The shine comes off the Vision Pro

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss Apple fans starting to return the Vision Pro, Xbox exclusive games, Super Bowl streaming troubles, and more. Further reading: Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros Zuckerberg says Quest 3 is ‘the better product’ vs. Apple’s Vision Pro Meta’s big vision for face computers might be better than Apple’s Microsoft’s gaming chief on Xbox games coming to PS5, next-gen hardware, and more Microsoft prepares to take Xbox everywhere Gemini Advanced is most impressive when it’s working with Google Gemini 1.5: Google’s next-gen AI model is almost ready Google’s Gemini assistant is fantastic and frustrating OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model ChatGPT’s memory gives OpenAI’s chatbot new information about you Can watermarks save us from deepfakes? Automating ableism The text file that runs the internet Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU FCC commissioner wants to investigate Apple over Beeper Mini shutdown Apple appears to be breaking iPhone web apps in the EU Walmart might buy Vizio to win the fight over cheap TVs AI at Work 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

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• 0:55Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of perceiving the world through screens.

• 1:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  The thing I told you about.

• 1:04Alex Cranz?

  It's accurate.

• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  That no one believed me about.

• 1:07David Pierce?

  So does that mean our podcast is like very good at first and then sort of slowly gets more annoying over time?

• 1:13Alex Cranz?

  You fluctuate.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  It's magic until it's not. It's The Vergecast.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Quite a lot going on this week.

• 1:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22Nilay Patel?

  As we're recording, we are expecting breaking news from Microsoft about the future of the Xbox.

• 1:27David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:28Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  So we're just going to react to that in real time. And then we'll have Tom Warren come on the next show to explain what's going on. But we'll react to that in real time, I promise you. I'm your friend Neil I. David Pierce is here.

• 1:39David Pierce?

  Hi. I should warn everyone that I have a deeply sore throat. So the like sexy smoldering thing I'm doing is just a one time thing. And it will not be this good to listen to me every time.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  No, you should keep it. We're going to do an AI that we're going to do a sexy smolder AI. Openai.com/sexysmolder.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:01Alex Cranz?

  Deeply disappointed I don't also have a cold right now.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  You can vague it.

• 2:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I could. I could drop it a little lower. I don't even know how far to go.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  This is when, when we first started podcasting, the Inga J podcast ages ago, I was like, I should have a podcast voice.

• 2:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  But I gave up on that immediately.

• 2:17Alex Cranz?

  You have to, otherwise you forget about it. And then you're like, oh, how are you? This is my normal voice. And people are like, geez.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  You went with Mickey Mouse?

• 2:24Alex Cranz?

  That's my normal voice. You don't, I actually do a Verge voice at home. I talk like this all the time.

• 2:31David Pierce?

  Can you do an impression of your podcast voice for us? Just real fast?

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  I think Decoder is my fake podcast voice.

• 2:37David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's a pseudo NPR.

• 2:40David Pierce?

  I think of that as like Neelai Patel in his study swirling a brandy.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a podcast. That's the same, that's the same voice.

• 2:48David Pierce?

  That's right. That makes sense. Okay.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  Drunk Ira Glass. That's the Decoder voice. That's what I got for you.

• 2:54David Pierce?

  Okay, I love this for you.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we got to start with some housekeeping. This is our first Vergecast back on the main Verge YouTube channel. I, I'm told this was a complicated move, but it should be simple to experience. Dave, can you explain what's going on?

• 3:10David Pierce?

  Yes. Okay, so there are now two channels on which you can experience the Vergecast. We have the Verge's main YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/theverge or search for The Verge. That's where all the full episodes are gonna live. Uh, we just wanted to have the show and the rest of our stuff kind of be closer to each other, easier to find. And with all the stuff YouTube is doing with podcasts right now, it actually makes sense to have those things a little closer together, because now you can subscribe to just a single playlist. If all you want is the podcast, you can subscribe to the channel and get everything in YouTube and get the podcast and YouTube Music. It's all a little weird right now because Google is still sorting out how all of the podcast stuff works.

• 3:50Nilay Patel?

  It's very in character for Google. I just want to be clear about that.

• 3:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, so like, all of this is stuff that I think we are doing correctly, uh, and just slightly ahead of Google. So hopefully this will continue to make more sense as time goes on. But basically, all the full episodes are going to be on the Verge's YouTube channel from now on. And then we're gonna do like clips and extras and silly stuff where we make fun of Neelai off the show, uh, on the Vergecast channel. So that's where all that stuff will live. Um, I promise, there was a lot of weirdness as we moved all of this stuff. Uh, Liam, our producer, did like a heroic job to get all of this done. It was messy because YouTube is messy, but I think it's done now. People seem to have like found the Vergecast again in all the YouTube platforms. So it should work. And if you don't listen to this podcast on YouTube, don't worry about it.

• 4:38David Pierce?

  Literally, nothing else will change.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  I hope this makes more sense as time goes on should be Google's motto. I just want to be 100% clear on that.

• 4:47David Pierce?

  We have a product team focused on making this make sense.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I hope this makes sense as time goes on is how Google approaches product strategy at a very high level.

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  I'll give you one, but one example, and I don't know why this threads posted the numbers it did, except I think it spoke to people's very souls. I bought a big silly Sony TV. I'm very happy with it. Yeah. It's an 895 OLED. Ooh. Very, very pleased with this. It looks amazing. It came with a webcam, which I think is just representative of how deeply overcharged I was for this TV. They're like, it's the, we made so much money. Here's a camera. Fine. So I'm like, what can this webcam do? Uh, nothing. It can watch you while you watch TV and adjust the settings. That's a hard no. Yeah. And then it, it, there's a Zoom client and there's a Google Meet client. So I was like, fine.

• 5:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it has gesture controls, which are after the Vision Pro. I'm just not doing gesture controls.

• 5:51David Pierce?

  I know what happened. Oh my God, this is the best. If this goes where I think this is about to go, this is my favorite thing.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  I clipped the camera to the top of the TV and I launched Google Meet to sign into our staff meeting and basically be a brat at our staff meeting. And I'm like, where do I type in the code? And you can't. And I was like, okay, where do I switch accounts to my work account? And you can't. Oh. And so they've made a Google Meet client for Android, which this television runs. They can't join meetings.

• 6:28Alex Cranz?

  But what can

• 6:29Nilay Patel?

  It can just call, you can just call people with your phone number from your television, a thing that everyone wants to do.

• 6:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  David, I'm curious for your guess on what happened here because I think I know.

• 6:42David Pierce?

  So what happened was Google, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Duo and Meet should not be different things because when you call one person and you call another person, it should be the same thing. So what they did was they renamed Duo to Meet and then renamed Meet to Meet Original. And then, I think I have this right, and then the old Duo now Meet became Google Meet. But I'm guessing what never happened is that your TV never got an update. So you still have Google Duo with a different name.

• 7:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it didn't get up. There's no update available. It's not, my TV didn't get an update. My TV is hardwired to the router. This is a very insane TV situation.

• 7:27David Pierce?

  Well, okay, you're right. Google forgot that this TV exists.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  Google forgot to update the Meet client so that it could join meetings.

• 7:35David Pierce?

  Right. It changed the name, but forgot to change the app.

• 7:38Nilay Patel?

  There's a can band board in Mountain View labeled, "We hope this makes sense over time." And update the Meet client so it can join meetings is a card on that board. And it just hasn't moved in over a year.

• 7:54David Pierce?

  Neil, I have to tell you, they, they scrubbed this and they didn't, they decided that updating Neil's TV was not a corporate priority.

• 8:01Nilay Patel?

  It's an Android app.

• 8:02David Pierce?

  Your TV was a zero interest rate phenomenon.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  It's just a giant tablet. You don't even, remember when they were like, Android tablets are back. We're gonna try hard again. Remember that?

• 8:13Alex Cranz?

  It'll make sense over time. Don't worry about it.

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  Makes, we hope this makes sense over time.

• 8:18Alex Cranz?

  Don't worry about it. It'll come.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I, I had to audio only join this meeting. I was like, I don't even, I can't join from my phone down here.

• 8:27Alex Cranz?

  I had all the powers great.

• 8:28Nilay Patel?

  It was great. Uh, truly. All right, uh, so we're on YouTube. The upshot of that is, one, I can't join meetings from my television. Uh, and two, we are now available on the main YouTube channel.

• 8:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  Is that all right?

• 8:41Alex Cranz?

  That's right.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  Pretty much. All right, let's talk about the news. There's quite a bit of news. Let's start with the Vision Pro. It is two weeks after the Vision Pro hit.

• 8:48Alex Cranz?

  Which means everybody has to return it now.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  You gotta make the big return decision. Right. Uh, look, a lot of influencers bought the Vision Pro to make a bunch of Vision Pro views on YouTube. And now they have returned the Vision Pro.

• 8:59Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  Because why would you keep it?

• 9:03Alex Cranz?

  But.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  If that's your goal, like, why would you keep it?

• 9:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, you've, you've milked that for all it's worth.

• 9:08Alex Cranz?

  That's how you used to be able to do, like, reviews and stuff, once upon a time. You'd just be like, "Yeah, I definitely want this very expensive product."

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. I would just say there's a clout element to Vision Pro discourse that we keep pointing out. Like, "Vision Pro, thrown at a Cybertruck. Subscribe to my newsletter." Like, that is a whole-

• 9:27Alex Cranz?

  Well, that one can't be returned.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you get enough newsletter subs.

• 9:31Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 9:32Nilay Patel?

  Um, there's, there's just a whole universe of that discourse that I think we can just set aside. As a family, we can agree. We're gonna set aside the clout-chasing part of the coverage. Then there's a bunch of people who are happy with it, and they're keeping it, and it works for them, and they're excited, and they've, they've got big lonely TVs to watch. That's great. We can talk about that. Because I think some of that is coming into focus as well. Then there's the people who, the hype balloon for them popped, and they are genuinely returning it for a variety of reasons. All of which seem fairly predictable.

• 10:05Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  And I think that it's the gap between the hype and reality that is really disappointing a bunch of people here. So, people are returning because it's not comfortable to wear. People are returning because it makes their eyes hurt. They're getting headaches. People are returning it because they are lonely in it, or the pass-through isn't what they thought it was gonna be. It, it feels like-

• 10:24Alex Cranz?

  The Windows management was one I saw.

• 10:26Nilay Patel?

  Someone returned it over window management?

• 10:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they were, like, it was one of many reasons, but like, a big factor for them was like, "Yeah, I can't, like, manage the Windows properly. It doesn't feel like it."

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  If you are a person who had enough feelings about window management to return a $3,500 computer, please, we should hang out.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  We love you. Just come on over. Like, we should talk. Uh, but that, that's how I would diagnose it, right, is the things it was promised to do-

• 10:52Nilay Patel?

  And then the things it can actually do and the product it is now, there is a pretty staggering gap between those two things.

• 10:57David Pierce?

  Yes, and I think the thing we've really spent the last week kind of discovering as a society is that it turns out that Apple, having a long history of making these things work and having a presumably very cool roadmap, doesn't mean anything for the thing on your face, right? Like, this is what we talked about when we did this review, right? Like, you can talk all you want about where this is going and who's right about the future and the big ideas behind all of this and Apple's ability to execute, and I still have not changed my mind on any of that. I think if you were to bet on a horse in this race, you'd be crazy not to bet on Apple. Just historically, that is true. It doesn't change anything for the fact that you just bought a very expensive thing that

• 11:38David Pierce?

  is uncomfortable to wear for a lot of people, doesn't do that much for most people's use cases, and is $3,500. And so I think we saw a really normal thing happen, which is a lot of people tried it. It's super cool. Like, you went through this too, Neil. Like, the first time you put it on, you spend a couple of hours in it, you take it off and you're like, "Oh, my God, that is the most impressive thing I've ever seen." And then the fifth time you do that, you're like, "Well, I'm not doing this because it's cool. I actually need something out of this." And the entertainment side of things seems to be holding up. Like, the people who want to watch a large screen, look at cool panoramic pictures they've

• 12:21David Pierce?

  taken, whatever, that seems to be working for people. But the question of, A, is that enough for this $3,500 headset? And B, can I do that comfortably? Like, literally, physically comfortably?

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:35David Pierce?

  Is turning out to be a higher bar, I think, than a lot of people who bought this thing expected.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  I want to stay focused on that use case. I would submit to you, if you take your $3,500 and you go and buy the biggest TV you can get for that money, you will be happier in the long run than owning a first generation Vision Pro.

• 12:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because you can do TikTok at the same time.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  Because you can do TikTok, you can watch the show with someone else, which everyone keeps forgetting. Like, maybe you're a solitary person, and we've heard from a lot of people like this, and you never have people over to watch TV. The one time you want to, and your only option is the Vision Pro, you're gonna be like, huh. There's also just being able to move around, not having the weight on your face. There's just something about that that's different.

• 13:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  The thing you'll lose out on is the audio side of it, because the Vision Pro is very convincing with spatial audio, especially if you wear good headphones with it, like AirPods Pro. That's very convincing. And as a travel device, on an airplane, I've seen a lot of people wear this thing on airplanes and say, I love, like, for a long haul flight, you're flying New York, San Francisco, and you do the immersion, and you're just like in space, and you just don't feel cramped anymore. Great. $3,500 external battery pack. Like, you're still a generation or two behind from that thing being valuable, I would say.

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  But if that's the whole value proposition, you're really missing out on a lot that you should be getting from a computer that can put Windows everywhere in your space.

• 14:04David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  And I keep seeing apps that, like, could be really cool. There's one, V Song and I were laughing at last night, it's basically a virtual Peloton. So you have any exercise bike, preferably one with, like, Bluetooth that compared to a thing over Ant or whatever protocol that is, and it just mounts a big virtual screen in front of you, and then you go on a bike ride. That's cool.

• 14:28David Pierce?

  That is cool. I love that.

• 14:29Nilay Patel?

  Super cool. And then it's like, you have to wear a Vision Pro in your head to do it, with an external battery pack.

• 14:34Alex Cranz?

  With the sweat.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, none, it's not made for that.

• 14:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  Like, it just isn't made for that. And then there's the other app that everyone keeps talking about, which is the Mac display. And I thought it was utterly fascinating that a lot of the first conversation you saw from Vision Pro owners was the killer app for this thing is my Mac. Yeah. Which is wild. Like, just what, like, the application model has nothing to do with spatial computing. It's just a big window into your Mac. The Mac is notably much more open than an iOS or iPadOS-based device. So what you want is your Mac applications. And then you have this big screen, and Apple keeps billing it as a 4K screen. And then over time, you started seeing people say, this is actually kind of a little blurry.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  This isn't as sharp as I thought it was. And it's because Apple is making a 5K, like an iMac display or a Studio Display, that resolution. They're making a virtual one of those at that resolution. And then they're down-resing it to 4K and sending a 4K video stream of that. Lies.

• 15:36David Pierce?

  Which you can then scale infinitely to whatever weird size you want.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  And so I called this out in the review, and it was just like, one of those things that's like, so hard to explain. So much of this device is, once you see it for yourself, you get it. But it is really hard to explain. You're looking at a screen that seems sharp. And then underneath it are like five scaling operations. And then on top of it, there's foveated rendering. So you've made this huge Mac display that is already fuzzy because of the scaling steps in between the virtual display that's created, that's 5K, that's being scaled down to 4K and sent to the headset. And then you've made it really big. And then if you look at the center of it, the edges of it are blurry because of the foveated rendering. And so people are just sort of running into the reality of what that screen

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  really looks like. And they're like, oh, my application model is still the Mac. I should just use my Mac. Yeah.

• 16:28David Pierce?

  Right. And I think the other part of that is also, to your point about it's not super clear until you see it, the actual interaction of the Mac apps on my Mac, the Vision Pro apps that are actually optimized for this spatial computing, and the iPad apps that run in the Vision Pro, is not good. Like, you can technically have all of those things, but the world you want, and I think the world a lot of people Is one where all of my apps are just all of my apps and some of them run on my device. Some of them run on my Mac, but I can just sort of put them all anywhere and they all interact. And that's pretty cool. That is not at all how it works. And I think that like the people who are mad about the window management are the ones who are like,

• 17:09David Pierce?

  well, either the idea of being able to leave my email in the other room is actually like not a good. It's neat, but it's stupid. And why would I want that? Or this thing about like, okay, I've been promised something like sort of world scale. App multitasking and this is actually. A tiny little slice of that, plus a bunch of other slightly confusing things. To me, this is like when they put stage manager on the iPad and you're like, I can see what you were going for here. You just missed it by about 30% and it kind of kills the whole premise for me.

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  The two things that I think would make that much better and you can see them. And I think that's the 30%. One, to have to make it smaller, like.

• 17:56Nilay Patel?

  The hardware is not ready for the software. Like I, I've come back to that several times. Like one way to think about this is that this is a simulator for the hardware they want to build. And you can see putting windows over your house and like having digital objects everywhere would be amazing. But then you, you have to wear a vision pro and every time I see a cool vision pro app, I think yes, but to have this experience. You've got to put all that weight on your head. And for some people, that's fine. I don't want to discount the people who are like, that's great. But the, the reality of it is then you degrade, like literally degrade reality. You, you are wearing a vision pro on your face and the world around you is a lot granier. And there's motion blur and the pass through isn't good. And you are prioritizing the digital world over the real world. And I, I just don't think that's an appropriate.

• 18:39Alex Cranz?

  And the moment you walk into a dark room, you just see mud, right?

• 18:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a camera. Yeah, you just cannot overcome cameras. And I have now talked to, because in the review. I basically called the top on pastor, I was like, it can get better. But it can't get 5,000% better.

• 18:58Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  And if you did, like, by the time you get that much better, some other technology will come along and be disruptive. And very smart people disagree with me on this. I, fine, you know, like, who knows? But we all agreed that the timeline for that is 10 years out. And I am just not making any predictions on what happens in 10 years of technology development.

• 19:18Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think a bunch of us in the office have been talking about, how would you shrink this headset? Like, did they make a design mistake? And a lot of people are like, well, why didn't they just take that computer and put it with a battery pack, right?

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Alex Cranz?

  And just take a lot of that weight out. But then if you put it with a battery pack, you'd effectively be carrying around like a Mac Mini in your pocket with a battery attached to it.

• 19:38Nilay Patel?

  Backpack, full Apple backpack, big puffy white straps.

• 19:42Alex Cranz?

  You'd need fans to cool it. Who knows if it can like actually be fast enough along that wire to do all the incredible processing it's doing? It's like, no, it's actually a really calm, like, I keep going back to it. It's a really fascinating device because it is so complex. It is such a like exquisitely designed device that doesn't do a whole lot.

• 20:05Nilay Patel?

  But that part of it where it doesn't do a whole lot, that's because it's new. Like, there's no apps for it.

• 20:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  We saw a report this week from Immersive Wire, I want to say it was, that most Vision Pro apps hit a ceiling of 1,000 downloads. Like, very few people have this product. Vanishingly few people have this product. Vanishingly few app developers have started building apps that are made for it. That's a cycle that...

• 20:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and that's a cycle that's going to continue because if no one's making apps for it, then nobody's buying it. And if no one's buying it, then no one's making apps for it.

• 20:36David Pierce?

  I do think what's clear is that this is a repeat of the, you can't just blow up an iPhone app and have it work on the iPad problem, which Apple thought that ecosystem would buy it a ton of time. And that it didn't. Like, luckily, Apple was able to get the iPad ecosystem going very quickly because the, you will just 2X your iPhone app and it'll be great, was a total nonstarter. And I think we're going through that again, where it turns out iPad apps are not the answer. Like, we, what we have seen overwhelmingly so far is people being like, there's some cool stuff. Even Apple now is going into Apple Arcade and saying, here's some of the stuff you can actually use for Spatial, it's cool. This idea that, you know, you have access to this giant set of apps and it will get us there and buy us enough time to get to the next thing,

• 21:20David Pierce?

  I'm less convinced of every day because it just doesn't seem to be... It doesn't seem to be sort of satiating people that way.

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  So when I talk about one more limitation that I think the community has discovered of this thing, and then I want to talk about Mark Zuckerberg reviewing it.

• 21:35Alex Cranz?

  Yes, that was the best.

• 21:37Nilay Patel?

  Which is deeply, as a professional reviewer, all I could think of is, boy, I hope more CEOs try to take my business. Like, just get out there, Sundar Pichai, just start reviewing stuff, be like.

• 21:49Alex Cranz?

  Review the Pixel.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  He should review the Pixel. Sundar Pichai, pick up a Pixel challenge. Pay attention to the Pixel challenge.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  The other limitation that I think is really weird, and Addio will have a piece on this on the site by the time you're listening to this. The people in the, like, the Vision Pro subreddit and the people that I've seen in other places online, do not think Apple's default fitment is good.

• 22:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  So they're like, you go in, you get your face scanned, or you do the iPhone scan, and you get a light seal, and all of them are like, get a smaller light seal. Some people are like, take the light seal off and mash it against your face, which I tried. It is very convincing in terms of field of view, get a huge field of view. I felt like I was underwater, like, the lenses are not designed to be smashed directly against your eyeballs. But they're like, get a different light seal, make it smaller, like, mess with the fit. Because they don't think that the fit that Apple is giving people is right.

• 22:42David Pierce?

  Which we've discovered Apple really does not want you to do, right?

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  They really don't want you to do that.

• 22:46David Pierce?

  You can't just walk in and buy three light seals and see which one you like the best, right?

• 22:50Alex Cranz?

  Because they're $200.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're $200. But so like, I'll just, I'll make that concrete if you're listening. We have a review unit. We want more people in our team to use it. We want to make more videos, or we have ideas on how to cover it. Even if we bought another one, even if we sent the review unit from Apple back and we just bought one. In order to be fair in coverage as more people use the thing, we have to make sure it fits them. Because if it doesn't fit right, the eye tracking goes completely wonky and people get headaches. So, okay, I told Owen, our video director, just go to the Apple Store, just like, buy a bunch of light seals. Turns out there are 17 sizes. They're $200 a piece, and Apple won't let you just buy some. You cannot go to an Apple Store and just buy some.

• 23:33Alex Cranz?

  They keep them in a drawer, like, you have to ask someone and then they'll be.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  So Owen, who made the Vision Pro video, like, Owen is on that team, he edited that video. They made him sit for the demo, the full half hour demo, and then they let him buy one in his size. And it's like, why? Like, just, we want to give you money.

• 23:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  Up to $4,000. Like, if you walk into any store and you're like, I'll just, here's $4,000, just give me one of everything. Few stores in America will be like, no, you just, actually, there's a process here.

• 24:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Hermes would be like, get out. You get one.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And when you think of the Vision Pro Light Seal, you immediately leave to Hermes.

• 24:13Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent. Same experience. Same like, I walk in, I'm like, ooh, do I have enough money to be in here right now?

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's Barney's, Hermes, and the Vision Pro Light Seal in terms of luxury purchasing experiences. You can't just buy a Ferrari. You gotta buy a bad Ferrari first.

• 24:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  You can't just buy a Vision Pro Light Seal. You gotta sit down for 30 minutes first. So, that is annoying on its face if you buy it for enterprise use. I've seen a lot of designers, like, we bought one for our office so we could, like, share it as a 3D modeling tool. And they're like, this is just, like, not designed to be shared. If you spend $3,500 to have it as a cool TV, it is challenging to get it to fit the other people. That's just physically.

• 25:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  You can accomplish the goal, but it is challenging to be like, this computer is available for someone in this office to use. Here's a selection of things that make it fit your head.

• 25:09Alex Cranz?

  It's so consumer hostile.

• 25:12Nilay Patel?

  So, the, there's a, I think there's a connection here. It's too new.

• 25:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  I think they just shipped the thing. There's, like, you know, you all know how I feel about headphone jacks.

• 25:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  That was a hostile move. This is like, the product isn't ready to support that thing. And the way that it's in particular not ready is iOS and iPadOS have no affordance for multi-user support.

• 25:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Nilay Patel?

  So, the Vision Pro, it has optic ID in it. It can scan your eyes and log you in. It should be able to scan my eyes, or your eyes, or David's eyes, or someone else's eyes, and be like, here's your account. You're you. We know you're you. Here's your account, and here's your stuff. And it has nothing. And like on top of it, it has none of the like recalibrations stored. So if I have one, if I have a Vision Pro and I lend it to you.

• 26:06Alex Cranz?

  Thanks.

• 26:06Nilay Patel?

  Every time I lend it to you, you have to recalibrate. I have to put it in guest mode and you have to recalibrate it for your eyes.

• 26:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's stupid.

• 26:13David Pierce?

  That has to, that was a deliberate choice though, right? That has to have been a deliberate choice by Apple to make it hard for you to share this thing with people.

• 26:21Alex Cranz?

  But why?

• 26:22David Pierce?

  For all the reasons you've been talking about, that the hardware is not set up for success for you to be sharing.

• 26:28Alex Cranz?

  But why?

• 26:31Alex Cranz?

  That's why I think it's hostile because they never.

• 26:33David Pierce?

  It's not finished.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  But they cannot possibly, it's hostile with like.

• 26:37Alex Cranz?

  I don't think it's like Apple's hostile.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so let me explain why I think the headphone jack is hostile. Let me rewind this conversation. They took out the headphone jack, they didn't need to, especially as the phone started getting bigger. They did that because they wanted AirPods to succeed. AirPods are a huge success. I know people love their AirPods. I know people think we were wrong about AirPods.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  They basically created a market for proprietary headphones.

• 26:56Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 26:57Nilay Patel?

  AirPods are proprietary headphones. Like I know they run Bluetooth, but they actually run a special version of Bluetooth.

• 27:02Alex Cranz?

  Kinsey's, Kinsey gets you on that one. They, they, they're, they're all like, can you believe they, they got rid of the headphone jack? Who allowed that? And I'm like, we wrote about it all the time.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  I did my best, but like that was straight hostile. Like they created a market for proprietary headphones and they flooded the market with their AirPods. Yes, I'm aware that people really like them. Whatever, it's a thing that happened. Not allowing multiple users on the iPad at this point in the iPad's history, little bit hostile.

• 27:25David Pierce?

  Hostile.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  You have families, people share their iPads. Schools, there, there's some enterprise support for shared accounts on iOS devices. If you're in a school or a business, but a regular person who spends five, six, $700 on iPad, that is not a family device by any stretch of the imagination is locked to one user. Because Apple wants you to buy multiple iPads. They want everyone in your family to have an iPad. Okay, there's some just raw capitalistic user hostility there.

• 27:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  Fine, they're the richest company in the world. What a shock. I think with the Vision Pro, there's no expectation that a family of four is gonna buy four Vision Pros.

• 28:01Alex Cranz?

  No, I agree.

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's why I'm like, not ready to call it.

• 28:05Alex Cranz?

  I think-

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  I think they just shipped the product that was done.

• 28:07Alex Cranz?

  I think it was hostile design. I don't think it's necessarily like, Apple was set out to had a big vision here. I think it was just, well, we wanna make this thing as cool as possible, and that means we need to make it as finicky as possible, regardless of what that means for like, use cases for other people, because we wanna make it as cool as possible. And that's hostile to the users, because then they can't share it, they can't do anything with it, they have to, they do have to go buy another one, or they have to go buy a $200 light seal if they wanna have that experience. And like, I don't wanna say the Quest Pro was a good product, but that part of it-

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  I'll just remind everyone, we gave the Quest Pro a four-

• 28:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Nilay Patel?

  And the headline was "Get Me Out Of Here."

• 28:48Alex Cranz?

  But could you put it on, like, when you put it on your head, did it fit? Did you have to go buy a $200 light seal to make sure it worked?

• 28:55David Pierce?

  Oh, no. So I, I, I don't buy that premise at all, honestly. Like, have you ever put on somebody else's headset and you spend 15 minutes screwing around with the lenses and the strap to get it to fit your head? Like, it's, there's just-

• 29:08Alex Cranz?

  I love that awkwardness.

• 29:09David Pierce?

  -no world in which you have a good experience using these things. Ironically, it's one of the reasons I think Meta Ray-Ban strategy is closer to the right one, because that's just a pair of glasses.

• 29:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:19David Pierce?

  That is much closer to a thing you can just put on anyone's head, and it will more or less work.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:24David Pierce?

  You might look stupid in them, but it's just a pair of glasses. Whereas, something like this is just by definition so individual user-centric, that I think, for Apple to say, "Oh, share it with your friends, they're gonna have a trash experience in it," is actually a bad idea. Like, I think if-

• 29:42Alex Cranz?

  No, I think it was a bad idea, what I'm saying is, go further back. I think it was a bad idea to design a product-

• 29:47David Pierce?

  Well, you're just arguing it was a bad idea to ship the Vision Pro, which is fine.

• 29:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, to ship it in the state, to say, "Hey, we're gonna charge you $200 for a light seal, hey, we're gonna make it so extraordinary for one person and no one else." I think that's just inherently hostile design.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  I will say, I do think in- Interesting question that is becoming more and more open is whether Apple overshot. And this is where we should get into Mark Zuckerberg's review of this thing because it's part of the case that he made, which is that Apple basically came out and said, we are going to make the best, most impressive, most incredible thing possible. Every other consequence be damned, right? And it did that by all accounts. Like, I don't, I don't think it missed in terms of doing the best anyone possibly can at this moment in time on very many fronts.

• 30:35David Pierce?

  Is doing that a better idea than making something that is 85% as good and maybe half the weight? Don't know. It like, is it something that Apple should have shipped that was much closer to just a screen? And an entertainment device as opposed to trying to do all of this other stuff. These, I think this roadmap Apple has set itself on where it made the best thing possible and it's just going to try to bring it down in all of those ways over time towards people is a strategy, but I think it's, it's less and less obvious to me that it's the right one because it's like, you, you want that to be the luxury thing that not everybody can afford, but everybody who can really loves.

• 31:17David Pierce?

  And even that is not what it's getting right now. It's not like the Tesla Roadster or the super expensive first luxury item you see from a lot of companies. It's not even working for those people.

• 31:28Alex Cranz?

  It's not the, the Samsung flip phones, right? Like, like that was, that was the thing. It was like, okay, there's a lot of flaws in this. If you peel this part off, it will destroy it and then Samsung will not be happy. But like, it still worked pretty well and more, I mean, yeah, more than one person could use it, but it actually did. It delivered on the promise and this feels like it doesn't.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  But the promise there was just, it unfolds.

• 31:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was a much simpler.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  The promise that Apple is making is we will intermediate reality for you.

• 31:58Alex Cranz?

  And that was perhaps too big a promise to make.

• 32:01Nilay Patel?

  I think David said this a couple of weeks ago, which is with the Apple Watch and so, so many people have compared the Vision Pro to the Apple Watch, which I'm just going to remind everyone I got right in that review too.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  But the Apple Watch underwent drastic, drastic changes. But David, I think it was you said this a couple of weeks ago, they got the form factor right. Everyone knew that this is how it should look. And all you're doing is refining the thing around the shape that it should be. And here, it just seems obvious that the form factor isn't right. Right, that they shouldn't do pass through in this way. That what you want is all, you want glasses. So I think that does bring it to the Zuckerberg review. Which again, I think every CEO should just review their competitors' products like head on. Hundred percent. David, you want to tell us what's going on with Mark?

• 32:48David Pierce?

  Sure. Okay, so let me, let me just briefly set the scene for you here. So Mark Zuckerberg and his newly long hair, um, which I'm shocked we have not talked about it in this show yet, but we'll just leave that, uh, sitting on a couch in a, in a, you know, dark, long sleeve shirt, I think, uh, with an immaculately fluffed pillow behind him. Lovely setup. Did a, I don't know, what, maybe five minutes or so, just kind of riff on his experience with the Vision Pro? How he feels about the Quest 3 compared to the Vision Pro? Cause there were a lot of people, remember when this came out, who were like, oh, the Quest is dead. Meta actually rushed to launch the Quest 3 ahead of the Vision Pro. These two things have been very closely pitted against each other as sort of opposite ends of this strategy

• 33:33David Pierce?

  for a very long time. And he sat down and, and basically, we should just play a clip here. But he basically said at the end of his experience, he thinks not only is the Quest 3 a better value, he thinks it is straight up a better product than the Vision Pro.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Pull over in your car and just look at this man's hair and then listen to his voice.

• 33:51Speaker 06

  I think the Quest is the better product, period. And you know, the different companies made different design decisions for the headsets. They have different strengths. But overall, Quest is better for the vast majority of things that people use mixed reality for.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  And that's a good line, right? Beautiful hair, too. It's great. Um, it is like lustrous. Uh, that's what punching other men in the face will get you.

• 34:14Nilay Patel?

  Just gets the follicles down. He's just rocking. Healthier than ever. By the way, you know, mixed martial arts is listed in Meta's risk factors with investors. Yes. So good. Our CEO made deeply injure himself fighting other humans. Very good. Anyway, so the point there, right, is everyone thought, okay, does $500 get me 85% of a Vision Pro? And honestly, in the review, we didn't talk about the Quest a lot in our review because they, they feel very different.

• 34:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think now what Zuckerberg is trying to do is actually make them more competitors.

• 34:47David Pierce?

  See, I don't even know if I agree with that. I think

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  You don't.

• 34:50David Pierce?

  Part of his take, I think, is that they're actually very different things, that everybody wants them to be trying to do the same thing and sort of compete on what they can do for different people. And it's like, oh, I want to do X, Y, and Z. Should I buy a Quest or a Vision Pro? And his whole point is kind of, you can't do any of that stuff on the Vision Pro. The Quest, and I will say the single funniest thing about this whole video to me was the moment where the camera flips around and it becomes clear that he's filming this thing on a Quest 3, which just means there is a person sitting there very still, just staring at him with the headset on.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Just like you do with the Vision Pro at your child's birthday party.

• 35:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, next time we make a video, Neel, I'm just gonna stare into your eyes the whole time. It's gonna be incredible. But it's a big part of what he talks about, and I think is the most compelling part of Zuckerberg's case here, is that for all the stuff people actually want to do in a headset like this right now, we can talk about 10 years from now, we can talk about the big far future of headsets for everybody, but in terms of like, right now, what people want to do inside of a headset, there's just more of that in the Quest.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's more games, there's more apps, there are, there is, you can do three Mac Windows if you want to, although setting that up is a Byzantine nightmare of, like, what I call software dongles.

• 36:11David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  You don't want, it's not great.

• 36:13David Pierce?

  You have to download a bunch of apps that just sound like malware in order to like, it's bad.

• 36:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And you're like, I'm sending my entire screen to Meta? No, thank you, sir. I don't care what your hair looks like today. No, so you're not actually sending your entire screen to Meta, but you understand what I'm saying. It's a nightmare of weird applications and Mark actually calls it out like their eco, Apple's ecosystem is great. But if you want to play a bunch of games or you want to do fitness, if you want to control the thing, you have high resolution controllers, which he's calls out very specifically. And the heart of what he's getting at, and I think this is really interesting because you rarely see CEOs acknowledge this. He's like, we made different trade offs than Apple.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  And we think our trade offs make a better product period, not just a cheaper product, not just a better product at our price point. And he comes back to that over and over again, and you, if you go listen to any CEO ever talk about their products, I talked to a lot of CEOs. And a lot of decoders like you made this trade off, how did you make that choice? And they're like, we didn't make any trade offs at all. All the time.

• 37:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  Like all the time, especially Apple refuses to acknowledge that they made trade offs. Right. Like in their review process, we're like, why is the battery over here? And they're like, yeah, we want to save weight on your head. And that is as much of a trade off.

• 37:30David Pierce?

  Because it is meant to be over here.

• 37:33David Pierce?

  Jesus wanted it that way.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  And it's like there's that one you can't avoid. But everything else, they're like, these are the best displays ever made.

• 37:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  And then Mark is there being like, we've looked at these displays and they are OLED displays and they have exactly the kind of motion blur that you would expect from OLED displays. Our lenses are better. Meta really believes the Quest 3's pancake lenses are better. They have a wider field of view. So we lose X from the displays, the resolution that Apple has in their displays, but we gain X in the lenses. I'm not saying these are the right trade offs. I'm not saying these are trade offs that make you buy anything. I'm saying a CEO acknowledging the trade offs in a product category is wild, like fully wild. And I don't know if you saw this, Zuck's, a lot of people were like, this is Zuck's Ballmer moment. Oh. Where Ballmer was like $500, fully unsubsidized of the plan. I like our phone better.

• 38:27Nilay Patel?

  And that's, there's an element of that to what Zuck was doing.

• 38:30Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, I disagree. I thought, it felt more like a victory lap, like a legit victory lap.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  Wow, okay, that's how you took it.

• 38:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because I, you know, we put up a story this week that I worked with her on about the visions of these two companies, because they're both, the end game for both of them isn't VR, it's AR, right? Like, both of these companies are waiting, eventually the technology's going to get there, and they're going to do face computers, and that's what everybody wants. Spatial computing.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  After 15 days of the vision probe, can we say everyone wants a face?

• 38:59Alex Cranz?

  That's what everyone in Silicon Valley wants. That's what all the VCs want. But, but I think, like, their, their strategy is a much smarter strategy, and I think when you think about how you have to normalize these products, because they are really big, really wild, and really insane, you have to normalize that. Like, it's, it's going to be, require a cultural shift, and Meta has, is moving with much smarter purpose in that direction than Apple, who is like, "Face computer that looks like ski goggles, put it on your face, it's way too heavy and you might throw up, it'll be fine." And, and Meta's like, "Okay, well, we've got, like, these glasses that just look like glasses, and you can't do as much, but you can still do, like, you can still, like, scan photos and stuff like that, which is really, really cool." And, and they've got the VR headsets

• 39:42Alex Cranz?

  that actually, like, do VR well.

• 39:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:46Alex Cranz?

  Which, like, I think that's just a better strategy. I, I think, I think he's right. And, and when I was watching it, I was like, "Oh, this is him just taking this victory lap, and also making some egregious claims, like Meta is going to be the open ecosystem."

• 40:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, which is bananas.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, are they gonna let Lenovo build Quests?

• 40:04Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I was like, "Oh, are you just announcing that everybody's going to be making headsets for, for Meta OS?"

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  What they, what they mean, from what I understand, is that you can sideload applications on a Quest.

• 40:14David Pierce?

  No, what Meta means is if you build something cool, we'll just buy your company, and that's, that's an open model.

• 40:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's an open ecosystem, because you get rich.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what they, they mean, in every phase of computing, there's Apple being weird, and then there's everyone else being like, "What if we work together?" And then there's Apple being weird.

• 40:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that part I was like, oh, I feel like you're like you had me this whole time. Your hair looks great. You're like you're speak you're saying the things that I really do think about this whole field. And now you've just lied.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  He does keep saying that they will be the open player in VR and it really unclear.

• 40:46Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I really want to sit him down with like a computer historian to explain to him computer histories that he understands that what he is saying is not true.

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I'm sure he has access to computer historians.

• 40:57Alex Cranz?

  He probably does. He probably but he doesn't listen.

• 40:59Nilay Patel?

  I think there's a there's just a way of positioning yourself up against the big bad of Apple that he's taking advantage of. But I think right now what they have is side loading apps.

• 41:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. But I will say also, to your point, Alex, I think one thing I'm really starting to realize is how significant Meta's lead is just having been at this in public for a decade.

• 41:20Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 41:21David Pierce?

  Because, again, like me and I go back to the Apple Watch, you launch the thing, and then you wait around for a couple of years for people to tell you what they want from it. And then it's your job to kind of chase that and figure it out, right? And Apple is good at that generally and does it very quickly and relies on its developers to do it for them. Meta's been at that for 10 years now. Like, the thing where here's a thing on your face, it's kind of ugly and you'll probably throw up. Like, you know what that sounds like is the first three Oculus products.

• 41:48David Pierce?

  That's just what it was. And it turned off a lot of people and we all, you know, hemmed and hawed about whether a whole generation was being turned off by their first experience in VR because it was so bad. But now it's been at this long enough that it's pretty good at it and it has a pretty clear sense of what people want right now. And I think that's where things like the Meta Ray-Ban stuff come from. It's like, oh, people want super immersive. And that's either like gaming or the fitness stuff. They want to be in another world, or they want as little technology as possible. And so they've pushed to both ends of that. And I think are able to do it. Whereas Apple very much just put out a tech demo and we're like, is this anything? Like, it's starting at that road now. And Meta has been on it for a long time.

• 42:28Nilay Patel?

  I would say that there's a there. I think there's a little bit of a danger of the Ballmer problem and that Apple is relentless.

• 42:33Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  And they do stay focused. The difference, the difference.

• 42:37David Pierce?

  And they have all the money in the universe.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  Is that Mark Zuckerberg is not Steve Ballmer.

• 42:42Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  Just a, just an observation that I've made over time. I've studied these two men very carefully. I think Meta is more reactive to consumers and that bombers Microsoft was much more reactive to enterprise.

• 42:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Nilay Patel?

  And so, and they just, and that version of Microsoft, not Microsoft now, but that version of Microsoft in particular, was addicted to making the ugliest shit possible.

• 43:04Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  They're just like, it's Windows Mobile 6.5. It's the same Windows Mobile that you've hated all this time, but now the stock launcher is a honeycomb. Also, that won't be there and carriers can do whatever garbage they want. And it's like, this isn't a good idea.

• 43:18David Pierce?

  We made the icons smaller.

• 43:21Nilay Patel?

  This is bad.

• 43:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  And Apple was able to for, and so I think there are some meaningful differences here because they have been in market with a complete consumer product. I'm not saying, I have a Quest 2, you have a, like, lots of Quest 2s out there, some Quest 3s. Apple's coming at this from a different direction, unless they want to succeed. But I think after two weeks with this thing, like, the, the barriers are, are just crystal clear.

• 43:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Nilay Patel?

  In a way that the barriers to the Quest are also crystal clear. And I, they're gonna converge more than they don't, but saying like, Apple revitalized this market, I think is.

• 44:01Alex Cranz?

  Generous.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and with the watch, they had a huge advantage, which was no one else could make a watch.

• 44:07Alex Cranz?

  Well.

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, like, literally, like, the iPhone does not allow other watches.

• 44:11Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's true, yeah.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  You, like, Pebble existed.

• 44:14Alex Cranz?

  I was just, yeah, I was just, I was like, Pebble was a great watch.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  No, but if you want to do the thing where you get a text message and you just respond, yes, like Pebble was not allowed to do that.

• 44:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you'd be like, oh, okay, let me pull my phone out.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so we'll see. Uh...

• 44:27David Pierce?

  Now, we've talked enough about the Vision Pro. I like that we just spent 40 minutes being like, everybody's returning this product, let's talk about it.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I did, it is the most fascinating product. It is Apple's first big bet, I want to talk about it. I just want to end on this. I want everyone to do this homework and send me your evaluation. We've talked a lot about my theory of wearable bullshit.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  Whatever that is, where the chart is value on one axis, and then like fiddliness,

• 44:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  And then a 10x multiplier if it's on your face. That's as far as I've gotten on this. So an Apple Watch started really fiddly with not a lot of value, eventually crossed the line. And now people really like Apple Watches.

• 45:08Alex Cranz?

  We all have one.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, AirPods, not very fiddly at all. Super valuable. People really like them. Face computers, historically below the line. Very fiddly, enormous social cost, not a lot of value.

• 45:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  Where do you think the Vision Pro is on the graph? Send me your graph. We'll just go through them. I'm dying to know what you all think after this. Because that's fiddliness. No, it's a value on the, uh, the values on the Y-axis. Fiddliness on the X, and then a 10x multiplier for on your face. That's it. Those are, that's what I think it is. There's an entire episode where we go through this. So I'm just, you go back and look at that one if you want more versions of the graph. But just send me your graphs. I'm dying to know what you think about the theory of wearable bullshit. All right, we have to take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  We're back. As we've been recording, vamping to fill time with the Vision Pro, Microsoft has been quietly making announcements in the background on a podcast, I believe.

• 47:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:44David Pierce?

  The weirdest way ever to announce things.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  We've been recording a podcast while they have been publishing a podcast, and now our podcast will be about what they said on their podcast.

• 47:54David Pierce?

  Does it, do we now directly compete with the Xbox?

• 47:57Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Download ours. Don't, don't download the Xbox.

• 48:00Nilay Patel?

  Phil Spencer just went on a podcast and said, "Everything The Verge said is true, and always has been." All right, Alex, what is going on in the news over there?

• 48:08Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so there's been rumors for the last few weeks that Microsoft was going to take a couple of games and, that are exclusive for the Xbox, and make them not exclusive. Put them on the Switch, put them on the PS5. Fans were not pleased about that.

• 48:23David Pierce?

  Can you explain that to me? Actually, I have realized in all of this chaos that I don't understand why people would be so up in arms about that.

• 48:29Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think if you go and you spend a lot of money on a product, and you invest a lot of time and energy into it and like buying a lot of games for it, and then, and you're like, "Yeah, I don't get like The Last of Us, and I don't get Horizon Zero Dawn, and I don't get all these cool PS5 games, but I get, was it Starfield?" And, and I get Sea of Thieves. And then they say, "Okay, now Starfield is going to go off and be on, on PS5." I would probably like... I'd probably be a little miffed.

• 48:58David Pierce?

  So you're like, maybe I should have just bought a PlayStation and now like get all the games.

• 49:01Alex Cranz?

  Right, like why did I even buy an Xbox to begin with?

• 49:03David Pierce?

  I get that.

• 49:03Alex Cranz?

  Because they're like five, $600. That's expensive. So Starfield is not coming to the PS5, but Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush, and Pentament are coming to the PS5 and the Switch. First Hi-Fi Rush and Pentament, then Sea of Thieves and Grounded. Sea of Thieves is like a really pretty popular Xbox game where you can like be a pirate and you go play with other pirates. It's cute, it's fun, it's a big like, it's almost an MMORPG, but not quite. These are, these are pretty popular games for Xbox and now they're gonna be on PS5 and Nintendo Switch.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I just say something about this? Microsoft has not actually officially confirmed those four games.

• 49:44Alex Cranz?

  What?

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  Tom.

• 49:46Alex Cranz?

  Tom is.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  Has reported and knows that it's those four games.

• 49:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft won't confirm that those are.

• 49:52Alex Cranz?

  They're just saying four games, but they are not, they, they've pretty clearly said it's not gonna be Starfield and it's not gonna be the rumored Indiana Jones video game that's coming out.

• 50:03David Pierce?

  So it's not any of the big games? I mean, like realistically, like.

• 50:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:08David Pierce?

  Microsoft does a handful of like gigantic things in its arsenal now and none of the games you just named are those games.

• 50:15Alex Cranz?

  Like Xbox fans, please don't come for me, but, but if you're not like a big hardcore Xbox fans, these are probably not the biggest games in the world. It's, it's nowhere compared, nothing compared to like The Last of Us or Uncharted or some of PlayStation's exclusives.

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm horrible with video games and all of these sound like fun names for thieves in a comic book.

• 50:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm Pentament.

• 50:38Nilay Patel?

  I'm Sea of Thieves, like.

• 50:39David Pierce?

  Like rejected musketeers?

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 50:45Nilay Patel?

  Oh no, it's Hi-Fi Rush!

• 50:48Alex Cranz?

  But it's, it's, this was like, this has been a big deal for the community. Tom actually got to talk with Phil Spencer about it. There was a big interview and I have definitely been maybe editing that, that looking at that stuff. I maybe, I maybe knew a little ahead of the podcast. What was coming or not coming? Spoilers. And I thought what was really interesting was he was very evasive in, in the interview with us about like what games were coming and what games weren't coming. He wasn't really committed to anything. He, and when asked specifically about Starfield and Indiana Jones, which are the ones I think fans are most concerned about losing that, that access to, or losing that exclusive access to. He said, you know, I don't think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to

• 51:33Alex Cranz?

  any other platform, which is, you know, if you just want to be able to play any game, like you, Neelai, who is bad at games and probably doesn't want to own every system, that's great news for you. If you're really invested in one ecosystem, that's less great news because like the console wars.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So a really interesting thing here that I am hoping you can explain to me. I have for years now assumed that the Microsoft strategy is game streaming.

• 52:01Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 52:02Nilay Patel?

  Right, they're slowly moving to Xbox game streaming. They bought Activision. They, they want to be everywhere. And Phil Spencer has said to me, like, we are bad. We're, we're the number three player in video games and

• 52:16Alex Cranz?

  In consoles.

• 52:17Nilay Patel?

  In consoles. And if you look broadly, all the action is on phones and we gotta go there.

• 52:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:22Nilay Patel?

  And that has always felt like a hint of we're going to go do game streaming. Now there's the Digital Markets Act. Apple has to open up different stores. Apple has said they're going to allow game streaming. So you look at this shift and it is not that. They're not putting Xbox Game Pass on the PS5. They're just porting four titles to the PS5.

• 52:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And people were that upset about it.

• 52:45Nilay Patel?

  But that's the part that I don't get. It's like, why, that's a lot of work. Like, isn't the point that we're going to stream the titles over there?

• 52:54Alex Cranz?

  It's not like, given that the architecture of these consoles now, it's not as hard a work as it used to be because they both run on the same like AMD kind of architecture. It's, it's different enough that it's like, it's not like just point and click and you immediately transfer, but, but it's not as hard as it used to be. I think this is all kind of part of showing that they're friendly and that they're not going to Create a monopoly in gaming because right now they they own Activision Blizzard, which was like one of the largest game companies. They are effectively one of the largest game companies in the world right now, right? Like, I think Tencent and maybe Nintendo are the only thing that might even come close to them. So just absolutely enormous. And if they want to say, okay, no more Call of Duty on PS5, in 10 years, they can do that. So this-

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  No, but they ran around the world-

• 53:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  -promising any government official-

• 53:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  -that they would ship Call of Duty for at least five more years, right?

• 53:44Alex Cranz?

  Like- 10, 10.

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  10.

• 53:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So so they're like committed for the next 10 years-

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there are like feudal lords in European countries that you've never heard of that have secured a 10-year commitment for Call of Duty.

• 53:54Alex Cranz?

  And they're trying, and like a feudal lord, they're trying to show how magnanimous they are, right? They're trying to show, yeah, yeah, we got you. We want to be everywhere all at once, but we also don't want to destroy all of our competition because we need them to sell games.

• 54:07David Pierce?

  Oh, man, that is so charitable and so wrong. Oh, man.

• 54:12Alex Cranz?

  Where do you, what's your read on it?

• 54:13David Pierce?

  So we, we should, it's, you're probably right, honestly.

• 54:16Alex Cranz?

  I don't know.

• 54:16David Pierce?

  But we should, we should cut off here because I think we're gonna have Tom on the show on Tuesday-

• 54:22Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 54:22David Pierce?

  -who knows clearly more about what's going on than anyone at Microsoft. So Tom's going to explain what's going on here. But Neelai, I would just point you to the Xbox One and the thing where Microsoft said, hey, here's a console that plays all of your games, but we're doing it in a slightly new way. And also, a different thing happens when you turn on your TV. And gamers just about burned the buildings down at Microsoft. Like, this business is too big to screw up. And if you're Microsoft and you're out here saying, game streaming is the future, we're moving these three games you've never heard of and Sea of Thieves over, and people lose their minds, like, Microsoft is going to play this

• 55:02David Pierce?

  the slowest possible way because it is desperately afraid of losing this little bit of love that it has in the gaming community. Like, I do actually agree with Alex that there are some reasons to be worried about the antitrust ramifications of just running roughshod over the gaming industry, which in theory, Microsoft could afford to do. But also, pissing off gamers goes real bad forever. Everybody and Microsoft knows that better than anybody. And so it is, it is going to take this the slowest.

• 55:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:29David Pierce?

  Feels like it can afford to take.

• 55:31Alex Cranz?

  Which is why there's a lot of rumors. We, we wrote a piece this week, like Tom really thinks a handheld is coming. He'll talk more about it with David on, uh, next week. Sean also fully wants, uh, he wants to manifest a handheld. That's like a Steam Deck with Xbox built in. Like I am rooting for Sean because I think that will be cool too. But they, they did tease some like unique hardware coming. They've, they've teased that some bigger hardware is coming down the line.

• 55:55Nilay Patel?

  Phil Spencer keeps liking tweets about.

• 55:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he keeps liking tweets about handhelds. And they keep in, in this conversation he had with Tom, he said, yes, some unique stuff's coming. So like.

• 56:04David Pierce?

  A handheld is coming like.

• 56:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a handheld is coming. Is it going to be like a good handheld? Or is it going to be more like what Sony like farted out? We'll see.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 56:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  We'll come back. Tom will be on the show. We'll unpack all of it.

• 56:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm legitimately confused about why port four games to another console.

• 56:26Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna like.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  If your strategy is to be everywhere and the problem is phones.

• 56:29Alex Cranz?

  We're going to throw you into the Xbox like Reddit and just, I think the confusion will go away.

• 56:35David Pierce?

  Can I interest you in gamers?

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh no, it's Hi-Fi Rush.

• 56:43Alex Cranz?

  They were mainly concerned, I think they were more concerned about Starfield, which it sounds like is not going to be in this initial run. So to be fair, that was the one they were really passionate about because it just came out. They're like, don't do this like this.

• 56:54David Pierce?

  But I would bet you $10 that if Microsoft had its druthers and was not afraid of the ramifications, Starfield would be in this.

• 57:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 57:02David Pierce?

  Like Microsoft's strategy includes Starfield and Indiana Jones being available everywhere. It just does.

• 57:08Alex Cranz?

  It's coming. It's just, they're going to be like six months from now, they'll be like, oh, it came out. Don't worry about it.

• 57:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. Phil Spencer is just like quietly tiptoeing in slippers towards the future that he is promising. Like that's, that's where we're at here.

• 57:22Alex Cranz?

  High up on the tippies.

• 57:24David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 57:26Alex Cranz?

  High heels on the tippies.

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  Yep, yep, I know.

• 57:27Alex Cranz?

  There we go. I sent it all the way to work today. That's how I walk.

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  The next line, that's the real problem.

• 57:32Alex Cranz?

  I'm not going to finish it.

• 57:33David Pierce?

  Let's just move on.

• 57:34Alex Cranz?

  We're good. We're good here. I love TikTok.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's, that's Microsoft. And again, Tom will be on the show and we'll, we'll try to fair what all this means. We should talk about AI briefly before our lightning round. By the way, two more people have asked me how to sponsor lightning round. And the answer is that for all my jokes about taking your money, that's not my job. I don't know how. That's not what we do here. Just Venmo him. The influencers know how to take money. They but we are, we just do disclosures and other people take money. So we'll figure it out. I promise someone else is going to take your money. But we talk about AI quickly and then do a lightning round. We mentioned at the top of the show that Google's strategy is very much, we hope over time this makes

• 58:17Nilay Patel?

  sense. I would say that my understanding of the Gemini product roadmap right now fits perfectly into over time, we hope this makes sense. Because they announced Gemini Ultra, which is 20 bucks a month. And then David, you just wrote about Gemini 1.5 Pro, which they're like, is as good as Gemini Ultra. What is going on here?

• 58:40David Pierce?

  So, Google, in case you've wondered if Google is good at naming things now because they decided to name everything Gemini, and that seemed like it made sense. Don't worry, my friends, Google still sucks at naming stuff. There are, I think, four different product names between the Gemini product that you use and the Gemini subscription that you pay for. There are four different product names. But at any rate, so Gemini 1.5 is basically Google's new next model. It makes sense. Everybody's always working on these next models. I was talking to Sooner, try their CEO about this yesterday. And one of the things that he told me was, he thinks that over time, eventually, these numbers

• 59:24David Pierce?

  won't matter to people. And all of this stuff will just sort of happen in the background. He compared it to Google Search, where like, search doesn't get new version names, it just kind of gets better over time.

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  I want to point out that Sam Altman said that a million times before announcing GPT-4. Just saying.

• 59:39David Pierce?

  Oh, sure. There's 3.5, and there's 3.5 Turbo, and there's GPT-4, and now GPT-5 is apparently a thing, even though he said it wouldn't matter. Like, all of this is insane. But we're going to get to that point eventually. But right now, we're very much in this arms race. And I think especially the way you have to understand the arms race is, these two companies in particular, OpenAI and Google, are in a massive land grab for developer resources, right? Like, if if every company on earth is at some point going to have an AI strategy, and at this moment, that's what it looks like. There are basically two players right now they can give a whole lot of money to. And there is a lot of money in winning that, like, think about what AWS did for Amazon, right? Because it was early to, we're very good at giving you developer resources in the cloud.

• 1:00:24David Pierce?

  There is now a belief that the market for AI is going to be even bigger and happen even faster. So these companies are just running as fast as they possibly can. And they honestly don't care all that much if the version numbers don't make any sense to us as users. But so Gemini 1.5 is coming out and at some point it will just sort of wholly replace Gemini 1.0. And there's the three sizes of it. There's Ultra, which is like the big full model, all the epic stuff. The Pro, which is the middle one, which is the one that most consumers see. And then there's Nano, which is specifically designed to run on people's devices. Google hasn't talked much about Nano yet on any of its Gemini stuff, but that's, I think, interesting piece of it. The big thing with Gemini 1.5 is that its context window is much bigger.

• 1:01:08David Pierce?

  And essentially what that means is you can just put a lot more stuff into it at a time. When you, there's a bunch of like weird, complicated math to do, but typically they say it's like three quarters of a word is a token. And Google's context window for Gemini 1.5 is a million tokens, which is a lot of words. You can do hours of video, hours of audio, all kinds of different stuff. So you can just plug all this in and then ask questions about it, do stuff with it. And they have, they have big ideas about what people might do with this huge context window. And there's a lot coming.

• 1:01:43Alex Cranz?

  So we could put like the entire B movie in there? And then find out like if we were supposed to really think there was a romance between a human woman and a bee?

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  That is a great question, ask a computer, actually. Do you detect love?

• 1:01:58Alex Cranz?

  I really want to do that.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  Let me have the difficult for you.

• 1:02:00Alex Cranz?

  If you do this, please, please email me.

• 1:02:02Nilay Patel?

  There's a great exchange in David's report on this where I think Sundar says you could fit the entire Lord of the Rings movie into the context window. And David's like, that means it's happened to Google.

• 1:02:12David Pierce?

  He said it so without thinking that he was just like, it was, it was as if he had like left the Lord of the Rings meeting right before talking to me. It's just like, this definitely happened, right?

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. What's fascinating to me about all of this is, yes, there's an arms race for developers. There are still, I think we're hitting the same place with AI in a slightly longer timeframe as people are hitting with the Vision Pro in a slightly shorter timeframe. We were like, it's really cool, fastest consumer adoption history. And now we've all just run into the limits.

• 1:02:45David Pierce?

  That's right. Yes.

• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I think developers love it because they can build new apps. They can certainly go get funding from VCs. You can write code with it, which I think people really love to do. And sort of everywhere else, it's like, what I can do is produce spam at a higher rate than spam has ever been produced before and turn the internet into a fetid swamp.

• 1:03:04Alex Cranz?

  Oh, the, the corporate folks love it.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Alex Cranz?

  Cause they're like, yeah, I can just have it do all my emails. When I have to do a memo, I just have it write the first draft of my memo for me. And you're like, well, you shouldn't do that. Don't you, you should write. That's important.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I, I actually, I think sending corporate emails with AIs. I don't actually send a lot of emails. I refuse to use enterprise software.

• 1:03:28Alex Cranz?

  Well, not that part.

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  The thing about me. But like the idea that some transactional email is better written by AI than you, fine. But like, that is a pretty small use case in the grand order of things.

• 1:03:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm wondering, like David, as you looked at this model, as you played with Ultra, as you've played with the other ones, do you see that next set of big uses showing up?

• 1:03:53David Pierce?

  No, I think there, there's going to be an increasing kind of creative state of the art. Like one of the other things that happened this week was OpenAI launched Sora, which is its text to video model. And so I think the kind of state of the art of stuff you can make creatively, there's a just massive room left to go. And there's going to be all kinds of cool stuff on that front. But I think we've been talking about on the show for a while now. When is the sort of novelty of using these AI chatbots going to wear off? And we're there. I think it's happening. And, and one of the other things I'm starting to see all over social is a lot of people who started paying for Copilot for Microsoft and are now canceling it. And people are starting to sign up for Gemini Advanced with $20 a month.

• 1:04:38David Pierce?

  People are starting to goof around with it. And you, you look at it and it's like, the thing so many people keep saying about the Vision Pro is like amazing technology.

• 1:04:47David Pierce?

  I took it off and kind of never had a reason to put it on again. And I think a lot of people are starting to feel that way, especially in the sort of one-to-one consumer use case about AI stuff. And also, I think that's why all these companies are going after companies. Because if I'm already signed up for this stuff through my organization, like, yeah, I'll use it to make it easier to make charts or whatever.

• 1:05:11Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that was Microsoft's whole strategy, right? Like, get Copilot out.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Copilot is 20 bucks a month to make charts easier.

• 1:05:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but you're like a IT guy with endless budget at a big company.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  The days of endless IT budgets are over.

• 1:05:25Alex Cranz?

  Who knows?

• 1:05:26Nilay Patel?

  Right, you can see, all these companies are contracting. They're like, not spending lots of money. Like, that to me is like, this is the big gap. I will say that I recently set the action button on my iPhone 15 Pro to open the ChatGPT voice assistant, just the cheap one, 3.5, not 4, not the one you have to be for. And it is like, oh, they should just make Siri this.

• 1:05:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, they should throw Siri away and they should just make Siri this. It is revelatory when you're like, the other day, we had to reheat chicken wings from the Super Bowl and I just asked my phone and it said an answer to me. Was that answer correct? Did it lie?

• 1:06:03Alex Cranz?

  How were the chicken wings?

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Did it hallucinate the temperature and the time? It was fine because the stakes were so low.

• 1:06:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  I asked it twice.

• 1:06:11Alex Cranz?

  Chicken wings is high stakes, though.

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  No, they're not reheating.

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 1:06:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, reheating, that's, yeah, that's fair.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  Does it, because I asked it twice and the first time it said 350 degrees and the second time it said 375 and I was like, this doesn't matter. The stakes are very low here and I didn't have to trawl the SEO'd internet.

• 1:06:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Nilay Patel?

  And Siri, I asked Siri and Siri was like, I don't know.

• 1:06:34Alex Cranz?

  If it is a 200, would you have been like in there being like, this feels wrong, but I'll go with it?

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  That's how I describe the ChatGPT use case. You know, that old Stephen Colbert word, truthiness?

• 1:06:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Nilay Patel?

  Like if you're comfortable with something that just feels right, I really encourage you to set chat GPT your action button.

• 1:06:51David Pierce?

  So, but actually, that's a really good, uh, like example of the problem that all these companies are having, right? Like Google is essentially ripping and replacing Google Assistant with Gemini for the same reason. Like this stuff is going to be better at those things. Would you pay $20 a month for the thing that you just described? Like, no, nobody would. And so there's going to be this like mainstream use case for this stuff that no one will pay for. And then there's going to be a ton of money, at least that's what these companies are betting, in the business use cases. But to me, it feels like we are quickly hitting something like a ceiling of what people actually want to do with these things day in and day out. Like, a million token context window does not make you better at chicken wings.

• 1:07:36David Pierce?

  It just doesn't. And so I think that next thing for regular people is going to have to come from somewhere else. And there's a bunch of different ways these companies are trying to do it. Uh, OpenAI has been making a bunch of tweaks to like how it builds its models to try and make them sort of smarter and more efficient. It also launched a thing this week called memory, where it can actually remember things about you and what you like and your preferences, so that it should sort of interact with you in a more human and like friendly way over time. That's the stuff that I think is going to be interesting. Just building bigger models to do more high-end stuff is like purely a business play. And I think you're right, that $20 per person per month is more money than most companies have to spend at this moment in time. So I don't know, I don't know which of those things is going to catch up first.

• 1:08:20Alex Cranz?

  Can you imagine spending $20 a month for like, possibly right, possibly wrong, chicken wings reheating instructions?

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think if you just buy chicken wings at restaurants, you're always, it's always, are they gonna be good?

• 1:08:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  If your chicken wings budget is 20 bucks a month, it's a gamble every time.

• 1:08:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  Chicken wings are a big deal.

• 1:08:42Alex Cranz?

  They are. Very important.

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  I want to talk about the other side of the AI debate real quick. Uh, David, you wrote about robots.txt this week. Sarah Jeong and I talked about the copyright battles that are, uh, facing all these AI companies on Decoder. There's something else here, right? These companies are forging ahead with ever bigger models, ever more use cases, higher prices, and the-

• 1:09:08Nilay Patel?

  Sort of underlying question of is it okay to take all this stuff to make the models remains extraordinarily unresolved. The Sarah Silverman case, a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman suing OpenAI, they just had a setback in their case. All of the claims, except direct copyright infringement, which is a big deal, but all the other claims are thrown out. The judge seemed very skeptical. There, there are some like, specific concerns in there that are pretty wonky, so we don't have to go into them. But that case is getting whittled down. I think the Times case against OpenAI is a little bit stronger. So we'll see. But we don't know if these companies can even do it. Like, whether this is copyright infringement

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  such that the courts just shut down the entire notion of this to begin with, or if the payments that they're required to make become so high that the business models don't work out. All open questions. And then David, I want you to talk about robots.txt because there's this little handshake agreement of a text file on every website. And that handshake agreement is like, one hand is just crushing the other one. And it's like, this thing can't support the weight of it, I don't think.

• 1:10:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, so I got, I got sort of obsessed with this years ago, when I first started talking to people about Google AMP for a story I wrote, which was basically like, what is the value exchange on the internet, right? And it turns out that a lot of the sort of policing of the internet happens in that file named robots.txt. If you go to almost any website, and then just put up slash robots.txt, it'll pop up a text file that you can see that basically decides which crawlers from around the web are and are not allowed to go onto a website. So crawlers exist for lots of reasons. Many of them are from search engines, which are indexing the web in order to be able to send search results. Amazon has a crawler that checks for pricing around the web for what the government would say

• 1:10:58David Pierce?

  are extremely nefarious reasons, and Amazon would say are for legitimate business reasons. You might run a crawler to check all the links on your own site to make sure that they're still live. Like, there are a lot of reasons to run crawlers. And this is like a technology from the early 90s that basically a bunch of people on a mailing list, including like Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen, and a bunch of like, early internet optimists decided is like, okay, you're just going to put up this thing that says essentially who's in and who's out. And everyone else who makes one of these crawlers is going to abide by those rules, because we want the internet to work. We're all cool people. This is going to be great. That worked pretty well for a surprisingly long time. And now what's happening is if you run an AI company and you want to get a bunch of training data, you know what's full of training data is the internet.

• 1:11:41David Pierce?

  And so you just go, you crawl the whole internet, you pull all that stuff in, you dump it in and you train your model on it. That's how you get recipes. That's how you get all this stuff. Like you just base it on all the stuff that exists on the public internet. And so now, if you're a person who runs a website or a recipe blog, or any number of other things on the internet, you have to go in and decide who's in and who's out. With a thousand new crawlers, a bunch of companies of varying levels of decency and sketchiness. OpenAI has been in a bunch of like media coverage about this because it actually told people how to block GPT-Bot and promised to abide by it and by all accounts is doing so.

• 1:12:23David Pierce?

  A huge portion of websites on the internet, including I believe all of Vox Media, blocked GPT-Bot. The New York Times did, a lot of publishers have. But there are a lot of things out there that are either too small for now to even be known to these publishers, or just don't care. They just don't have to respect this little tiny text file that has no legal or technical authority. And so any AI that wants to come in just can. And that's just where we are. And we have just like broken this basic give and take that the internet ran on for so long. And like I talked to Tony Stubblebine, the CEO of Medium, who has been a big proponent of kicking out the bots in this particular way.

• 1:13:07David Pierce?

  And what he said is basically like, we're getting nothing out of this exchange. They're just taking everything from us and telling us that, you know, it's for the good of society. And like, screw that. That's not, that's not how the internet works. That's not what we're after. And I think everyone on the internet now is starting to have to make that exact same set of decisions.

• 1:13:28Nilay Patel?

  And what's fascinating is OpenAI only made GPT Bot blockable after they had scraped the internet.

• 1:13:36David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 1:13:37Nilay Patel?

  And I honestly think that they did that so that media organizations, and I have, I'm not privy to what Vox Media does at that level. I don't know why they did that or didn't do that.

• 1:13:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  But I'm pretty sure they did it so media organizations, companies could block OpenAI and then, and feel like they had some control. And then OpenAI could go make a deal. Right. And they're like, oh no, you took the control away from us.

• 1:14:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, that is, I will say that is precisely why. I mean, I talked to the OpenAI's chief strategy officer who said basically that exact thing, that, that it is, this is a way to signal that you would like to make a commercial deal. And let's do it. And that is a pretty wild way of, of backing into something like that. But yeah, it is, it's not an accident that OpenAI didn't tell people about GPT Bot until it had already been pretty far down the road.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27David Pierce?

  Because without doing what it did, GPT 4 and ChatGPT wouldn't be as good as they are. Like that, that is the trade. But then the question is, who experiences the downside of that? Like, is that bad for the internet? Is it bad for the world? Or is it just bad for OpenAI? It's like, that's the question now.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think individual creators are feeling the pain of this very deeply.

• 1:14:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  Even when we just write about neat AI tools, we get people who are sort of morally outraged that we would acknowledge that some of them are neat. Because it's built on something. It's built on some taking. And whether or not you think that taking is fair or not is sort of divorced from whether it's legal or not. And I, I don't know that anyone has quite figured that out, right?

• 1:15:12Alex Cranz?

  Somebody needs to pop it into, am I the asshole on Reddit? Like, it's, it's a perfect one, right?

• 1:15:18Nilay Patel?

  And then you enter all of that into the million token Gemini field. And like, is this correct?

• 1:15:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And then we, we send it to the judges and we're like, look, we figured it out. The robots figured it out. They, they talked to each other. We got this. We know who the asshole is. That means who legally is right.

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  Again, I keep, I keep coming back to what I, I refer to as the end game post.

• 1:15:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Nilay Patel?

  Which is a person who's like, I love podcasts, but I don't have time for them. I just feed them into an AI and then it's somewhere, and it's like, dude, you just want articles.

• 1:15:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Just go read those.

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  What you want is articles, like just go read articles made by people who care about you.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  It's a very simple, very simple way of getting what you want from the internet. Read, like people would like to read. It is amazing that the, the broad future of computing is like more reading.

• 1:16:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  After all these, anyway, doesn't matter. I think that the turn for these AI companies, for OpenAI, for example, you can signal you want commercial deals, but they're being sued. So if you go out and make a bunch of deals, you're kind of admitting that you need the deals. And the New York Times is gonna, or whoever else is suing OpenAI, Getty's doing stability is gonna say, look, you know that you should pay money for this stuff. You didn't pay us to begin with. So you're on the, and that is a strategic nightmare for these companies.

• 1:16:37David Pierce?

  It is, and I think James Kwan, the, the chief strategy officer at OpenAI, I was talking to, one of the things he said is, and this kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, is that OpenAI feels very strongly that ChatGPT should be mostly free for most people for exactly that reason. Like, that's the value they believe they deliver back to the world, is that by giving to this system, you then get access to this system and the, the increase in quality of this system is good for the world and you can have it and it will make your life better. And I think you can view that as like dystopian, Black Mirror nonsense, or you can view that as like a fair trade in the way that Google search was a fair trade. But like, that is the dynamic that we're about to reckon with in a lot of really, really messy ways.

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and what is the most fascinating about all this, we can bring it all the way back around to Google. No one is gonna block the Google bot.

• 1:17:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, no one thinks they should be invisible from a search. You can block-

• 1:17:32Alex Cranz?

  Torrent sites probably would. I don't know what those are.

• 1:17:38Nilay Patel?

  Alex's Plex server continues to rock and roll in the background. No one's blocking Alex's Plex server.

• 1:17:42Alex Cranz?

  Use net.

• 1:17:43Nilay Patel?

  You can block Google with some gradations. You can block Google search, which no one will do, and then you can block the other stuff. You can block Google's AI training. But no one is willing to say, I'm so mad at Google for scraping all of our stuff that we're gonna block search. And I think that's, when that one flips and people are like, it is worth it to be invisible to Google, like, the architecture of the internet changes.

• 1:18:05David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

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• 1:19:42Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Do you remember when Time Magazine said the person of the year was you?

• 1:19:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And it was the little mirror. It wasn't a real mirror.

• 1:19:51Nilay Patel?

  That was when print magazines had budget to put Mirror on the cover of magazines in every grocery store in America and be like, "The person of the year is you." It was like a foggy, do you like, holding their carrots? Like, what?

• 1:20:02Alex Cranz?

  It was all like, curvy, warped looking. Oh, that's not me.

• 1:20:06Nilay Patel?

  I was here for milk, not conceptual print ideas.

• 1:20:10David Pierce?

  So you're saying y'all didn't frame yours and put it up next to your other awards? Isn't that not? That's not what you did? That's weird.

• 1:20:16Nilay Patel?

  Donald Trump has like, the fake one and then like, "This one's real." Like, "It's me, you guys."

• 1:20:23Alex Cranz?

  He looks at it every...

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  It's like, "It is me. I was for real that time." All right. I feel like all of my Lightning Round entries are just complaining about streaming the Super Bowl. So, Cranz, do you want to go first?

• 1:20:36Alex Cranz?

  Mine is like, I just find it fascinating. The big, big turn in the, the whole DMA thing with the European Union. iMessage is not found to be a, what is it they call it? Gatekeeper. Yeah. iMessage is not found to be a core platform service. So that you, they're not going to make it open up, which feels probably right, given that no one in the EU.

• 1:21:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is the trade, Apple.

• 1:21:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Nilay Patel?

  They've notably made the trade of saying, we will support RCS. And I think this is what they got in return.

• 1:21:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So, so they're free and clear, as are my personal favorite, Microsoft's Edge browser is not considered a core service. And Bing Search was found to not be a core service.

• 1:21:21Nilay Patel?

  I don't think anybody has ever found Bing Search to be a core service.

• 1:21:24Alex Cranz?

  I just, I really loved that it was like, okay, iMessage, like, damn it. And then Edge, and then Bing.

• 1:21:32Nilay Patel?

  Not even the bureaucrats of the European Union to bring themselves to regulate Bing.

• 1:21:36Alex Cranz?

  I wonder if they just like chuckled. They're like, oh, no.

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  One thing that is really interesting in the mix there is Apple broke web apps in the EU. So for a minute, it looked like Apple would support what's called progressive web apps on the iPhone, where you have a web app, you can save it to your home screen, you push the button, it loads up in a wrapper, and it feels just like a normal app. This is great. I think this is like, in terms of out.

• 1:22:06Alex Cranz?

  That's how I do The Verge.

• 1:22:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's how I do The Verge. It's how I do RCS when I want to post a quick post really fast.

• 1:22:11Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, that's smart.

• 1:22:12Nilay Patel?

  A quick link that just opens up a web wrapper. It's not in Safari. And Apple broke it two betas ago in iOS 17. And they didn't say anything about why. And then today, they finally released a statement on their developer portal that's like, well, we have to support other browsers in iOS now with a browser. And as you know, they all have to be equal. So how could we possibly re-architect all of iOS to support launching a web app and another browser engine from the home screen? So we just shut it off. And it's like. Dude, stop doing malicious compliance.

• 1:22:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like that was just like kicking and screaming. Like, that's just a hissy fit.

• 1:22:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, do you know what platform supports PWAs and allows other browser engines? Android. It's right there. You can just look at it.

• 1:22:53Alex Cranz?

  It's just whiny.

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  It's the most popular operating system on Earth.

• 1:22:58David Pierce?

  Meanwhile, the other browser makers have spent the last few weeks making very clear to everyone that Apple has actually, if anything, made it harder to be a browser maker in the EU now because you essentially have to run many different versions of your app inside your one app. And it's just going to make everyone's life impossible.

• 1:23:16Alex Cranz?

  Apple, come on.

• 1:23:17David Pierce?

  Great job, Apple.

• 1:23:18Nilay Patel?

  Look, we don't talk about this aspect of companies very often. We treat companies as sort of singular entities. There's a real split inside Apple right now between the suits, basically, the policy and the business folks, and the very idealistic engineers who make the products.

• 1:23:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Nilay Patel?

  And I think that this EU thing is really pushing on that split in a way that, you know, Apple is a very well-run company. They are mission-driven in their way. But I'm wondering how much of this stuff, where it's like a bunch of pretty bad faith responses to a law that's designed to make computers feel more like computers?

• 1:23:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Nilay Patel?

  You just wonder, you know, like, someone had to, like, write the code to break all the web apps in the EU.

• 1:24:04Alex Cranz?

  Just like furiously?

• 1:24:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just like-

• 1:24:06Alex Cranz?

  Suit standing over their shoulder, just like, "I hate you so much right now, but I'm gonna write the really good code."

• 1:24:11Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, yeah, some lawyer is like, "Do the malicious compliance."

• 1:24:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Nilay Patel?

  You know, and they, like, file the JIRA ticket, and the JIRA ticket is just labeled "malicious compliance." That's gotta suck. That's all I'm saying. Like, on Decoder, I'm always asking about how decisions are made, but like, how a decision actually gets implemented is equally interesting to me. It's like, someone had to file the JIRA ticket. It's like, "Per DMA, break web apps."

• 1:24:34David Pierce?

  There's three levers in Tim Cook's office. One of them says, "Ship the thing." The other one says, "Buy that company," and the third one just says, "Malicious compliance."

• 1:24:46David Pierce?

  And he just pulls it and just like lights start flashing all over Apple Park and that's how everybody knows.

• 1:24:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know. There's something weird there that I, you know, again, we usually think of companies as like singular entities.

• 1:24:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57Nilay Patel?

  Like there's Tim Cook in arms, you know, like, and like, Tim Cook is in control of all the arms, or sooner or later in arms, and the arms are like, who are you?

• 1:25:06Nilay Patel?

  You made a messaging app? But these companies are tens of thousands of people, if not 100,000 people, when they're at their biggest.

• 1:25:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:14Nilay Patel?

  And they are not singular in that way. And I, this is the sort of thing that I think, I get that Apple's very mad at the Europeans. My caution is this is the sort of thing that breaks a very idealistic culture.

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  Because you have to make everyone believe that you are totally right.

• 1:25:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:31Nilay Patel?

  And that this little move, which is not a very, which is a very cynical kind of move, is actually, is actually somehow idealistic in terms. That's just complicated.

• 1:25:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:41Nilay Patel?

  All right. I basically did a lightning round under your lightning round.

• 1:25:44Alex Cranz?

  It was great.

• 1:25:44Nilay Patel?

  A sub.

• 1:25:45Alex Cranz?

  Sub. Well, yeah, we have it in the thing.

• 1:25:46Nilay Patel?

  Like an aftershock.

• 1:25:47Alex Cranz?

  There's like a sub lightning round under it.

• 1:25:49Nilay Patel?

  You can sponsor an aftershock.

• 1:25:50David Pierce?

  I don't know. I'll take your money. I was just about to say that.

• 1:25:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:25:56David Pierce?

  Uh, mine, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna aftershock when we start complaining about the Super Bowl, so I'll come back to that. Um, mine was just, there was this news this week from a Wall Street Journal report that Walmart might buy Vizio.

• 1:26:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10David Pierce?

  Which I just find deeply fascinating. Uh, and also kind of to be a bummer, I feel like it wasn't that long ago that we thought Vizio had a chance to be a really interesting forward-thinking player in TVs.

• 1:26:20Nilay Patel?

  That was 2011. I wrote a profile of Vizio in 2011.

• 1:26:23David Pierce?

  Was that 2011?

• 1:26:24Nilay Patel?

  It was like when we launched.

• 1:26:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:26Alex Cranz?

  Echo was, was supposed to buy Vizio in what, 2017?

• 1:26:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Alex Cranz?

  And then after that, it just kind of started to.

• 1:26:32Nilay Patel?

  The Echo. I totally forgot.

• 1:26:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Alex Cranz?

  And then that fell apart.

• 1:26:35Alex Cranz?

  They're like, TV. And then they disappeared and then I could not get them to take the TV back.

• 1:26:39David Pierce?

  Didn't they make a car at one point?

• 1:26:41Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:26:42Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:26:42Nilay Patel?

  That was a truly weird.

• 1:26:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, that was just a psyop. That was a Chinese government psyop.

• 1:26:47Alex Cranz?

  I loved that company. That was a good time.

• 1:26:50David Pierce?

  But anyway.

• 1:26:51Nilay Patel?

  But you remember the 2011, I wrote the profile of Vizio. This guy Matt McCray was the CTO. He was a lot of fun. Do you remember they put out Windows laptops and he kept saying they were bone stock?

• 1:27:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:01Nilay Patel?

  It was great. All that was great. And they, they kept on trying to expand by doing like fan service and the TV business was just their business. Matt is now the CEO of Arlo Cameras.

• 1:27:13Nilay Patel?

  And I think Vizio is just like, really, they tried so many interesting things. Remember when the TVs were just Chromecast?

• 1:27:20David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:27:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I have one of those.

• 1:27:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy. But that's what everybody wanted.

• 1:27:25Alex Cranz?

  In practice, no.

• 1:27:26David Pierce?

  They had like the Android tablet that was the remote, right?

• 1:27:29Alex Cranz?

  I know. I don't know where it is.

• 1:27:31Nilay Patel?

  But this is what I mean by revealed preferences. Everyone in our audience is like, I don't want a smart TV. I just want a panel. And then they like ship the thing.

• 1:27:41Alex Cranz?

  But it had no remote. We wanted a remote. I still want to be able to turn up the volume without having to charge my damn remote.

• 1:27:46Nilay Patel?

  I just want a dumb TV. I don't want, and then they shipped it and they're like, no, I don't want that.

• 1:27:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Nilay Patel?

  I want, give me a smart TV.

• 1:27:53Alex Cranz?

  The day the update came and I like, I didn't even, it must've come months in advance. And I turned that TV on because it's like my bedroom TV, so it's never on. I turned it on and I was like, oh, my Vizio is smart now. And it was much more usable. And then I was very upset because I was like, that wasn't the promise.

• 1:28:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Alex Cranz?

  I got bummed.

• 1:28:11Nilay Patel?

  Revealed preferences, man. Everyone wants to run some weird data tracking smart TV operating system.

• 1:28:18Nilay Patel?

  So $2 billion Walmart wants to buy Vizio.

• 1:28:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it just feels like that's a lot of money also to basically improve its house brand of TVs, which is essentially what Walmart would be doing. I would remind you that its existing house brand is called ON with two N's. So I would spend $2 billion to not have ON with two N's as my house brand of anything.

• 1:28:40Alex Cranz?

  Like, Vizio's kind of got embodied by TCL and Hysense in the last few years in the budget TV market. So it's.

• 1:28:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, like what a bleak statement, though, right? Like that, like the fact that that is true and that is true is so, it's such a bummer.

• 1:28:54Alex Cranz?

  It's, yeah, watching Vizio go from like.

• 1:28:58Alex Cranz?

  It was such a good company because, okay, you could get the TV in and it wouldn't necessarily be like, like you'd have to fiddle with it. You'd have to mess around, but then it could look really, really pretty. And you'd be like, oh, holy crap. I spent like half of what I could have spent on an LG. And I have a great looking TV and now that's just not quite the case anymore.

• 1:29:16David Pierce?

  And now the whole TV business is collecting data on people who watch you while you put up your webcam.

• 1:29:21Alex Cranz?

  Vizio was one of the first.

• 1:29:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, Vizio is, is, has been doing that.

• 1:29:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like Vizio was, Vizio was a, was a really, a thought leader in that department for a while there. Uh, unfortunate for all of us.

• 1:29:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's how they made the TVs cheap. I mean, this was.

• 1:29:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that was their sub, like they, they essentially subsidized it and, and then Roku came in and was like, we can do it better because our, our operating system is actually usable. And, and that's why Roku like partnered with Hi-Sense. That's why they partnered with, with TCL. And, and now Roku is this really dominant force in advertising and in TVs. And Vizio is off in the corner being like, let go, I blame you for everything.

• 1:30:03David Pierce?

  Well, Roku also came to people and said, we have an advertising business that we'll give you a cut of. And that has become a business for Walmart that it thinks it can do more. Like it's just all, this is a lot of money being thrown around for big deals and big companies. And none of it is about making good televisions and that just sucks.

• 1:30:20Alex Cranz?

  That sucks.

• 1:30:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a great television, Sony, you know.

• 1:30:23David Pierce?

  That watches you while you're.

• 1:30:25Nilay Patel?

  I know, I unplug the camera and I turned all this stuff off.

• 1:30:28Alex Cranz?

  Try to join another meeting with that TV. Tell us how great it is.

• 1:30:32Nilay Patel?

  We're, we're done messing with the, uh, features of the television.

• 1:30:35Alex Cranz?

  Did you have to like go and put the webcam back in a box?

• 1:30:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the webcam was like quickly discarded. I've got, I've got a drawer that I just think of as the E-Waste drawer.

• 1:30:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:44Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, maybe one day I'll be like, where is that webcam? And I'm going to open the E-Waste drawer. It's going to be great.

• 1:30:49David Pierce?

  Speaking of, let's complain about the Super Bowl.

• 1:30:52Nilay Patel?

  All right. I have a lot to say about this whole situation.

• 1:30:58Nilay Patel?

  It is an embarrassment that in America, on the most watched Super Bowl ever.

• 1:31:04David Pierce?

  Oh, Lord.

• 1:31:05Nilay Patel?

  Where America's sweetheart.

• 1:31:08Nilay Patel?

  Did something with Travis Kelsey on that. She won the Super Bowl. She won the Super Bowl. Actually, can I just say this other, you know, there's a video clip of them running to each other after the Super Bowl and she like hug each other. And then finally the clip with the audio came out because he was mic'd out. Yeah. And he's like, I love you. Thank you for coming. I appreciate you. Thank you for flying halfway around the world. And then he says, was it electric? And she's like, it was unbelievable. I have asked Becky if shit was electric, like 50 times a day since I've seen that clip. Like, I'm like pouring the coffee, like, was it electric?

• 1:31:41Nilay Patel?

  Easily the best thing to come out of the entire Taylor Swift Travis Kelsey story. It's just constantly asking Becky if things are, and she's like, no. She's, she does not think it was unbelievable. Shut down immediately. No. Anyway, so, uh, Super Bowl not streamed in 4K, but kind of streamed in 4K. So Paramount Plus, I think David, that's where you watched it.

• 1:32:02David Pierce?

  That is where I watched it.

• 1:32:03Nilay Patel?

  That's where I watched 30 minutes of it. They only gave a 4K stream to cable companies. So nothing direct from CBS. So if you had cable or DirecTV, you could switch to a 4K CBS channel, which was upscaled 1080p HDR. So it already looked weird. Uh, uh, one of the most vibrant cable companies in America is YouTube. So YouTube TV, you can pay for the 4K add-on, which I churned off of ages ago because it was not worth it. So I paid the 10 bucks for 4K for the month.

• 1:32:40Nilay Patel?

  And I go to watch it and the bitrate keeps crashing on YouTube TV. Just like, I'm watching my router. It starts, you know, like, Yeah. 15 or 20 or whatever the 4K stream would be at. Uh, not even that high. It's like eight. Uh, and then it just, like, just dropped like a stone. Brutal. And I kept switching back to the 1080p feed on CBS and it looked great. Why didn't you switch over? It's not my internet. Switch over to Nickelodeon. Everyone told me Nickelodeon stream looked great.

• 1:33:06Alex Cranz?

  It was, it looked beautiful. Dora the Explorer explained what illegal holding is. And now I know.

• 1:33:12Nilay Patel?

  At the end, they slimed everyone, I believe, on the feed.

• 1:33:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that was good.

• 1:33:16Nilay Patel?

  Just a disaster. And some people thought it was working great, but I posted on threads like, this bitrate keeps crashing and too many people agreed with me.

• 1:33:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Nilay Patel?

  That it was a bad experience for me to think that it was like my internet. I switched from the Apple TV, YouTube TV app to the Android app on the Sony TV, assuming that Google, you know, like a good gatekeeper.

• 1:33:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:38Nilay Patel?

  Would preference its own service on its own operating system. It worked for slightly longer. It worked for five minutes before it crashed. But then it crashed.

• 1:33:46David Pierce?

  Well, we hope it will make sense over time.

• 1:33:49Alex Cranz?

  Is Max Sports or whatever this new super sports streaming service called, is that gonna save the Super Bowl?

• 1:33:57Nilay Patel?

  The Super Bowl does not need to be saved.

• 1:33:59Alex Cranz?

  Well, you know what, like, save it from bad streaming experiences.

• 1:34:03Nilay Patel?

  I just think it is fundamentally embarrassing that we, as a nation, cannot figure this out. Like, you go to watch soccer in, in England and they're like, it's 10 4K feeds anywhere you want to be. It's free and also there's free healthcare. And like, what are we doing?

• 1:34:20Alex Cranz?

  As you said that, I saw like an American flag drop behind you and I just like, heard the, the, the American music.

• 1:34:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, someone's getting mad at me for not being sufficiently patriotic that we have to watch upscale 1080p.

• 1:34:29Alex Cranz?

  No, no, I thought that was the most patriotic thing I've seen in a while.

• 1:34:32Nilay Patel?

  We have to figure this out.

• 1:34:34Alex Cranz?

  Fix the Super Bowl. I also, speaking of sports, I, I made a big gaffe last week because I mistakenly said that Fox sports channels are owned by Disney and that is only true, and I believe Argentina and some parts of South America.

• 1:34:50David Pierce?

  That's where all our listeners are. It's fine.

• 1:34:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It is not owned by Disney in America where it is owned by.

• 1:34:59Nilay Patel?

  Fox, Rupert Murdoch.

• 1:35:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's still owned by Rupert. I, I forgot. But, but Disney does own it, just, just not in this country. I'm sorry.

• 1:35:08David Pierce?

  I would just like to say two things about that. One, we screwed that up and it was complicated.

• 1:35:12Alex Cranz?

  It was very embarrassing. I was annoyed.

• 1:35:14David Pierce?

  Two, it makes this whole thing even funnier because it now is even more like Hulu. It is three direct competitors being like, let's be best friends. We'll figure this out.

• 1:35:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24David Pierce?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:35:25Alex Cranz?

  It's so good. And if you, it's also very funny. If you go and look at Fox Sports on like the Wikipedia page and this is current owners and there's a list of like six current owners depending on what region you're in. I was like.

• 1:35:36Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 1:35:37Alex Cranz?

  Help out. Come on, Fox. Like just one company own the company, please.

• 1:35:41Nilay Patel?

  No, that's not. Rupert's breaking up his empire.

• 1:35:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Nilay Patel?

  And by the way, you need Fox Sports because you have to have Fox Sports because of football.

• 1:35:50Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I don't.

• 1:35:51Nilay Patel?

  But the cable companies do.

• 1:35:52Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah, that's true.

• 1:35:53Nilay Patel?

  And to get Fox Sports, you have to carry Fox News.

• 1:35:55David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:35:55Nilay Patel?

  That's a real thing. They leverage each other. Fox News.

• 1:35:58Alex Cranz?

  I mean.

• 1:35:58Nilay Patel?

  I have a lot of feelings for Fox News. Fox News on its own, popular, but they are a bundle deal.

• 1:36:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, they are unstoppable.

• 1:36:04Nilay Patel?

  You can't get football without taking the other thing. That's not, that's not a choice for you.

• 1:36:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:36:09Nilay Patel?

  Which many cable operators have always sort of like been aware of.

• 1:36:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Nilay Patel?

  That's America.

• 1:36:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:15Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is we can stream it in four K. How was Paramount Plus? I know you watch on Paramount Plus.

• 1:36:18David Pierce?

  I would just like to briefly complain about this. I try not to use The Verge as a place to be annoyed at customer service things, but Paramount Plus sucked for me during the Super Bowl and I'm very upset about it. So for a while, uh, it just didn't work at all. It would throw up like a mysterious, a bad thing happened. We don't know. Try again. And then I would try again and it wouldn't work. But eventually it worked and it actually streamed fine and looked fine. But this incredible thing kept happening, which is that the audio would get about eight seconds ahead of the video. And so literally every single time the play would have just finished before I saw the play. So Jim Nance would be like shouting about how Brandon Iuk caught it for 20 yards right as their snapping ball.

• 1:37:03David Pierce?

  It made it so unpleasant to watch this game. It was like, I literally stopped looking at it for a while. I was like, I'm going to listen to this like it's radio. Uh, and Tony Romo is just going to say nonsensical things at me. But it was just, I kept, I would like, try to pause and you can't because it's live and it's illegal to pause things or something. I would go out of the app and come back in and it would work fine and then go back to being off by about the same amount. I rebooted my TV at one point. I did the whole Roku reboot at one point.

• 1:37:31Nilay Patel?

  That's bad.

• 1:37:31Alex Cranz?

  Oh, you were on a Roku. See, there was your problem.

• 1:37:33Nilay Patel?

  Those letters bouncing at you when you want to watch TV and it's like, oh my gosh.

• 1:37:39Alex Cranz?

  You like, you got your food right in front of you.

• 1:37:40David Pierce?

  Nightmare.

• 1:37:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, watching those letters bounce when you reboot a Roku and you're just trying to get there. And was there anyone else in the room with you? It's like they're taunting you.

• 1:37:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I also think this was also a little bit like Paramount was getting back at David particularly because he makes fun of how much I enjoy Paramount.

• 1:37:56David Pierce?

  I have said a lot of mean things about Paramount Plus. So I did deserve this. But like, we're squared now Paramount. Listen, Sherry Redstone, we're cool now.

• 1:38:04Nilay Patel?

  What, what, what heartened me was the number of people responding to my complaints about streaming sports on the internet by telling me to get an antenna. And I thought of you, Alex. I did not dig out an antenna with 15 people in my home. Like, I've already switched operating systems. We're not doing antenna runs right now.

• 1:38:24Alex Cranz?

  It's great. It's a good time.

• 1:38:25Nilay Patel?

  We did watch the halftime show at the low bitrate because I couldn't switch it to the other stream in the middle.

• 1:38:29David Pierce?

  Oh, can I complain about another thing about Paramount Plus?

• 1:38:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33David Pierce?

  So I, like the genius that I am, opened up Paramount Plus after one of my many reboots, clicked on the thing that said the football game and it took me to a separate channel where they were talking about the football game. So I was like, oh, this is just the halftime show before the thing. And then Anna, my wife, gets a text from her friend being like, oh, are you watching Usher? He's sick. And I'm sitting there telling her that it must not have started yet. And it turns out that when I clicked on football, it didn't click on football. It clicked on something else for me and didn't. So I missed like three quarters of Usher because it didn't select the thing that it was supposed to select.

• 1:39:08Alex Cranz?

  You can watch it on the Apple TV app.

• 1:39:11Nilay Patel?

  You're doing great, David.

• 1:39:13David Pierce?

  I'm still angry.

• 1:39:14Nilay Patel?

  I feel like a lot of your choices are your fault.

• 1:39:17David Pierce?

  Usher took his shirt off, Neelai, and I missed it. I missed it.

• 1:39:21Nilay Patel?

  You did.

• 1:39:21David Pierce?

  I did see the roller skates though, so it was like.

• 1:39:23Alex Cranz?

  The roller skates were sick.

• 1:39:24Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say, it was electric?

• 1:39:34Nilay Patel?

  I want to just do a quick Atmos music update for everyone. We installed the big home theater in our house. It's done. If you've been listening to Verge House since September when we moved into our new house, in the background has been construction sounds every time I record from my house because we've just been renovating. It's done now. Only two things that need to be done. Who knows what they'll ever get done? But it's done and the TVs are done and we have a 5.1.4 Atmos system. It's cool.

• 1:40:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:04Nilay Patel?

  I like it. And so I texted a friend who believes in Atmos music more than I do. I said, "This is as much of a chance as I can ever give this boondoggle." And he sent me a list of things to listen to. Random Access Memories by Deaf Punk, the Dua Lipa record, a bunch of other stuff. And so I listened to it. I was also told that Amazon Music is better. Their codec is better than Apple's. So I'm comparing, I'm doing my best.

• 1:40:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:33Nilay Patel?

  Really running it to ground. Two things I've discovered. One, the only idea anyone has is putting percussion accents behind you. Someone rings a cowbell and it's like behind you. It's like, dun dun dun. Like every song with anything like that, like a tomphil, that's going around you. And that's, that's what we got.

• 1:40:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Nilay Patel?

  And we've solved that problem. Like in the manual of how to remix a song for Atmos, it's like if there's any sort of percussion accent, get it back there. Two, and I've been joking about this for, I want to say over a year, in the Atmos remix of Come Together by The Beatles, George Harrison sneaks up behind you playing the guitar. This is your dream.

• 1:41:25Alex Cranz?

  Was it like a slow sneak? Was it?

• 1:41:28Nilay Patel?

  No, yeah, it it it it's at the very end. You know, there's like little, just like a little guitar.

• 1:41:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Nilay Patel?

  Like happening, come together. And it starts behind you. And then it comes in front of you.

• 1:41:39Alex Cranz?

  It was like he was in the room with you.

• 1:41:40Nilay Patel?

  Like each successive one gets closer and closer. And then it's in front of you at the end. And you have to understand, I'm like, I'm like, listening to this at like 11:45 PM alone, just cracking up. Just losing my mind. Like, this is the funniest thing that's ever happened. It's just like me rewinding Come Together over and over again and be like, no, that's real. It's very good. I encourage everyone to listen to it. That we were done here. Atmos has been completed. You've solved it. It actually happened. It's it's it's very funny. It's deeply, meaningfully funny.

• 1:42:19Nilay Patel?

  If you know of any other songs where the guitar player sneaks up from, please let me know.

• 1:42:26Nilay Patel?

  It is my now my go to demo song. Dare I say it's electric.

• 1:42:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got we got to end the show. Tom will be on to talk about some actual news that happened. With Microsoft soon. We are now on the main YouTube channel, so go listen there. I want to call out, we started the second episode of Decoder. So we have two every week now. We on Mondays, we do the big interviews, CEOs and so on. And then on Thursdays, we run Explainer with Verge reporters and other friends of the show just figuring out big topics. This week was AI and copyright law, which is why I'm bringing it up with Sarah Jeong, who is wonderful.

• 1:43:04David Pierce?

  It's a good one. And it's like it'll, anyone who has been listening to us rant and rave about that will enjoy that.

• 1:43:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a good one. And then David, you've got a big right to repair story on the Tuesday episode of Verge Cast this week.

• 1:43:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, so Will Poor, our newest producer, has been running around, basically trying to figure out what in the world all of this right to repair stuff actually means. And he's going to spend a bunch of time this year telling us sort of different stories from different parts of the right to repair world. And his first one is coming on Tuesday. So the episode's going to be that. And Tom, it's going to be a fun episode. Definitely stay tuned.

• 1:43:36Nilay Patel?

  Will's just gonna fix stuff. So mail him your broken gashits.

• 1:43:39David Pierce?

  The end of this is definitely Will opens a repair shop. Like, there's just no question that's not how this ends. It's gonna be amazing.

• 1:43:46Nilay Patel?

  Finally. Finally, we're on one of those kiosks in the mall that can change your bed. It's always been our dream.

• 1:43:52David Pierce?

  And then he'll sponsor the lightning round.

• 1:43:57Nilay Patel?

  Uh, should we call it aftershocks or shockwaves? Let us know, [email protected]. Uh, that's it. That's vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:44:07Speaker 00

  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. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:44:28Speaker 09

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

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