's broken.

• 5:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  There's nothing more powerful you can say in a product meeting than it's broken in Safari 2.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  Just done.

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about some things. David, you just did a bunch of reviews on the Wednesday show. And then you just reviewed the Meta Quest 3. You want to talk about those quickly?

• 6:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, I'm mostly curious from the Pixel perspective, kind of what you guys think of all this. We've been tracking this a lot. Neelai, you've you now had a week to sit with your what is a photo feelings. I talked to Alison a bunch about how she feels about this. She's a lot more, I would say, normal human than you are about this. She's just like, yeah, it's it's this stuff is complicated and weird and it doesn't always work all that well. And I'm very aware every time I've edited these images. That was one of the questions I asked her that I've actually gotten a surprising amount of people responding to is this like, she was like, yeah, my images look like normal images, but I know that I did something to them and it sort of changes my relationship with it. And I thought that was really interesting and a bunch of people have reached out and said,

• 6:54David Pierce?

  not only do I feel that way with this stuff, but like it has changed the way that I've edited all of my family photos forever. Because even when I put the better face on, I remember and it changes my relationship to that image when I change it. So I've just been thinking about that for like days now. But I said on this show last week that I was sort of disappointed in what the Pixel 8 seemed to be. And I feel like I have changed my tune now, seeing Alison's review and other people's reaction to it. People seem to be into this phone, like it seems like they Google like did a good thing.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  I thought her framing of the review is really interesting and I encourage people to read it. It's about whether or not you can trust Google, which is where Google is like I. And I think the seven years of updates that they promised, we got a bunch of notes. Why don't you talk about the seven years of updates? I think people are excited about it. It's you can be of two minds about that. One, you can be excited about it. Google's finally going to commit to supporting a thing for seven years. Or you can say, when will they break my heart? And I think we got a bunch of notes on either side of that debate. And it's a strange place for Google to be in. Like people don't trust them to support their products over the long term.

• 7:57David Pierce?

  I mean, and with good reason, why would they?

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  They've provided abundant evidence. So you make a promise like we'll support it for seven years. And then you get a 50 50 reaction to it, which is, I think, fascinating. And that's, you know, the Pixel 8, I think, is just in that lineage of things. Like, are they going to stay committed to all of these ideas? Or are they going to walk away from some of them? The assistant seems better and faster on this phone. Will it work like that next year? Or will Google flip the table and Android 15? Like, there's just a lot of that embedded in this phone alongside, oh, some ideas did iterate themselves to completion and it's pretty good.

• 8:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. I think the AI stuff is so tied up in that, right? Because like, the promise Google has been making about this push to AI is you're going to be able to buy a piece of hardware. And as long as it is sufficiently capable, it is going to get better over time. Like, actually get better over time, which is a thing we've been saying for years. Never buy a product based on future promises. But like, the promise of AI is that it will get better over time. Literally, as you use it, it will get better. And that's compelling. But I think the Pixel 7 didn't really do that. And I think Allison wrote that piece like six months after the Pixel 7 came out, being like, yeah, this phone is still pretty good. It's really not any better. Like, Google does, the feature drops, it adds new stuff, the models get better, whatever.

• 9:16David Pierce?

  But there hasn't been anything that sort of changed the game there. And I, like, the reason to worry about this phone is to worry that it is going to be exactly what it is right now, seven years from now. And that is so not the promise Google wants you to believe in. And yeah, I'm very torn between the two. But like, Google at least seems to have made a bunch of good decisions about where it could go. It's just about whether it chooses to keep going that way.

• 9:42Alex Cranz?

  When do we trust Google? Like, I think that's the thing I keep thinking about is it feels like I'm in, like, when you're in a relationship and somebody breaks your trust and you're like, how do I go back to trusting you, right? Like, in real life, it's a long journey. It's not like you need to start doing these things. And that's usually when we talk about companies. We want to trust them again. We're like, you need to do this, this and this. But Google can't do that because it keeps breaking promises. It's like a real-

• 10:07David Pierce?

  Google killed Pixel Pass six weeks ago.

• 10:10Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like, how do I trust Google again? Because I kind of like, this phone seems really cool. Like, part of me wants to. It's just like that best friend where I'm like, I want to trust you. How?

• 10:23Nilay Patel?

  I think the answer is really narrow. I think it's kind of what David is saying. You're gonna buy this phone on the same cadence, especially the Pro. People who buy Pro phones, I think, are on two-year cycles, maybe shorter. I think I know a lot of Pro phone people who are on a one-year cycle.

• 10:36Alex Cranz?

  I'm on a three-year.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  But that's reasonable. I think it's the seven years where people are like, really? Like, it's hard to think of a Google product except for search and YouTube that has lasted for seven years.

• 10:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Nilay Patel?

  Gmail. That's basically true. Like, that's kind of what we're working with here.

• 10:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  Even, I got a note today about Decoder being in YouTube Music, and it's like, oh, because they shut down the podcast thing and moved it on. Like, even that, like, even what you would think of as, like, basic stuff, they just move around on it. So the idea that this phone is gonna stay fixed and relevant for seven years, I think is really important. It's Google saying, okay, the Pixel program is gonna be around for seven years. But like David said, they canceled the Pixel past six weeks before this, so who knows?

• 11:20Alex Cranz?

  So really, it's just, it is that waiting game, that it is like that best friend.

• 11:23Nilay Patel?

  I just thought that was like, in Alison's entire review, like, that was the framing that got me, like, it's the right framing. Like, here's a bunch of bets Google is taking. Some of these thoughts are finished. That's really remarkable. Google doesn't finish a lot of thoughts, and some of the thoughts on the phone are finished. But the fact that it's like a vessel of Google Services and Google AI means you have to believe

• 11:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Nilay Patel?

  that that stuff will persist for quite a long time. You have to believe that this ecosystem is gonna get richer and richer and richer for a long time, in a way that even the Samsung ecosystem is. Now that I have, like, a long train commute, I gotta say I'm getting Seifert-pilled. I'm like, what if I don't bring a laptop and I have a Galaxy Fold? And then I use Dex at the office. And I've thought, like, I'm like, that ecosystem is, they just kept at it.

• 12:07Alex Cranz?

  What if you bring in?

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  And now it's just waiting for me.

• 12:09Alex Cranz?

  You can do an iPad.

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  Every time I get on this, no, no, no, no, no.

• 12:11Alex Cranz?

  It's gotta be Dex. It's gotta be Dex.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  No, because what I want is to not carry a backpack.

• 12:16Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  I just want to roll onto the train like a ninja, you know, like an assassin. No backpack, no bag, nothing. Like, who is this guy in the morning commuting to New York City with nothing?

• 12:29Alex Cranz?

  Coffee, at least.

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  Maybe.

• 12:31Alex Cranz?

  Maybe.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  Even that, just like, who, what?

• 12:33Alex Cranz?

  Just...

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  Because that is a power, especially when it's warmer and you're not even wearing a coat.

• 12:37Alex Cranz?

  You just flip the phone out as dramatically as possible.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  Except for me. I've got a folding phone. Would you like to see my tablet? It used to be my phone. And then I get to the office, I still have nothing. You're the only person in the elevator or a building without a bag. And he's like constantly walked to one like weird rotaty desk and you sit down, you're like,

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  I have a computer now. It's not a great computer. It's not super functional. The Slack experience is probably better. Probably. Yeah, because Slack hasn't been updated for Dex. Yeah, that's good. We will now spend the rest of the show complaining about the Slack redesign. Get excited. But yeah, all I'm saying is Samsung like kept chipping away at that ecosystem such that even if it's a bad idea, it feels like a good idea now, right? You're not like an early adopter of this. You're like down the road with it. And you can read all the blog posts about how to make it work for you or talk to Dan. Two choices. With the Pixel, it's like everything is new all the time. Yeah. So that's, that's the thing that really got me. It does seem like the camera sort of divorced from the AI editing stuff.

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  The camera is good. I think Alison said it's a pixel camera. When it's great, it's great. And then when it fails, it's very predictable how it fails. I think these cameras year over year are almost like imperceptibly different. Like I didn't review the iPhone 15 this year, so I tried to do a thing where I tried to not pay attention to what was new for my 14, just to see what jumped out and it's nothing. It's nothing. And when I go look, I mean, I obviously know there's stuff I'm excited about. USBC, very cool. Had to buy only cables. Very cool. But it's like, it's so imperceptibly different. It's the zoom lens is really nice. In low light, it's a little bit, you know, sweaters are a little more sweater modey. Yeah. So soft. But I think it's the same way with the Pixel too. Both of these phones, I think, are imperceptibly better year over year.

• 14:29Nilay Patel?

  I just come back to the AI thing and I know I was like ranting and raving last week and I received a lot of feedback. And the feedback is uniformly in two camps. This is the end of all trusted information and we should be more careful. Or you couldn't trust the information anyway. Why do you care now? Yeah. That's it. There's like almost no gray area.

• 14:48David Pierce?

  Those aren't that different. Like those might actually be on one side of the story.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  And I just think that's really interesting. Again, you can say, a lot of people are like, he hates Google. It's like, no, I'm just saying, if you can ship photos that demonstrably did not happen and no one knows except for you. And as David pointed out, like a lot of the feedback is like, but I know. When you have that feeling that something important is happening there, right? The feeling is, oh, I'm lying to everyone. That's the feeling. That's, there's not anything else. You're not being totally honest and you know. That's all I'm saying. Like, something along the way should quell that feeling. Just so you can communicate, oh, this photo was, in the metadata, in a way that can't be stripped. Or, don't do this. There's another choice. I will say, I took, on my Instagram, there's, I took a photo of Max and I eating ice cream, and you can go look at it.

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  And there's people in the background, and I thought to myself, boy, I'd like to delete those people. But you'd know. I didn't do it. Because I, I can't then come back on the show. I boxed myself into a non-AI generative corner. What if you'd heel, heel brushed them out? Yeah, or just replaced them fully. Yeah, just.

• 15:56David Pierce?

  Just stick a tree in front of them.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  It's just, for some reason, David and Alex are in the background of all of my photos.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  Alright, tell me about the Quest 3 real quick. That's the thing I really wanted to hear about.

• 16:06David Pierce?

  So, I had this really interesting experience with the Quest 3, which is like, it's two different headsets in one headset. Uh, on the one hand, it is like the third Quest, right? It's, it's a VR headset that does VR headset things. And it does them, like, shockingly well. I had this experience, the first time I put on the headset, of, things looked right. I didn't have to spend half an hour, like, dialing in the little things. I didn't have to move it around a bunch in my head. It just, like, looked good. And, it's crazy how much that upgrade in display quality, which it has, it's the best looking Quest by a mile ever, including the Quest Pro. And just, like, changes everything. It's more fun to do things, it's more fun to look at menus. I find myself, like, using the headset longer.

• 16:48David Pierce?

  It has more games, it has more processing power, so like, it's a better VR headset in all the ways you would want it to be a VR headset. But then, on the other hand, Meta is out here being like, this is the first mainstream mixed-reality headset. And I just found myself the whole time doing this review, being like, what does that mean? It has new pass-through, it uses these cameras and a depth sensor to, like, better map the world around you and see what's going on, and you can interact with the world through your headset. That's all true and all cool, and there is precisely one good mixed-reality experience I had on the whole thing, and it's the demo app that shows you how to use mixed-reality. Like, it's called First Encounter, and it's sick. It's so- So fun. There's like, like I played it mostly down here and it's, it starts with coming from your ceiling.

• 17:31David Pierce?

  There's a little alien craft and it actually makes a thing that looks like a hole in your ceiling. And then aliens just blow holes in all your walls and you have to fight them. It's so fun. It lasts like eight minutes and then it's like, go have fun on your headset. And I'm like, what else? What do I do here? So I landed in this really weird place of like, and I argued about this a bunch with Addy and Dan, who have done a lot of these headset reviews for us too. Like, on the one hand, it's a $500 very good VR headset. Cool. Big upgrade over the Quest 2, a lot more expensive than the Quest 2. On the other hand, it has this like amazing new functionality that is essentially not for anything. Don't know what to do with that.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  And that's how they're, they're marketing the product.

• 18:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Alex Cranz?

  That was the same thing we saw with the PS5, right? Like PS5 comes out, Astro's Playroom, really, really cool. Great demos. You're like, oh wow, the controller is so cool. Every other game is just like, yep, that's a controller.

• 18:22David Pierce?

  A hundred percent.

• 18:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Alex Cranz?

  But this is like, I feel like a bigger deal because mixed reality is bigger than haptic feedbacks. Probably not a lot of people were buying the PS5.

• 18:32Nilay Patel?

  They made the entire PS5 for a Metal Gear game that never came.

• 18:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  And like dude left, you know?

• 18:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Nilay Patel?

  And like Kojima's gone and like, no one's ever gonna use this controller again.

• 18:41Alex Cranz?

  Haptics.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  Only Nintendo gets to pull the controller trick.

• 18:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I'm sure there are cool haptic PS5 games. I only pay Madden and Gran Turismo and that, fine. All right? Just be fine with that.

• 18:51Alex Cranz?

  Horizon was lovely.

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  I get what I want out of this console. It's awesome. Gran Turismo. Let's just talk about, let's just talk about racing seats the rest of the show.

• 18:59Alex Cranz?

  We're pivoting.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  No, I think there's that, like the chicken egg problem. Like you need a cheap, good mixed reality headset.

• 19:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  For developers to want to come and develop for it. Fine. And the Vision Pro is coming and presumably some of these concepts will grow and the market will grow. I guess my question is, that's what everyone wants, right? Everyone wants to do augmented reality. I can't tell if we made the best VR headset ever, but we want to talk about it as though it is not a VR headset? Means the VR market has come to its logical conclusion.

• 19:30Alex Cranz?

  I think it has.

• 19:32David Pierce?

  I kind of think so too. I think, I don't know if it's come to its logical conclusion. I think it's very clear that it has a ceiling and that that ceiling is fairly low. Like, I don't think this headset, as much better as it is, is going to make people who never wanted headsets want headsets. Right? And like, if you take the diagram of headset people and all people, it's headset people is like a teeny tiny sliver, right? It's like people who had smartphones in like 2002. I was one of those people and it ruled and my smartphone was a piece of junk and I had it because like I am that kind of person. But it took a long time for like the world to become smartphone people. And then we're there with headsets, right?

• 20:16David Pierce?

  Where there's like, there's this much market share for people who want headsets to do VR things, right? It's like, it's a gaming thing and it is harder to use and access than a lot of gaming things. So it's a small group. If you believe, as a lot of people in tech do, that the future is glasses, that we are all eventually going to wear something on our face, you are never going to get anywhere close to that with mostly a VR product. I think you're right that Meta is just out here saying like, this is the start of it. Like, this is what the Oculus dev kit was, you know, 11 years ago. This is now that. Except they want you very badly to buy it. But the thing that really confuses me is that at the very beginning, when Meta decided it was all in on VR,

• 21:01David Pierce?

  back when it was Oculus and Facebook was Facebook, the company went way out of its way to like juice this ecosystem. It bought every company it could think of. It had this like crazy flood of content. It like, single-handedly made the VR ecosystem an ecosystem. I don't see any of that happening in mixed reality now. Even all the cool stuff coming, there's a bunch of cool games coming, there's an Assassin's Creed game coming. If no game console shall exist without Assassin's Creed. It's illegal, yeah. If you don't get it in six months, just throw it in the trash. If it's not stabbing you, nothing is happening.

• 21:35David Pierce?

  But all the stuff that's coming is VR games. Addie kept making the case to me that maybe the problem here is that even Meta is not sure what mixed reality is for, especially in a headset you're not likely to like wear out into the world. And I think she's probably right about that. So it's like, this is like a very cool VR headset with a tech demo on top of it.

• 21:54Alex Cranz?

  And that tech demo was also like, wasn't that a Magic Leap tech demo years ago? Or is like, it was part of their-

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the aliens?

• 22:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the aliens. Cause it was, but it was in the office and you're like, ah, in the office. And I was like, that's cool. So it's exciting I can do that now. Not with like glasses and a little backpack, but-

• 22:10David Pierce?

  It's something, like it's fun. The, the first encounter thing is like legit fun.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  Would you say that it hacked the GPU of your brain? Which is what Magic Leap used to say?

• 22:20David Pierce?

  About the teeny tiny like sliver of field of view that you would get in the Magic Leap headset? Yeah.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  I would just never, ever forget, I believe this was like a Wired covered story, right?

• 22:31David Pierce?

  Uh huh. Kevin Kelly wrote about it.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  It was like, we, we used that Magic Leap and there was just a line in it where they refused to describe how their technology worked.

• 22:40Alex Cranz?

  Magic.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  Like the poor Wired reporters, like we asked how the technology worked and they wouldn't say, they just kept saying things like, it hacks the GPU of your brain. It was just incredible. Like, if only I could say things like that more consistently, right? You know, it'd be great.

• 22:55Alex Cranz?

  I mean, Meta 3-

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  Deverge. It hacks the GPU of your brain.

• 23:00David Pierce?

  That's pretty good, honestly.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I agree with you about this VR thing. Every compelling demo, even of the Vision Pro, every compelling idea for these products is virtual reality. There, there just isn't one. The, you know, the, the videos of the Vision Pro or the Quest Pro before it, where you're at a table and you've put five giant monitors in front of you on the table. It's like, you know what that requires? An empty table. What, why would you have, what, like, inside your house is a bad mixed reality environment? Cause it is likely that you don't just have like empty rooms.

• 23:33Alex Cranz?

  I got the idea.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  The dystopian vision of Mark Zuckerberg being like, here's what's gonna happen in the future. People will live in gigantic, empty homes and my virtual objects will fill those homes. And to move around your house and do anything, you will wear my headset.

• 23:47Alex Cranz?

  And buy my NFTs.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  But that's just like, is that, is that right? Is that why we're all chasing it? So you can buy TVs from the Facebook store? I don't know, like that, you gotta give me some reason to wanna wear this thing in my house. And all the reasons in the house are virtual reality reasons.

• 24:02Alex Cranz?

  I got one.

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  It's Gran Turismo and supernatural.

• 24:05Alex Cranz?

  They haven't released it yet, but they got to. Like, car and computer repair mixed reality. Like, you just put it on and you look down, it's like, oh, yeah.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  No, I fix it.

• 24:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you messed that up. Do that.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  That's all I was gonna say is, boy, those screws are smaller than you thought, huh?

• 24:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Nilay Patel?

  You don't have a bowl, do you? You forgot a bowl. You're just hoping they don't roll away.

• 24:25Alex Cranz?

  And it's just like a little thing up at the top showing you what actually you need to do.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Alex Cranz?

  Versus whatever the instructions say. Like, I would buy a headset in a heartbeat if it did that for IKEA furniture, plumbing. I don't know how to plum.

• 24:38David Pierce?

  Alex, I have such good news for you. I'd like to tell you about a product called Google Glass, which exists still in this world.

• 24:46Alex Cranz?

  I know.

• 24:46David Pierce?

  Two day exists to do exactly the thing you're describing. It's not for you, it's for like, people who repair airplanes and stuff. It's not for people who put together IKEA furniture, which, to be fair, would be sick.

• 24:57Alex Cranz?

  I want it for my house.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  No, wait, hold on, hold on, excuse me, I'm sorry. My Google clock dinged. You are wrong, Google Glass has been discontinued.

• 25:06Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  March 15, 2023, Google Enterprises stopped being sold. That was their market, they pivoted into.

• 25:12David Pierce?

  Okay, but people are still using it.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, sure, I'm sure somewhere there's a mechanic being like, man, I hope this airplane database is up to date.

• 25:18David Pierce?

  Can you imagine rolling to Jiffy Lube? And the guy's like, let me take a look. Just flips his Google Glass down off his head.

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  I will say, the first ever HoloLens demo I took at Microsoft, they made me wear a HoloLens, and I replaced a spark plug in an ATV by walking around a room.

• 25:34Alex Cranz?

  I fixed some plumbing.

• 25:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, see?

• 25:37Alex Cranz?

  Issue.

• 25:38Nilay Patel?

  That was, my question to them, which in retrospect was not as rude as it should have been, was if you are a mechanic and you have a shop full of tools, and someone has brought you their ATV, wouldn't you already know how to fix the spark plug?

• 25:53Alex Cranz?

  But that's why this is perfect for consumers, because I would not, I have a vague understanding.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  You wouldn't, you wouldn't be in a position where like you were perfectly ready to replace a spark plug. And your face computer was like, now walk 30 steps to the left and get this wrench. Like if all of that is ready to go and you spent the time to set that up, like and you don't know how to fix the spark plug. Like your, your priorities are just upside down.

• 26:21Alex Cranz?

  But that is exactly what I would do in real life.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 26:25Alex Cranz?

  It's like, like a hundred percent. Yeah, I've got everything ready. I Googled that. I didn't Google how to actually do the thing. I just Googled the prep.

• 26:32David Pierce?

  But luckily YouTube exists and I'm sure there is a middle aged man with boots on who will teach you how to do anything you can think of.

• 26:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I want him in mixed reality showing me and then being like, Alex, that's terrible. What are you doing? The other direction.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  This is what, this is like the true promise of AI.

• 26:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Nilay Patel?

  It's synthesizing YouTube fix it guy to look through your eyes.

• 26:53David Pierce?

  And he should be played by T-Pain.

• 26:56Alex Cranz?

  Never hire an AC repair guy.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  And you say we don't have ideas in the Vergecast. This is how you hack the GPU of the brain.

• 27:02David Pierce?

  We did it, guys.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  T-Pain generative AI plumber, just being like, that's not how you fix a toilet, Alex.

• 27:09Alex Cranz?

  Perfect.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  It's true, by the way, that those enterprise products existed. They thought that would be a huge market, right? You've got a, you're a baby mechanic for Delta. You gotta fix a thing.

• 27:19Alex Cranz?

  I don't want you.

• 27:20Nilay Patel?

  That, that's what they thought and none of them worked out. I just say, I, I keep coming back to this basic idea. The thing they all want to build is glasses and the thing they keep trying to sell is virtual reality and glasses and virtual reality are not compatible.

• 27:34Alex Cranz?

  Correct. That's true.

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  And so it, it's, when I say like, is this the end of the VR market? Like you, you have to make the turn. You have to stop doing VR games. You have to stop Supernatural's entirely VR. You have to stop telling people that you're going to get on an airplane with your $3,500 Vision Pro and a battery pack in your back pocket and you're going to watch a movie in VR. Cause if your eventual goal is to ship glasses, you won't be able to do that anymore. Cause you won't be able to block out the world around you. And I, I don't, I, it just seems like everyone knows this problem is there. It's not like a secret problem. This is not some grand insight that

• 28:08Alex Cranz?

  They gotta sell-

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  VR requires you to block out the world around you. But like, how are you gonna do it?

• 28:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they just gotta move headsets for, for the holidays. So, so let's talk about the VR part, because that's what kids can actually use right now.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Alex Cranz?

  And sell it. And then I think that's always the plan is like VR, VR, VR. And then one day they'll be like, okay, the glasses are ready. VR is over there. If you want it, you can get that. Or you could spend $4,000 on these glasses and T-Pain will be in your ear. And like,

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Finally, finally, someone has a killer app that does not require face roll recognition.

• 28:38Alex Cranz?

  See, we did it.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  Angry T-Pain, the plumber.

• 28:41Alex Cranz?

  We fixed it.

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I, I say this for maybe the hundredth time of the Verchess. T-Pain rules, and if he ever wants to come on the show, he's more than welcome. Just putting that out there. We should talk about threads really quickly, just before we move to a break. There's just Twitter and threads news in the world. There's a war going on between Israel and Hamas. Twitter did not do great in that circumstance. Every time Twitter does not do great, a flood of people comes to threads, and then we all have to contend with Adam Mosseri talking about news on threads, which he should just stop doing. That's just my free advice to Adam Mosseri, because he keeps saying things like, it's not that we don't want news, it's that we're gonna prioritize everything else. Anything but news is my priority. Does that

• 29:25Nilay Patel?

  make sense to you? It's not that we don't want it, even though you keep asking for it and doing it. And boy, do you keep doing it. It's just that I don't wanna prioritize it in any way, shape or form. And it's like, you know, that, that it, but, but-

• 29:38Alex Cranz?

  Silence, silence is good.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  It's not that I don't wanna turn up the volume on this channel. It's that I'm gonna turn up all the other channels as loud as I can, so that this channel is effectively zero. Like, that's what that looks like.

• 29:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he needs to just stop talking about news until he actually has some news about

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  I don't, so I, so I think he's sincere. I like Adam. He's been on Decoder before. I think he's even been on the Verchess before. I, I think he's sincere. I think Meta got burned. By what you might call the great Facebook news experiment.

• 30:04David Pierce?

  And also like burned the world.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  They burned the world.

• 30:07David Pierce?

  It's useful to remember that asking Meta to do more news has not historically been a good idea for like the earth.

• 30:14Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a lot of wreckage in what you might call the millennial media ravine. Let's name some brands that don't exist. BuzzFeed News, Mike.com, like generally Vice in its previous incarnation. It's just true. I mean, like, those are all huge bets on Facebook news distribution or Facebook video distribution. You can just go look at the Wikipedia page for the words pivot to video. We all lived through it. And that was Facebook sent floods of traffic, web traffic to publishers. And then they stopped and they started saying the future of the internet is video, which I will grant them broadly true. That was true. People like watching video. Who knew?

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  You can get it from a streaming service. You can get it from Alex's Plex server. Or you can get it from a social platform. Most people pick social platforms. So that's fine. But Facebook led a bunch of companies off a cliff, basically, in terms of revenue. And I think Adam doesn't want to do that again. He keeps saying, I don't want to overpromise and underdeliver. Cynically, what you might respond to that with is then don't break your promises. That's just a thing you could say.

• 31:20Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think it's important to remember what people are asking for isn't like, give us algorithms that control the news, which leads to all the things that happened when Facebook did that. And they're not asking for pivoting to video or any of the other things. They're just saying like, give us better hashtag support. So if I want to follow something breaking in the world, I can. And it doesn't have to be bad. It can be sports. And so like, that's the really interesting thing that's happening here to me is just completely rolling all of that in together. And I'm like, Adam, I promise you, whatever's happening in Marvel

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  Talking directly to Adam.

• 31:57Alex Cranz?

  Or NFL is not the same as whatever's happening in the larger world with conflicts and stuff like that. Like, those are different types of news. People just want a way to be like, oh, something happening. What?

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, but again, I think they've been burned by this idea in the past.

• 32:14Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  And I think, again, in no way is criticism of X, the company, praise for criticism of the previous administration of Twitter, the company. But I think you can look at it and say, maybe that horrible clown car was the best it could ever be, then we don't want to do that. We want to build something bigger. I think they're sincere about that. All that said, I don't think that they're ever going to do news. I think that Adam Mosseri says that they're not going to do news over and over again because they don't want to do it. It's, and again, he's not saying they won't do it, they're going to block it, although they have some very restrictive moderation policies that seem like they don't want to do, like you can't talk about COVID on threads, really. It's just like not a thing you're allowed to do. You know, I think they're going to prioritize sports coverage and fashion and culture and whatever, and they will accidentally build tools that are reasonably good for news.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  But the idea that the way that Twitter was just sort of the assignment editor for the media in the Trump era, I think they would prefer threads to not be that thing.

• 33:07Alex Cranz?

  And that I'm okay with. Like, that's the kind of thing where I'm like, okay, yeah, we don't need that. There are other ways to get this. And frankly, having all of your, your really good reports appearing in like 148 characters on a website is not the best way to deliver a lot of news, and we need to move past that. That seems

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Alex Cranz?

  fine. Let's do that.

• 33:25Nilay Patel?

  This is the time in the rich ass where I start talking about Activity Pub. This is the point. Everyone's making the huge mistake. You don't want Twitter again. It wasn't great. It just wasn't good.

• 33:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, just

• 33:35Alex Cranz?

  Fundamentally bad.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  It was, it was not a great time for a handful of guys to be in charge of a handful of platforms that dominated our information ecosystem. So, the point, and I think that the, the better thing to do is hold Instagram and Meta to their promises around Federation and Activity Pub, which they continually say they're going to do. Like, their engineers on the platform are saying they're going to do it. Their representative to the W3C is on there saying they're going to do it. Mosseri says they're going to do it. Zuckerberg said Alex Heath a couple of weeks ago, they're going to do it. They keep saying they're going to do it. They haven't done it. So you got to hold them to that promise, and then you have to build products that interoperate. And allow you to address the threads audience with news products or allow you to build news products that use content from threads

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  in new and interesting ways.

• 34:22David Pierce?

  I agree with that. I also think you just made the exact case why Meta wants to do this because Meta federating lets it wash its hands of every complicated thing it doesn't feel like dealing with, right? And so I think it's just going to be true that threads is the biggest thing in the Fediverse or the open social web or whatever you want to call it. Like the day it does, it will be the dominant player on Activity Pub and probably will be for a long time. And so it's still going to have this same set of responsibilities. And I think just to be able to say, it's like Google saying you can use a different search engine, right? It's just like, it's not, it's true, but it's not the reality of being alive. Like,

• 35:05David Pierce?

  most people are going to be on threads doing this stuff. And like Adam Mosser and his team still have incentives and I think responsibilities to get this stuff right. But I think like what he means when he says, we don't want to do news is literally, it's like the knob that says news that's on his desk, he is going to keep dialing it down, right? Like, you know, your thing about turning up the volume is like, I think a surprisingly real metaphor. Like, I don't think that's actually that far off from what's actually going on. The question is, do you care more about like evergreen stuff or do you care more about real time stuff, right? And Twitter, a thing it did right was it found that balance really, really, really well. It's really hard to do the thing where you divide between what is

• 35:48David Pierce?

  good and what is now. And Twitter hit that balance better than I think any other platform ever has, which is why it was so good at that. You could even go on the algorithmic timeline and it would still show you new stuff. I don't think threads is ever going to push as far down that real time road ever as Twitter did. I just don't see it.

• 36:08Alex Cranz?

  I have one question about all of this. And it was something I actually saw on threads. And I think it was maybe from you or maybe a response to Adam Mosser. Why are we focused so much on threads and how it handles news and not focused on TikTok, which by all accounts is a much more widely used platform and it how it handles news because it has a lot of the same kind of like. Concerns about like what you can and cannot say on the platform, but it also has a much bigger audience and it is actually actively algorithmically delivering that news, whatever it is to people, be it accurate or not. And it's kind of obnoxious, I found to like, report when stuff is inaccurate on that platform. Like, do I just do a call out TikTok being like, everything this man has said is wrong?

• 36:52Alex Cranz?

  Like, I've thought about it, but like, that for me feels almost a bigger concern than what's happening at Threads. And it's kind of interesting that, I think we all talk about it here, and I know a lot of people in media talk about it, Threads, because Twitter was very much like a media thing. Everybody on media used it. And then a lot of people have migrated to Blue Sky, to Mastodon, now to Threads, and they're very much using it there. And a lot of the discourse, the conversation around news, is driven by the media on that platform. And it is kind of interesting that we're driving it there and we're kind of ignoring TikTok, where the people are actually watching the news.

• 37:27David Pierce?

  I also think there's something about those platforms that make it feel more like everyone is having a similar experience, where I think like on TikTok, there's no pretense that what I'm seeing on TikTok is anything like what either of you are seeing on TikTok, right? And so it, it makes this question of like, what is the quote unquote TikTok experience, really hard to talk about, in a way that these more like participatory messaging things like Twitter and Blue Sky and now Threads, it just feels more like everyone is in one place. Whereas these other things, and I think YouTube falls in this category too, like, you don't see on YouTube what I see on YouTube. So it's very hard for us to actually talk about the way YouTube works, because everyone's

• 38:12David Pierce?

  experience of it is so different. But on a place like Threads, it feels more like everyone is there, just because it moves so fast, that even though the experiences are different, it just makes people feel more like they understand it, I think.

• 38:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and there was like, there are universal experiences. We all got the sexy ladies for like, a week on Threads, and we're like, why are you here? Stop.

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  I was like, why aren't you here more often?

• 38:34Alex Cranz?

  He was like, some sexy ladies. Favorite app.

• 38:39David Pierce?

  Mine was just the Nugget account. Like, that was the most universal experience of all, was the Nugget account for like, three weeks on Threads.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  What, you didn't just actively interact with the sexy ladies of Threads to bring them back more often? You're like, "Crypto, you want it? Oh, oh, it's, this is happening. It's fine. I'm nothing but a man. I'm just, the thing about news is like, I, uh, here's my other metaphor. You ready? Mm-hmm. Here's what the media is. The news media is on Threads. We're the mandolin players in ACDC. All right? It's not to say there's not a mandolin player at ACDC. Maybe there is. You don't know. But there's also ACDC. They're not kicking you out. You might, you might be jangling away on that thing. It's in the back.

• 39:23Nilay Patel?

  Behind the drum kit. And Adam and Sarah is like, "Look, we're just not gonna amplify the mandolin." They don't get a mic. Yeah, that's, that's all that's happening there. And it's fine. It's, it's a way to be. But I'm just saying that opportunity, especially when the big player is gonna do Federation, again, you gotta hold them to it. That means you get to rethink all of web distribution. You get to rethink content moderation. And to be like, "Give me trending topics, so I can one-to-one replace Twitter," is like, that's just itty-bitty thinking.

• 39:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Nilay Patel?

  Everyone, everyone think bigger. If you wanna, if you're out there building a cool Activity Pub product, just like, let us know. We're gonna start over covering that stuff just to show people that people are building new, interesting products. We'll, I mean, it has to be good. It can't just be sexy ladies and crypto.

• 40:05David Pierce?

  And speaking of Activity Pub, we should say the one, the bit of Activity Pub news this week was that WordPress now officially supports Activity Pub on wordpress.com accounts. And like, what WordPress is, is very confusing. Wordpress.com is only a subset of WordPress and WordPress the company and WordPress. It's like, it's a lot. But a lot of websites can now, with one plugin and checkbox, interoperate with Activity Pub, which means you can actually push your content to these other places. And it's like, that's what this is supposed to look like.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:35David Pierce?

  Right? Like, that, I think is very exciting.

• 40:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right.

• 40:39David Pierce?

  Is a big start in this.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  Narrowly, it's, well, Threads doesn't do it yet. So if you have a blog and you're like, running it, someone can follow you on Mastodon and your post to your blog will show up in their Mastodon feed. And if they hit like, it'll come back to you. That's hugely powerful. You could see how, for example, if a large technology website had a quick posting format, it might make use of such a technology, especially if it was migrating to WordPress in the future. Just an idea that I have, just a hypothetical for you all to think about. Okay, we should take a break. I want to get David's perspective on his time in the US versus Google courtroom. And then Chris Walsh is going to join us and talk about another Google case, which is handily winning. We'll be right back.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out. In. Dashboard. Confessions.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 42:30Nilay Patel?

  Welcome back to the Vergecast Legal Hour, where we break down the hottest action courtrooms around the country. We should just pivot the show to true crime.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  That's what does the numbers.

• 42:40David Pierce?

  That is the dream of the people who run this podcast network, that we do a tech true crime show.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  They stole my battery bank and I spent the next five years tracking them down. Well, Chris Welch is here. Hey, Chris. Hello. Pleasure to be here. Chris covers, I would say, Sonos in, to the closest degree possible.

• 42:59Alex Cranz?

  I think it's kind of interesting you're here and not currently in the vents at Sonos.

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'll take a break here and there. So I want to talk about what's going on with Google and Sonos. There's a big ruling in that that patent case. It's like a remarkable ruling. So I want to spend some time there. But first, there's actually another trial that's ongoing, which we keep talking about. United States versus Google. It is a trial claiming that effectively the deals Google makes with other vendors, most notably Apple, provide an illegal benefit to its search monopoly. And those deals are bad. David, you've been in and out of that courtroom. If you've been listening to Verge Cast, you know this trial is really hard to cover. There, there's no streams. Documents and transcripts are hard to come by. There's been drama around that stuff. So we've just been, when we can, sending David into the courtroom in DC to watch things

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  go down, watch the various witnesses. This last turn, it made it very clear that as goes Apple, goes the search market. And I think it's like underreported on, undernoticed. That is like the heart of this whole case.

• 44:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. And ironically, this turn really started with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who, a lot of people give testimony in these things and they're prepared by a lot of lawyers to not really say anything interesting. And there have been a few witnesses so far who I know have spicy hot takes. Some of them I have written about on theverge.com in stories that I'm happy to send you links to, who clearly were trained to like, sort of do the least in the courtroom. Satya Nadella was not one of those people. The dude came out swinging and essentially began to make this case that Bing is bad, it's worse than Google, but the only reason Bing is worse than Google is because of the Apple deal.

• 44:42David Pierce?

  And that sounds like this like wild, impossible to navigate thing, but essentially what the argument has come down to, and a number of people have made this argument, and even Google has sort of acknowledged that it understands this in a lot of the evidence that we've seen in the exhibits. That are being published, it's essentially that if you can be the default search engine in Safari, which Google has been for 20 years, for as long as there has been a Safari, you will get such market share so quickly and so many more searches. Like I have like learned how things like query flow work and basically the like flywheel of the more searches you get, the better the searches are. Thus you can make more searches, thus you do better, thus you get more certain like on and on and on.

• 45:26David Pierce?

  And if anyone could break in overwhelmingly, the industry seems to think there would be real serious competitors to Google essentially overnight. And that by not getting out of its deal with Google or letting anybody else in, DuckDuckGo apparently was in negotiations to do it for private browsing, which Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO, said would have been absolutely game changing for their business. It would have increased their market share, I think he said multiple times over. But like, Apple is the moat for Google, right? Like, Google has Chrome and it has Android and it turns out it's not illegal to like have your own products on your own products. So there's really no fight there. But this one deal that Apple has, if it gave it to somebody else,

• 46:11David Pierce?

  the DOJ's argument is that it would essentially raise up a serious Google competitor out of nothing. And because Google is so rich, it is preventing that from happening. And that's like, that has become the thrust of the argument and it's really fascinating. What do you think? I think it's true. I mean, it's, it's hard to say counterfactually, right? Like, one of the things that Judge Metta, who's, who's presiding over this case, asked Satya Nadella was, could a startup in search succeed, right? And there's been a bunch of talk about how the search market is considered like a no fly zone for VCs. They don't even invest in it because it's not worth it. And so he asked him, is like, can a startup win at search? And Nadella like thought about it for a second and then just goes, well, there's no evidence for that.

• 46:56David Pierce?

  And his point over and over was he was like, we, I'm willing to lose $15 billion a year to Apple just to get the query flow and the market share that comes with it for Bing. Microsoft, at one point, thought about selling part or all of Bing to Apple in order to fund a competitor that could actually stand up to Google in a real way, because they don't think Google being this powerful is valuable. Like, there are a lot of reasons to believe that Apple could essentially turn that on for somebody else. But also, we have no proof. Google has been the partner for 20 years. Like, it was in the very first press release announcing Safari, which they showed while Eddie Q was on the stand a couple of weeks ago, mentioned Google as a partner and has been a partner ever since. And the terms of that deal have changed.

• 47:41David Pierce?

  And so, we've just never seen it. Like, one of the things that has really blown my mind is we've only ever seen one version of the search market. There's never even been, in like, the modern internet, another world.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, there is if you leave this country, right? That's also come out, right? In other countries, Apple partners with other search providers in Safari. And those companies are fine. They like, exist and are competitive.

• 48:06David Pierce?

  Yandex is very successful.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Alex Cranz?

  And to be clear, like, one of the reasons that if you put something else on Apple instead, part of it was, okay, everybody's using it on Apple. So, that's just automatically, they use it. But it would also learn and get better, because more people would be using it, right? So, that's how it would compete? Or is it just like, more people using it because it's on Apple and it's the natural, the default search?

• 48:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, so the sort of universal truth of search is that the best way to make a search engine is to already have a successful search engine. And the more people use it, like, one way to think about it is, a big part of your job as a search engine is to know when somebody spells something wrong, what they're actually looking for, right? Like, that's a, that's a big job of a search engine. And the way that you do that is by seeing the queries that people get wrong, and then where they go. And you can figure out, okay, well, they typed this word. They didn't get what they wanted, then they typed that word, which looks very similar. We can put those two things together, and the next time somebody searches for this wrongly spelled word, we can get it right the first time. You've just instantly made your search engine better, right? Like, you just can't do that if you don't have the searches.

• 49:13David Pierce?

  And everyone acknowledges this. This is not like, a secret fact. This is like, how the search engine world works, is that the more search queries you get... The better your ranking gets, the better your personalization gets, the better your spell check gets, the better your, they call it, there's a better term for it than this, but it's essentially query rewriting. So when you type in a query, what do you actually mean? Are you looking for a shopping link? Are you looking for travel? They do this thing where they take the words that you use and then sort of boil it down to a set of words that can also be used in a bunch of ways. All of that you can only do with the data and the only way to get that data is to get people searching. And so like what Nadella was saying is he's like, I don't want any of the money that comes out of an Apple deal because I'm so convinced that the product will get so much better that will make up

• 49:57David Pierce?

  the rest of the money elsewhere. And that like, I don't think he's just spouting out of his ass. Like that is the deal that Microsoft has offered to Apple and loss.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  I will say there's a deeply funny Google presentation that has been entered into the exhibits here about iOS 8.

• 50:15David Pierce?

  Oh, it's so good.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  I mean, again, this is how long this has been going.

• 50:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Nilay Patel?

  So in iOS 8, Apple rolled out Spotlight. So you could just like pull down and do stuff. And there's a deck and we'll link to it and it's in David's piece. It's linked there. But the deck is called, it's a Google deck. It's called iOS 8 Revenue Impact. And the first heading on the first slide, bottom line, it's bad.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it's not, they're just like, they're doing less searches. It's a bad. And then he goes into it and like, here's all the searches that Apple is doing for itself now. And so instead of sending people to us, it's the App Store and Maps and Wikipedia and all this stuff.

• 50:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  And they're just like, yeah, we're just losing searches and revenue because any amount of, any amount of loss from Safari is huge.

• 51:00David Pierce?

  Right.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  Bottom line, it's bad. It's like, it's like so funny.

• 51:04David Pierce?

  Well, and that has become one of the new stipulations in Google's deal with Apple as of, I think, 2016, is that Apple can't do more in search than it had been doing in 2016. Right? Like by the terms of this agreement, Apple is not allowed to build a Google competitor or else it's in violation of this deal.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  This explains, by the way, several years ago, there was like I/O and WWDC were like kind of back to back. And at WWDC, Apple announced like some more search things in some version of iOS. This is post 2016. And then we went to I/O like several days later and all of like, all the Google people were like, Apple's doing some search stuff. And I was, at the time, I was like, yeah, they should. But I didn't realize, like, they were like, oh, are they in trouble? Like, are they past the line? And we wouldn't know, right? Because this deal was a secret until this trial.

• 51:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, we knew there was a deal, but like, the machinations of the deal and both how profitable it is for Apple and how exclusionary it is are definitely, they're coming out in really new ways. It's really interesting.

• 52:14Nilay Patel?

  Just to say it, and we should move on and talk about Sonos. I'm aware that people think that Google should be able to pay whatever money to Apple for whatever Apple wants to buy. And that, yes, I'm aware that many retail stores in America have their own products they put on shelves and they pay for placement. And you can make all kinds of analogies. And I'm just telling you that winning an argument through analogy is like kissing your sister. That's just fine. I don't care.

• 52:35Alex Cranz?

  Wait, you don't care?

• 52:37David Pierce?

  Can I just tell you one very quick courtroom story that summarizes this entire thing very well? At one point during Satya Nadella's testimony, Judge Meta, who I wouldn't say interrupts a lot, but he'll occasionally like follow up on questions or ask to clarify. And like, he does a lot of sort of drilling down on technical things that either he doesn't understand or he wants in the record or whatever. He, at one point, looks over at Satya Nadella and says, okay, imagine you're Tim Cook. Why would you want to switch to Bing when it's a worse search engine? And that was the whole question. And like, you could, like, Google, you know, they have a table full of lawyers. Like, you could just feel the vibe in the room. Everybody at the Google table is just like, yes. Because that's their whole defense. Is that, like, Satya Nadella getting up there and saying Bing is not as good as Google

• 53:19David Pierce?

  is both a case against Google and the entire Google defense, which is that it is not illegal to be the best product. And everyone is acknowledging that it is the best product. It's just, it's a very funny thing where like, the DOJ has to do this thing where they're saying, Google is really good because no one else is allowed to be. And Google is just going to keep saying, we're good and that's okay. And that's a really, really, really compelling argument. Like, being the best is not a problem. And Google is going to spend a lot of time, when it turns and becomes Google's chance to really give its argument, it's going to spend a lot of time telling us how terrific Google is. And I'm very much looking forward to like, that second half of this trial.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think Google is too, to be perfectly honest. All right, speaking of Google on a high in the legal system. Yes. I mean, this is, this is, when it comes to the patent wars, this is as slam donkey swagger off the court as it's gotten a while. Chris, what's going on?

• 54:22Speaker 06

  Uh, Sonos got its ass handed to it and in court, uh, had a 32.5 million judgment tossed out, uh, by Judge William Alsup, one of the most high-profile judges who's covered who knows how many tech cases.

• 54:34Nilay Patel?

  We profiled him.

• 54:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, we profiled him. Yeah. And so he knows his stuff. He knows what Sonos is, how long they've been around. And if you read this ruling, it's really like a super deep dive on zones and like different rooms and overlapping zones. And so he knows this stuff. And so it comes down to, he just said that Sonos took too long to really, you know, come up with these complaints and say Google was copying its technology. 13 years is really the time between like their first application. And then when they like said, you know, hey, Google's stealing our ideas and trying to copy multi-room audio. And so, uh, the patents that they had included were ruled to be, said they were, they're now invalid and also unenforceable. And so In like big, bold letters in the ruling. I very much enjoyed that. It was like a different font for the word unenforceable, which I really liked.

• 55:18Speaker 06

  So he calls Sonos a pretender and he says Google is the innovator, which is, is a little harsh, man. Like, you know, like Sonos is the company that like has made this their whole brand, you know? So I feel like that was a little, little mean, but.

• 55:32Alex Cranz?

  What did Google innovate in this space?

• 55:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  I like That's a really good question.

• 55:36Alex Cranz?

  Uh, because honestly, this whole case, the entire time, we, we've heard about it and we've been covering it and stuff. It always seemed like Sonos was kind of in the right. Google used

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, so there, this

• 55:47Alex Cranz?

  And then that all got thrown out and like

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this case has a bunch of twists and turns. The heart of it is like not patents.

• 55:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Nilay Patel?

  And I, this has always been, and we had Patrick Spence and at the time Sonos' chief legal counsel on the show and we talked about why you would sue Google and like They're using their patents because they're mad about something else.

• 56:07Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 56:08Nilay Patel?

  Which many people have many feelings about. Yeah. What are they mad about? They basically like went to go work with Google and then Google like immediately undercut them on business terms. They released.

• 56:19Speaker 06

  Put out cheap speakers that cost forty nine dollars.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. They like immediately undercut them with cheaper speakers that copied their features. So they did the thing that every big company has always done to small companies.

• 56:28Alex Cranz?

  They pulled in Amazon.

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can replace Google with Amazon and Sonos is just as mad, but Amazon lets them use Alexa. It's like their Sonos is in this weird position where they need access to voice assistants or they, at the time they did. And they just ended up really upside down with Google.

• 56:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. And they felt, they felt very strongly that Google had taken advantage of them. So then they said, well, look, we invented a bunch of this technology. We've been around for a long time. We're going to sue Google for patent infringement. That will create some leverage and Google will inevitably settle because why wouldn't they? And then we can all get along. And that was like more or less the story.

• 57:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 06

  Three years later.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  And then Google did not settle and Sonos won the judgment and then Google appealed. And now Alsup is like, what's the quote? It is wrong that our patent system was used in this way. This is from the ruling. With its constitutional underpinnings, the system is intended to promote and protect innovation. Here, by contrast, it was used to punish an innovator and enrich a pretender by delay and sleight of hand. It has taken a full trial to learn this sad fact, but at long last, a measure of justice is done.

• 57:33Alex Cranz?

  Like.

• 57:33Nilay Patel?

  It's, I mean, it's a good, it's a lot.

• 57:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  Think that it was a murder trial.

• 57:38Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like, what did Sonos do to this judge?

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So this judge is like, my fucking speakers keep disappearing. Like, that's what he's.

• 57:47Alex Cranz?

  He had to do that transition from Sonos version one to two.

• 57:50Speaker 06

  That S two.

• 57:51Alex Cranz?

  He was ready.

• 57:52Nilay Patel?

  He's super mad. His Play three is just sitting there and he's like, a measure of justice for the Sonos Play three. Uh, I don't know, man. It, again, for Google, it's thirty million. Google sneezes that money. We're just talking about like a ten billion dollar deal with Apple.

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, so now Google's won. They put out a statement that is just...

• 58:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was taking a victory lap and saying the patent system needs reform and this and that. And Sonos came back and said the same thing.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  Of course.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  But also said they still want to keep on fighting Google because they're trying to protect their patents and innovations. And they're trying to like get royalties, which I think is the main crux of this whole thing. It's like they want all these tech companies to like pay them royalties for their technology and like multi-room audio and whatnot. And that's clearly not something that Google will budge on anytime soon, as we've seen. And so, three years later, there's no sign of a settlement. There's no Google Assistant on the new Sonos speakers still, which I think is the worst experience for customers.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 58:45Speaker 06

  Customers always suffer.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  I won't buy them.

• 58:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I think, I mean, like, Sonos was concerned about these companies putting out cheaper speakers. But I feel like Google and Amazon really don't care about audio as much anymore. You know, like the Nest Audio came out three years ago and like Google hasn't put out a new speaker that was good.

• 59:01Nilay Patel?

  I don't even care about their voice assistants anymore. There was just that new, it's Marshall, right? That has both assistants on it at the same time.

• 59:07Speaker 06

  I think it was JBL.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  JBL, sorry.

• 59:09Speaker 06

  But yeah, that is both things, which Sonos said once, like they wouldn't, couldn't do that. By Google's own terms, they weren't allowed to do that. And so now, we see it happening on this other speaker. So, you know, I think it's time to hopefully settle because I think Sonos has its, you know...

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh, there's no way. I'm sorry.

• 59:24Speaker 06

  Sonos has its own place carved out.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  If at long last, a measure of justice is done in your back pocket.

• 59:29Speaker 06

  Google's never settling.

• 59:30Nilay Patel?

  There's no settling happening here.

• 59:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I just feel like Sonos, you know, like they're, they're safe. They have their, you know, you're just walking into like any Best Buy or Target and there's like a Sonos section there. Like they're not a small company.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, compared to Google.

• 59:41Speaker 06

  Compared to Google, yes. But like, you know, this like small company, like David versus Goliath thing is like, you know, they're a pretty sizable audio company compared to like Wim or Weem. And what's that brand that Chris Person loves a lot? Like, that's a small company. Wim. Sonos, Wim. Yeah, Sonos is a bit larger than that.

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  I will say, Chris and I, earlier this week, we went and visited a studio where Dolby was showing off how they mix in Atmos.

• 1:00:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  And their test product was an Aero 300, right? And it was actually really funny because it was a prototype and had the word prototype like printed on it. And I was like, Chris had every part of the scoop, except a picture of a prototype with the word prototype on it. But like, but that's it. Like, the, the recording industry is like in on Sonos.

• 1:00:22Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  That is the test product. And Chris was like, do you ever test on the HomePod? And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. We don't, no, thank you.

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  No, I'm about that.

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  Um, and it's true. I don't think the Amazon products are like huge successes in the audio world. The Google products certainly aren't.

• 1:00:37Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah, like, yeah, Sonos has like the Move 2, which like none of these brands really have their own version of. So I feel like Sonos as a business is pretty secure. So like at least, you know, like move towards some kind of resolution here, like for the benefit of people and customers who want Google Assistant on their Sonos speaker. And, you know.

• 1:00:52Alex Cranz?

  And when it originally sued Google, it was not as, as secure.

• 1:00:56Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:00:56Alex Cranz?

  As it is now, right? Like, like at the time, it was very much, we are fighting an existential threat from Amazon and from Google, and we do not know how our company is going to continue. And if we don't figure that out, we're screwed.

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  So it was a framing. I mean, if I was a lawsuit. I believe it was at CS. I think we were in Vegas when the lawsuit hit. And it was just before we assumed both companies would announce a bunch of stuff.

• 1:01:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  And they announced a bunch of stuff. You know, a theme of this first cast is that like, Google products don't last a long time. It's like, looking back, we're like, oh, were they going to stay committed to the Nest Audio? Or could you have just waited them out?

• 1:01:31Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think what that was a curiosity was like, okay, this is probably almost certainly not going to be as good as whatever Sonos does, but is it going to be cheaper and then push Sonos out that way? And so Sonos is, shrinks, shrinks. And instead, Sonos is like, feels like it's kind of turned, doing well. Apart from this.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I'm curious what Chris is taking here, but it seems like they, they didn't just become a patent troll. They invented a whole bunch of stuff.

• 1:01:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  Right. And Patrick Spence has been on the show a bunch of time, being like, the pace of innovation, we need to pick it up. We need to go faster. They're on a yearly cadence now.

• 1:02:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  Before Patrick showed up, they were on like a one decade cadence.

• 1:02:07Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  You know, like, so like, I think they did the right thing there for sure. I, this rule, you should read the rule. It's like a fun read.

• 1:02:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  To read this ruling, because he's just so mad.

• 1:02:19Speaker 06

  He's so angry.

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  That any of this happens. Um, I, I think there's like an equal amount of mad at Google that you could be.

• 1:02:27Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  Because they didn't, like, 70, 80% of cases settle. And if you're Google, it is probably better to settle and move on and also have Google Assistant be available on all kinds of devices. For what is peanuts in the scheme of Google.

• 1:02:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  But it's a fun read, you should read it. And like, a measure of justice is done. It's just incredible for a, for a multi-zone audio patent lawsuit.

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  What's going on over there, Bill? You all right? You're still pissed about the Play 3? Like, Air 300's out, it's a replacement.

• 1:03:06Alex Cranz?

  Seems real nice.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  It's, it sounds great. Chris loves it.

• 1:03:09Speaker 06

  I do. I do like most of their products. You know, Google and Amazon, their speakers are fine. Like, the Echo Studio is fine. It's been sitting there like untouched for like three or four years now, so, but it sounds nice. I just think tho- those companies clearly don't care about audio as much as they want to. I think Apple, like if there's one company that Sonos should be like pretty concerned about, it's Apple. The HomePod and like the AirPods, you know, like headphones, if they ever get in headphones, obviously that's gonna be a hard climb for Sonos to do. And I think there will be like a, you know, some kind of Apple soundbar at some point. It seems like they're super interested in like

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  You think Apple's gonna make a soundbar?

• 1:03:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. With the HomePods as, as satellites, right?

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I think they're gonna

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  No way.

• 1:03:45Speaker 06

  Come into their territory at some point a bit more, no?

• 1:03:47Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be like the Roku one. It's gonna have an Apple TV built on it.

• 1:03:50Nilay Patel?

  How to sell you extra iCloud storage, the product, they will never make it.

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

  Well, I go with the trouble of like letting you use two HomePods as like EARC outputs if they're not gonna like make a proper soundbar at some point.

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  They did that, like, oh yeah, they did that under duress. They're like, god damn it. You know, like, straight up, like enough people just annoyed them about this thing.

• 1:04:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  And then like probably Phil Schiller in his house was like, why do I have other speakers? You know?

• 1:04:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Nilay Patel?

  But actually a soundbar? No way. Zero percent chance.

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  They are not interested in that market.

• 1:04:20Speaker 06

  We can have a wager.

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  They're A wager. Apple will release a cheap Vision Pro before they release a soundbar.

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:04:28Alex Cranz?

  Wow, you're gonna make some money, Chris. I'm really excited for you.

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:04:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, this is, this is an important prediction. You think they're gonna make a soundbar?

• 1:04:37Speaker 06

  I mean, what's a cheap Vision Pro? We should really get into that.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  Thousand dollars. Thousand dollars.

• 1:04:42Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  That's cheap. I think that's, I think for a product with Vision Pro, that's, it's

• 1:04:46Alex Cranz?

  I think you still have good odds.

• 1:04:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think I'm still feeling pretty good about some kind of like Apple TV 4K soundbar, HomePod concoction, you know, one of those things all melded, all melded together.

• 1:04:56Nilay Patel?

  I think of concoctions.

• 1:05:00David Pierce?

  But Chris, you, an important stipulation is you only win if Apple calls it a soundbar, which it never, ever, ever, ever, ever will. Not a single chance. Who knows?

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  There is a 0% chance, Apple. I just want to be so clear about this.

• 1:05:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm with Nilay on this. Like, that's, it's never gonna happen.

• 1:05:18Alex Cranz?

  I don't know.

• 1:05:19David Pierce?

  But wait, one thing I've been thinking about a lot with this is, it seems like one of the things that happened from when this ruling started, from when this trial started to today, is that the stakes for audio seem like they've gone way down. Like, if you rewind a bunch of years to when this all started, we were in this phase where, like, voice assistants were gonna be the next big thing, everybody was gonna use them, they were gonna be huge businesses. Sonos was under pressure to, like, be part of this because the idea was you were gonna have speakers all over your house, and you were gonna talk to them, and that was gonna be your main interface with technology. And like, that idea is not dead, but like, not alive anymore. And so now we're back to the speaker business. And Google and Amazon have no interest in being in the speaker business. They're in the, they're in the business of getting you to use their assistants, but

• 1:06:04David Pierce?

  they're even getting out of those businesses. Like, Amazon is shedding the Alexa team in a big way. Google is gonna put Bard into assistant, but is already, like, pretty clearly pivoting the way that it thinks about that as a tool. Like, we're just out of this phase where speakers are going to be the centerpiece of your home, and they're back to being speakers. And I think if we're gonna go back to being speakers, that's probably good news for Sonos, because these other companies just aren't gonna care that much about it.

• 1:06:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 06

  Right, so then it's like, why keep fighting this battle? You know, like, just, you know?

• 1:06:35David Pierce?

  I think at some point, if you're Google, you're like, we, we can't go down this road because then we're gonna end up paying royalties on everything, every time we screw over a small tech company and we're hosed. Like, the fight for them seems like it's on, like, patent principle rather than the specifics of this case.

• 1:06:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:06:52David Pierce?

  Whereas Sonos, like, needed this win a lot more back then. But at this point, I don't know, like, I don't know how big Sonos loses here.

• 1:07:00Alex Cranz?

  Sonos has gotta fight, cuz they got owned so hard in this judgment, like...

• 1:07:06David Pierce?

  Oh, sure, they did.

• 1:07:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, if I got owned that hard, I would fight, even if I knew I was gonna lose, I'd be like, no, I'm still going.

• 1:07:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, so be clear, so they lost at this court.

• 1:07:15Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:07:16Nilay Patel?

  They need to appeal to an appeals court, right?

• 1:07:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so, there's this case, and there's still several others. There's one at the ITC where they've won a few times to ban... Like very old Google products that you can't even buy anymore, as is usually the case with those lawsuits.

• 1:07:29Alex Cranz?

  Neat.

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  And so, yeah, there's other counter suits from Google in several countries. So it's still just like a very, like, very angry feud that seems to have no sign of cooling down anytime soon, which seems a bit silly at this point.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, now that a measure of justice has been done. I don't know why you don't say that all. There's a long road. There's an appeals court. I love the idea of our current Supreme Court being made to deeply consider multi-room audio.

• 1:07:56Alex Cranz?

  That's all I want. David just sitting in the...

• 1:07:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, a pile of soundbars has arrived at Justice Clarence Thomas's house. And he didn't refuse them. Oh, no. I can't help it if my friends own a jet and love surround sound.

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. We'll do a lightning round, then we'll get out of here. We'll be right back.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. Alex, you want to start?

• 1:09:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's a new-

• 1:09:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, by the way, a number of people have told us that we need to change the lightning round to USBC round. Because, you know-

• 1:09:36Alex Cranz?

  It's not as "pa-pow" sounding.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  It's also... It's not named after the port. I don't know how to-

• 1:09:43Alex Cranz?

  It's just a lightning round.

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  Words have multiple... That's just a noun.

• 1:09:46David Pierce?

  This is the PCI round. Get ready, everybody.

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  It's the Thunderbolt 4 round. Okay. Go ahead, Alex.

• 1:09:52Alex Cranz?

  Sponsored by Intel.

• 1:09:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:09:54Alex Cranz?

  Oh, sorry.

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  You gotta pay us money for that.

• 1:09:57Alex Cranz?

  Me or Intel?

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  Someone.

• 1:09:58Alex Cranz?

  Someone.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  If you want to pay us to sponsor the Thunderbolt 4 round.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm not gonna say no. All right, go ahead. There's some journalistic integrity there. This transparent disclosure. I will accept money if it's funny.

• 1:10:13Alex Cranz?

  All right, so the Sony PS5, it's got a new Sony PS5? Just like now, now you can go buy one. And that is a perfect time to be like, no, we got new ones coming. It's been rumored for a while. It's smaller. It's slimmer. It should actually fit in most home theater setups, which the current one doesn't.

• 1:10:32David Pierce?

  Okay, I would like to quibble with that particular assessment. This thing is gigantic.

• 1:10:36Alex Cranz?

  You probably have an ugly home theater setup.

• 1:10:38David Pierce?

  This thing went from being preposterously humongous to very slightly less preposterously humongous.

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think there's a piece on the site, actually, by Jay Peters that says, "The slim PS5 is still huge." It's a chunk.

• 1:10:52David Pierce?

  It's smoother now. It's much more like straightforward Eye of Sauron, Lord of the Rings now than it was.

• 1:10:58Alex Cranz?

  No, no, but it's 24% lighter, which I think is very important-

• 1:11:03David Pierce?

  My home theater system will be psyched about that.

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This is the thing that you put down once and never touch again, right?

• 1:11:10Alex Cranz?

  I'm just, look, these are the specs they gave us. And this is what they're proud of.

• 1:11:14Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen the stand for horizontal mode?

• 1:11:17Alex Cranz?

  I didn't know you're supposed to use the current one with the stand and-

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  So you just had your current one horizontal the whole time?

• 1:11:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:11:24Alex Cranz?

  It'd fit in my home theater system. I had to clear a whole shelf.

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  I will say that Sony picked and then picked another shape that incompatible with most furniture.

• 1:11:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  They're just like, "Oh, this is for a rectangle?" To hell with you.

• 1:11:39Nilay Patel?

  But the little stand to be horizontal is not a stand, it's just like a little peg. It's like a little peg leg.

• 1:11:45Alex Cranz?

  I know, I just like stuck like a something under there.

• 1:11:48Speaker 06

  There's the stand, you can detach the optical drive, which is truly wild.

• 1:11:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, the optical drive I think is most interesting. This is the part like Tom Warren, when he was looking at the news, he's like, "Oh my god, that's so cool." And like, yeah, it is cool. It looks, it seems fairly elegant way to do it, because you can now go same price, 24% lighter, 30% smaller by volume.

• 1:12:12Nilay Patel?

  Hey, that's, um, those are how people consider game consoles.

• 1:12:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  Xbox or PS5, I'm going with 30% smaller by volume.

• 1:12:20Alex Cranz?

  That's what you should have listed on like the Costco website, the Best Buy website.

• 1:12:24David Pierce?

  My water displacement is gonna go so far down when I buy that.

• 1:12:27Speaker 06

  Still feel like physical media is like slowly dying here. Like this is like an optional like optical drive, you can have it if you want it, if you want to watch 4K Blu-ray, like that new Xbox that leaked has like, has no more drive in there anymore. So I feel like we're slowly inching towards like a gaming world where it's like all digital.

• 1:12:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting rid of the drives, but the drives are actually important. They're good. If you want to watch DVDs in UHD Blu-rays and everything, like only three people in the world, and they're all in this room, would do. But it's a little cheaper, right? Like it's $4.50 starting for the digital, the disc free one, and previously it was $4.99 for the digital free one. And then the new base like model with the drive already installed is gonna be $4.99, which was the old price for the disc free one. So that's kind of nice. And then there's gonna be the disc player, which is 80 bucks additional and integrates kind of neatly. You can go look at it on the website, it's cool. There's like a little video, it shows the integration, and it is cool.

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Alex Cranz?

  But like, you should also go look at Jay's story about how much smaller it is, because like 30% volume does not actually track to dimensions.

• 1:13:36Speaker 06

  Still don't want to measure your cabinet and make sure it'll, it'll fit.

• 1:13:40Nilay Patel?

  Again, it is also a shape that is incompatible with most things.

• 1:13:43Alex Cranz?

  You can't stack on it. You can just slide off. It's horrible.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  I think, yeah.

• 1:13:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, Chris, what you got?

• 1:13:50Speaker 06

  My pick of the week is the speakers on the Pixel 8 Pro. If you've owned a Pixel over the last few years, you've known that Google, for some reason, has put like terrible loudspeakers in their phones. They started with the Pixel 5, they had some weird like vibration motor that like made sound, and then they went back to like standard speakers for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7, but they were tinny and hollow and just sounded like absolute trash. And so, since the Pixel 8 Pro now costs a thousand dollars, you would hope and pray that the speaker is decent. Like, I don't use my speaker a ton, but if I'm in bed and, you know, playing a podcast or watching a video, I want it to sound decent. I don't want to spend a grand on a phone and have it sound like absolute garbage. And so finally, Google, I'm happy to say, has a speaker that sounds comparable to the

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  iPhone, not quite the level of like the iPhone 15 Pro Max, but you know, it's in that ballpark, which was certainly not the case last year.

• 1:14:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Speaker 06

  Or the year before that, or the year before that.

• 1:14:41David Pierce?

  My wife has a Pixel 6, and, I mean, just by virtue of like what I do for a living, I have 400,000 speakers in this house. Uh, she steadfastly refuses to use any of them and just plays everything out of her phone, and the rage it has filled me with in the last two years as she has had this phone of how bad it sounds all the time. She's just like, "Oh, we're gonna like put on some music while we have dinner." And I'm like, "There's a Sonos, like you're connected to the Sonos." And she's like, "No, I'll just, I'll just put it on my phone. It'll be fine."

• 1:15:10Nilay Patel?

  This is podcasts through Becky's phone. I'm like, "Hey, what kind of speaker should I get? Should I put speakers on the ceiling of your house?" She's like, "I don't know, I listen to podcasts on my phone." I'm like, "But there's, a world of possibilities exists for you."

• 1:15:22Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:15:22Nilay Patel?

  Nope, podcasts on my phone.

• 1:15:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. So like, to me, the speaker upgrade might be the single most important thing about the Pixel 8, and I will probably be buying an A1 as a result. It's very exciting for me.

• 1:15:32Speaker 06

  It's a good phone, and it doesn't get that hot anymore, which was pretty concerning about the past.

• 1:15:36Nilay Patel?

  That's a real part of this generation of phones is, boy, they get real hot when you first buy them.

• 1:15:42Speaker 06

  Gotta be careful that Instagram. It's a heavy, resource-intensive app.

• 1:15:45Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'll make mine quick. There's another trial that's happening right now. Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for the FTX, which is called fraud. I mean, I think it's like fairly obvious what happened here. And Liz Lopato is here in New York. She's been at the courthouse filing reports every day. It is some of the funniest coverage we've ever had on the site. It is Liz at full force in terms of being a writer, so just the funniest writing we've had on the site. Her last headline is Sam Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend. I mean, perfect, just like perfect. Just go read it. You'll read it all. She's doing it basically every day. There's like an army of people waiting, just like waiting for her edits at the end of like the courtroom day. It's all very funny and the dude did it. I don't

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  like, I don't want to turn this into too much of a true crime podcast, but after extensive investigation, I can exclusively reveal that FTX was a scam and it was obvious the entire time and crypto is a fraud.

• 1:16:41David Pierce?

  Michael Lewis is gonna find you and fight you.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  That dude. Do you have another hour?

• 1:16:48Nilay Patel?

  Did you see the thing? Michael Lewis, he wrote The Blind Side, that book, which is now in a substantial amount of controversy, but he had a state, I think he gave an interview time this week. He's like, I wrote my book for the jury. They should read my book. And it's like, no, they should do the trial.

• 1:17:04Nilay Patel?

  That might be a substantially better use of their time.

• 1:17:06Speaker 06

  They should watch Moneyball.

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  Pretty good. Okay, read Liz's coverage. It's great. It's really fun. All right, that was mine. David, what's yours?

• 1:17:16David Pierce?

  I would just like to very quickly appeal to Samsung and Google to stop being so embarrassing, trying to convince Apple to support RCS.

• 1:17:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no. Do we have to disclose that Dieter Bone, former host of The Vergecast, regularly tweets? Apple about RCS?

• 1:17:34David Pierce?

  Sure. There you go. Done. Disclosed. Dieter is right. To be clear, Google is right. Samsung is right. Apple should support RCS. It is a it is a better system. SMS is like a technological disaster that should no longer exist and we should stop using it. Silly YouTube videos from major competitors are not going to convince Apple to do anything. In fact, I would argue that every time Samsung and Google say to Apple, do RCS or you won't be cool anymore, Tim Cook just like, I don't know.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

  Buy your mom an iPhone.

• 1:18:07David Pierce?

  Throws the cat out the window and like cackles. I don't know. Whatever he does.

• 1:18:10Nilay Patel?

  Throws a cat out the window?

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  Bring me another cat. Samsung's at it again. Open the cat room.

• 1:18:21David Pierce?

  Yeah. And like, and now Samsung's whole thing is like, we're bubbles too. And it's just like, it's not going to work. Go, go pick the fight with carriers. Go try to like, covertly destroy SMS from the outside. Like, pick, pick any fight you want, or just like, wait for the EU to make Apple, you know, interoperate with all of the other messaging apps and it'll be fine.

• 1:18:43Speaker 06

  It just seems kind of sad. It's like, all the teens are leaving our phones. We have to like, come up with these ad campaigns to.

• 1:18:49David Pierce?

  Like, I, I want this to happen. And they're doing it wrong. And I would like them to stop.

• 1:18:55Alex Cranz?

  It's real cringe.

• 1:18:56Nilay Patel?

  Here's what Google can do. Have a messaging app that people like to use.

• 1:19:01Alex Cranz?

  And stick with it for longer than six months.

• 1:19:04Nilay Patel?

  Uh, G chat. An app which people firmly believe that they used and loved, but which Google never made.

• 1:19:10Speaker 06

  I don't know. And I think Allo was the way that was the.

• 1:19:14Nilay Patel?

  My God.

• 1:19:15Alex Cranz?

  It's all about.

• 1:19:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, and Google has enough money. You just got your $30 million back. Just give everybody five bucks. It's fine. Just do it. You'll, you'll, you'll get a substantial user base. Just five bucks at a time. That's how the DVCs did it.

• 1:19:31Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't they just put it into their next?

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 1:19:34Alex Cranz?

  Search deal with iOS? Just be like, okay, we'll let you use our search, but also.

• 1:19:39Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook is gonna throw so many cats out the window if they bring it up. Bring me a tiger.

• 1:19:47Nilay Patel?

  All right. He's, he's, he's a fit man.

• 1:19:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he is.

• 1:19:52Nilay Patel?

  He can lift a large cat. That's all I'm saying.

• 1:19:53Alex Cranz?

  He could throw a large tiger.

• 1:19:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay, please send us a note with your thoughts on how large of a cat Tim Cook can lift. Doesn't he go to the gym at like 5 a.m. every day? Yeah, I'm saying it's, I think it's a larger cat than you expect. It's a big cat. Yeah, I agree. All right, that's, we gotta end it here. I would also accept AI-generated images of Tim Cook lifting a large cat. Just putting out in the world, you gotta manifest what you want, you know? And that's what I want. Send them to us at The Vergecast. We love hearing from you. Monday, Connectivity Mini Series comes back with Beeper, speaking of messaging app, Beeper co-founder Eric Michikovsky, who is a longtime friend of The Verge. That's gonna be really exciting. David's got Installer, which, can I reveal this stat, David? Sure. I don't, sure, maybe. You're just well over 10,000 subscribers now. Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  Zero to 10,000. Amazing. People love it. Subscribe to that. And then, I'm not gonna tell you what's happening on Decoder, because I don't know, but I think something very exciting is gonna happen on Decoder very soon. That's what I got for you. All right, that's it. That's Vergecast. Rock on.

• 1:20:57David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. We'll see you next week.

• 1:21:30Speaker 07

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:21:59Speaker 08

  Fall savings are happening now at The Home Depot. Save up to $500 on select appliances. Plus, enjoy free delivery when you spend $998 or more. From prepping to cooking to cleaning up, Frigidaire has you covered. The custom Flex Temp drawer switches from fridge to freezer. With more than 15 cooking modes, including stone baked pizza mode, you can enjoy restaurant quality pizza in as little as two minutes. Then clean up with the Frigidaire dishwasher, featuring the industry's fastest normal wash cycle. Shop fall savings now at The Home Depot. Off of valve through October 21st. U.S. only. See store online for details.