Why Apple and Amazon can't stop launching stuff

We are once again back to taking your questions on The Vergecast Hotline! (Call 866-VERGE11, or email [email protected].) This time, David has some thoughts on Apple's new product launch strategy, the impossible task of building a modular operating system, and more. Also: a theory on the word "theory." Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:43David Pierce?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of answering machines. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show, we're getting into the hotline. So as a reminder, the best way to reach out to us about anything and everything all the time is to email us [email protected] or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you about everything. I feel like people don't believe me when I say this, but any weird tech question or feeling or intrusive thought or bizarre tiny mystery that you can't solve, anytime you're like, gosh, I wish I had somebody to talk to about this, get at us. I want to hear about them. We'll talk about it on the show. We will solve all of your problems in technology here on The Vergecast. That is our promise to you. Joining me today to go through a bunch of hotline stuff is Vergecast supervising producer Travis Larchuk. Hey, buddy.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  Hi, everybody. Forget about BetterHelp, call into The Vergecast.

• 2:34David Pierce?

  We need a promo code that is just like accidentally redirects your BetterHelp domain to the Vergecast email address. All right, we have a bunch of stuff to go through today. Travis, what's first on the list?

• 2:46Speaker 04

  I don't know if you've noticed, David, but lately there's been a lot of Apple stuff coming out.

• 2:51David Pierce?

  I literally, I probably shouldn't say this on the show, but I made a person at Apple promise me that there was no more stuff coming. Because I can't, I can't do it anymore.

• 3:02David Pierce?

  It's been a fun season of Apple products and I need it to be over.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Was that person Tardis?

• 3:09David Pierce?

  I said, listen, Johnny, I call him Johnny. I said, J-Bone, I'm done with this.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Just for you, David, we'll put a hold on all of our other planned releases for the year.

• 3:18David Pierce?

  I'm grateful.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  All right, here's the question.

• 3:20David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  Hello, David and Verge team. This is Ben, proud subscriber.

• 3:26David Pierce?

  Thanks, Ben.

• 3:27Speaker 05

  Just was watching the coverage on the new MacBook Pro. And it was occurring to me that Apple seems to have really disrupted its product release playbook recently. I was thinking, you know, strategically, why would they do that? It occurred to me that maybe it takes stock pressure off the dependence on single devices in some way, sort of diffuses that risk. Secondly, it definitely is keeping them in the news cycle a lot more. Really feels like a flurry. Every podcast is lit up all the time talking about it. And I don't know, maybe some consumer conditioning is being built in there too. Like I can definitely see why.

• 4:12Speaker 05

  I can't decide if people are going to be waiting longer because there's so much stuff or not waiting and just upgrading a lot. I don't know, it's tough to tell what the effect of that one will be.

• 4:23David Pierce?

  Okay, I have a couple of thoughts here. The first is that I do think there is an industry-wide shift happening in how products get released. So if you go back a generation, this really like, you could take this story back to the 1980s, but I think it really starts with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in the 90s.

• 4:44David Pierce?

  Apple became the company that could two or three times a year, get up on stage, announce a bunch of products and just command a news cycle. And I think no one really has ever been able to match the way that Apple has managed to do that. Like, okay, Travis, here's a fun example, just to put you on the spot. What is the most sort of seminal memory of an Apple product release for you? I think a lot of people in our world actually can think of a like, I remember where I was moment from a Steve Jobs product announcement, which is a wild thing to say. What's the one that comes to your mind first?

• 5:24Speaker 04

  The, we're about to announce three products. It's a phone, it's an iPod, it's an internet communicator. Oh, psych, it's one product, it's the iPhone, that's the one.

• 5:34David Pierce?

  I mean, that is the one, but there's a bunch of other ones too, right? There's Steve Jobs pulling the MacBook Air out of the manila envelope. There's Steve Jobs sitting down with the iPad on that leather chair and reading and swiping through the New York Times homepage. There's just a bunch of these moments that I think are real historical moments in the annals of technology that are just Steve Jobs launching a new product. I don't think the world works that way anymore. In part because I think Steve Jobs was uniquely good at that, but also just the way that people consume information and pay attention to things doesn't quite support those sorts of events anymore. So I think for a variety of reasons, that thing has just kind of gone out of style.

• 6:16David Pierce?

  Which is funny because every other company started to try and do the same thing. Like Evan Spiegel at Snap did a lot of very Steve Jobs-y presentations. Samsung continues to like have theaters full of people that they'll bring for presentations. And that's not to say these events don't work. I just don't think they are central in the way that they were a long time ago. So I think in that case, it's not, you just don't need those events in the way that you used to, even if you're Apple. On the other hand, the whole idea of having sort of moment in time product releases, I think is just dying. The advent of AI over the last few years has sped up product development so fast and there's such a perceived race in all of this stuff now

• 7:00David Pierce?

  that you have to move fast and be able to convince investors that you're moving fast. And so the idea that we're going to save all of our new software for September is just going to make you look slow. It's going to make everything look like it is running behind. And we've already seen Apple get away from that cadence a little bit where it will announce things at WWDC that aren't shipping in September. They ship in like January. Like I remember the Freeform app was a good example of this, right? Apple was like, here, a big exciting new thing, didn't ship anywhere close to the actual iOS drops. Which is fine, the idea is to get it out there and tell people what you're working on way before you ship it. I think what we're going to see is more of that, but also more of the inverse where instead of waiting for there to be a big moment to announce things, Apple is just going to drop new features.

• 7:43David Pierce?

  I think we're going to see a lot less of big, you know, number dot zero releases from Apple and more 10 smaller releases throughout the year that really add up to something big. What that means for things like WWDC and the September iPhone event, we'll see. But I suspect those will last, but they won't have the sort of huge import to the Apple community that they have. The other piece of it is, think about if Apple took all of the stuff that it has announced this fall and did it in one event, right? You have the iPhone 18 lineup, you have the iPhone Duo, you have the Home View, you have all the other weird smart home stuff from LG that they probably should have just buried in an event somewhere. They have the new iPad Mini, they have the new MacBooks,

• 8:28David Pierce?

  they have the new touchscreen MacBook. And I'm sure there's stuff I'm forgetting. If you try to do all of that in one 90-minute Apple event, all we would have talked about was the Duo. We would have spent all of our, the Duo would have absolutely owned two weeks of the news in the way that it did. We would have talked a little bit about the Home View and been confused by it. We would have talked a tiny bit about the touchscreen MacBook Pro, but everything else would have just faded into the background. And so if you're Apple, you look at this and you say, okay, well, if we release one of those things a week for six weeks, what we can do is, just like you said on the call, every podcast will stay lit up about Apple announcements for six weeks.

• 9:10David Pierce?

  So I think this idea of staying in the news, staying top of mind is part of that same idea, right? They're just not feeling like we can wrap it all up into one big beautiful package that will blow people's minds. We have to stay on top of the news cycle at all times. Which, by the way, you know, you mentioned stock prices and all this stuff. All that stuff is tied up together, right? Especially for Apple, which doesn't have new model releases to juice its stock price every once in a while. Apple's bet is that it is going to be the products you use to access all of the AI stuff. And so what it has to keep doing is it has to keep pushing that message as often as possible that like, hey, here's a new AI thing for you to do. Hey, here's a new thing for you to run all those models on. Oh, new Gemini, run it on our new MacBook.

• 9:53David Pierce?

  Like you're going to start to see that pitch speed up as Apple tries to keep speeding up to keep up with the AI world. I think that's sort of sad in a certain way. Like I have enjoyed the era of big giant Apple events with months of rumors leading up to them. It's also just been a lot to do this for the last two months. Like it's been a grind of talking about Apple products, frankly. I'm excited to have a chance to talk about other things. Another company, by the way, that has just completely adopted this playbook is Amazon. Amazon has also announced essentially a new product a week all fall and is very explicit about trying to do the same thing. They're like, if we shipped a bunch, one thing would have gotten a lot of shine

• 10:38David Pierce?

  and both for our product teams and for our stock price and for our users, we want to space things out to give things more of a moment in the sun. And I think that is just going to be the playbook going forward, for better and for worse.

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• 13:09Speaker 01

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• 13:55Speaker 04

  All right, our next question is about modular operating systems.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  There we go.

• 14:02David Pierce?

  We're getting into it, Travis.

• 14:04Speaker 06

  Hey, it's Jacob here. So now that we have a folding iPhone and a touchscreen MacBook, I've been thinking a lot about modular operating systems. That's an idea that I know Microsoft and Google have both tried and failed pretty badly at. I know Google's early work with Fuchsia had it as this, like, separate layered system where you could pull out different layers and swap them out with each other. And then Microsoft had Core OS, and I think before that it was called OneCore, which was the super-long-running project to make like a unified Windows that crucially had one app

• 14:46Speaker 06

  ecosystem that was supposed to scale across types of input and device form factors. So you could make one UWP app and run it on, you know, a Windows phone, a laptop, a tablet, an Xbox, or even like a $15,000 Microsoft whiteboard if your office bought one. This idea seems super duper cursed from everyone who's tried it before. And so I'm curious if y'all also think that Apple is kind of backing their way into this with how much overlap and blending there is between all of their devices now. Anyway, love your show.

• 15:29David Pierce?

  Okay, I just want to say first, a little bit of advice to anyone watching or listening to this. If you ever want to get a job at The Verge, using the sentence "I've been thinking a lot about modular operating systems" in your interview will basically guarantee you get the job. That's just a little bit of advice from me to you. Okay, I hear two questions here. One is, are modular operating systems cursed? And two is, is Apple backing its way into having a modular operating system? I want to, we'll just take those in order. Question number one, are modular operating systems cursed? The answer is clearly yes. It is, everyone has tried and no one has succeeded. I think the challenge is, in almost all of the cases that we've named, the goal at the

• 16:12David Pierce?

  beginning has not been to build a modular operating system. So Windows was not created to work on lots of devices. Windows was created to work on PCs. Android was not created to work on lots of devices. Android was created to work on smartphones. Pick an Apple device, it was not built to be a modular operating system, it was built for that device. And so what has been a challenge is you start with a product designed to solve a specific problem on a specific kind of device, and then you have a new kind of device. And often what happens is that thing gets its own entire new idea about software. And then somebody goes, huh, these two things have some overlap. Let's smoosh them together and figure out what the answer is.

• 16:53David Pierce?

  And often what you decide is, let's build a third operating system that will overlap everything and make it all make sense. That's what Google did with Fuchsia. That's, the whole story of Google Books, honestly, is Chromebooks came out, running Chrome OS. Android becomes hugely successful. Google says, oh, we need a way to stitch Chrome OS and Android together so that we can get the best of Chrome OS, which works really well on laptops, but also get the full Android ecosystem of apps into Chrome OS. And they spent years and years and years and years and years and years trying to figure out how to put those things together with various code names and various operating systems and building a whole new things. And then they realized, oh, actually, what this just needs to be is Android. And I think what has happened, and Google is the closest to this, and it's by a mile,

• 17:36David Pierce?

  Google is the closest to this, because they just leaned into the idea that actually what we need to do is figure out how to turn Android from an operating system meant for phones into basically a bunch of component software pieces that you can reassemble however you'd like. That's a very hard thing to retcon, right? Especially after you had a decade of it is mostly a phone operating system and people mostly built phone apps for it. But I think Android is the closest thing to it. The problem that we have right now is that it's stupid and foolish and won't work to try to compete with Android and iOS. Many have tried and all have failed. And I think there's a bunch of interesting ideas out there that if you were to start

• 18:21David Pierce?

  from scratch and say, I want to build an operating system that works across all of these different devices, you could do it. And you could do it, frankly, technically better and more efficiently because you're starting from a modular standpoint from the very beginning. But you can't, because Android and iOS won. So the problem right now is there is just no room for that thing, even if you could do it better. And I think that's a shame, because I think it is absolutely possible to do it better. It's very hard to do better, to be clear. Making a thing like, just as you're describing on the call, making one piece of software that not only technically works but makes any kind of user experience sense across all of those different devices is just unbelievably hard.

• 19:04David Pierce?

  And not only do you have to do it, you have to convince every developer to do it. And you have to, you have to build this giant ecosystem of third-party apps that also successfully supports all of these different devices. That is so, so, so hard. If you could do it, you could take over the freaking world. And this, this is what brings us to Apple, which is, Apple, I think, I have, I have no evidence for this, but I, just based on what I know about Apple and what this company is, I think if that company were to strip it all back and be forced to essentially start over, I think it probably would build something like a modular operating system.

• 19:44David Pierce?

  Because we are now at a moment where the iPad and the iPhone and the Mac and the Duo all share so much DNA that actually what you're seeing is Apple do a lot of work on top to connect things. This is where you get things like Sidecar and things like Handoff and all of the very clever software things Apple has done to make its devices make sense together that you just wouldn't have to do if they all ran the same operating system. But there are two problems. One is that all of these devices already exist, and saying we are going to just destroy and rewrite all of our software is an insane thing to do after 20 years of iPhones and

• 20:27David Pierce?

  15 years of iPads and 20-plus years of MacBooks, like...

• 20:33David Pierce?

  They're just not going to do that. It's, it's the tech debt there is just unfathomable and is impossible to get over. So the idea that you're just going to say, screw it, we're starting over with all of these enormously successful businesses is just not going to happen. It also runs the risk of starting to cannibalize things, right? Apple really, really, really wants you to buy an iPhone and an iPad and a Mac. And they really think that even if you own an iPhone Duo, you should still also own an iPad. And if you start to build something that more successfully crosses all of the borders and is kind of everything to everyone all the time, even if you do it well, you're going to sell people fewer devices. Because now I have a device that can be all of those things.

• 21:16David Pierce?

  I can take my Duo and attach a physical keyboard and all of a sudden I have something that is approximately a MacBook because it runs the same software. And I don't think Apple has any reason or incentive to do that. So again, if you were to start from scratch and say, we want to build one incredible ecosystem that works across everything that makes all of your devices magically perfectly attuned to both what they are and to everything else, it would be incredible. But nobody who is set up to do that has any incentive to do that. So the idea of like, is Apple going to just make the Duo an iPad? Is no, because, because it can't.

• 21:57David Pierce?

  Because trying to take what iPadOS is, which is increasingly far away from iOS, remember, all this stuff used to be on macOS, right? Like, if you go back to the beginning of the iPhone, this thing started on macOS. And if they had just stayed there and said, this is our operating system and we are going to do what Android did and turn it into a bunch of modular pieces that you can, you can move around as you go, maybe, maybe Apple could do it. But instead, it branched macOS off into a million different directions that are all now very far apart from each other and I think are essentially impossible to put back together. So like, could Apple be backing its way into a modular operating system? Yes. Is it and will it? No, not a chance.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  All right.

• 22:38David Pierce?

  I also think a lot about modular operating systems.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  It keeps you up at night. All right, this is, this next question is straight up David bait.

• 22:49David Pierce?

  Oh, no. Is it about Inc? Be honest.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  It's not about Inc.

• 22:52David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  David, this is Ben from Arlington. In the latest edition of the installer, you talked about default browsers and that they all continue to fail you. And what I've realized is I am a pretty basic browser user and have no idea what it means for a browser to fail you in terms of what you're trying to do. So I'd be really interested in you unpacking more for folks like me that don't know about other browsers and their functionality or just kind of, you know, I use Internet Explorer and then I probably use Netscape and then I probably use Chrome or Mozilla and I'm still on Chrome. What am I missing by not playing around with other more modern browsers? Thanks.

• 23:39David Pierce?

  This is David bait. Okay. I'm going to do this in three or four hours. So, um, no, okay. So I have been down the road of testing new browsers recently because my beloved Arc is finally actually dying, which means everyone who uses Arc, a lot of people who use it on my recommendation and are now very upset with me because they have to go find a new browser. Please know that I'm sorry and also it's not my fault. It's the browser company's fault. I will happily give you their email address.

• 24:08David Pierce?

  I think a couple of things. One is that I have discovered I have two very different needs on desktop and on mobile. And a lot of browsers try to be sort of the same thing on desktop and on your phone. And I think that's dead wrong. So like, I've been using this browser called Lens recently, which is essentially the most stripped down browser you could possibly imagine. It's, it lets you send a tab from your computer to your phone if you want to. And then otherwise, it's basically just one tab and you open it up and you search for things and then you close it. Fabulous. I love it. It's very fast. It doesn't use a ton of memory. It is easy and simple and I only literally just need one tab that pops up the keyboard when I open it so I can search for whatever I'm doing and then move on with my day. That's on mobile.

• 24:53David Pierce?

  I want a very simple stripped down browser and I'm looking for those things. Desktop is really different. I think the reason I liked Arc and the reason a lot of people liked Arc is that it felt kind of like an operating system inside of your operating system. It had a bunch of features that made not all tabs the same. You could open a tab, you could favorite a tab, you could pin a tab so that you could find it later. It would sync your tabs from place to place. You could have different profiles inside of a single browser window. So I could be like, okay, here are all of my work tabs and then just swipe and now I'm looking at all of my personal tabs. And Chrome in particular has just never let you think about how the browser actually works, right?

• 25:35David Pierce?

  It's, it is explicitly and intentionally, like the people who work on Chrome would say, the goal is for Chrome to get out of the way, that it is there for you to open and use web products. And I think that's a fine outcome, but actually many of us spend most of our time on our computers in a browser for one reason or another, doing your email. Office is now in the browser, like Canva and Figma. The more and more of software is just stuff in the browser. And part of the reason we all use horrible Electron native apps is because browsers have not given us any kind of tools to manage and organize life in a browser. So you just end up with a million tabs eating a ton of RAM that you can't use.

• 26:17David Pierce?

  But then you get something like Arc, which is like, oh, sometimes when you click a link, you don't want it to open a new tab. You want to just see what's behind the link very quickly and then have it disappear. And they shipped this thing called Peak and they shipped another thing called Little Arc. And it's again, it's acknowledging the fact that not every tab is the same thing and you're not just meant to have a row of them up top. I could go on like this forever. But the point is, Arc did a really smart thing by saying, we are going to give you tools to manage your life in a browser, the same way that your computer gives you tools to manage your life on your computer. And I think that is a very powerful idea about what the internet is and how we use it. It's also just really attractive and well-designed and made of nice colors.

• 27:01David Pierce?

  Chrome is like ugly. It's, I'm looking at it now and all it does is just yell at me to use Gemini. And then you open a tab and it yells at you to use Gemini. And you can have bookmarks that are poorly organized and not thoughtfully presented. Like Chrome is fine if what you want is to open web apps and use those web apps. But I think a thing that Arc did that I think is very cool, and I think we now see everywhere, is give you the idea of what if you had a sidebar? And what if you could organize that sidebar like you organize the sidebar in any other app where it shows you the tools you want to use and it shows you where your stuff is and you can go find things again? That's the kind of stuff that I'm looking for in a browser now. Just having a bunch of tabs next to each other is not enough.

• 27:45David Pierce?

  Also, Chrome uses so much memory. And this has actually been my problem with a lot of browsers and frankly, Arc is not exempt from this. Every browser uses too much memory. And I've realized the main thing I'm looking for is some of these organization features, but just don't light my computer on fire every time I open 10 tabs. And that appears to be impossible, but that's where we are. I'm still on my search. I will update as I find one. I've used a lot of browsers. Most of them are heavy and bad and vibe-clotted Arc clones. I don't recommend any of those. I will find one that works for me and I will report back. But I think I have always been of the mind, and I keep yelling at people that it is worth caring about your browser because you live inside of it on your computer. And I still very much feel that way.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  I feel like that was Plato's allegory of the cave just now.

• 28:33David Pierce?

  Once you see the light, there's no going back.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're like, leave the cave. There's other browsers.

• 28:39David Pierce?

  You're going to be like, I use Microsoft Edge and I just love that it tells me to buy crypto. Like, is that, is that where we are?

• 28:44Speaker 04

  I'm just here on Safari, man.

• 28:47David Pierce?

  Safari, getting vertical tabs.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 28:50David Pierce?

  Just came out in beta. Huge day for everybody. Vertical Tabs Are Better and You Should Use Them by David Pierce. We'll, we'll do more browser stuff over the next couple of months. There's a lot left in the David's Adventures in Browser story.

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• 30:22Speaker 04

  David, I have one more thing for you.

• 30:23David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  All right, let me just pull up this email that a listener sent in. One second.

• 30:29David Pierce?

  Travis just opened his duo.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, just good.

• 30:33David Pierce?

  Literally, this is just my night.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  Pull this up.

• 30:35David Pierce?

  I need everyone to understand how much Travis unabashedly loves his duo.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  I have labeled this a harmless semantic complaint.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Uh, this is from, uh, I trash. I hope I'm saying your name right. Hey, guys, big fan of the podcast. Been listening to it for a little over a year now. Love the format change to the daily short form in the Friday long form episodes. Hey.

• 30:58David Pierce?

  Love to hear it.

• 30:59Speaker 04

  My only pet peeve is how David and sometimes Neel I use the word theory to describe what in reality are hypotheses. Verified and validated hypotheses become theories. This is a scientific method stuff. For instance, the theory that David mentioned that the new MacBook Pro touchscreen is the result of it being the only available for that type of OLEDs is a great hypothesis. If the supplier slash Apple verified that hypothesis, then it would become a theory. It's a mundane thing, but it bothers me a lot on how loosely people on the internet use the word theory for unverified and even unfounded claims. And then throwing shade on another podcast, we don't need to get into that.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Much love and keep up the great work.

• 31:45David Pierce?

  I have one piece of semantic issue with this semantic issue, which is that.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  Complaint.

• 31:52David Pierce?

  Uh, I have a counter complaint, which is just that if we knew the answer to was this the only, uh, supply available to Apple for this OLED screen? Is that why it has a touchscreen? There are people at Apple who just know the answer to that question. And at that point, it wouldn't become a theory. It would just become a fact. If I were to go out and try to buy it myself and it was the only one available to me, then it's a theory. But at any rate, I actually agree with this a lot. And I think, I think I should probably use the word hypothesis more. I will say, I think when I say theory and when Neel I says theory and when people on other podcasts who I like and trust, I suspect I know who this complaint is about, but we'll leave them outside. Uh, I think what we generally mean, my theory about what we mean when we say theory is

• 32:37David Pierce?

  something more like educated guess than hypothesis. A hypothesis is, is based largely on, you know, intuition and it's, it's a thing I've observed and want to go test more and find out. What I mean often is I have talked to a lot of people. I have done a lot of research. I have, I have a lot of experience in this field. I have an educated guess as to what is going on here. It's, I, I don't know for sure. I, I cannot report it. I cannot state it as fact, but I have, I have an educated guess. And that's probably what I should say more than I have a theory, but that's usually what I mean. And I think Neel I is largely the same where based on all of the research and reporting and, and reading I have done in this space, this is what I think is right.

• 33:22David Pierce?

  We both try not to present our, our educated guesses as if they are unassailable facts because we, we try to be good reporters. There are a lot of people out there who present educated guesses as unassailable facts. We're trying not to do that, but we should probably say the word hypothesis more often. And the touchscreen one is actually a perfect example of pure hypothesis. I have no reporting that suggests it. It is a thing that I read on the internet that seemed kind of reasonable. And that is, that is a good hypothesis, but it's not a theory, nor is it fact.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Conjecture? Would that be a better word?

• 34:01David Pierce?

  If I ever come on this podcast and say, Travis, I have a conjecture. Uh, I need you to just immediately end the episode.

• 34:08David Pierce?

  But yeah, that's good. I just appreciate anyone who doesn't write in to yell at me for saying the phrase, I think that's right, too often, because I do and I say it too often. And please, please be aware that I know that. And my theory is that I will try to say that less often.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  To the listener, I think, I think this is just like the word literally. The world has decided that literally means figuratively and literally.

• 34:33David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  And it's all context based.

• 34:36David Pierce?

  You're probably right that we know it.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  And that I suspect nothing is going to change.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  No.

• 34:41David Pierce?

  This is, yeah, this is where we are.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  I just wanted to acknowledge that it's, it's nice. It's nice to get a complaint that is low stakes, you know?

• 34:49David Pierce?

  I don't know. It's pretty, every time I say theory now, I'm going to hear it in a way that I'm this, it's going to take me a while to get over this. But I appreciate it. Thank you to everybody who sent us questions. We're going to try to do this episode more often. Sometimes we'll have guests. Sometimes it'll just be me. Sometimes Travis will be yelling questions at Neel I. Uh, we're, we're going to try to make the hotline episode a more regular part of the show. So please send your questions. 866 VERGE11 is the hotline. Vergecast at theverge.com is the email. Thank you in advance. Thank you to everybody who sent questions today. This has been a tremendous amount of fun. And as a reminder, if you want to support everything that we're up to here at The Verge, I will say at some point, we're going to have like extra hotline benefits for subscribers. We haven't figured this out yet, but we're going to figure it out.

• 35:34David Pierce?

  And if you want to get in early, subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com/subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you whatever future subscriber hotline thing we figure out. I'm saying this on the podcast to force us to do it. It's going to be great. Theverge.com/subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and you, Travis Larchuk.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  See you next time. Rock and roll.

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