Pod Insights The Vergecast Your robot is about to get its own robot About this episode It's a big week for the smart home. Jake, Vee, and Jen sit down to chat about all the new tech out of IFA, from robots that carry robot vacuums up stairs to upgrades that turn 10-year-old Hue bulbs into motion sensors. Then, Lauren joins the show to talk about the Google antitrust remedies ruling and what Google is going to have to do to allow more competition in the search market. Finally, the Thunder Round is back and better than ever. We're talking $2,000 smart watches, Amazon yanking a major Prime perk, the Pixel 10 Pro's 100x AI zoom, Instagram for iPad, and drama at the FTC.
Further reading:
Eufy built a stairlift for its robovacs
Inside Philips Hue’s plans to make all your lights motion sensors
Philips Hue responds to cheaper competitors with major product overhaul
SwitchBot has ambitions to be the AI that powers your smart home
Samsung’s Galaxy S25 FE and Tab S11 are thinner, lighter, and otherwise about the same
Google gets to keep Chrome, judge rules in search antitrust case
Google critics think the search remedies ruling is a total whiff
Here’s what Google and the DOJ had to say about the search remedies ruling
The tech antitrust renaissance may already be over
Garmin’s Fenix 8 Pro series finally lets you leave your phone at home — sort of
Instagram is coming to iPad, 15 years later
Amazon ends shared Prime free shipping outside your home
Ousted Democratic FTC commissioner can return (again) for now
Here’s how the Pixel’s AI zoom compares to a real 100x lens
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
Transcript 15,866 words · 12 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Company spend can be complicated. Managing it shouldn't be. AMEX Corporate connects cards, expenses, and payments all in one place. That's less time managing work and more time doing work that matters. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate. Get started at go.amex/ammexcorporate. Terms apply.
0:27 Speaker 01 Hey, Bose here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front, every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.
0:43 Speaker 02 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.
0:52 Speaker 03 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand." When leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
1:00 Speaker 02 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
1:15 Speaker 04 Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of robots carrying other robots. I'm Jake Kastanakis, executive editor of The Verge. David Neely, those guys not here today, but got some big news here. David Pierce will be back starting next week. He'll be on the podcast, so tune in. Look forward to that. Today, we've got a great crew, though. With me for the whole show is going to be V Song, senior reviewer at The Verge.
1:42 Speaker 05 Hello.
1:43 Speaker 04 And V, you just had a big announcement.
1:46 Speaker 05 Yes, I did. I launched Optimizer, which is our latest newsletter.
1:52 Speaker 04 All right.
1:54 Speaker 05 It's it's gonna be a fun time. I will be having several existential crises as I test out tech's claims to make your life better with whatever app, AI gizmo, smart watch, you know, the whole spiel. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna dive into whether these things actually make your life better.
2:15 Speaker 04 I'm so excited for this. V has already been writing basically a bunch of these on the site. And so if you've been reading her stuff lately, being like, these are wild, these are ridiculous, like, that's, that's what optimizers are gonna be. It's gonna be really fun. So check it out, theverge.com. We've got a lot to talk about today. There is a huge ruling in the Google antitrust case. Lauren Finer, the Verge's senior policy reporter, is gonna join us later to talk about that. But first, we've got Jen Tuohy here. She is in Berlin at the IFA trade show. Jen, how's it going?
2:50 Speaker 06 Good, thanks. Yeah, hot and sweaty. It's like 900 degrees in Berlin. But having a, having a blast checking out all the, the fun gadgets and the robots carrying robots. So it's, it's, it's always a good time here.
3:05 Speaker 04 Okay, I have an important question. How is your hotel room? Is there any smart tech?
3:13 Speaker 06 No.
3:15 Speaker 04 It's not.
3:15 Speaker 06 I've never been in a smart tech hotel. I think they only exist in California, honestly.
3:21 Speaker 04 Okay, well, that's, that, we need to make your next trip over to California. I thought, I was hoping that because of IFA, you'd, you'd have a slightly smarter, swankier AI-infused hotel. But no, nothing yet.
3:33 Speaker 06 No.
3:34 Speaker 04 Okay, we'll, we'll get there.
3:35 Speaker 06 This one can't even do the air conditioning. It's definitely not smart.
3:38 Speaker 04 Oof, it's not good. What floor are you on?
3:41 Speaker 06 I can open my window. That's the nice thing about Europe.
3:44 Speaker 04 Okay, okay.
3:44 Speaker 06 It's Europeans that you open windows.
3:46 Speaker 04 That's, you know what? That's technology.
3:48 Speaker 06 Yes, that is.
3:49 Speaker 04 It's a different kind.
3:50 Speaker 06 That is very true.
3:51 Speaker 04 So Jen is in Germany for IFA. IFA is this big European tech show. There's been a lot of stuff going on. Samsung announced a new FE phone and a tablet. Anchor has a cool new party speaker slash party projector. But Smart Home is the star of the show. It has been for the last few years. There are a bunch of robot vacuums, a lot of smart lights. A big announcement from Philips Hue that turns its smart bulbs into motion detectors. We're going to get into all of that. I guess, Jen, you've been walking around the show all day. How is it and what are people buzzing about?
4:27 Speaker 06 So today was the media day and unlike, so IFA is kind of like CES for Europe. But unlike CES for America, here in IFA, you don't have to go to a little boring press rooms. They have their press conferences for all the media on the show floor. But they haven't finished putting their booths together. So we're basically dodging, literally dodging forklift trucks and ladders and like buckets of paint as we try and go and check out these press conferences. So I haven't got to really get hands on in too many booths yet because they're still building them. But we got a lot of announcements. So, but it was fun to get a few sneak peeks, you know, around the back of the curtain for some of the booths.
5:12 Speaker 06 So Dreamy had a big press conference in their booth today. And that was one of the more sort of, huh, this is kind of cool, but do we really need it moments? Which was a stair climbing robot. And this is something that has been sort of dear to my heart in the robot vacuum world. You know, robots with various limbs and things that they can do.
5:38 Speaker 04 Like actual, like proper stairs. I feel like it's been announced before and they're like, it can, it's actually just like a bump.
5:43 Speaker 06 I know, you're right. We've had these levels. Now we're at the, so.
5:50 Speaker 04 What are we talking about here? Legs, treads?
5:52 Speaker 06 Treads. So it's actually, they call them arms or, well, there's two companies that have actually released the same robot concept. Yufi has one, which you can actually, are gonna be able to buy relatively soon, I think next year. And then Dreamy has announced its concept. And it's tracks. And they basically fold their sort of arms out from the body and turn into tracks and then track, track, track, track, up the stairs. So it went up like nine stairs. And then stopped, turned around, and came down.
6:24 Speaker 04 That's almost a whole flight of stairs.
6:26 Speaker 06 That's almost.
6:28 Speaker 05 Is there a limit to the number of stairs they can do? Because, you know, I live in a four-floor townhouse. It would be nice to have one stair climbing robot instead of four robo-vacuums that are limited to each floor.
6:40 Speaker 06 So they didn't release specs on the Dreamy one, but the Yufi one, they did say it can go up to, I think it was up to five flights. And they can turn corners and so, you know, and do different shapes of stairs. But the way it works is instead of it actually being a robot vacuum, it's just a robot. And the robot vacuum gets into it and gets carried up. So it's like a stair lift for your robot vacuum.
7:06 Speaker 05 My god. That is so cool and so frightening at the same time.
7:15 Speaker 06 I'm just waiting for my cat to like decide, okay, I'm gonna hop on and get a ride up.
7:21 Speaker 04 So it's a robot for your robot. It's a mech that your robot gets into. And that's, I feel like we've gone too far.
7:29 Speaker 06 I think we've over-engineered cleaning our floors. I really do.
7:33 Speaker 04 It's so impressive.
7:35 Speaker 06 And the thing that gets me is it doesn't clean the stairs. I want something that cleans the stairs.
7:39 Speaker 05 Oh, come on. It's right there.
7:42 Speaker 04 That's next year's robot. It will also carry the separate, buy it separately, stair cleaning bot as it brings it up. I love, robo-vacs are always good for like truly ridiculous robot technology. It does feel like they really turned a corner this year and have been adding all these limbs and appendages. It's wild. It's not clear that any of them work like amazingly. You tested the one with the robot arm, right? And it was like, eh.
8:08 Speaker 06 It was fine at a vacuum, but the arm was very limited.
8:12 Speaker 05 Well, you know, it's Gen 1. It's a Gen 1 arm.
8:16 Speaker 06 Yes.
8:17 Speaker 05 I do. I do have one question about Ifa, and is it still at Mess Berlin?
8:23 Speaker 06 Yeah, which is a fascinating building. I mean, if you're into brutalist German architecture, then you will love this place. But it's also a maze, which is actually, you know, there are stairs everywhere. So honestly, I could have used one of these for me, like a gen transporter to take me around the conference center.
8:43 Speaker 04 That's how they'll really impress us. So what has been your number one thing so far of the show?
8:48 Speaker 06 Well, I was very into all the Hue lighting announcements yesterday. They did a big event out, not actually in the Messer, which is probably one of the reasons I liked it. And they did a big event where they announced a ton of new lights. The sort of headline feature for most people is that their products are getting cheaper. So they've released a new line of Essentials light bulbs that starts at around $15 a bulb, which is still not the least expensive smart bulb you can buy, but definitely.
9:22 Speaker 04 I mean, that's like a quarter of the price, right? Like a Hue bulb is 60 bucks.
9:26 Speaker 06 60 bucks. So it's 24.99 for a single Essentials bulb. But if you buy a four pack, it's down to $15 a bulb. So it's, yeah, that's, that's great.
9:37 Speaker 04 That's wild pricing for Hue.
9:39 Speaker 05 Can you change the colors?
9:40 Speaker 06 Yes. So they're all white and color ambience bulbs. They just have, so they don't dim quite as deep. They have slightly less temperature range. And they say that while the color accuracy is very good, it's not, they don't, it's not as guaranteed to be matched perfectly with all your other Hue bulbs in the way that their premium bulbs are. So that was kind of nice, I think, for the market to see that because Hue has always been a very popular product. But the number one complaint I hear from people is, it's just so expensive. And now there are all these other products on the market. And with Matter, you know, it's much easier. It used to be for Hue, they worked with everyone. So that was a
10:20 Speaker 06 great selling point and maybe one of the reasons you might think to spend more. But with Matter now, most smart lighting bulbs work with most platforms. So that, they were kind of losing that differentiating factor. I think that probably played into needing to move. You know, have more choice for the for people. But the really exciting thing, for me, anyway, I'm not sure if this is as exciting for most people as the pricing, but is that they have released a new feature, which is a software upgrade that will go on every Hue bulb made after 2014. So basically, second gen on. That turns your light bulbs into motion sensors.
11:01 Speaker 04 This is wild.
11:02 Speaker 05 This is what I've wanted this whole year of like, um, building my first smart home in this very vertical townhouse. Uh, like the Cold War my spouse and I have is over the smart lights. Because I like to use voice and they're like, the Google Assistant kind of discriminates against their voice and never works, uh, even though we've trained it. So they're just like, I gotta pull out an app. What's wrong with a light switch? But you know, if it was a motion sensor, and I'm guessing it turns on when you walk into a room or turns off when you leave it, then we don't have to have any fights anymore about turning on the lights.
11:42 Speaker 06 That could be their tagline. Yeah, Philips Hue, saving people's marriages. Yeah. Well, you could get a motion sensor, E. I mean, to be fair, you can buy motion sensors.
11:52 Speaker 05 We could, but you know, it's kind of cool if you don't have to buy multiple devices.
11:56 Speaker 06 And motion sensors can be fiddly. It's kind of, one of the advantages of this tech is it covers a larger area than, say, a traditional P I R sensor. Um, but, but there are a few caveats here. You have to have three bulbs in the room, in the area you want the motion sensing, because it kind of triangulates. And what it's using is R F sensing. So, um, that's something that we've seen with Wi Fi, wireless, Wi Fi sensing, um, Zig B, Bluetooth, there's some of this, um, and a couple of products that use Bluetooth mesh sensing. But this is the first product to launch that uses Zig B. RF sensing and it's a technology developed by a company called Ivani called Sensify,
12:38 Speaker 06 which I wrote about a year or so ago and we kind of speculated at the time that this might be what Hugh was going to be using for its bulbs because they're obviously one of the most well-known Zigbee-based smart lighting lines. And so it's basically just detects disturbances in the radio frequency signals between the bulbs. So that's why you need at least, I think they recommend three to four, which could be a bit tricky depending on what kind of a room you have. And you don't, I asked and they said, no, you don't do like three in a row. Like if you had track lighting, that's probably not going to work that well because it's not creating a zone. So there's going to be a bit of setting up to do. I did test a Wi-Fi version of this that Wiz, which is Hugh's
13:23 Speaker 06 sister company, had for their bulbs and it wasn't super reliable. It would turn on okay, but it was the turning off part that was less reliable. So, but Hugh says that they've worked, they've been working on this for a long time, like multiple years, specifically sort of fine tuning the reliability aspect. So I'm going to be really interested to try it out because it is, the idea that you can take a product you already own and upgrade it to get this kind of function is a great thing for the smart home. Also not having little white boxes and sensors around the house. I mean, I have a Hugh motion sensor,
14:05 Speaker 06 they're great, but like my kid will move it or my husband will get annoyed by the light. You know, it's occasionally it will blink a little LED light and he'll like put it flat on its face. So it's no longer sensing motion. But there is one caveat, you do have to have the new Hugh Bridge Pro for this to work. Sorry, just got that one in there.
14:26 Speaker 04 No, no, that's important. So it really is remarkable though. Like I truly cannot think of another instance where a company went and retroactively added a major feature to 10 years worth of products.
14:38 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:39 Speaker 04 And especially something as substantially different as this. Like this is a very clever implementation and a very clever new feature and
14:48 Speaker 04 You know, you're right, like, there is this important caveat. So you do have to have this new hub to enable it.
14:53 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:54 Speaker 04 And it sounds like there's a legitimate reason for that, right? They're not just like pagating it.
14:58 Speaker 06 Right, so it is a heavy technical load to process. So what happens is that the bulbs can be firmware updated to support this sort of tech stack of the sensified technology with the Hue technology sort of mixed in. But they then, all they do is detect motion. They don't know what that motion is. And so they send their signals back to the bridge, which processes, uses algorithms that have been kind of fine tuned to detect specific types of motion. So there are two use cases for this that Hugh's touting. And there's motion sensing for turning your lights on, and that's free if you buy the bridge.
15:38 Speaker 06 But it's also been used for security because Hugh has a security suite of cameras and now a new siren. So you could actually use it like a security system. And the security algorithm is different from the motion sensing algorithm. The motion sensing algorithm actually needs to be more precise. But the security, I mean, more, it needs to be quicker, it needs to be super fast. Whereas the security algorithm doesn't need to be as fast, but it needs to be very accurate because you don't want to trigger an alarm for a false alarm. So yeah, and that they're charging for. That's a dollar a month, or it's part of their Hue secure system.
16:19 Speaker 06 But yeah, so the bridge is doing all that processing of the data that the radio waves disturbances are sending to the bridge, and then it decides what's going to happen, what's been triggered.
16:33 Speaker 04 Were they able to demo any of this for you yet? Okay, so you actually did, you walked in and saw the lights come on?
16:39 Speaker 06 Yes.
16:40 Speaker 04 Like, and okay, this is my big question, like, how, obviously you have to do a lot more testing to see how reliable it is, but like, was it, was it fast?
16:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, oh yeah, it was very, it was very fast. But I didn't get to see how long it, so for me, as I mentioned, is it turning off? Because that's that's the tricky one like I I get this with my spouse all the time like the lights turned off on me and I you know I didn't want them to turn off and I said we weren't moving enough.
17:07 Speaker 04 Oh, right. Well, this is important because you know you you say this in your piece. It's motion sensing. It's not presence sensing.
17:13 Speaker 06 Correct.
17:13 Speaker 04 And so if you are just sitting there, the lights will sort of turn off on you.
17:17 Speaker 06 Yes.
17:18 Speaker 05 What about pets?
17:19 Speaker 06 Right.
17:20 Speaker 05 Like what if I have a naughty little kitty who is zooming around at 2am and I'm trying to I mean, I want my kitty to see.
17:28 Speaker 04 You're doomed.
17:29 Speaker 06 They can see in the dark. Um, no, it is. It's just like having a P I R sensor in that if if you have a large animal, it will probably trigger it. Like, my dog constantly triggers my motion sensors. But there is a sensitivity slider like there is with P I R motion sensors in the app. So you can adjust, um, sort of fine tune it for your household. So I mean, I think and the turning off part is to me is quite important because I have often have my lights turn off on me while I'm still in a room, while I'm still doing something. And that's very frustrating. So that's the part I I mean, they didn't really demo that because they're not going to be like, let's sit here for 10 minutes and wait for the lights to turn off. So I'm looking forward to trying that out. So.
18:15 Speaker 05 Do stretch breaks every once in a while and make arm motions and you know, the next time your smartwatch is like, hey, you've been sitting too long and go like, oh, yeah, my life also needs me to move around. So maybe this is a holistic health and lighting solution. I don't know.
18:35 Speaker 06 Or maybe you could have, we could somehow tie in your smartwatch to your motion sensing technology to tell you that you are still moving a little bit. Because this is something else I saw a lot of on the show floor today is a is sort of holistic home.
18:57 Speaker 06 The holistic smart home, everything feeding data into a central AI-powered system. They don't want to say AI agent yet because it's not really agentic. But you can see that we could be moving to the point where data that your home takes in can then be processed and some sort of intelligent decision could be made to predict perhaps what you might want to do next or what you might want your home to do next. Like you're getting a bit warm, maybe your smartwatch can send that data and your home could decide to turn your AC on for you. I know, there was a lot of that.
19:41 Speaker 06 LG had a whole sort of AI home booth. They actually had an entire orchestra of appliances.
19:50 Speaker 04 Oh, my gosh.
19:51 Speaker 05 This sounds so much like, what was it? It's just fresh on my mind because we just had the Pixel event. But this sounds so much like that whole ambient computing thing that Google is always on about and just how everything will be invisible and you'll have, this is the conspiracy theory, you'll have all these devices just feeding data to each other and talking to each other and the AI in your home will be the thread. Another smart home pun to tie it all together. And so, you know, it really, you know, I think back in the day we're like ambient computing, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But now it's just like all starting to fall together into the same piece and hearing this.
20:34 Speaker 05 I'm just like, yeah, I want motion sensors in my lights. Wouldn't it be really cool if it talks to my smartwatch for those reasons? I mean, I'm sure we could think of a really dystopian use case for it, like that. I don't know if you saw the Disney Channel movie, like about the smart home that goes really rogue on the family at one point. But, you know, I think it sounds great. It would be super convenient for me, like me personally.
21:01 Speaker 04 This AI stuff does seem to be like, this is the next frontier for them, right? That Switchbot also had this announcement that they're gonna do an AI hub. And it seems like all these companies are going, okay, we put enough stuff in your home. It's kinda complicated, but maybe if we all mix it around with AI, yeah. Like, it turns into something more coherent. Like, that's the next move, but we're not sure if it works yet.
21:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's, I think you're right. It's very much about, like, there is so much capability in the smart home tech world today, but getting people to actually use those capabilities is hard, because it's a steep learning curve for a lot of things. Even just a motion sensor, just if you went and bought a motion sensor and tried to set it up and get it to work with your home and your routines, it can be frustrating turning the lights on when you don't want it to. Whereas if the home system can manage all of that stuff for you and ideally be able to kind of pull in data from all parts of your home, not just necessarily for your comfort, but also for convenience, for saving energy, for safety. Like, one of the things this new tech, the sensing tech can do,
22:14 Speaker 06 could eventually be good enough to sense if you fell over. So in theory, you know, your home could basically be watching you. And I know, everyone's going, ah!
22:24 Speaker 04 No, your lights are watching you. It's not creepy. It's just merely a totally different appliance that shouldn't be able to see you.
22:31 Speaker 06 Right, so that is the benefit of this sort of ambient sensing. But I do see with AI home bent, that cameras are going to be a huge part of using this ambient home being proactive. Because the data, the richness of the data they get from cameras versus the data you get from sensors is just a step above. And so in terms of, like, so Switchbot's example, they released their AI hub, and they have a couple cameras that you can use inside the home. They have one pan and tilt camera, and they have a video doorbell. And they were sort of pitching it like, we can see where you've left your phone,
23:15 Speaker 06 because we're watching you in the home.
23:17 Speaker 04 Okay, that's a good feature.
23:18 Speaker 06 And then when you can't find your phone, you say, hey, Switchbot, where's my phone? And they'll be like, you left it in the bathroom.
23:26 Speaker 04 And then your three robot vacuums go and crawl up to the bathroom and grab it with their arm and bring it back to you.
23:35 Speaker 06 Yes, there you go. You've solved it.
23:37 Speaker 04 It's all coming together.
23:39 Speaker 05 That sounds so cool and so scary at the same time, like just like equal parts, like the idea of having cameras in every part of my home watching me, like when you say like, oh, it'll tell you where your phone is. I'm like, I need that because I'm constantly dinging the thing at all points in time. And you know, you're finding the sound, but your cat's sitting on it. So the sound isn't accurate, that sort of thing. Air tags don't work well through floors and all of that stuff. So that personally, this is all just personally in my life. I would love that. But at the same time, I don't know if I want a camera in my bathroom.
24:13 Speaker 06 Yeah. I mean, the cameras, you know, ideally though, but yeah, you wouldn't do, but if you have a camera at the front door, maybe you have a camera at the back door. Maybe you have one in the hallway and then the other sensors could help for, you know, the bathroom stuff. Um, but yeah, there's got to be a way to kind of pull all of this together where it feels private and secure. And this was something that Switchbot was focusing on too, because their hub was entirely local. But they were also using um, vision uh, learning. So machine vision learning, which is has to use the cloud because it's such a high processing, you know, it requires a lot of processing power, which the hub can't do.
24:54 Speaker 06 And you would have to pay a monthly fee for those types of things. I can see more and more companies doing that. So using the AI for what the home sees in strategic areas so that like it can then, you know, so to say, I've lost my cat. It will know that the it saw the cat leave through the front door because someone left the door open or, um, but then the personal data can be more like wearables or sensors in the bedroom or the bathroom. But the key is tying it all together. And right now, everything is so disparate. Each company is like, you can use all of our appliances, like that's LG with its appliance orchestra. It's like, look, we can make all of these work together, but that means I have to have everything from LG.
25:37 Speaker 06 Or I have to have everything from Samsung or everything from Switchbot. So that next level is how do we bring all of this together?
25:45 Speaker 04 And how much is Matter and Thread helping with stuff like, like it's a promise?
25:50 Speaker 06 It could. Nothing at the moment.
25:52 Speaker 04 Yes, could. Could is is an important word.
25:55 Speaker 06 Yes. I mean, it's that's one of the reasons for Matter is so that we could have this more. It's an open standard. It provides the platform for the technology to to talk to each other. So you could then bring in Samsung AI Home or LG's Furon Agent, as they call it. And or Switchbot Hub or something else to connect into the data that Matter provides. So you wouldn't necessarily so Matter being any device can work with any platform, no matter who made it. So you're not locked into proprietary ecosystems. That's really the foundation of that was the point of creating Matter.
26:40 Speaker 06 So, yes, you can see that this could help create that foundation. And then the the fight now, the arms race, is who becomes the brain of your home? Because that is going to be someone you have to pick. Is it Google? Is it Apple? Is it Alexa? Is it LG? Is it Samsung? Or is it Switchbot?
26:59 Speaker 05 It's just like I I put up a story over the weekend about how when I talked to Google, they were basically selling the same idea about how the ambient computing world is going to happen. And AI is just going to be the glue that keeps all of these devices talking to each other together. So if you win the AI battle and you're, in Google's case, Gemini is the the bot that everybody chooses.
27:24 Speaker 06 Yeah.
27:24 Speaker 05 Then in some ways, like AI is strengthening the product ecosystem. It's like built, it's like putting putty and strengthening the walled gardens as opposed to tearing it down in some way.
27:39 Speaker 06 I think for the flagship products, definitely, for the phone, the speaker, the watch. But where it's democratized, you know, so it makes buying a light bulb. A $15 Hue light bulb now, much more approachable, or a motion sensor, or a present sensor. You know, we saw some cool new present sensors out on the show floor today. Or a door lock. You know, all of that now doesn't have to be from one company. That's where you get much more of the democracy and being able to choose what you want to make your homework. But yes, I think the flagship products, you're gonna be feel locked in.
28:19 Speaker 06 So 20 minutes of Samsung's keynote today was all about AI Home. So at CES, they called it Home AI, but now they've rebranded and it's now AI Home.
28:33 Speaker 06 It's like, oh, thinking outside the box there.
28:37 Speaker 06 And it's, yeah, it was all about the Galaxy Watch, the Galaxy Phone, Samsung Food, which is their meal planning, healthy eating recipe system app. And then Smart Things, so bringing all of their pieces together to sort of lock you into that ecosystem. They don't really care which smart bulbs you buy.
28:57 Speaker 04 So Jen, I know the show hasn't even technically started yet, but is there anything else we should?
29:01 Speaker 06 Or today, today's Friday, right?
29:03 Speaker 04 Well, as this is airing, the show has started.
29:06 Speaker 06 Just started.
29:07 Speaker 04 For you personally, well, it's really, no, but is there anything else we should be looking forward to throughout IFA, or is it just gonna be AI AI? What, you know, what's next?
29:19 Speaker 06 I think more robots.
29:21 Speaker 04 Robots.
29:21 Speaker 06 Always, we always get excited about robots. There's, there's, there's some interesting, I did get to play with a robot pet today, which was quite cute.
29:30 Speaker 04 I love, I love the weird pets.
29:31 Speaker 06 The weird pets. The pets are so good. Yeah, LG has its weird little baby in a bowl pet that it had at CES here. Do you remember that thing?
29:39 Speaker 04 That's okay.
29:40 Speaker 06 Was it the Maruni? No, it wasn't Maruni. It was like a Japanese one. But yeah, so that's here. And there's also, Switchboard has its AI pet. And I saw, I saw like anime holograms in like a, in a, like a canister. That's meant to be a pet.
30:01 Speaker 06 Lots of companionship.
30:02 Speaker 04 It's time to shut down EFA. We have gone too far.
30:06 Speaker 06 It was like an anime character and they were like, yes, it's your companion. It's like, oh, my daughter loves anime. And I got a bit closer, I'm like, I don't think this is for her.
30:15 Speaker 04 No.
30:18 Speaker 06 Was it like anime, like Pikachu anime? No, no, no. Or was it like Elon Musk Annie anime? Oh, no.
30:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:26 Speaker 06 Oh, no. So, yeah, and then there's another robot with an arm that can throw tennis balls.
30:33 Speaker 04 No, that's better.
30:35 Speaker 06 Yeah.
30:37 Speaker 06 I love that robot. So there's lots of fun robots, lots of appliances. I always get excited about appliances.
30:43 Speaker 04 Sweet.
30:45 Speaker 06 And I think there's laptops too, in case people are interested in those.
30:49 Speaker 04 Awesome. Well, I'm very excited. Everyone should stay tuned to theverge.com. We're going to have a lot more. Jen, thank you so much for hopping on to tell us all about EFA. I'll let you get back to the wild show in Berlin.
31:03 Speaker 06 Thank you.
31:05 Speaker 04 All right, we've got to take a break. When we're back, we're going to have Lauren Finer talking about the Google antitrust ruling.
31:12 Speaker 01 Hey, Bose here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front. Every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.
31:27 Speaker 02 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great. Till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
31:36 Speaker 03 I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
31:44 Speaker 02 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
31:57 Speaker 07 College football is back. So Hilton called and me, this is superstition, concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
32:30 Speaker 04 And we're back and we've got The Verge's senior policy reporter Lauren Finer here with us.
32:35 Speaker 08 Hi.
32:36 Speaker 04 Lauren, you spent a bunch of time this spring in a courthouse watching the remedies trial of the Google antitrust decision. This started, I guess, a year ago. A year ago, a judge decided that Google had maintained a monopoly in the search and advertising markets. Then this spring, there was a whole big to do over what they should do about it. And that ruling finally came down. And people were expecting something pretty big, right?
33:05 Speaker 08 Yeah, yeah. I mean, this even goes back, you know, another like five years, back to 2020, when this case was first filed under the first Trump administration. And then, you know, in last August, the judge finally said that Google is a monopoly in online search. And that was a huge landmark ruling, the first of these big tech cases by the government. And then there was all this anticipation of like, OK, what is he going to do to make sure that Google can no longer have this, you know, power grip over this industry? And that leads us up to this past week when the judge finally issued his ruling
33:49 Speaker 08 and said, basically, Google can't do some contracts, some certain terms in their contracts, and they have to share some data to help search competitors, get up to speed with them. But basically rejected the largest of the DOJ's proposals of how to restore competition to this market.
34:10 Speaker 04 Right. The DOJ like swung for the fences. And they had these, these pretty big asks that, I think the most famous of them was trying to get, force Google to sell Chrome. And then like, everyone was coming out of the woodwork, trying to buy Chrome, even though it wasn't for sale yet. And the judge is just like, no, that's absolutely not happening. He said the government really overreached too by, by trying to get them to, as a backup, maybe have to sell Android. Most of the big asks just didn't happen here. And I think most of the big asks just didn't happen here, right? Like, the DOJ didn't get most of what they were asking for.
34:48 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think you could definitely look at this and say, hey, the DOJ swung through the fences, um, you know, put out all of these really big ideas of how to fix this market, um, and it probably wasn't going to get all of them. But I think it was surprising the extent to which, um, they didn't get so much of what they wanted. Um, you know, the judge really didn't go all that much further beyond what Google had conceded to. Um, and in some ways, having watched, um, Judge Mateh throughout both the liability phase and the remedies phase trials, um, you know, you could see that he was really grappling with what to do here. He's the first out of the gate
35:32 Speaker 08 with one of these rulings in this kind of new era of tech antitrust reform. And, um, he really was seemed very cautious about, you know, not wanting to create a new problem, um, and disrupt something that's, you know, already set in motion.
35:50 Speaker 04 Well, it's really interesting. In his opinion this week, he goes into the fact that AI changed how he ended up making this decision. Um, the fact that AI is now seen as a competitor of search made him, I think, a little bit more cautious in what he did here. He has this one quote, um, he says, quote, "Much has changed since the end of the liability trial. Artificial intelligence technologies, particularly generative AI, may yet prove to be game changers." And then he just says like, flat out, "The emergence of gen AI changed the course of this case." And so there is this real thing here where
36:32 Speaker 04 I think possibly we could have gotten a much stronger, uh, version of these remedies against Google. But for the first time in decades, the first time maybe ever, Google actually is seeing some material competition. Um, and I think, you know, V, you just did a whole Vergecast episode on this about people's use for AI and search is one of the big ones now.
36:58 Speaker 08 I mean, for like you and I talked pretty heavily about using AI for search because
37:04 Speaker 05 Sorry, Google's your search kind of sucks now like it's so weird because on the one hand, we use Google the way that we use the word Kleenex to mean tissues, right? Google just means go search something on the internet that's in our vernacular that pretty much would make you think that, hey, this is a monopoly because we don't say, oh, go Yahoo that thing, right? We say, go Google that thing. But to our Vergecast discussion,
37:33 Speaker 05 it's not good enough anymore because all of the SEO slop has just changed that game. So it's sort of like, oh, once again, because I've been watching Law and Order and I had to have perplexity tell me what season it was that Finn Tutuola cuts off his ponytail. Like AI was actually able to tell me, like, it told me a wrong answer and someone called me out online. And then I looked it up again and then it told me the right answer. So you do have to kind of handhold it a little bit. But it's still telling you what's more likely to be a an answer when your traditional Google search isn't going to help you anymore. I had a situation this morning where my fridge was the ice maker was spitting out
38:15 Speaker 05 clay balls. And I was like, what, what is happening here? I'm concerned about that. I'm very concerned. Why is my ice maker spitting out clay balls? And then I asked, and Google was not giving me any answers. And so I asked AI and they're like, well, this is either a sediment issue and you're just gonna have to do a lot of work or something's wrong with your with your thing. And why don't you just empty out the ice bucket? And I was like, oh, I can empty out the ice bucket? New homeowner here. I've never had to do appliance maintenance before. And I found out that my spouse had put an eye mask with clay balls in them in the ice maker. Oh, my God. It had opened up a hole. And that's why clay balls were coming out of my ice maker. So I was like, AI didn't give me the right answer in this situation, but it did kind
39:00 Speaker 05 of put me on a path that got me to the right answer for a search and a question that I had, whereas just typing it into Google.
39:08 Speaker 08 Did nothing for me. So it's like a really, I get where the judge is coming from, but also I'm like, come on, man.
39:17 Speaker 04 It is one of those ultra-specific things. Again, I did the exact same thing. I was trying to look up, do you remember the chat app Trillion? I was like, how do I search for a chat app that was popular in 2006 with a weird like infinity logo? And it was just, right? Like, I can't Google that. But you're right. It is pretty remarkable that if this remedies trial had been held probably a year earlier, certainly two years earlier, we may have ended up in a very different outcome. Because Google, it seemed kind of borderline impossible that Google would see material challenge to its dominance
39:58 Speaker 04 in the search industry. So I'm just going to read out, I think, a quick TLDR of how I'm seeing the things that they actually have to do. And Lauren, you can tell me if this is about correct. But here's what the judge is going to require of Google, assuming that this sticks. The judge says that Google has to stop making exclusivity contracts for products like Search, Chrome, and Gemini. So they can still make default contracts, but they can't say it's the exclusive provider of those things. Google has to stop tying some of their apps to the placement or use of other apps on their devices. So they can't be like, if you want Gmail, you have to use Chrome. If you want Gmail, you
40:41 Speaker 04 have to use Gemini. They can't do that anymore. They're going to have to syndicate some of their search results, and that's like with an asterisk. There's like a big subset there. And they have to share some of their search index. Is that about right? Like, it's a lot of like half-measures here.
40:58 Speaker 08 That's right. And he leaves open some possibility that he could expand some of this in the future. For example, you know, he finds that, you know, these remedies aren't actually enough to restore competition. Maybe he'll look back on the payments part of this or something like that. So there's some options here, but that's basically the extent of what Google has to do if these remedies hold up.
41:21 Speaker 04 Well, and actually, we should touch on the payments part, because that was a big thing at issue here. And he thinks, they're fine, right?
41:28 Speaker 08 Yeah. I mean, I don't know if he necessarily would say, oh, this is totally fine. I think throughout the trial, even the liability phase and the remedies phase, we saw You know, he really felt like the fact that Google was paying Apple, you know, $20 billion to be the default search provider on Safari was pretty indicative that, you know, they they felt like they needed to hold on to this position, even though they keep saying that they're the best. And so he really seemed to kind of hang on to that fact throughout the trial. But at the same time, I think he heard from both Eddie Q from Apple and an executive
42:11 Speaker 08 from Mozilla who said, you know, we're we would basically be pure losers here if you decide that we can't get these payments from Google because Google is still dominant. People, our customers are still going to want to go to Google and we have to provide that option and yet we'll no longer be able to be paid for it. So I think that was something that he really wanted to consider here and probably drove some of his thinking around whether Google could be able to make these payments.
42:41 Speaker 04 It's really fascinating. You know, I think the critics of Google are are pretty upset about this ruling. They think that it's not going to go far enough, at least from what I've seen. But as I was reading the opinion, you know, you do sort of like see how the judge landed here and you start to feel for him in terms of the the challenge of threading this needle. Because you look at the the payments, which were one of the big things at issue here. And it's like, OK, so maybe you say, you know what? It is bad for Google to be able to pay to be the default and therefore crowd out everybody else. And then you think from the judge's point of view, OK, does it help Google or hurt Google if I ban them from paying Apple $20 billion a year, but Apple sets Google as
43:26 Speaker 04 the default search anyway because Google is the best product? Does it help Google or hurt Google if I ban them from paying Mozilla a bunch of money and then Firefox dies and even more people have to use Chrome? And you just keep going through these things and it's like, oh, like, this is this is kind of tough. Like, how do you make space for competitors? Without actually hurting the rest of the industry at the same time. Because all of these companies are just hooked on Google's money. And Google, you know, saving them a bunch of cash would actually be a perk for them in some ways.
44:03 Speaker 08 Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, Judge Maja talks a lot about judicial humility and not wanting to kind of take proactive action that will cause more harm or disruption or pretend that he can know the future. But at the same time, I think critics of this decision are saying, you know, he really didn't go far enough. And we already, he already found that there's this issue in this market that revolves around how Google has conducted itself. And, you know, a lot of these critics feel like he hasn't gone far enough and instead did a sort of half measure that says
44:44 Speaker 08 they can't have these exclusivity in their contracts, but they can keep paying heaps of money to be the defaults, which, you know, already he's kind of found that the defaults act as a way that Google has been able to maintain its monopoly power.
44:59 Speaker 05 So a question I have is like, a lot of times with law, and one thing that I've learned just serving in unions is that you can want all of these ambitious things, but you really have to think about enforceability, right? Like when you decide you're going to do things a new way and you're like, hey, what if we do it this way? I think one of the challenges that I learned about was how implementable is it actually? So are the things that he's, you know, asking Google to do, are these things that materially make a difference? Are these things that the government can enforce? Or is it just sort of like we said that they're doing this here? Uh, but actually, it's a status quo.
45:43 Speaker 08 Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the reason why the Justice Department was pushing for a breakup, um, or what they'd call structural remedies in the first place is that, you know, a lot of people who advocate for those kinds of remedies say they're the easiest to enforce because you don't have to monitor it, you don't have to babysit a company, you just break them up. You just say Chrome can no longer be owned by Google and they have to sell it and they have to break it apart. Um, and obviously that's easier said than done, but you know, once it's done, it's done. Um, these behavioral remedies, um, like, you know, having to, uh, you know, not put certain provisions in their contracts or
46:24 Speaker 08 share certain search data. Um, that's something that kind of does have to be monitored for compliance a little bit more. Um, but you know, I think in this case, it doesn't seem like so hard to do that. Um, but I guess the devil be in the details of how they're, you know, they have to do that. Um, if, you know, they actually get to that point.
46:47 Speaker 04 So the, the thing that I think is a little tricky here is I, I sort of see how he lands at, we can't ban these payments. As for how he lands at the rest of the remedies and what is required of Google to create competition, it gets a little more complicated, I think, because he, he actually carves this like pretty narrow path. And I don't know that this path is necessarily tied to the ways that Google created its monopoly and enforced its monopoly. And I think that's what a lot of the remedies were about, right? The remedies were Chrome enables Google's monopoly, so we will remove Chrome. Android enables Google's monopoly and so we'll, we'll threaten to remove Android. And kind of as I see it,
47:32 Speaker 04 what he's doing instead is saying, I'm going to create a little narrow path that will allow more competition to bubble up. You're saying that the problem is that Google has such a lead in search that no one else can catch up and compete with them. So I'm going to give you some basic tools so that these other companies can bubble up and start to create competition. And from my read of the opinion,
47:56 Speaker 04 He's basically saying, listen, all you other companies, you can have basically a map of what Google is doing. And that's kind of it, right? We'll give you some supporting stuff. So you'll have a map, like the search index is essentially a map of the Internet to let them understand what Google is indexing. They're going to get some basic search syndication, but they can only syndicate up to like 40% of their of their search from Google. And that's supposed to sort of help bootstrap them. But the judge is pretty blunt about, from there, you got to do it yourself. You can't keep going back to Google and getting more information about how they build their search engine. You need to invest and you need to build a good product.
48:40 Speaker 04 You need to compete with them, which is still a pretty big ask of the industry.
48:46 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think it's important to know that, you know, an antitrust law, when it comes to remedy is, you know, the goal here is not, you know, let's undo every anti-competitive thing that Google did up until this point. Because some of them maybe are irrelevant to the market at this point. The goal is to restore competition to the market that Google has monopolized. So, you know, I think the goal with these remedies is basically to make it so that, you know, rivals really can compete in this market in a way they haven't been able to in, you know, decades, based on Judge Maida's ruling. So basically, they, he's implementing all of this to say,
49:28 Speaker 08 okay, let's give some of these rivals kind of a jumpstart in the way that they haven't been able to do that in years. Because basically delivering valuable search results requires a lot of data, collecting a lot of data requires a lot of users coming to your service and putting in a lot of queries. And if Google is gobbling all of those up, then no other company is really getting that. So the goal is to kind of give these other companies a jumpstart in that way. And so that's kind of what he's trying to do here. But at the same time, he's kind of limiting that a lot more than what the Justice Department said would be necessary to really get them there by saying, you know, we're not going
50:11 Speaker 08 to let you have access to this on a periodic basis. You'll just get like one snapshot in time and that should give you a sense of like what Google knows. Or, you know, saying you can only have some access to some of these features for six years rather than 10. So I think that's kind of how he's tried to like walk this line. And he's really wary of making these rivals dependent on Google. He doesn't want them to feel like, okay, we have like a long runway to figure this out. And we could just like coast on Google's data. In the meantime, he wants them to build up to be their own services.
50:53 Speaker 04 Have you heard from, you know, the Mozilla's, the DuckDuckGoes, like how they feel about this? Like, is this going to be helpful to them?
51:00 Speaker 08 I mean, I think Mozilla is relieved that they will not be losing a huge chunk of their revenue that comes from Google for default payments for Firefox. I think DuckDuckGo was really not happy with this ruling. And, you know, they ultimately said, their CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, said in a statement, quote, "Google will still be allowed to continue to use its monopoly to hold back competitors, including an AI search. As a result, consumers will continue to suffer. We believe Congress should now step in." And, you know, if you're calling on Congress to step in at this point after we've seen
51:42 Speaker 08 these bills shot down before, you know, that really feels like a last resort.
51:47 Speaker 04 So there's this take out there and I'm curious your thought. Like, it seemed people, Google, Google clearly lost the lawsuit, right? They were ruled to have a monopoly. That is the last thing they wanted. But when it comes to the remedies, it kind of seems like they won. Do you agree with that?
52:08 Speaker 08 I do largely agree with that. I mean, basically, what the judge granted was pretty much most of what, pretty much all of what Google had proposed, that they said, we'd be fine with this, which is basically the exclusivity contracts aspect.
52:25 Speaker 08 And then he imposed somewhat more of what the Justice Department asked for in terms of some of the search data and other syndication that he ordered. But really, the DOJ lost out on all of its other big ass. So, you know, it's not a total loss for the Justice Department, but it's far short of what they asked for and seems to be far short of what many critics here think would be necessary to restore competition.
52:54 Speaker 04 I want to ask maybe a bigger picture question. You had this story that ran on Thursday. You said, "The tech antitrust renaissance may already be over." Can you dive into that more? Because there was, I think, this big burst of momentum and energy toward, you know, tearing apart big tech, and it seemed like this was going to be the moment. And I think you're saying maybe it fizzled out before it even started?
53:20 Speaker 08 Yeah, I mean, I started on this beat about six years ago, when a lot of this was starting to bubble up. And at the time, you know, there was this kind of feeling around antitrust for a long time, that, you know, we should kind of just look at, like, prices, and do prices go up or down? And what does that mean for consumers? And we should really be restrained in how we think about antitrust. And that was just beginning to change with things like Lena Kahn coming on the scene with a proposal about how we should look differently at markets that aren't necessarily, don't necessarily have a price tag for consumers, like is the case in digital markets a lot
54:03 Speaker 08 of the time, but still have, you know, a lot of power. And, you know, she kind of came onto the scene, making an argument about how to go after Amazon's alleged monopoly.
54:17 Speaker 08 And then we saw this explosion of interest from lawmakers, from outside groups, and, you know, eventually from the enforcers themselves to actually kind of take this new approach to antitrust. And, you know, in 2019, we saw the House Judiciary Committee start to investigate all of these companies. We saw the DOJ and the FTC begin to look into all of these companies. And all of that has resulted in lawsuits at this point against Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon. I mean, that's just unheard of for at one point in time to have huge monopoly cases against all of these companies. So it was really a milestone.
55:00 Speaker 08 And then, you know, in the last couple of years, we've seen these cases begin to go to trial and having the initial liability finding from Judge Mate saying that Google is a monopoly in online search. I mean, that was just huge. That was such a watershed moment for this movement and seemed to really solidify like, okay, really, we can get the courts on board here if we put in the work, if we bring these cases. And I think getting to this point and seeing, okay, yes, we got a court, the Justice Department got a court to find a tech company to be a monopoly. But then he does kind of the bare minimum
55:45 Speaker 08 to remedy it. That is, that's a real setback. And I think it's, it just casts some doubt on how far courts will really be willing to go to address this problem. And, you know, it could be that in a few years, it turns out that this was the outlier. You know, there's, Google is going to face the DOJ later this month in its other case that it lost to the Justice Department over its ad tech monopoly. And it's very possible that the judge in that case could say, I'm going to break up part of Google's ad tech business. And we could see some more, more, you know, aggressive rulings in some of these
56:25 Speaker 08 other cases. So it is too soon to know what the arc of history on this will look like. But I think it is just a, a kind of a A warning to the optimism that's existed in this space that, you know, there's still such a long road ahead and the hardest part may be yet to come.
56:45 Speaker 05 I'm just curious because like you're kind of mentioning that this is a marathon, not like a 5K, just to use runner analogies. But, you know, I'm just curious how much of the environmental vibe shift plays into this? Because if this started six years ago, then well, a lot of this momentum and energy started under the Trump, the initial Trump regime and then gained some momentum, I guess during the Biden years. And, you know, I think everyone would agree that there's been a little bit of an energy change since, you know, the start of 2025. So I'm just curious, like, does that also play into this like fear that the Renaissance might be over before it began? Because, you know, ostensibly, there's a long time before there's another vibe shift,
57:29 Speaker 05 maybe, or maybe there'll never be another vibe shift again. So just curious how much that plays into like thoughts regarding like how this is going to go with all of these big antitrust cases?
57:40 Speaker 08 Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, I think it's impossible to ignore the, you know, political influence here and just the way, you know, the political moment has shifted. At the same time, it's, it's really interesting and I've written about this a good amount. It's been such a bipartisan movement here and it's not that it's like all sides of both parties really care about this, but it's, you know, a certain subset of each party is really invested and you'll see like, you know, I think at one hearing there was like Matt Gaetz and, you know, will be saying something that sounds a lot like Elizabeth Warren. And so it's just like really perplexing sometimes. But then I think you end up seeing
58:25 Speaker 08 like In this moment, especially amid like all the upheaval we saw earlier this year with Doge, with, you know, Mark Zuckerberg coming to the White House right before his antitrust case went to trial, you know, all of this kind of fear about outside influence, corporate influence, and just how the Trump administration would conduct itself, his dismantling of different agencies and kind of taking Democrats off the Federal Trade Commission. I think all of that just kind of created this questioning and distrust among, between the parties around
59:04 Speaker 08 all of this. So I don't know that it necessarily undermines the like, policy goals that I think are kind of deeply held beliefs, at least within a lot of members of this movement on both sides. But I think it's impossible to ignore the possible influence of that and just kind of the different moment that we're in right now.
59:27 Speaker 04 I think you're right that at a bare minimum, this is a coming back down to earth moment. This is, even if we get there, judges are typically very cautious in how they approach these remedies. And, you know, I think it says a lot that Google, at least as of the time we're recording this on Thursday afternoon, Google has not appealed, right? They still could. But I tend to find that most companies, about 30 minutes after an opinion comes down, put out a statement saying, this is terrible, this is the worst thing that's ever happened, and we're going to appeal. And, and Google put out a statement that was actually like, you know, the judge, he was very thoughtful in this case. We're just like, not, not what
1:00:09 Speaker 04 you expect to happen. They didn't have that one drafted. They had to write that one on the fly. So Lauren, what happens next here, right? This still could get appealed. It could eventually be put into into place. What are we waiting on?
1:00:24 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think it still is pretty likely that Google appeals. They said before this came out that they would appeal because basically they had to wait for the remedies ruling to come out to even appeal the underlying liability funding. And Google doesn't like being called a monopolist. It probably is going to appeal that part of the ruling. But, you know, we'll see what happens there. The other thing that could happen is that the DOJ or the states that also brought this case against Google could appeal to get more of the remedies that they were asking for. So we could see appeals from one or both sides here. And then that would go up to the appeals court and that could eventually go up to the Supreme Court.
1:01:08 Speaker 08 So even though a lot of these remedies could go in place soon, you know, they could all be kind of paused while all of this goes on and it really could be a long time before any of this really comes to fruition. R I P Lauren.
1:01:23 Speaker 04 Yes.
1:01:25 Speaker 08 You know where to find me.
1:01:28 Speaker 04 Stay tuned. Maybe we'll have AGI by the time the actual remedies come down. All right, we've got to take a break. When we get back, the thunder round is back and better than ever. Stay tuned.
1:01:41 Speaker 01 Hey, Bose here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front. Every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.
1:01:56 Speaker 02 Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard Confessions.
1:02:06 Speaker 03 My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.
1:02:13 Speaker 02 Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
1:02:27 Speaker 07 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
1:02:59 Speaker 04 All right, we are back for the Thunder Round. There it is.
1:03:06 Speaker 04 As you all hopefully know, I have been on a power trip. A widely beloved fan favorite. Only positive reaction, I'm losing my adjectives here. Power trip. That, I have to warn you all, may come to an end as soon as next week. I'm gonna have to fight David Pierce. Two podcasters enter, only one will leave, to find out whether the Thunder Round continues. Listen, if you love the Thunder Round, if you support the Thunder Round, I'm gonna need you to email [email protected] . Tell us how important it is to you. This is the Thunder Round, five stories, five minutes each. When we're running out of time, we'll hear some rumbling thunder.
1:03:49 Speaker 04 When time is up, our producer, Travis Flarschek, will strike us down with a final crash. That means it's time to move on. All right, V, you're up first. What have we got?
1:04:00 Speaker 05 Okay, so my question is, would you pay $2,000 for a smartwatch? Because that's what Garmin is asking from some people. They came out with an announcement this week about their flagship Garmin Phoenix 8 Pro series. So it's like an S-year for Garmin? The Phoenix is their flagship line and just like how the iPhone used to have an iPhone four, then iPhone four S, the S year is just like, ah, that many updates. So they just came out with the S, uh, year pro Garmin Phoenix eight. And, uh, you know, there's some really cool things. They finally added LTE and satellite SOS. Kind of, kind of. You have to use the Garmin Messenger app. So it's not like you can have an actual phone number
1:04:43 Speaker 05 on, on your Garmin or, um, uh, fully like how you would think of a data connection on that.
1:04:50 Speaker 04 Doesn't the Apple Watch Ultra have that for half the price?
1:04:54 Speaker 05 It's for $10 and it's 800, you know, the, the LTE connection is generally $10 depending on your, uh, carrier and the Apple Watch Ultra is $800. But, but they're saying, hold on now. The starting price for an OLED display will be $1,200. If you go a slight size up, it'll be $1,300. But if you want the micro LED display, which has a maximum brightness of 4,500 nits, which I don't think I've ever heard of any device with a maximum brightness of 4,500 nits, you have the privilege and the distinct honor of paying $2,000. And I was just like, you can't convince people to spend $2,000 for a foldable phone that
1:05:39 Speaker 05 does a lot of stuff. $2,000, $2,000, $2,000. Like people were losing their minds over the garments because Phoenix eight being a thousand dollars. $2,000, $2,000.
1:05:51 Speaker 04 For $2,000, this thing better like be 4K. I like, I, I better be able to watch like Dolby Vision movies on my wrist, like with, with this thing. So I don't, what is the outdoorsy use case where you absolutely need 4500 nits? Like, it's like you exclusively hike in the desert with the midday sun directly overhead and you just like can't possibly rotate your wrist enough to like see it?
1:06:17 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's mostly so you can see things in bright, direct sunlight, but it's really funny because I was reading the comments and everyone was just like, what? No memory and pixel reflective display, which, you know, would let the battery be 4,000 years long? Uh, uh.
1:06:34 Speaker 04 Now with the display that bright, not happening.
1:06:36 Speaker 05 No, no. So the micro LED will be, um, I think about a 10 day battery life. And for Garmin, you know, if you're talking about for, for an Apple watch or a Pixel watch or a Samsung watch, 10 days battery life, holy, sign me up, Bob. Uh, but for a Garmin where they measure the battery life in weeks and months, 10 days, they're like, 10 days?
1:07:00 Speaker 08 Is this supposed to be like a part of the ultralight hiking movement so that like you don't have to bring your phone or your satellite phone? But I don't get how you would be able to rely on this to send all your messages if you are in an emergency.
1:07:14 Speaker 05 Uh, yeah, kind of like basically what they're doing, cause it's really hard to negotiate these carrier deals for the smaller. I say smaller brands like Garmin is a publicly traded company, but it's just, it's not on the scale of like Apple or Google, right? So it's harder for them to negotiate the, the carrier deals. So what they're doing is they're relying on the Garmin in reach satellite communications to bring LTE M to these watches and satellite connectivity. So depending where you are, if you make an SOS call, which is the big, um, appeal of these things, it'll reroute you to the Garmin like response center. So Garmin is going to be like a middleman in every step of the thing. Your watch won't have its own cellphone number.
1:07:59 Speaker 05 You can only call other Garmin Phoenix. So your friend who has also spent over a thousand dollars for Garmin Phoenix eight and/or the family members that you've badgered into downloading the Garmin Messenger app, which is their proprietary app to enable text messaging more thoroughly on their, on their, um, device. And, you know, they introduced that last year. I tested it for the Garmin Phoenix eight review. I had a friend download it and as soon as I was done with the review, she was like, so the reviews up? And I was like, yeah. She's like, can I delete this app now? So it's great. Helps them compete more with Apple and all those stuff, but I can't help but feel like they've lost the plot a little bit for what their users actually want. So $2,000, that's, that's my.
1:08:44 Speaker 04 They have taken the best and worst parts of micro LED, which is really bright and insanely expensive.
1:08:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:08:52 Speaker 04 All right, Lauren, what have you got?
1:08:54 Speaker 08 Okay, so I'm here to deliver some devastating news that Amazon is cracking down on how you share your Prime shipping benefits with your friends and family. Yeah, this was huge news in my family because on the day that the Google Search Remedies ruling came out, my dad said, "Okay, yeah, but have you seen that you have to stop mooching off of our Amazon benefits?" So, yeah, basically, they're making it so, you know, they're kind of changing this invitee program that they had into Amazon family, and under that program, you kind of, everyone who's part of that has to be part of the same primary household.
1:09:36 Speaker 08 So if you don't live with the other person in your family or your friend group that you share a Prime account with, you can't kind of share that, those Prime benefits. It seems like, from how I'm reading it, that you could still just have, you know, your friend or family member ship you stuff from their account, just to like a different address, or you could log in there, but you can't have like your own account and use their shipping benefits.
1:10:03 Speaker 04 I'm not letting somebody else see my Amazon purchase history. Like, I just cannot explain like why I bought like a tarp and like a tomato plant stick and also like 15 USB-C cables in the same order. Like, it just, it just doesn't add up. I, I had no idea that this was even a benefit that, that was allowed. Like Netflix password sharing, like, okay, that makes sense. Like, these are just computers. Netflix isn't tied to my house. Amazon, Amazon is like very singular to me. So I was like, honestly, maybe I'm just out of the loop, maybe I'm just left behind. I didn't realize, I, I barely even realized you could share it within your household. So I was like, hmm.
1:10:43 Speaker 08 No, oh.
1:10:44 Speaker 04 I thought I was getting an upgrade.
1:10:45 Speaker 08 Jake!
1:10:46 Speaker 04 It's not true.
1:10:47 Speaker 08 Jake, you gotta get on the password sharing, at least within your house, because, oh, you know, that, you know, for a while before, like, tied the knot, said holy matrimony, we were paying for our individual Prime stuff, and then when we found out that we were basically paying twice while living under the same household, we were like, why are we doing this? Why should we have to be doing this?
1:11:10 Speaker 05 But I hate that Amazon is basically taking a page out of the streamers. But I mean, come on, man. We all got subscription fatigue. Let us have this. Let us have our shipping. Come on.
1:11:23 Speaker 04 Like, the narrative, though, for subscriptions over the past, what, like, two years at this point? And it like, it was started by Netflix, and they were like, we're gonna crack down passwords. And like, they, they expanded it globally, and now it's kind of everyone. Like, if they haven't done it already, they have announced that they're going to do it. I'm pretty sure it came to HBO. I'm pretty sure it came or is coming to Disney Plus. And, and Amazon Prime, I, I'm gonna say, this one actually makes the most sense to me as a thing that feels very focused on a single location. But nonetheless, like, these things are expensive. And every time another company does a crackdown, it adds another subscription to everybody else.
1:12:04 Speaker 04 And so it's like, each crackdown is hurting the next company that does a crackdown, because they're just going to have fewer people who are willing to add a subscription. Like, I am, I am tapped out. I have too many things. I like, when it comes to streaming services, I just like, save it up until there's like enough like movies and shows that I wanna watch, and then like try to knock it out in like a month or two. Cause I'm like, I can't keep all these going at the same time. This is outrageous.
1:12:31 Speaker 08 I think it's kind of surprising that they let us like have all these password sharing for as long as they did. And I think once like Netflix decided we're gonna crack down on this, and, you know, people didn't just leave in droves. I think everyone else was like, alright, I guess we could do it too, finally.
1:12:47 Speaker 04 No, that's so true. Like, Netflix was willing to take the reputational hit. And I guess people actually just like Netflix enough that they're like, well, what are you gonna do? I'll pay for some more Netflix.
1:12:58 Speaker 05 I mean, it helps that there's like bundles now, where if you go to a carrier, they'll be like, we'll give you a free year of this and a free year of that. And you can now, within a one bundle, get five different subscription services, and you'll save money than if you were subscribing to them all independently. And here's a credit card thing, but I was like, why do we have to do this? Why do we have to jump through all of these hoops? I had a racket going with a bunch of six friends, where one person would pay for one service and then put us all as family. And everyone was responsible for paying one subscription. And we were all just on a- Big old racket and this is like falling apart. But and so now I'm just like, do I need this service? I don't, I miss my, my subscription racket.
1:13:42 Speaker 04 I will say some of the companies that have done these crackdowns. Hmm, they're not as good as cracking down as they say they are. There's a, you know, listen, I, I'm not breaking any rules, but there might be some people on my, my accounts who are. And they, nobody's caught on yet. All right. Next story. Okay, so I have been talking about this, I think the past three weeks. I am obsessed with the Pixel 10 Pro's 100x zoom feature. So it has this feature called ProRes Zoom, where when you zoom into 100x, it will use AI to enhance the image. And I think when we first saw this, I was like, these demo images that I'm seeing seem like incredible. They're, they're remarkable. I can't believe they look this good.
1:14:27 Speaker 04 And then last week I was like, well, I'm, I'm maybe seeing a few flaws here. This week, I think I'm ready to say, I might hate it. I might hate it. So Allison Johnson went out with the Pixel 10 Pro and a Coolpix camera that actually has a 100x lens. And number one, you have to see what this camera looks like. It is this enormous black thing. It is like the size of a limb. It, it's huge because it turns out you need a huge lens to actually get 100x. But she did a bunch of side by side photos with the Pixel 10 Pro and this actual 100x zoom. Okay, so I want to show you two of the photos that Allison took.
1:15:10 Speaker 04 And I want to hear what, which one you think is better. And this is, I'm going to give you the one that I think is maybe the best presentation from the AI. So here are two photos of the tails of some planes. So here's photo one, and it is kind of like blurry and ripply. And it almost feels like you can feel the like fumes or something coming out of the back of the jet engines. And here's another one, and I think this one is like crisp and clear, maybe a little smooth. The colors are vibrant. I, I'm curious, do you two have thoughts on which of these two is a better photo?
1:15:47 Speaker 05 The one that doesn't look like amateur impressionist art.
1:15:52 Speaker 04 So you're saying to this one that's currently up, which is the smooth one with the, the bold colors? Lauren, do you, do you feel the same? Do you prefer this one?
1:16:01 Speaker 08 I think the crisper one is better, but it's a little bit like too, too perfect.
1:16:08 Speaker 04 So this is, this is the AI one, and this is, I think, the best case for it. Right? It is these sort of big, simple objects, big, bold colors, and it's able to clean them up really neatly. And there aren't too many weird artifacts or messy imperfections or fake things. But I went through all of Alison's photos, and this is like the single one that I think actually shows off this feature being good. But the one that really broke it for me, there's this photo of the moon that Alison took with the Pixel. And I looked at it and I thought, you know, that's a pretty darn good picture of the moon. And it like, it looks sharp. It has this incredible texture on it. And I'm like, it has moon texture. It looks like the moon. This is so cool.
1:16:53 Speaker 04 And the, the moment that I turned against this feature was when I looked at the actual photo of the moon. And it is completely different. All the texture is made up. It got, it's, it's not there at all. It was just like, oh yeah, it's some texture here. So I, I, I don't know. I, oh man, I was in pretty messy feelings about this.
1:17:14 Speaker 08 It's a different color.
1:17:15 Speaker 04 Right. Yeah, it's certainly a different color.
1:17:19 Speaker 04 I don't know. I feel very, very torn because again, I do think like this one photo of the plains, like, yeah, that's, that's pretty good for, for 100x. Like that cleans it up nicely. But this moon photo, I'm like, it just made up a bunch of stuff about the moon. Like, that's not, that's not what I want from a camera. And Alison just talked to Mark Lavoie, who used to work on the Pixel cameras and now works on cameras at Adobe. And talked to him about putting generative AI in camera apps. And I don't know, my, the impression I got was that he was kind of.
1:17:56 Speaker 04 Uncertain if it was a good idea. And I, I, yeah. This, this is, this is how I feel. I'm curious, you guys, I, I think, look through some of the other photos. Like, do you have thoughts here? Like, i- is this good? Is this evil?
1:18:09 Speaker 05 It's just why?
1:18:10 Speaker 08 I feel like I have mixed feelings. Yeah, I, I think it kind of just depends what you're going for with the photo. Like, if you're trying to like, capture the moment that you're in, or like, or get like, real information from a photo that you're gonna remember. Like, I don't know that I'd want to rely on AI for that. Because it's like, you could just like, download a photo of, a really good photo of the moon, if you want to know what the moon really looks like. Or, you know, I feel like some of, just like, taking photos with your phone is just like, capturing the moment. But, yeah, this feels like something else.
1:18:45 Speaker 05 Why are you zooming in 100 times? Just because you can? Like, what, for what reason are we going 100 times zoom sometimes? It's like...
1:18:54 Speaker 04 It is because I can, to be clear.
1:18:56 Speaker 05 Right.
1:18:56 Speaker 04 Like, I'm excited by that. It just, it just doesn't make any sense. Okay, we could do another like, 20 hours on, on 100x zoom. But we must move on. The, what have you got?
1:19:10 Speaker 08 In the year of our Lord, 2025, you can finally have Instagram on the iPad. I saw this headline.
1:19:17 Speaker 04 They did it! They did it!
1:19:19 Speaker 05 They did it!
1:19:20 Speaker 04 This is the most impressive piece of... Oh my gosh! Incredible! Oh, oh!
1:19:30 Speaker 04 This is the single most impressive piece of engineering that we've seen out of Meta in years. Can you believe they managed to do this?
1:19:37 Speaker 05 It's groundbreaking! We've only been asking for this since the inception of Instagram over 10 years ago. And it's just like, oh, cool!
1:19:47 Speaker 04 Instagram and the iPad are the same age! They're the same age! They could have done it at any point!
1:19:54 Speaker 05 At any point! We could have had a native iPad app that just, you know, blow, instead of an iPhone app that just blows up. But then, at the same time, so I was reading me a story on it, and it's like, it'll prominently feature reels. And I was like, that's not what I want! That's not what I want! From the iPad Instagram app! But as there I guess.
1:20:15 Speaker 04 This is mind blowing. You open it up and it defaults to reels. And if you want to find photos on Instagram, you have to go to a new tab. That like, it looks like you're going to find your friends or something like it's, it's not a clear photo. You need to find, it's buried in a new tab, the photos. The Instagram part of Instagram is now hidden within Instagram.
1:20:39 Speaker 05 This just screams to me that they just wanted to find another way to distribute reels and they didn't really have interest in an actual Instagram app for iPad. That's exactly it. And it's just like, listen, I'm pitching a new segment called, give the people what they fricking want. And don't edit, like, you know, there's just so many things where it's just give the people what they want. We are asking nicely. Please don't put your nefarious agenda into the thing that we're asking for. Give us a chronological fricking feedback. Ah, I was just like, yeah.
1:21:16 Speaker 04 Listen, I will use the Chinese state sponsored, you know, NSA deeply concerned. App TikTok for my short form video and Instagram, I would like to stick to photos. That's, that's how I feel. I, I'm not, I'm not messing with reels. I'm messing with reels until the day that TikTok gets banned. And then I'll open up my iPad.
1:21:42 Speaker 05 Photos and stories. That's all, you know, honestly, just give me the stories. I want to snoop on what my friends are doing and go like, oh, good for her. Or like, oh, that's shady. You know, that's what Instagram on the iPad should be for, just as it is on the phone. I don't want reels there. Leave me alone. So, yeah. I, it was just like so wonderful and then so cruel. And I say this as someone who hasn't had a fully charged iPad in months. So I'm just saying, I'm just saying.
1:22:14 Speaker 04 It is, Meta's approach to the iPad has been bewildering and I realize like. I don't know. I realize it takes some engineering resources. I realize like, maybe it's, it's probably never going to be the most popular platform for them. But it is so embarrassing and weird and ridiculous that today, like you, or at least as of yesterday, you opened up Instagram and it was still that tiny little square that, that you, just like a version of what you'd see on the phone. And the same is true for threads, right? I believe it was true for WhatsApp until pretty recently as well, too. So hopefully, hopefully this means threads is next.
1:22:50 Speaker 05 What do they have against the iPad? Like, I'm not a big iPad girly, but like, all of our grandparents and all of the children are on iPads. Those are great segments to target. I don't get it.
1:23:02 Speaker 04 I do think they have beef with Apple. Meta and Apple definitely have beef. But like, taking it out on the iPad is like, Apple does not notice that. They're like, they're not like, oh no, but, but WhatsApp for iPad doesn't go fullscreen. Like, that's not, that's not your leverage to getting a better deal in the App Store.
1:23:25 Speaker 05 You're just hurting all the old people with bad eyes, which will be me in a few, like, not even a few years. It's me now, an old person with bad eyes.
1:23:34 Speaker 04 I saw your glasses earlier. They are, they're, you're already there.
1:23:38 Speaker 05 I'm already there. My eyes are garbage eyeballs. And I was, you know, I was like, oh, I don't have to do the thingy and maybe I'll use my iPad more because I don't have to have all these iPhone apps that just blow up. No, I'm, I'm very upset by this.
1:23:52 Speaker 04 I know. It's finally here and I'm still upset about it because they're using it to push reels. R I P to our Instagram. It was already not Instagram anymore. But now it's clear where their interest lies. All right, Lauren, last one. Take us home.
1:24:08 Speaker 08 Last one. So yeah, this is just basically shout out to Democratic FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, who pretty much every day for past several months has had to check a court docket to figure out if she's going back to work. You might recall that Trump tried to fire her and her colleague at the Time Alvaro Badoia from the Federal Trade Commission, which he technically isn't allowed to do based on Supreme Court precedent that basically they're trying to challenge. This whole case had to play out and you know, the district court judge said, you can go back. So she went back and then the appeals court said, wait a minute, we're going to pause all this while
1:24:53 Speaker 08 we figure it out. Then she went home and just this week, the circuit court said, okay, you know what? She can go back to work. We're still figuring out the case, but you know, for now, like she's allowed to go back. So yeah, I just can't imagine your life being run by a court docket in this way.
1:25:15 Speaker 04 And very publicly.
1:25:16 Speaker 08 The situation.
1:25:17 Speaker 04 She's like finding out in the New York Times if she goes to work in the morning.
1:25:21 Speaker 08 Pretty much.
1:25:21 Speaker 04 It's like the weirdest snow day imaginable.
1:25:24 Speaker 05 Yeah. That's hell. That's real hell. I don't think I could do it. She's a strong woman.
1:25:31 Speaker 04 So has, obviously it is, I'm gonna say, bad for the FTC not to have a full set of commissioners and very problematic for Trump to fire the Democrats. These are intentionally designed to be a bipartisan commission. Has it allowed them to, you know, go running now that there hasn't been two Democrats in there? Or is the FTC commissioners who are left like not even care?
1:25:58 Speaker 08 Well, I think the thing it changes is not so much like what the, what the commission is actually doing, but just like what sort of insight the public could possibly get into what they're doing. So, you know, there's three Republicans on the commission now, so they were always going to have the majority. It's a five-person panel when it's full. So, and the chair gets to set the agenda. So it's not that the Democrats would be able to kind of change the outcomes of any votes or anything, but they have access to the same documents that the rest of the commissioners do. They'd be able to say in their dissenting statements, like. Hey, you know, this is why I think this was really wrong. And without that, you know, we'll never really know.
1:26:41 Speaker 04 There's also just like stymies the commission. I think one thing that's overlooked, and this is true at the FCC as well, like, a lot of what the commission does is boring bipartisan stuff. And that day to day work now just grinds to a halt in some respects when you're down two major leaders. And so it's like, the commission is just going to do a worse job of being the Federal Trade Commission. They're going to do a worse job of enforcing the rules that universally they agree they want to enforce. And, you know, it would be nice if this person was allowed to have her job back as she is legally allowed to be there.
1:27:26 Speaker 08 Yeah, I mean, I think it also just arguably makes it so any company that's trying to sue because they didn't like what the FTC told them they have to do, gives them another thing to say in court, like, hey, look at this is, this is not like the normal course of things.
1:27:40 Speaker 04 That's fascinating. I'm sure that like any court case, we've got like 900 appeals to go.
1:27:46 Speaker 08 For sure.
1:27:47 Speaker 05 RIP Lauren.
1:27:51 Speaker 04 I'm excited to see how it all plays out. All right. That's it for the Thunder Round. Again, if you love the Thunder Round, send an email, [email protected] , hashtag save the Thunder Round, hashtag David loves the Thunder Round.
1:28:09 Speaker 04 Send in your emails.
1:28:10 Speaker 08 I've loved the Thunder Round. I've seen every iteration of the Thunder Round. I've enjoyed it immensely.
1:28:16 Speaker 04 We will.
1:28:16 Speaker 08 You got my vote.
1:28:17 Speaker 04 You have, you have, including, listen, the Thunder Round is always new. It is always improving and it will stay that way until the day that it clashes with David Pierce, which will be. Next week. All right. That's The Vergecast. I am off to California next week along with V to cover the Apple announcement. Our Tuesday episode of The Vergecast will be pushed to Wednesday as a result, so we can give you some of our impressions from the event. And stay tuned because David Pierce will be back for that episode to chat with us. It's been a blast being your Friday host. I will still be around the show. Whether the Thunder Round survives is another question. Send in your emails. If you like what we do here, the best way
1:29:00 Speaker 04 to support us is to get a subscription to The Verge at theverge.com. And be sure to sign up for V's newsletter, Optimizer, while you're there. It's gonna be good. We're all gonna have an existential crisis and feel good about it.
1:29:14 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:29:14 Speaker 04 That's what V does best. We'd love to hear your questions and feedback. Let us know what you want us to talk about. Email us, [email protected] , hashtag Save the Thunder Round, or give us a call, 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Marino. See you next week.
1:29:40 Speaker 09 This week, it pays extra to be a MyLowe's Rewards member. Through October 14, members get $10 MyLowe's money when you spend $200 or more on an eligible purchase during MyLowe's Money Days. Also, using your MyLowe's Rewards credit card? Even better, that's an additional $20 MyLowe's money. Use it to save on your next Lowe's haul. Exclusions, restrictions, and more terms apply. See Lowe's.com/Mylowe'sMoneyDays for details. MyLowe's money expires 30 days after issuance. Subject to change. Credit offer subject to credit approval.
1:30:09 Speaker 10 Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com/AppleWatchSeries12.
1:30:38 Speaker 11 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
Previous Why are online puzzle games having a moment? Next The orange iPhone stole the show Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
