The Vergecast - 2023's biggest tech stories

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Richard Lawler discuss Apple pulling the Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 from its website, the potential Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount merger, and what the biggest stories were on The Verge Dot Com. Further reading: Apple to pull Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 this week due to ITC ban Apple loses attempt to halt Apple Watch sales ban Why the Apple Watch is being banned — and how Apple can avoid it Masimo CEO thinks Apple can’t code its way out of the Watch ban. Apple Watch ban: everything you need to know Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream Apple reportedly plans Vision Pro launch by February Apple’s immersive next-gen CarPlay will start with Porsche and Aston Martin Bird’s goose is cooked. Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount in discussions for a max merger Adobe explains why it abandoned the Figma deal Adobe won’t compromise on UK’s attempt to block Figma merger Peloton’s oldest bike tablet will be cut off from classes in a few months Peloton’s app now pairs with third-party treadmills for some subscribers Inside Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter Elon Musk predicts X will replace banks in 2024 Mark Zuckerberg agrees to Elon Musk cage match challenge Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the best headset demo ever. Sam Bankman-Fried gambled on a trial and his parents lost Amazon has just opened up its Sidewalk network to give any gadget free low speed data Sony’s portable PlayStation Portal launches on November 15th for $199.99 Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO FTC v. Microsoft: all the news from the big Xbox courtroom battle Buckle up because El Niño is almost here, and it’s going to get hot iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in titanium: price, features, and release date  This is Microsoft’s new disc-less Xbox Series X design with a lift-to-wake controller Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon The Steam Deck wasn’t born ready, but it’s ready now Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human SodaStream is a bad deal, and modding your own is better Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of 2023, the whole year. When you think of 20203, you should think of the Vergecast. And you should tell your friends to think of it that way. I know the people have been doing year-in-review packages. We've done them as well. All of them are wrong because the only thing that happened in 2023 was the Vergecast.

Is that right, Dave's true? That is absolutely correct. The Vergecast wrapped is a thing that doesn't exist, but will in 2020. I don't want to know. I'm your friend, Neely. That's David. Alex Cranz is on vacation. Well-deserved vacation already. Our holiday wishes to her. But Richard Lawler is here to fill in. Hey, Richard. Hey, good to be back. All right. So this is our year and review show. Unfortunately, the tech industry has decided to chaotically fire out news at the end of the year. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to do what David has titled, A Year End Apple Chaos lightning round.

then we're going to have an actual news-focused lighting round. And then we're going to go through our biggest stories of the year, which when we get to it, it will explain how we decided what they were. It's surprising. But that's how we're structuring the show. I think it'll be good. The news is a lot. Like, I just want to say before we, like, could everybody just stop, please?

Like, the last time we had a holiday, Sam Mulden got fired. Like, it's about to be Christmas. Can we just not, like, from now on, can we just not for, like, two weeks? please, everything. Yeah, just shut it down. This is the problem with working from home. All right? Let me just put it out there like a cranky old man.

You're at home now. All right, stop working. Stop doing things. No more calls. Shut the laptop. Go to the fun screen. Not the work screen. It's time.

All right. On that note, Twitter goes down in the middle of the night. Yeah. Richard, I've never seen Richard actually like turn it all the way off. I've known Richard for a very long time. All the way off is not a setting that I think exists with Richard Lawler. All right, let's start with the year-end Apple chaos. There's a lot of year-end Apple chaos.

I think the biggest most material bit of year-end Apple chaos news is whatever is going on with the Apple Watch at the ITC. Yeah. David, can you quickly run us through this? Sure. So the basic thing that is happening is Apple lost a long-running fight against a company called Massimo, which makes medical devices, about a sensor for, blood oxidization in the Apple Watch. There's a lot of history there that we can talk about, much of which I think is very interesting, but what it amounts to is that Apple lost and the ITC, the International Trade

Commission, put in an import ban, which would mean that Apple could not import and then sell Apple Watches. All recent Apple Watches since the Apple Watch Series 6, except for the SE, would be covered. So basically, no new Apple watches for Apple into the United States. Apple had 60 days since that ruling in October to either come to a deal with Massimo to get this done and sign a licensing agreement or convince President Biden to veto the order. That expires December 25th, which is Christmas. And then on December 26th, the import ban takes effect. At this point, anything could still happen, but pretty much everybody seems to think that by a mile the most likely outcome is that come December 26th, Apple is no longer going to be allowed to sell most of it.

Apple Watch models in the United States. So there's a few things to unpack here, which I think are interesting. One is the long history between Apple and Massimo, which we can talk about. The second, which people have directly asked me about is patent nerdery. So I'll just... That's why we had to do this here. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Patent's Mercury. This is what I'm here for.

So let me just... I'll just do this part very quickly. Because it's not actually that complicated this time. You can feel however you want about the patent system. But in this case, you have a small... U.S. company that developed some technology, got some patents on it. Then there's the walkie backstory with Apple, which we can get into. But you have a small U.S. company made some products, got some patents. The thing that has become the trend in patent lawsuits,

especially between tech companies over the last decade, is you file two patent lawsuits when you're mad. One is a regular old patent infringement case in federal court. The other is a patent infringement case at the International Trade Commission, which is an executive agency. that regulates what comes into the country. And the reason you do that, the reason it's popular, is because we don't make a lot of things in America. That's just the truth. Yeah.

So if you are Apple suing Samsung or Samsung suing Apple back in the day, you are running this fast-track parallel patent infringement litigation at the ITC to ban your competitor's phones from entry in the United States because that's going to create a lot of leverage for you in a settlement or negotiation or whatever. So that is the trend. Every time you see a patent infringement lawsuit, especially when one of the companies involved or both the companies involved have a big offshore manufacturing presence. They need to import goods in the United States. The ITC gets involved. Sonos and Google, ITC involved. Famously, Apple and Samsung was involved. And Samsung actually won at the ITC against Apple was going to prevent iPhones from being imported. And the Obama administration stepped in and said, no, we're going to veto this one. And in that case, you see there's like a nationalistic impulse at play. You have an American company, you have a Korean company.

The White House is like, we're going to let the American company win. In this case, something that's very different is you have a small American company and you have a giant American multinational. It does not seem like the Biden administration wants to pick sides here. It's like not an easy win. No one's waving a flag when you let Apple crush the small company. It just doesn't seem like it's going to happen. So that's the just the shape of it.

The ITC is this place where a lot of parallel patent litigation happens because it's faster and because you can quickly get to a very damaging result, which is banning imports, which creates a lot of leverage. And now Massimo has that leverage. The ITC is not a legal system, right? It's not like writing laws and judges at the end of it. It's just like a bunch of people who make a decision that has this gigantic effect you're talking about. But it's not like- It's an administrative court.

It's a different kind of court. you can get all the way down and it's some real law school stuff. It's not a court in the judicial branch. It's an administrative court, and they work a little bit differently, but it's a court. It does that thing. So that's what's happened here, right? There's been this patent litigation.

I'm sure the sort of federal court patent litigation will continue to wind its way through the court system. But Massimo 1 at the ITC said basically the policy of the United States is we don't allow people to import goods that are infringing the patent. of companies that operate in the United States. Okay. Like, broadly, patent system aside,

you understand why that's the policy. You want to punish people for violating patents, especially people who might be manufacturing their goods offshore or not paying all that. Like, you see where that's coming from. Okay, Apple has to contend with that. And it's what's amazing to me about this, and David,

I think this is where the backstory is really interesting. They haven't just paid the money to Massina. They haven't just bought the company or paid the licensing fee. They've been waging war. against a small company for like a decade. Yeah, this goes back to 2013. And the very short version of the backstory

is when Apple decided it wanted to start doing the blood oxygen stuff in the Apple Watch, it contacted Massimo as a possible partner. And both sides agreed that that is a thing that happened, that the two companies talked to each other. And then from there, Massimo's argument is essentially Apple hired, I think it was their chief medical officer and a bunch of our employees and a bunch of our engineers

and essentially just ripped off our technology whole hog and put it into the Apple Watch. Apple's version is we met with Massimo, decided that it wasn't going to be what we wanted it to be. They weren't close enough to a consumer device, so we went a different direction, and then hired Massimo's chief medical officer and a lot of engineers and staff and built very similar versions of its technology. So the sides are like far apart in a certain way, but not that far apart in a certain way. but not that far apart in a certain way.

And it seems like what has happened at this point. I was watching a bunch of interviews with Joe Keani, who's Massimo's CEO, and he is, like, bought in on this idea that Apple is not an innovative company and needs to be shown to the world to be the non-innovative company that it really is. And Apple's also having this fight with a live core

about some of the EKG stuff that was going on, and he is out here being like, I have spent $60 million over a decade on this litigation, and I am going to win to prove to the world that Apple is not the company that it claims to be. Apple, meanwhile, is the largest and most resourced company on planet Earth. And the general consensus of the reason that no one at Apple's side has come to the table here is that Apple doesn't want to give people incentive to sue them.

And if you can sue your way into getting bought by Apple or getting paid off by Apple, people will do it. And I think those, if you take those two things, there's just no space in between them, just none. There's a little bit of space. Is there? There's a little bit of space. What is that sense? It's not a ton of space.

And I've covered Apple patent litigation for a long time. In many ways, Apple v. Samsung is the new story that helped The Verge become the verge. Like, it was a thing that drove a lot of our early traffic and interest. So I've spent a lot of time covering Apple patent stuff and talking to Apple folks. They are religious that they don't steal anything, that everyone else is a bad actor. And everyone wants money and that Apple's going to come out. And I get it. I really get it.

And you can see how this gets expressed in all kinds of ways. Apple hates Qualcomm. They hate this company. And it's because Qualcomm runs a bunch of patent licensing schemes. I own all the patents to 5G. Apple doesn't want to pay them. They sued each other. The lawsuits were really snippy.

Apple went out and bought Intel's modem division so they get away from Qualcomm. That is an incredible bet. Yeah. Apple has like whole. billion dollar divisions of its company that are just set up as petty counters to other failing divisions. Yeah. Like if you'll remember, Intel failed to build a 5G modem, and Apple bought the failed modem

division from Intel on the theory that they would just manage those people better. That's crazy. You only do that if you're like blinded by petty rage at someone else believing that they had invented something that you needed. And so that's Qualcomm. And I think people look at their attitude towards Samsung or Qualcomm. These are giants fighting. What are they doing?

You get down to the smaller companies who feel aggrieved and Apple runs the same playbook. And I think it comes out looking very differently. Right? We met with this small company. We saw their technology. We went and instead of having to pay the premium to buy the company, we just paid a premium for all the people. Right. I think in one of the stories, Joe Keani says the chief medical officer, like, tripled his payday or something.

So they just spent a bunch of money in people. they took the company away from him, and they took his technology, and he's been fighting his patent lawsuit. And Apple's belief is that it can just win in court over and over and over again. And this is a story that startups tell about big companies all the time. Every company. Yeah.

I look at this, and I look at Apple getting all the way to this moment where they have preemptively announced they're not going to sell the Apple Watch. The ban isn't in effect. It's just the week before Christmas. They should be selling every Apple Watch they can. the way Apple announced it, super weird. Super weird. If you're Apple and it's Christmas and the Apple watch is one of your, is like the

ultimate Apple Christmas gift, right? You need to sell as many watches as you can. This is extremely material information that your Q4 results will be impacted by not having the ability to sell the Apple Watch. That is, that should be a press release. That should be an 8K filed with the SEC. You should be informing investors in the biggest, most official way you can. And Apple didn't do that.

They gave a background quote to 9 to 5 Mac, which is great. I love 9 to 5 Mac. All of my criticism here is for Apple. That is an insane way to announce this news. And my belief is they announced it that way because they didn't want to seem important. They wanted to raise the pressure on the administration. They wanted this veto. And I don't think they're going to get it.

And they're going to have to contend with the Apple Watch not being on sale unless they buy this company, pay a settlement whose premium is rising every single day. Every day the Apple Watch isn't on sale is a day that Massimo is like winning. The price increases from Massimo side. Every day the Apple Watch is on sale. And what's even crazier about this, Joe from Massimo keeps saying this in every interview. He keeps saying it takes two to tango, which is just an amazing thing to say. He's like, I'm willing. Like, I will accept the money. They have to show up and offer it to me. And they won't. And I think. Apple's just backed itself into a weird kind of corner here where they should have just bought

this company 10 years ago. And we would have, no one would have ever heard about any of this. And I think your explanation of it being religion is the only one that makes sense here, because when you think about it, how could Apple possibly have let it get this far? It just, it boggles my mind to think that they didn't take care of this before, that they didn't deal with this. Whether you're worried about being sued by other companies or who else might follow a precedent, anything like that, they're getting sued all the time. That is already happening. There's just, there's no reason to do this, logically. Yeah.

It does seem like there is a certain version of this set of events that it never gets to this, right? Like, part of the reason this is so shocking is that we went through all these steps. And Richard, one of the things I'm curious about is how much you've been sort of aware of this story over the last 12 months. Because it's been lingering for a long time. Like, they've been fighting about this for a decade. And yet I personally was fully out of the last. of the blue shocked by the news that this was happening. Because every time you turn around and it's like, oh, a company is suing Apple, Apple,

we'll eventually write them a check and we'll never hear about it again. This is what happens over and over. The fact that anybody talked about it at all is surprising. And then every step gets a little more surprising. But eventually it's like they're either going to write the check or settle in some other way and we'll all move on with our lives. So to me, it's like it's the fact that it came out of nowhere, even though it absolutely did not come out of nowhere is what's so telling to me.

that it's like this is such an unusual outcome of an incredibly common thing that I think if I'm Apple, I bet nobody at Apple thought it would get this far up to and potentially including the day of the ban. I bet most people at Apple are like it will win. It'll be fine. And I think you're exactly right. That's pretty much how I was thinking about it. I was aware of it just like I was aware of a number of other lawsuits that are winding their way through the system involving Apple. You have all the class action lawsuits.

You have all the patent lawsuits. You have everyone ever saying that they invented the action. before you got it on your iPhone 15 pro. But it never turns into anything or very rarely turns into anything. And then this one just dropped one day. It was like, oh, by the way, if you want an Apple Watch, you should get it soon. Yeah, my favorite conspiracy theory about all of this, by the way, is that everybody's saying, like, oh, this is actually going to be awesome for Apple's Q4 because everybody's going to rush out to buy an Apple Watch before it leaves shells. What a vote of no confidence in Apple's business development or legal teams.

If you're like, this will improve sales because everyone will rush out. You're like, because Apple's lawyers will continue to lose this fight. Tim Cook won't just write the check. I don't know, man. It's a weird story. Every part of it is weird. It was weird 10 years ago. It's weird because Apple's religion is weird.

People sue Apple every day, right? You're not by settling the one case where there's merit or we'll get this far, regardless of your opinion on merit. It's not like you're going to encourage other people to show. show up. They're already there. You're already the richest company in the world. Like, you're the fattest target there is. Yeah. So it's a weird dynamic to think more people will want to see you. Like, there's no one left. They're already suing you. If you wake up one day and you're like, you know what, I'm going to be a patent troll today. The first thing on your mind is how do you sue Apple?

And that is fine. And it's like, whatever, it's part of the system. But there comes a point where you had 60 days to negotiate the settlement before the thing wouldn't go on sale, and you banked it on Biden showing up and having an opinion on whether the Apple Watch should be on sale? I don't, like, have you, you didn't pay attention to this dude? Like, doesn't seem likely. Yeah, it's weird. Like, Biden's out there giving interviews on whether President Trump did an insurrection. They're like two, like, even if you think he's checked in whether the Apple Watch on sale,

is on his list of things to be paying attention to, far down any list that anyone would make of things the President of United States should be paying attention to at this moment in time. So the whole thing is weird. Last minute, Apple chaos. Anyway, it's Christmas.

Go buy an Apple Watch before. Yeah. Becky's doesn't listen to the show. I bought, she got a new one for Christmas. And I will tell you this, one of the funniest things. She only got her because she has a six. She has a series five or series six.

It's dying, like the battery's dying. it's several years old. I bought her the new one. I bought her a nine. And I was like, oh, this is just not different. No, they are remarkably the same. To the point where I had to take mine off and look at it today to remember which one that I had. Like, this is just where we are.

And what's actually funny, Victoria's song has pointed this out over and over again our coverage. The blood oxygen sensor in Apple Watch is not that useful. No. It just doesn't do a lot. So what are we doing? But if you have an old one, you should keep it around just in case it's useful for I message.

All right, let's get to that. Let's talk about Beeper. Eventually you're going to have to jailbreak an iPhone. No, eventually you're going to have to jailbreak an Apple Watch and wear it around your neck to use Beeper. That's where we're going, David. What's going on here? This makes me so sad. So we've been covering the Beeper versus I-Message thing for the last few weeks.

And I think at this point, I feel pretty good about pronouncing it over. So Beeper said at the beginning of this week that they had yet another fix for the iMessage blue bubble. on Android thing that they've been working on and announced the fix and it is so ridiculous as to be more or less sort of unusable for most people. Basically, the way that it's working

is by connecting to a device. It can register your phone number as an I-Message number if and only if you have an iPhone or a Mac, which I would point out is exactly how it already worked. And so we've just kind of come all the way back around to where we were. their solution is literally like,

it's gotten to the point where they're saying, ask a friend who has an iPhone to give you the registration code so that we can get into their system because that's the unique number that we need. They won't have access to your iMessages, but every once in a while they're going to get a new code to keep the registration going,

and they're going to have to give you that too. Or you can have an old iPhone, which I'm sure tons of Android users have around, or, and this is the best one, you can rent an iPhone from Beeper, which is a thing that they're considering doing. Like, this just, it just doesn't work, right? Like, Beeper lost.

And you can feel about that, however you'd like to feel about that, Beeper loss. And I think it's very clear now that what Beeper is pushing towards is being like a murder for a greater cause of fighting against Apple. And Eric Mijikovsky, the CEO, was on, I forget one of the morning shows talking about this. I think it was CBS this morning talking about this. A bunch of congresspeople wrote a letter about,

the antitrust implications of iMessage. And so there's this like political fight starting that I don't think is actually going to go anywhere because I don't think the merits of this particular case are particularly strong. But one of the first times I talked to Eric about this, I asked him, like, is there a version of this story where you become a murder for a greater cause and are you okay with that being the end? And he's like, that's not what's going to happen.

And I was right, that's what happened. I'm sorry. I read that letter, you know, I want to have a high opinion of our government. Yeah, like as a citizen of America, I truly want to believe that we can get back to having an effective government. I read that letter and I was like, have any of you ever used a computer? Do you have them? Are you ever turn one on? You ever see how?

Like, they're using Apple's computers without permission. That's what's going on here. It's not, this is pretty straightforward. And you can believe that Apple should make I message more interoperable. I believe that. You can believe that green bubbles and blue bubbles are causing an epidemic of weird bullying in America's schools. I believe that. You can believe that Apple has a moral obligation to allow for encrypted messaging between iPhone users and Android users without saying something like, go use WhatsApp and stuff.

You can believe all these things. Ages ago before Dieter went to work for Google while he still worked here, he wrote a story for us called The Moral Case for Bringing Eye Message to Android. Right. You can believe all of those things. That's a great piece. You should read it again. It holds up really well. I read it while writing about Beeper, and it is everything he says is still true.

Yeah. You can believe all these things. You do not have to believe that requires Apple to let people hack their systems. Or find these work brands. Like, there's just something in there that the moral argument for letting Beeper work in the way that Beeper works is just weird. Right? It's like it's a little too uncomfortable. beyond, we should put some pressure on Apple

to make the system more interoperable. But what you're pegging it on is they found a 16-year-old kid found a hack. Like, you're just in dicey territory from the jump. And by the way, I really do believe Apple should make eye message interoperable. I think everything should be interoperable.

But it's just this one is like, it's Apple resolved it without a lawsuit. That's actually probably the most notable thing here. They just cat and mouse to beeper out of the game without ever sending the mean letter. which based on what we were just talking about, it's like very admirable for Apple. Yeah.

They did not use, I assumed we would get a computer fraud and abuse act letter, but they just shut it down. Yeah, Richard, what do you make of this? I feel like I've talked to myself in circles now for like three weeks about, I think Beeper is right about everything, except whether it is and should be allowed to do what it's doing.

And ultimately, that's the only thing that matters to me. But I'm super curious what you, think having followed all of this? That is the stickiest part about this is that what Beeper is actually doing, they're pretending to be iPhones or Macs. They've figured out a way to do that, and Apple figured out a way to undo that. And I don't think either party is wrong. It's great that they've tried to do it. And Apple is certainly within their right to say, hey, this device that is on our messaging system is not actually an iPhone or Mac that has been activated. It shouldn't be allowed to do that. And the kind of the solution that they've come to where you are actually using an iPhone or Mac is probably one that I guess Apple doesn't really have a way around and that they could use.

But it's so ridiculous. This is not what anyone wants. This is not a service that people want to pay for as they were suggesting it. And ultimately, I think everyone's unsatisfied. Being an Android user never having had an iPhone, the most surprising part of this whole news is when I opened up my iPad and found out that I have nine iMessage. messages in storage somehow. And I don't know how that happened. So that

is a mystery that still has not been solved. And if anyone at Beeper or Apple would like to... I don't know how to say this to you, but I've been using your iPad to spoof I message for some time. I should have known. I should have known. That explains a lot of weird messages I've been getting. And you know, the funniest thing about this

is Apple, you know, they cave to Europe. They're going to do our... They've talked about doing encrypted RCS. They've talked about other extensions RCS to make rich messages with video and photos better. We're very close to getting what you want out of Apple here. Right. So what end does actually making iMessage itself like forcibly interoperate with just one app accomplish very much? Again, I think it would be great.

I like Beeper as a user experience a lot. I piped in like 10 different inboxes into Beeper and it is like a saner way to message. It's great. No one is obligated to support that, right? And I think you're right. Like if you boil Eric and Beeper's like moral argument all the way down, what they say is SMS is bad technology and Apple is doing its users a disservice by relying on it. I think that is absolutely true. And I think RCS is the correct.

solution to that problem, not Beeper, which is the problem, right? Like, even the case Beeper wants to make doesn't end in and the right solution is Beeper. It ends in, and the right solution is this better technology that we've invented that works for everyone. Yeah. No, the right solution is to take it back to when we had that one app that had MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger and IRC. Trilium. Yes, Trilium. That's, that is the solution. That is where we need to Trillium, addium, pigeon. Pigeon. What a world.

None of them could spell any words correct. They all had eyes where there shouldn't have been eyes. All right. So our condolences to Beeper, hopefully one day there's blue bubbles for everyone. Until that time, you can buy an iPhone and use Beeper on your Android phone. We got there. You won again, Tim Cook, you crafty devil. Other little bit of Apple news.

Lots of smoke, but no fire yet on a Vision Pro launch in. February, potentially late January. This makes sense. Just if you think about the next few weeks here, it's going to be CES very soon, a terrifying reality. Apple loves to disrupt CES. So saying we're going to have an event in late January, early February, during the second week of January, when CS is going. Pretty good timing for Apple. And then they have said early 24 for the Vision Pro since the very beginning. So we'll see. I think does. this thing, have a killer? Has Apple figured out what the Vision Pro is for yet? I don't know. The answer seems to be spatial video, right? Like, I feel like this has been the most interesting

thing about the last month or so, is we've seen this trickle of stories come out from people who have tried shooting spatial video on the iPhone and then seeing it on the Vision Pro. And that just, at least from Apple's perspective, seems to be overwhelmingly the first thing Apple would like to tell you about the vision pro i am very skeptical i mean some of the headlines you see are absurd people are like i was moved to tears by seeing my photos in the vision it's like i bet i probably not that's probably just like the screen resolution being off and it hurt your eyes like that's you're like you haven't had emotional experiences with technology before that's impossible i i don't know i i'm not convinced that that is the killer app uh you're just you just you just

never had a feeling in your life, man. I cried when I watched the movie Best of the Best with Julia Roberts' brother. Like, I'm confident this thing is going to bring me to tears, like the first time I try it on. I've started shooting, I will say, because, you know, there has been these very controlled, Apple's been weird with the press. I'm just going to say this, right? They did the Apple Watch thing in this weird background statement to one out, like, that's weird. It's just weird on his face. We're going to talk about the CarPlay announcement. CarPlay also wasn't a press release. They gave that to G. And like, what are we doing?

And then this weird thing where like some people get to do this facial video demo and some people like, whatever. Even the Bieber stuff to like call a win for us weird, which it also was, the beeper stuff, which Apple never in a million years would have talked about. We spent weeks trying to get them to talk. They gave me one quote and have never answered another question about it. What? Yeah, we're in the ecosystem.

Yeah. Sometimes, you know, the light of the sun shines upon us. Yeah. I'm just pointing out, in general. It's been a weird, a weird sequence of statements and not statements and whatever. But the Vision Pro one is, to me, is like classic Apple, where they just want people to be talking about other people's experiences, which are good. Which is fine. It's like, again, people, companies are going to, Apple has run the most successful playbook in this in world's history.

Keep doing it. but the idea that you're going to put on this headset and have an immediate set of emotional experiences is what Apple definitely wants you to think about it right now. Yes. Not. It's what you should think about it. Having an emotional experience through a screen is the best thing possible. Yes.

I mean, think about it. What would you rather do? Use your real eyes to look at your children in three dimensions or look at them inside an Apple headset on a screen in three dimensions. Well, if they're not around. I think there's an obvious answer here. I think like is a actually they are around they're tapping you on the shoulder right now

as you're wearing the headset looking at them I'm just saying as a parent of the five year old there are definitely moments from like I wish I could just rewind the clock on whatever you're doing right now and experience you a couple weeks ago and you can with an Applevision pro

it is only $3,500 how have you not bought one already look I've started shooting some special videos just so I have them right I'm like I'm very curious about this my broader point is not positive or negative. It's just you can see when I say, what is the killer app for this? It is not something that is useful.

It is something that is emotional. Yeah. Like that's what we're being steered towards. You're going to have a series of emotional experiences with this technology, which is probably the right thing. Richard's sarcasm aside, probably the right thing. Here's the thing that's going to help you relieve some memories. Here's a thing that's going to blow your mind.

Here's a thing that's going to be memorable that you're going to want to talk about. that you're going to be excited for buying the more affordable version when it comes out, not here's a thing that helps you get better at work, so you tell your boss to expense a $3,500 headset, which is where meta was going with the Quest Pro, right? And just no one could get there. Like, no one was like, this has made me more productive. It's kind of what Apple learned from the watch, right?

Like, Apple framed the watch as very much a successor to the phone. And that didn't work. But then Apple found out a thing the watch was good at, that the phone was not, which was all the health and wellness and fitness stuff, and just leaned really hard into that. And so all of a sudden it's like, okay, you need this device because it does things your other devices can't do. And I think the problem all the headsets have had so far is they don't really have any of that,

right? They yell about like, it's more immersive and they talk about like the games you can play. But fundamentally, it's like stuff you can do on other screens just different and potentially cooler. And that pitch doesn't actually work all that well. at least not at the scale you need to work if you're Apple. But with something like you're talking about, like 360 videos feel like you're living inside of your memories.

Like, there it is. That's a thing. Real or not, like, that is a thing I can't do on my phone. Whereas, like, I have more screens is not. And in a world where most of people don't have actual access to these devices, it's a story that you can tell over and over and over again and they'll be interested in until you can get the price down and the manufacturing up and actually sell them an affordable headset

Yeah, two and a half years from now. I'm just going to remind everyone that many, many years ago, before disinformation and fake news was a threat to democracy, we ran a fake Super Bowl ad. We put out a press release saying we were going to run a Super Bowl ad. This got picked up far and wide. We did it to punk the haters. I want to be very clear. There was like three reporters that specifically I wanted to tweak.

And we got them all. We also unfortunately got the New York Times, which to this day. has a story in their set that says like the Verge plan Super Bowl ad. Which is technically true. It was true.

We bought a Super Bowl ad. We bought airtime in Helena, Montana for like $700. And we ran out a very local Super Bowl ad. We sent a reporter to the Buffalo Wild Wings in Helena, Montana to watch our Super Bowl ad and see what people reacted.

And I don't need to tell you that the patrons of the Buffalo Wild Wings in Helena, during the Super Bowl, were not moved by our Super Bowl ad. Our traffic did not go up on that day. But in that ad, there is a shot of former Verge editor Ross Miller shedding a tear inside a VR headset.

Oh, yeah. And that is the thing that most people seized upon is being utterly ludicrous. Inside, like the joke inside of our joke was that the Verge thought people would cry in VR. And like, here we are. It's 2024. And Apple's like, here's what you're going to do. going to weep like a little baby in our headset. And it's like, all right, we weren't so wrong.

I'm excited. Like I said, I've already started shooting some videos of Max in his facial video. Just because I don't want to look at someone else's kids. That's not going to make me cry. I'm not going to look at David's kid. Yeah. Whatever. He sucks.

We should actually, that's, that's, okay, this is going to be part of the review. We're going to send each other videos of our children. Ooh. And see if one of another's children can make us cry. Okay. That's cool. I'm going to cry like a baby, no matter what happens. I love kids.

All right, last one. Richard, I feel like you got to take us through the car play situation because it is ridiculous. Last year, in 2022, if you can remember at its developer conference, Apple said that we were going to get a new next-gen car play. It would take over every screen in your car and they were going to announce vehicle news by the end of 2023. It is, we've got a few days left in 2023, and they finally said it's coming in some Porsche and Aston Martin next year, maybe. And we've got two mock-up displays of the kind of carplay equipped supercars. And what you see is the carplay screen across even in the dashboard right in front of the driver with the speedometer, the tachometer, whatever you want. It's in the center or maybe it's on the left.

It's styled with their logos, with their colors and with the, I think, Porsche's Houndtooth pattern that they usually have on their seats is now in the screen. I'm not sure if it's any better than what you already. have in your car or something you actually aspire to. But the idea is that if you are a Porsche owner and you're using CarPlay, you'll get a special carplay experience. That someone doesn't get in, you know, their mirror Honda or Toyota or something like that. So you don't have to deal with that anymore. I'm not sure really where we're going with this. I just, buttons are still better. We had dials and needles, and that was fine to show out your speed and your decometer. So a couple of things. One, a totally reasonable headline on the story.

Could have been Apple announces Photoshopps. Yes. Because these things are not real. I believe they're real. These pictures are not real. So the Asthmart one in particular is the interior of an Asthmarton DB12. And it is just a bad Photoshop job. Like the carplay display has not been skewed correctly onto the screen of the Astin Martin DB12.

And I know this because. it broke my brain and I put it on threads and people started noticing that the lines aren't parallel. Oh, geez. Like, it's just, it's just weird. So that's one thing. The Porsche is a little more confusing. I'm not 100%. I assumed it was a can. It doesn't look like a cayenne. Even if you just look at that. So what you have in the Aston Martin is they took over the infotainment with just regular old car play. Unclear why they had to Photoshop this bad that's just carplay on that center screen. It's not what they showed last,

it's not what they showed in 2020. Yeah, I'm just saying like that's just, it's just car play on the center screen. And the carplay has a handful of climate controls baked into it. What's particularly funny about that is there are hard buttons in the DB12 for climate right below them. So we've accomplished a lot.

But you've got a little bit of climate control in car play. That's a big. And then you've obviously got the speedometer and then. But carplay today can access the center screens of certain. cars like pull stars. So we just very little has been accomplished in the Ashton Martin screenshot. The poor screenshot, again, it appears to just be Photoshop. You look at it, you're like, why would you want this? Like, why? First of all, the Porsche is going 205 kilometers an hour, which is 127 miles per hour. Sick. While on a phone call.

With a calendar open on the passenger display. So it's like, this is the most dangerous office environment in world history. Like, don't do this. I think that you misunderstand Porsche customers. Like, that's it. And then all of the screen real estate is, again, to my eye, just like not being used for anything. Right? So you've got a gauge cluster.

You've got a speedometer. you've got a row of icons, so you've got a launcher. You have a giant map instruction that says stay on this road. You have call controls. And then over on the right, the massive passenger display, you've got two calendar entries, a media controller, which, why is that all the way over there? And then more map information and then the weather. Perfect.

I don't see the problem here. It's like, they're rolling. What is all this, like, is this, are people crying out for the lowest information density possible in the driving? While you're going 130 miles an hour? I'm so torn on this because on the one hand, I think it continues to be true that car play is better than everybody else's software in cars.

Yes. So to some extent. By the way, and you know I don't think it's good. Oh. But I will agree with you that it's safe for Tesla and potentially Rivian. Sure. Fine. Maybe.

It's better than Porsche would build on its own is a thing I believe very strongly. That said, why do we want any of this? My favorite thing that happened here was this came out right at the same time that VW did an interview where it was like, we're bringing buttons back to our cars because everybody wants buttons. and we tried to do other things, and we moved everything around, and people said, stop it, give us buttons. So they were bringing back buttons. That's like a thing that happened.

And so I'm like, okay, if this is where cars are headed, I kind of don't think it's the worst idea to give all of it to companies that actually know how to build software. I'm not sure the right answer is Apple, but it's like, if all of my car is going to be is a bunch of screens, I would rather have Apple programmed those screens than whoever makes my car, just as I would rather have a car company make my car than Apple.

But what if we just didn't do any of this? Like, what if we just rewound this idea back like six generations ago and just made cars the better way? Yeah, and we did our best to put software in them that made sense. Or just less software. Like, I'm almost on the NELI team of like the amount of, software I need in my car is a mount for my phone. Maybe that's it.

Like when we were at the part where it was just Bluetooth controlling the app on your phone that's playing the podcast and you could just press the same play button and pause button to pause it or whatever. We were pretty good there. Like that's what you want mostly. I am utterly. And your phone on a mount with Google. Yeah.

befuddled. So again, I think the Ashton Martin screenshot is a DB12. Almost 100%. It's true of that. It has to be. It was the only car announced. Well, no, they didn't announce any cars. So this is an important part of this announcement.

They didn't announce any actual cars. They didn't announce any actual features. They announced two screenshots, which are Photoshop, and two quotes from people who work at Aston Martin and Porsche. So I couldn't tell you when these. They told car and driver that it should be in the system that's coming next year in the DB12 in the Volante. Oh, okay. So Asson, the car and driver has. And Porsche said something.

They'll like have more information when they reveal the Machen, however you say that, the all-electric car. Okay. So this is the interior of the McCann. That's what you can assume, I think. Because it is not the current interior of the current McCann. Yes. So a new electric McCann will have this. Okay, fine.

That makes sense to me. I'm just saying why, like Apple could have just been late, right? They promised it by the end of this year they would have some announcements. We had heard, I've heard over and over and over again from all kinds of car companies, except for Portion Estin Martin, which foolishly I did not think to consider, that no one's going to do this because everyone thinks, the future of their cars is recurring revenue in the cars. You can go listen to the CEO Volvo on Decoder just recently,

talk about how he's doing it differently, but he still wants to do recurring revenue just for, like, car insurance. Like everyone thinks that controlling this interface is a big deal and letting Apple undifferentiate their cars is a big deal. So you can see this middle step is Apple is still going to run all the software, but Porsche gets to skin it, or Aston Martin gets to skin it a little bit. okay, but they're not actually cars.

Like, why not wait until you have an actual car? What was the rush to get it at before the end of the year? Like, no one thought it was coming. They could have done a line on the page where they talk about the next genit car play that says, oh, and it's coming in a Porsche and Aston Martin next year. Right, but instead we have to announce some screenshots. Do you think Apple, like, some lawyer at Apple came, like,

running into Tim Cook's office and was like, the watch is getting banned. And Tim was just like, release the Photoshop's. just has them ready. Whenever we need to drown out bad news, we'll just show people weird car play stuff. I'm excited. I'm excited for us to have giant screens full of redundant information surrounding us in cars. You know what's great about driving at night is having bright LED lit screens at you,

just in the middle of nowhere. All right. That's the end of the Apple chaos. We got to wrap this up. We're going to come back. We're doing a very fast lighting around. Then we're going to do a year in review. It's going to be great.

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All right, we're back. We have to do a very fast lightning round. Fast. The note is for me. I'm the one who makes the struggle. All right, David, kick us off. For this lightning round, I have six things. No, mine's very short.

It's that Bird, the once flying scooter company, is cooked to steal from Jess Weatherbed on our team. Bird filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company has been all but dead for a pretty long time and just seems to have completely given up. This company was worth, I want to say, like, $2 or $3 billion just a few years ago. I confess I was all in on this micro mobility future. I still kind of think it could work that like what we need is better public transit, but what we also need is cool ways to get around cities that aren't cars. And like I think the e-bike revolution is really interesting.

I think scooters are really interesting, all this stuff. Bird like really started this trend in a really big way. It just sort of dropped scooters in every city in the world, made a ton of money, raised a ton of money, really did the Uber playbook. It was run by Travis Van der Zander, who was a former Uber executive, took over in a huge way, flew too close to the sun, and RIP bird. That's that. I was just in downtown LA. By the way, I went to the Emmy Awards because our Netflix show was nominated for an Emmy.

Yeah. It's like a real thing. Disclosure, we make a Netflix show. Well, we're going to talk about Warner Bros. It's coming anyway. Disclosure, our Netflix show was nominated for an Emmy, and I went to Emmy Awards, which was crazy. and I sat behind the production team for the Kelly Clarkson show. They loved a party.

They were just whooping it up. And statuettes for days over at the Kelly Clarkson show. Sadly, we did not win. We lost a show about Italy on PBS, which, you know, when you're in the educational informational program category, the daytime Emmys, you kind of think you're going to lose to the show about Italian food. Yeah. So it was still fun to go.

It's still fun to hang with their team. But anyway, so I was at the Emmys, downtown L.A., the streets are full of scooters. And what struck me was everyone, if you will remember, Bird and Lime, they started with just like consumer scooters. They were like ordering from like Ali Express at massive costs. And they were breaking and people are throwing in the river. And they're like, we're going to engineer the scooters be better once they've taken off. And they've done that.

And the bird scooters in particular now look like some Mad Max shit. Oh, yeah. Like raw, raw aluminum, like totally armored. Like there's like an imposing thing. and it's like, oh, these are the least cute scooters now. Yeah, they weigh like a thousand pounds too. Yeah. And this is the problem.

All those things became totally commoditized, and everybody was like either, you know, we're going to win and then we're going to be able to raise prices like Uber did, or we're going to figure out how to make the unit economics works so that they stick around, all this stuff. And then some combination of everybody grew too fast and there was a global pandemic and nobody went outside for a year. Yeah.

Just crushed everybody. And like, kudos to Lyme and a couple of others that have kind of managed to stick it. out and continue to keep on, keeping on. But this was always coming for Bird. It was either going to it really was. It was either going to just completely decimate everybody and take over the world, or it was going to run through all of its money really fast and die. And that seems to be what happened. Yeah. So it was less Uber and more we work. Yeah, exactly. All soft bank vision fund investments. Yeah. All right. Speaking of things that are doomed, Richard, I believe you have

lining round item for us? Yes. The news broke through multiple outlets in the last year so that Warner Brothers, Discovery, and Paramount executives are in discussions for a Max merger. That was an Alex Cranes headline, of course. Oh, my God. Because we might get Paramount plus Max, Max Plus, or something like that, if these companies are allowed to combine. Because we have two failing giant entertainment companies that can't really support themselves under their own weight. The only solution that their executives can think of is to combine them. Yeah.

Which I don't know what else you could do, but they're probably going to try and find out if this is the solution. You could try to make good movies. One option that does not seem to be in vogue. But it's just a thing you can do. You can make a compelling television show for your service that you've rebranded as Max.

You could stop trying to. be Netflix. Yeah. That could be fun. Like, I mean, this is the thing, right? And we've been talking about this for years now, that it was always going to be so expensive and so complicated to compete that there were always only going to be a few winners. And I think at this point, Netflix is one of those winners.

Like, I think I don't see how Netflix falls apart at any point in the near future. Disney's one of those winners, but isn't kind of a weird place. and there's probably not room for many more. Like Apple TV and Prime Video get to live on because their companies have so much money that those things are like not material. So this is the real problem, though, but all these executives will tell you

is that they're competing against cost centers for tech companies that have massive profits. So Apple TV Plus is just a cost center. Yeah, it's like lunch for employees and Apple TV Plus. And again, you know, my theory with Apple TV Plus in particular is they make it so that when they talk about services revenue,

they don't have to talk about candy crush whales. because all their service rate is revenue is the 30% cut of the net purchases on games. That is Apple services revenue. Amazon does Prime, and they spend a ton of money. And, you know, what you might describe is a produced Thursday Night Football Game. It's not the best produced, but it's produced Thursday Night Football Game. Because that stuff keeps Prime subscribers around. It is their retention.

They know it. But it's still a cost center, right? Like the lifetime, they, you know, it's Amazon. They run the math. The lifetime value of prime subscriber stays on year after year is very high and we can take some of that margin out and produce this TV show

because that will inspire more people to stay for longer. I mean, they did a Black Friday football game. Like, I don't know if you need a clearer indication of where the money here is for Amazon. Right. If you're Warner Brothers,

you don't have some other thing that's making all the money. You just have to go make the thing. And I would just remind the audience that Warner Brothers is the most cursed company in world history when it comes to mergers. God, that might be true.

The Times, I'm not the sort of person who runs or any, I like the Times, but the Times had a very funny piece on this, or at least I thought it was funny, because they had the very sort of normal Times business writing of like, there's ample business logic for the deal, and then they listed all the reasons you might want to merge. And it's like, you know, every time any company merges of Warner Brothers, it ends in disaster.

Like, the AOL Time Warner merger is, the most failed merger in history. The AT&T Time Warner merger is a close second. Like the only thing that merger accomplished was a massive layoffs, a shitload of debt, and a gray scale 4-3 Snyder cut. That's it. That's what you got out of that merger.

Nothing else. Like, what are we doing, y'all? Well, the Warner Brothers Discovery merger hasn't failed yet. I don't know. I think, uh, how's your, how's your bat girl? going. No, I think, I mean, the problem is the Warner Brothers Discovery thing was never going to work.

It has so much debt. So much debt. So many holes to dig out of that it's like since the minute this company existed, people have been asking who are they going to merge with? Which was just, it was just never going to work. And the answer, I think,

I mean, people have seen this coming for a long time, right? Like, these are two companies that were never going to compete with the handful of giants that are out there, but combined, Maybe. But combined to do what? Yeah, exactly.

Right? Like, honestly, combined to you what? To have more content? It's not more content that people. No one's running around being like, I don't have enough content. Right. And I don't even like that word. Like, it just implies, like, being shoveled, glurge into your mouth.

Just like, take the content. Like, just do it. It's another Tom Cruise movie. You will have it. There's more reality television. I think what people are, what you are looking to Hollywood to do is make really good stuff that is a little bit more scarce. If you want stuff with YouTube production values, boy, is there a YouTube for you?

If you want stuff at Hollywood production values, there's actually not a lot. And it just seems like there's a race to the bottom here because of all of the debt that in particular Warner has had to take on through its sequence of disastrous mergers. I don't know. These companies aren't not going to make a great app with a great user experience. that makes you feel good about using it. That's full of really great stuff that inspires you to pick it over TikTok.

And that's what they're really competing against is TikTok on your phone. And I think that's the biggest problem for them is that when you look at the supposed winners in the space, Netflix, are they winning? Because they're probably going to have to raise their prices. Again, they do every six months or so anyway. They're throwing on games.

They're trying to find some other way to get you to pay more for a slightly bigger bundle until they actually do recreate cable. Disney. What is Disney anymore? Is it going to have ESPN? Is it going to be something else? We don't even know.

So I'm not even sure what the model for victory is for them. They're chasing kind of nothing. It's mergers and golden parachutes. Let's be very honest. By the way, I haven't done the full disclosure. Comcast is a minority investor. No, Comcast, by the way, I haven't done the full disclosure. Comcast, NBC Universal Division is a minority investor in Fox Media

of the Virgist's parent company. I promise you, not a lot of love from Comcast flowing in our direction. By the way, one of the other line was like this would in the times piece, one of the other lines in the times piece was this will give them leverage. And it's in negotiating cable rates with Comcast and Charter. It's like the dying stars. Yeah. The thing that people are quitting in droves. Good luck.

And the companies who are now negotiating by saying we don't need TV anymore because the only place to we make money is their internet service. Yeah, perfect. By the way, they just leaked the last four social security digits of everyone who has internet service, maybe. Perfect. Anyway, so Comcast an investor in our company. We made a Netflix show. It's not a new for an Emmy.

It's called The Future I usually go watch it. Our company makes other TV shows. You know, the usual. I have a Disney account. I just went to Disney World. Does that count? I think The Magic Man is like neoliberal fantasy. Okay.

That's good. Okay, last one. This is mine. I think this is actually a fascinating on two friends. So Peloton. you know, they got a new CEO. They also went through a big pandemic overhire. They bought pre-core.

They bought factories. And then they went through a pandemic crash when people realized they could go back to the gym. So they're like reorganizing their business. So I have two Peloton ones. They're kind of the same one, I think, in interesting ways. The first, if you have Peloton hardware in your house and you have the subscription, which is the plus tier of the subscription, you now don't need the hardware. So you can now walk up to any treadmill that supports a Bluetooth

protocol called FTMS and use the Peloton app with that treadmill, which is like pretty interesting. And it'll like keep track of the same data about how you're running and all that stuff? Yeah, you get your incline speed, pace, and distance in the app, which we know, track it with the rest of the Peloton stuff. This is fascinating to me. Like just, they're just debundling their thing. You obviously need the more expensive subscription, which very much implies that you have the hardware. But they are debundling it. And then, you know, there's a weird little Bluetooth standard for, you know, there's a weird little Bluetooth standard for

people to argue about and figure out what supports what. Because it hasn't really been important yet, and now Peloton is going to make this weird little Bluetooth standard important. Next to that, their oldest bikes are 2015, 2016. They're getting very old. And so they are going to, they are no longer supporting the Android versions that run on those bikes tablets. So they will give you a $500 credit to buy a new bike, which is very expensive. Also, those bikes are always on say also. It's nothing, or this is really interesting. They will just sell you a new tablet for those bikes. The tablet is ridiculous expensive. So it's like a dumb bike with a smart TV and you just replace the smart TV. Yeah, like there's just a thing happening in Peloton world where they're realizing

that the sort of computer part of it can be fully disaggregated from the bike part of it or the treadmill part of it. And so in the one sense, their actual hardware, they're just upgrading the hardware. And there are some arguments in our comments and elsewhere about whether the price of that upgrade is too high. It's normally $375.75. But if your bike is expiring, they'll give you a $50 credit. So it's $325 to buy a new tablet. That's a lot for what is not the world's greatest Android tablet. On top of the very expensive thing that you already bought and have been paid for for a long time.

Yeah, that's a lot. This is a lot. But it is interesting, right? You can just put a new computer on it. And then on the other side of it, you can just get a treadmill that's supposed to, this Bluetooth protocol by the more extensive subscription and use your own tablet. So you kind of just see the nature of this company's relationship to hardware software subscriptions is changing a little bit in a way that you can get to a place where you're

paying too much money for a Peloton subscription and you have neither their treadmill nor their tablet. And their app is just talking to your treadmill on your iPad. And that's like, oh, now it's a totally different company. It just feels like what Peloton always should have been. kind of an add-on, that they didn't need to be the new exercise bike company. But I assume that they registered probably correctly that if they tried to launch with something like this, either the technology wasn't ready at the time, which I can believe to an extent,

or if they did deliver it and it did work, that one of the big bike companies would just make their own version and they would get frozen out. But we had to go through this whole 10 years of waste. It's interesting to put it in the context of the streaming conversation. Like, Peloton's real differentiation is it's instructors. Right? They've like, they put on a show,

the shows have communities around them, the instructors have people. The hardware's good. Becky has a Peloton treadmill. I have a Peloton bike. They're really good. We use them a lot. I can see how having them integrated

is a superior experience to if I was like cobbling together an iPad with something else and like needing a Bluetooth protocol to work. Yeah, I mean, anyone who's ever tried to pair their phone to the treadmill at the gym, like that experience can suck real bad.

Yeah. But what's fascinating about this is, Richard, your point. is they could have just made it all about the content. And maybe that would have been better. But I think you need something to sell. Like Apple Fitness Plus is all about the content. I don't think it's nearly as successful as Peloton.

And I, you know, like, Apple's like, you just bring your own bike and no one does it. Like, no one cares. So there's something in there that I think is just next to the streaming conversation. Peloton sort of debundling itself in this way is like fascinating. And then there's a wonky Bluetooth standard, which is suddenly going to become more important. It's cool. And, you know, I can't stay away. It's the stream.

Holiday Spectacular, 2024, Peloton Bluetooth. No, the thing I think is interesting about this is, like, Richard, I think that arc you describe is, like, exactly what Peloton should have done and potentially was always going to do. Like, no one at Peloton, I'm sure, was like, we can sell $1,800 bikes to every single person on Earth. They're like, we're going to sell these bikes to as like the luxury item, and that's where we start.

And then we become a content business to the rest of people. and that all would have worked just fine except they absolutely lost their mind in the middle of the pandemic when everybody bought a Peloton and so suddenly they were like oh maybe the market is bigger than we thought and what it actually was was just that they did

the 10 years of business they were ever going to do in like three months and suddenly they were instead of there being 10 times as many people who might buy a Peloton which is what they decided was the case it was actually just that everyone who was ever going to buy a Peloton

had already bought a Peloton so if they had shifted right then and been like okay, we've hit the group. Now we're going to be a content business. Peloton might be in a really different place. But instead, like you said, Neil,

it bought factories and bought companies and was like, we're going all in on weird hardware. And what's particularly interesting about that is along the way, the CEO of Peloton got pushed out for making those decisions, and they brought in the new guy,

Barry McCarthy, X Netflix, who is now running a Netflix flavor by disaggregating the service and the content from the hardware. Like I said, it was just, we were talking on streaming.

I was like, oh, this Peloton, there's something right there. That's the same thing. The difference between them in streaming is that Peloton also released a treadmill that killed a child. That's true. Which is probably not the way to do it. It's true. It was oddly dangerous. Yeah.

Like too dangerous. And it went away. And now on their website, you can pre-order the new one, which is the same. I don't know. Very confusing. All right. On that, very dark, no, thank you, Richard. We're going to take a break.

We're going to come back. we're going to do what I think will be very fun your interview. We'll wrap back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in.

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That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build. something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant,

enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. So David had an idea to just go through all of our top stories for the year. But then this idea got complicated by the idea of how you would make such a list, David. What have you done?

Yeah, so when I raised that I wanted to do some kind of end of the year thing, I was like, how do we sort of pick out the biggest stories of year? Do we all come with our ideas for the biggest stories? do we come up with the list and try to rank them? And you were just like, what if we just took the top posts on the verge.com and went through them all and decided, like, were those actually the top stories of the year?

I was like, cool, sounds fun. A horrible idea. We're going to do it, but it was a horrible idea. So we went through, and basically two ways that we measure traffic on the verge.com are through Google Analytics and through a tool called Parsley. They, it turns out, have very different ideas about how much traffic.

a page is getting. So what I ultimately did was look at both of them and then I sort of triangulated a list of the most popular Verge stories of 2023. But in order to do that, you have to get rid of all the stories that are just like obviously successful because people search for those things all the time. Right? Like a piece of fun inside baseball is that the single most popular Verge URL after our homepage in 2023 was our roundup of the best wireless earbuds. Sure. And And there's tons of those, right? We do buying guides. They're really good.

They're really helpful. Lots of people find them. Lots of people buy stuff. It's great. Then we have things like explainers. We have an NFT explainer from like two years ago, I think. Yep. That is still lingering as one of our most popular stories.

The best part about that explaining, by the way, is Mitchell Clark, I believe, wrote it. And it is basically a reason why no one should buy an NFT. It's also the reason Mitchell Clark left the verge and, like, move to the woods. He's like, I need to walk around the West Coast for a long time. And he's been doing ever since. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then there were, like, some random things that we just left off because they're popular for reasons that are not newsworthiness, like a sort of one-off story that James Vincent on our team wrote about deep fake nudes, that for reasons I don't need to explain, but are very obvious, was very popular on the internet all year. So, point is, I whittled all this down into, I think, an imperfect but, like, directionally useful list of the most popular stories on the very important.

verge.com in 20203. Minus the list of best laptops. Minus the list of best laptops, yeah. Which is a great list. Oh, tons of good stuff. I highly recommend Googling all those things and clicking on the verge links many times so that they keep being popular in 2024.

And so what I want to do with each of these is just go through and basically I want to decide for each of these, does this belong on like biggest stories of 2023 list? Because a lot of these, they have their moments. people get very excited, like, there's a huge sort of spike in interest in traffic, and then they die out. Others live much longer.

So I'm going to go through and see, like, does this merit a list of the best, biggest stories of 2023? And the first one, and again, I'm going in a pure list of popularity. This has no judgment. The first one is a big feature we wrote about inside Elon Musk's extremely hardcore Twitter. And there were a few others on this list, including the one where Elon's. Elon Musk predicted that X will replace banks. He gave employees a year to replace banks. And then there was the whole Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, cage match challenge.

So I've just boiled all of this down to Musk Twitter X shenanigans. The one thing I'll point out, just having looked at the list, I don't often think about our URL slugs. And the Zuckerberg versus Musk slug had the word world star in it, which is just the funny thing. That's fantastic. It was like Musk, Zuckerberg, cage match, world star. And it just did numbers. And now I've learned an important lesson about putting word world world star in all of our headlines. I see why this is the biggest story of the year.

It deserves to be here, right? Right. I mean, we've talked about this now at length. We've done a huge package on it. Like, this thing catalyzed a reordering of the internet. And maybe you think I'm going too far. I really think that that's true. and the only thing that I'm missing when I say that

is also the whole AI Google search dilemma is like right next to that. But this thing just catalyzed a rethinking of the social internet in big ways. Threads is the number one app on the app store. Macedon is growing. Interest and activity pub is growing. Threads is going to do activity. Like all of that massively catalyzed by Elon's

purchase of Twitter. Then next that, you know, that story extremely hardcore, you know, I'm just like a verge level. We co-produced that story with New York magazine. It was on the cover of New York Magazine. We made that story with Casey and Zoe a platformer and Alex Heath on our team. So it was just like, just from me personally, like a lot of people had to work together in a way that people in media don't often work together to make something really great. That story is really great. And it is the story of a culture change inside of a company and what it was like in those early days, tons and tons and tons of

great reporting. And that immediately led to not like just reflection, obviously, interest, but a bunch of other companies being like, what if we were a little bit more hardcore? And you just immediately saw that ping pong around sort of tech culture. Yeah, there was that brief moment where everybody was taking a page out of Musk's book and being like, that was like how a lot of people excused bringing people back to the office. They were like, it's time to get serious. Like stop being so nice to your employees. Yeah, we're going to lay off a bunch of you. It was like a real thing that happened sort of in the wake of Elon. Like, what if we had 50% less people? And then a bunch of companies realized, like, oh, that wouldn't work. And Elon was like, what if we did it again?

Well, we're going to get to the layoffs in a minute here. But Richard, you sit in the news all day. This is the biggest story of the year, right? I was at a holiday party from my wife's job the other day. And I was telling them kind of what it's like to work in this job. And this year, really for the last few years, a lot of it has been, oh, Elon just did a thing over and over and over again. If you are tired of reading the news, I am tired

of thinking about writing it and talking about it. The number of stories that we did not write is much longer than the number of stories that we published or that we consider it. And it's one of those things where, Nila, I think you're extremely right about all the things that it covered, but it was even more than that. It was security,

it was policy, it was international, even the layoffs, how they have happened in different countries across different continents and were affected by different laws. We had the lawsuit. We had the whistleblower who came back and said that Twitter was wildly insecure before and talked about the things that the previous administration was doing. We had the woman who was sleeping in our cubicle. Who then got fired. And later got fired. It was a momentary star. There were just so many things that happened.

I can't remember all of them or even one-tenth, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think, which is impressive, actually, because that means Elon Musk is the story of the year two years in a row, because all of the chaos of the acquisition was very much that thing in 2022. So here's hoping we don't make it a three-peat. On that note, let's move on. Next on the list, I would not have put this second, but I'm not surprised it's actually here, is the Vision Pro.

Our initial announcement post was number two. And Nelai, your hands-on getting to try it. Face on. Your face on. was also on this list, too. Not surprising to me that this is the gadget of the year, right? Yeah, it's the newest, most impressive thing. It has the biggest ideas.

It had the flashiest launch. It's Apple. Apple's always going to be on that list. I'll just do a spoiler way down on this list, but still in the top, whatever, 50, iPhone 15 Pro. Like, it's just there. I get it. And also, people are just really curious.

It's like a new hardware category from Apple. What are they going to do better than a iPhone? everyone else, I think that some of that interest will carry through the actual launch. But what surprised me is that the hands-on did as well, because it was, as I was writing it, I was like, there's no way to convey what's actually happening. Yeah. I'm dancing with architecture. Like, I'm doing the thing here where, like, I can't take a picture of it. I can't show it to you. I can just write about it around it, you know? Yeah, I was sitting one table over from you at Apple Park in their visitor center while you were

writing this story, and you came out and you were just like, I think I just have to write about all the things that happened in a row. And I think that's all I can do. And I was like, yeah, I think that's all you can do. That was what you did. Turn out people liked it. It worked out great. Yeah. All right. Number three on the list was, I believe this was Liz Lapato on the last day of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial. Her headline was Sam Bankman-Fried gambled on a trial and his parents lost. But I think to some extent, A, this is a terrific piece. But B was the, the summary of the SBF FTX trial, which Richard definitely belongs on this list, right?

Biggest stories of the year? Surely. Over the last year, we saw this kind of coming at the end of 2022 as FTX collapsed. Sam Bankman-Fried went on a massive media tour, and then he was arrested. Right. Like you do. A very strange sequence of events. Arrested and extradited from the Bahamas, and then we had the trial.

And it all kind of wrapped up within a year. And I think the verdict came in a year to the day after CoinDesk had published this kind of expose of what turned out to be just one of their balance sheets, showing some really serious problems within FTX. But Liz, I thought that in particular this piece dug into the personal side of it of who Sam Bankman-Fried was and what it meant for him to view the world in the way that he did and how that resulted in both the growth of FTX, the way that the investors and the people who backed it were kind of drawn into it. it and they saw an opportunity in this person and in this company. And then what happened after it all fell apart and after he was on trial and why someone would go to trial on this, why they would risk all of this when we all saw it, when we all read it and we were like, yeah, he's going to be found guilty, right? And he was. Yeah. But how we got there? I always think that the tagline for the verge is how technology makes us feel, you know,

which is like it doesn't work in ad meetings. Like that's where you need tagging. um what we're excited about the future whatever but this one to me is like a perfect encapsulation of that like we're not a financial publication we're not really a business publication sometimes i think we're like a secret business publication uh we're we cover tech really closely but we cover like this very human part of it we spend a lot of time on that thing and to me liz just found that line in this trial her coverage of this trial through and through it was amazing but this one it just made it sad like yeah he scanned a lot of people out of a lot of money. Yes, all this stuff. And there's just a sadness to it.

And if you even read the comments or like to people posting on threads about it or whatever, people caught that sadness and it really resonated with them. Like if you're just a parent and your kid has this big belief and he's on the rocket ride, like, you're just not motivated to be like, well, my kid's a shit. Yeah. And there's just something in there. It's worth reading and just like really sitting with because Liz caught it like exactly. And she was in the courtroom every day. And she was just watching this happen to these people. And there's something in it that I think is really powerful. It's like, it's very literary.

It's like what I want the verge to be at its best, even though it was a trial about cryptocurrency scams. Yeah. Yeah, I will say this is a totally unfair thing to say, whatever, six and a half weeks after the trial. But there has been less ongoing fallout from the FTX trial than I expected. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff brewing. But when the trial ended, it felt like a lot of people kind of, you know, wiped their hands of it and moved on it. their lives. It was like, oh, no, here's one thing I know. Richard remembers

the people who I remember everyone who ever tried to sell an NFT and I will follow them forever. It will never drop. Receit swaller over here has not forgotten a goddamn thing. What I was going to say is there actually has been some fallout. We've seen several other

executives go down. That's true. Binance started the entire run against FTX. They have had a guilty plea to criminal charges. Their CEO is in America and cannot leave because he is a flight risk. there are still things going on. I think we're going to see these echoes just kind of continue throughout crypto and throughout the financial industry. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Next one, this is just to, you know, take you further inside the Parsley Google Analytics thing. On Google Analytics, this was, I think, in like the top three most popular stories of the year. And it was nowhere on Parsley. So I don't know what to make of that. So I just put it in here. This is Gen Tui's story about Amazon opening up its sidewalk network to give any gadget-free low-speed data.

I remember being very surprised at how well this story was doing at the time. It's a good story, but I was shocked that many people care about sidewalk as a thing. I'm convinced that the words free data are the thing. That's interesting. Right. Any gadget free data, you get it. Fair. I immediately understand.

People are out there in the streets with their chumbies. How do I connect to these sidewalk networks? There was also a sort of weird discussion that popped up around this where people were like, Oh, your echo is suddenly going to give away your internet capacity to whoever wants to use it. So you need to change the thing. That's true. And your ring cameras, a bunch of stuff has sidewalk enabled. And the idea is that you can build stuff like Amazon has trackers, like tile and air tag competitive tracking stuff.

They have pet tags. And so you need to build this like big mesh network and you would participate in it. I don't think any of this has really come to pass, right? No. Like there's not a lot of sidewalk stuff out there. This is the first story on the list that I'm like, this doesn't really belong on the biggest stories of 20203 list, which is no slate to Jen.

It's a great story. But yeah, I think sidewalk is a longer term, super interesting thing. This idea of like these local mesh networks is really fascinating, but is not like in people's lives and brands. Amazon has a page that's like Amazon sidewalk gadgets on Amazon.com. And it's a long list of like FAQ questions and what you can use.

And the only product you, you can buy are bridges. You can buy Echo devices and ring cameras, and there's not one thing that you can do it. Connect all your stuff. Do nothing. I will say this. The coverage map is looking a lot more filled in.

If you click to their page compared to the version that we have in here, so it's still going. But they've also had an executive change in Amazon. So I don't know what the priority will be for this going forward. That's true. Panos Penna now runs devices and services at Amazon. Penos. Free data for everybody.

Let's do this. Okay, next up, Sony's portable PlayStation Portal launches on November 15th for 1999. This is the single most surprising thing to me on the list, mostly because the portal is stupid. Well, nobody knows that. You've done that. See, you do this for long enough. You get jaded. You get, you know, you got to sand that off.

You got to look at this with beginner's eyes, David. You're right. People are like, there's a new PlayStation. I'm super hype about it. It looks crazy. Life was so simple in August. Right? They're like, it looks crazy.

It's got these weird handle controllers. Like, it could also be a batarang. It's only $199. I haven't been told about the ridiculous limitations of this device yet. I understand why people clicked on this story. $200 PlayStation on the go. I can tell you confidently. It also only works in your house.

Yeah, how to buy the portal not on the popular list. I'll tell you that. Yeah. Yeah, I know you're right. This was exciting at the moment, and it felt interesting. Cloud gaming was the thing people talked about all year. It was like, there was a lot going on. I can see it.

But boy, did that. Yeah, look, I'm not going to be like the entire media's editor-in-chief. The difference between the verge and everything else is we're excited about technology often because I've watched this cycle a million times. Right. People are going to be excited about the PlayStation portal. And like, I know. I know.

Right. But I'm not going to harsh your vibe right at the beginning. Everyone else is like, this is stupid. Technology is stupid. We're not going to do that. We're here for you. We're going to talk about USBC for a full hour. And if you want to carry around an LCD screen to play PS5 games on, we're here for you.

Yeah. I support, I personally support your choices. But technically, we're not here for you because you have to be in your house and we have to be in our house. So we can't actually be here for you. Really sorry. For you. I would say the. The next one on your list is exactly the same story.

I was just about to say, speaking of cool promises that vastly underdelivered, Google announces the pixel fold. Whomp, wamp, wamp. Yeah, that didn't go great. I wanted to love the pixel fold. I have a pixel fold sitting right here, and I still look at it, and I'm like, why aren't you better? Yeah.

I mean, I would say all of the hardware we saw, the pixel tablet was also kind of a disaster that year. Yeah. Yeah. Last year, I should say, this past year. The pixel fold is, I think what people were hoping, and this is just, this is vibes-based analysis, but I think what people were hoping was that Google would have gotten it right in a way that Samsung has not gotten it right, or it would be cleaner in a way that a Samsung device is just a cacophony of capitalism.

And maybe, you know, Google outside's not right. But it also is just like not more useful than a regular pixel phone. Yeah. It's expensive. Yeah. Where we landed was like, this thing is $1,800. and doesn't make a particularly good case for itself. The thing that always amazes me is like it's just heavy.

It's just a big, chunky brick of a thing. And I still have high hopes for the fold, too. I'm not going to lie to you. And it doesn't even run Dex. Am I right? Look, if you could take a pixel fold and turn it into a proper Chromebook, let's talk.

You know who I'm talking to you. Let's talk. Which brings me into my next story. I love Dex by Dan Seifert. No, I'm just kidding. The other problem with the pixel fold is that it's both massively expensive and several months, just a few months later, they brought out a better phone that wasn't foldable and it was cheaper. So you don't have the new hardware and the new AI capabilities and the new pixel. It just folds.

And so you've paid all this money and you don't have the best phone. It's just the wrong mix of things. I really, I think the Verge audience wants to love the pixel, maybe more than it wants to love any. other individual device. Yeah. And like there's a lot to like about the pixel, but the pixel continues to be more loved than it deserves among our audience, I think. And among our staff in a lot of ways, I love the pixel, despite the fact that like

Samsung objectively makes better. I can't wait to get to the one Samsung on this list. I won't give it away now, but there's only one Samsung on this list. All right, yeah, we keep moving. So the next one is VW beat Tesla to the punch and unveil. an affordable electric vehicle. This was from March when VW announced the ID to all, one of the worst names of all time.

Yeah, it's not great. Like when you look at a name and you think, oh, that has to be a typo, I should fix that. You did it bad. ID, capital I, capital D, dot, space, number two, lowercase a-l-l-l-dot. What? That's nothing.

Yeah, it's not great. Nothing about this is crazy. This does not belong on the list. Great headline. Great headline. Does not belong. Great headline. Also, vaporware car.

Yeah. VW. Make buttons. That's good. But make cars. I just realized there's no cyber truck wiper coverage on this list. And I don't know what we're doing here, guys.

I got to, we got to go. I should have mentioned I took all cyber truck, cyber truck, vapor coverage off because it just would have dominated the whole list and who has the time.

Yeah. Next one, a pretty recent piece of news, Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI. This one I like very, very much because this is both extremely deserving as one of the biggest stories of 2023 and extremely not deserving at the same time. Yeah, a story in which almost nothing happened at the end. Right, but it was captivating in a way that I think no other single news event in our world

of 2023 was. I can't think of another moment like that this year. I maintain a list of TikToks that should be PhD theses in media studies. Sure. One day I'm going to publish the entire list. And a lot of them were TikTokers just like reading our stories about opening eye drama and then imposing like their own TikTok drama narratives on them. Which was it was just like the thing that interests me about that is like it was a story that could be everything to everyone. Like no matter what you thought or how you felt, you could take this like guy got fired.

Employees like guy. Guy comes back. And you could just it's like the hero's journey, man. It's like you just put any, any story you want onto that foundation, and they did. What happened in there is actually really meaningful, right? Like Microsoft is involved. They were taken aback. There's a lot of reporting now that comes out that's like maybe Sam was lying to the board,

but the board can point to any specific instances. There's going to be an investigation. But you're right. In the moment, it was captivating. It was also Thanksgiving. Like literally nothing else was going on. I think it's on those, I think this is one of those moments when like governance of AI, like, jumped all the way to the top of people's minds for a minute that at least

means the next time we have to talk about it, everyone is initiated into the vocabulary, which is good. Yeah, we, like, have a shared reality of AI chaos now, which is useful. Yeah. The thing that struck me about this one is it's the, it's the insanity story of the list. It is both the one that came completely out of nowhere. I think one of the things that hits me when we have big stories is when I think, oh, man, we should have seen that coming.

we should have been more prepared or had something ready. Did not see this one coming at all. Could not have seen it coming. It just dropped in the middle of the day and suddenly we're reading it all together. And we're like, wait, he's fired? Did that just happen? It also, as you mentioned, happened when nothing else was happening. Yeah.

Also for me personally, working on a story with Alex Heath while at Disney World, truly one of the most surreal moments of the year and potentially. If they were ever going to make a sports documentary about you and Eli, it would be that weekend. I'm just going to, I'm going to, there two things happen to me at the Outer Rim Bar at the Disney's Contemporary Resort. One, I talked to Alex about the story a whole bunch, which is just weird, right? My family's there at Disney World, like Mickey's singing or whatever Mickey's doing in the

restaurant, and I'm like talking about opening. The second is I went to the bar after a conversation, I sat down, and I was informed that there are regulars of the Outer Rim Bar at Disney's Contemporary Resort. and a bunch of regulars were there to watch football, and many of the regulars travel for hours to come to this bar. And I'm, like, looking around, I mean, it's not, it's just like, you know, it's like, it's one of those hotels where the middle is, like, wide open. And you can, you could see into the brunch spot where, like, Mickey was singing.

And I was like, you all come here and, like, we love it here. And I was like, I need to get out of Florida. Like, I need to go away. If you stay longer than six days, you never leave. I was like, I don't, and there are other cities. Yeah, there are other televisions, people. But, like, keep in mind, this is what was happening to me while we were doing the opening eye reporting.

I'm, like, a dead certain something that bled into the opening eye reports. The whole thing got more chaotic over time, which feels right for your situation. I was like, we all have to get out of Florida, metaphorically and literally. Next up on the list is FDC versus Microsoft. This is the story stream that, Tom Warren mostly did during the FTC versus Microsoft trial.

And a fun fact... The Activision trial. What it's at? This is the Activision deal. Yeah, the Activision trial. The fun fact about this one is that this is the only story on this list for which Google was not the top referer. Basically, any story that's going to have a long life on the internet ends up getting

a lot of traffic from Google because that's just how people find things. Google Discover, Google News, like Google is sort of the long tale of internet traffic. This is the only one on our most popular list where the number one traffic referer was the verge.com, which meant that people typed in Theverge.com to go find Tom's news about an Activision trial, and I think that kicks ass. Also, I think if the year wasn't ending now, Sean's coverage of Google versus Epic would have a similar traffic curve. It just happened towards the end of the year. The Microsoft case was earlier in the year. Also, you know, Activision is a little – this was a little sexier deal, I think. And the court case was more was revealed.

Yeah. I think one thing that I have taken away from all the trial coverage this year, and it's like a lot of it, it's a little overwhelming even for me and I love it, is boy, there's just a lot of backroom shamanigans at all these companies. We think these companies are just sort of like operating in the marketplace, and they are not. Like they are constantly thinking of like every possible way they can turn every single deal into an advantage. And that's, you know, Microsoft won this one. They obviously took over Activision. The FCC has appealed. We'll say how it goes.

But I think Microsoft's, people's perception of Microsoft changed after you, like, read a bunch of their internal emails about how this will happen. Yeah, this was a really interesting one. I feel like this was the kind of thing that just kept being interesting day after day after day after day after day. Like so many of these trials have sort of ebbs and flows. But FTC versus Microsoft is very compressed. It happened very quickly. And a ton of stuff happened. And we also learned that like Microsoft thinks it would be cool to buy Nintendo.

and it became a whole fight about Call of Duty. It was just like all of the biggest, sexiest names in gaming and entertainment, just yelling at each other. It was great. Next up on the list, buckle up because El Nino is almost here and it's going to get hot. Maybe the best headline we published this year. Nelai has a theory about buckle-up headlines.

Oh, it's not your theory. No, it's not my theory. It's Andy Hawkins or Transformation Editor. Every time we run a buckle-up headline and it does numbers, he just says, people love buckling up, which is totally true. Like, if you put buckle up in a headline, people like, I love to buckle up. I need to know what's going to happen.

Our climate coverage does surprisingly well. I think we have a young audience. People love it. People like being able to share the stories with like they're skeptical friends and family. Generally, there's a sense that like this is, this coverage is talking to an audience of itself. But Justine, our climate reporter and Andy, who's her editor, they do a really good job of making mistakes real. And I'm happy the stories. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. Justine does a really good job of covering climate stuff like for regular. people just living their lives day to day, which is cool. Okay, next up we have the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max launch. I'm actually surprised this was this low. Why? It's the iPhone. Like, I don't know.

The Verge is like founded on the iPhone being a big deal. It's an iPhone. That's true. Not the iPhone. Smartphones. Our early days were like, well, this Motorola phone. It won't. They put USBC on it.

And that's most of what we have to say. I wonder if we made this list over a long and appeared time for every year. We could track the sort of dominance of the iPhone by how high or low it is in the list. Because my sense is that it's trending down. Oh, that's interesting. Right. That like the newest iPhone is no longer the most important techniques of the year. And that has been the case for a while now.

There was a case, there was a time when it was the most important. means the year year for year. Yeah, I think that's right. It's still big. Like, I think to some extent it's interesting that it's the only

sequel device on the list. Everything else is like sort of brand new in some meaningful way. This is the 15th iPhone. Like, the GalaxyS-23 did not make the list. You know what I mean?

The Pixel 8 didn't make the list. So it's definitely in a league of its own in that way. But I do think it's true that I bet it has sort of fallen down the scale on Google Analytics over the last,

whatever, 12 years of the version. existence. Yeah. The flip side of that is that people are still really interested in the iPhone, which, again, if you kind of look in the broader press or the conventional wisdom or in the culture, there's a sense that people are over it. And then we look at our list and it's like, oh, this is still very high in this list. Like being up on the Verges traffic list represents a lot of traffic. The numbers on all of these are enormous, I should just say. Okay, next one, we have a couple more to do, and then we'll get out here. This is Microsoft's new discless Xbox

Series X design with a lift-to-weight controller. Richard, this was another FTC versus Microsoft thing. There was that run where we got accidentally a bunch of cool leaks, right? Yeah, a document was posted, I think, from Microsoft that accidentally didn't redact a bunch of things in it. And that revealed some of their future plans. And this is what we saw. The cylindrical Xbox Series X successor that maybe we'll see someday, maybe we won't,

their plans for a future controller, what they want for the Series S, what they want for Game Pass, all of these things. And this is the second time that we've seen these kinds of plans for Microsoft. There was a Ford of Liza leak years ago. Oh, yeah. And, you know, people just love these. I don't think there was anything that absurd about the, you know, kind of revealed in these documents. But just seeing a console that they haven't launched yet, and who knows, maybe they never will.

What was ridiculous. Yeah. And Phil Spencer had to put out a statement. He was like, no, this is a thing. We try everything. He was just like, he was very sad about it. The thing looks cool. I will say it looks great.

It does. And the thing, I continue to be very excited about the idea of a console that is actually just inside of a controller. And you just connect the controller to a screen and you can play that way. Like, that's the future. Give me that. Sadia was right about everything. And one of the things that we learned here is that Microsoft is looking at it that way too. They found, I think their phrase was that the controller is the hero.

And they're like, oh, you know, you can plug your Xbox controller into whatever and play Xbox game. Make it happen. in Microsoft. All right, last one. And Sony was like, the PS5 is weirder than ever. Do you like Spider-Man? Here's some.

This can only be, you can never put this on its side. Don't even try. Weirdly, no one had issues with us reporting on this one. Yeah, because it was in the trial. I mean, that's just like, whatever. It's like...

All right, we're gonna... We have one more on the list, but first I'd like to read you a handful of honorable mentions. Okay. We had stories about layoffs that were huge this year. We had a story about the steam deck that Sean wrote that was very good.

Ironically, he wrote it before the new steam deck came out. But it was a big year for the steam deck. Sean, the steam deck and the verge.com. It's just beautiful. Like, it just all comes together. It's just, it belongs together. Just don't leave, don't touch it. Leave it alone.

I agree. Josh Jezzo's piece inside the AI factory about like the real human labor behind AI was hugely popular. Really, really good story. Yep. It's been in a bunch of like best. things of 20203 lists I've seen recently. Go read that if you haven't.

Chris Persons' thing about modding his soda stream was really high on the list, which kind of made me happy. And then, Man of Chicago, Lewis's very recent story about SEO experts, which pissed off the whole SEO community. Thank you all for reading our story. Love that. But the last one on the list of the biggest stories of 2023 and one that I think absolutely deserves to be here.

Samsung caught faking Zoom photos of the moon. What is a photo? I'm doing it. I mean, this is it. This is proof forever that we get to talk about this as much as we want. Yeah, here's what I'm going to say. And I look, there's only half a joke. All right.

I love Liam, our producer. But any good podcast needs tension. You need to be fighting against someone who won't let you do what you want to do. And Liam is the one who says, I can't talk about what is a photo for an hour and a half every week. That's it. We're sticking it to the man. Every click on a what is a photo article.

It's a vote against Liam. No, don't. Liam is wonderful. No, no, no, I'm just joking around. But you need the tension. Big content's trying to hold me down. I actually love this story because it is a what is a photo story, which was genuinely like an ongoing news story all year.

It's an AI story. It's a like transparency in what we understand on the internet story. It's a like, what are your gadgets supposed to do for you story? It's like it kind of has everything all in one fake photo of the moon. And also the best thing about it. it is it requires you to understand that every photo of the moon is the same photo of the moon. Which is genuinely kind of mind bending. Like the thing about it that is the most interesting to me is like the stakes are zero because

you can never take a different photo of the moon. So like it, you, I could fake a photo of the moon today by just copying in a picture of the moon. And it's, I haven't lied to you because the moon definitely looked like that at that time. I love it. Let's just talk about it for another hour. No, we have to go. That's my list. This had been dug into in 2021.

It was a story that came back around and we'll probably come back on again. What? Yeah. There was a feature from 2021 where Input magazine talked about the fake detailed moon photos. And they kind of explained it then, but they didn't explain it enough. And that was why we had to do this all over again. Yeah. But I will say, like, a lot of people try to give Samsung an out.

it's not really faking it's like no you don't understand Samsung is taking the longest possible route to putting a clip art moon in your photos you don't need all this AI just just be like it's the moon right here's a selection of photos of the moon that you can have because they're all the same photo

your stupid eyes and dumb camera aren't required for this just print out this photo I really love that as a product that it's like every time you take a crappy picture of something your phone is just like it just like looks on the internet and it's like, here's a better photo of what you just... Would you like this one instead? We're so close to it.

Fireworks, concerts, just do it. The Eiffel Tower? Yeah, like somebody already did this. You're good. But the thing is, the difference with the moon is that no one in the world can take a different photo of the moon. Like the Eiffel Tower, like the Eiffel Tower is always changing. There's like dust in the air.

There's people around. There's French people whizzed by it with berets and cigarettes. The moon is just. there, man. It's been the same. Just give people a photo. I love it. Every time you take a picture of the moon, your printer starts and a picture of the moon comes out. It's amazing. All right, that's it. That's my list.

Biggest stories of 2023. It was a good year. Yeah. It was a pretty good year on the verge.com. Yeah. You got a good one. Thanks to everybody for listening to our show, which has been going on now since 2011. And then before that, even longer. we've got a lot of notes recently about how many people have been listening us to a whole time. Tell your children. Initiate a new audience.

It's going to be great. No, we had a great year. Sap was great. The Verge persists. We've got a huge year coming both in terms of what we want to cover, what we want to do, the features on the site we want to release.

I really do think that there's like a new internet coming and I want the verge to be right at the forefront of it. So I'm really excited about next year. I'm happy to work with these guys. I miss Alex. Say how to create a thing. if you see her gallivanting around the skies of America on Santa Sleigh.

And that's it. Happy holiday. That's the Vergecast. That's Vergecast. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Zander Adams.

And that's it. We'll see you next week.