The Vergecast - "After Steve" author Tripp Mickle / Fortnite’s back on iOS / Sonos’s voice assistant

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

Nilay Patel and David Pierce chat with Tripp Mickle, a New York Times reporter and the author of a new book titled After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost its Soul. They talk about the rise of Jony Ive and Tim Cook, the power struggle between the two, and how Apple is grappling with everything from building a car to managing its relationship with the Chinese government. After that, Verge managing editor Alex Cranz joins the show to talk about Starlink’s new Portability mode, HP’s super high-end new Chromebook, Fortnite coming back to iOS courtesy of Xbox Cloud Gaming, Sonos’s upcoming soundbar and voice assistant, and why Siri can’t seem to successfully close Nilay’s garage. After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul Starlink’s new Portability feature brings internet to vanlifers Now you can play Fortnite on iPhone or Android for free with Xbox Cloud Gaming Exclusive: Sonos’ next soundbar will be called the Sonos Ray Exclusive: Sonos is about to introduce its own voice assistant The HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook will start at $1,149 - The Verge Leak confirms Sony flagship headphone design, casts doubt on improved battery life Sennheiser’s Momentum True Wireless 3 earbuds have a fresh design and better ANC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, author Tripp Mickle joins the show to tell us about his new book, after Steve. Is Johnny Ive his real source? Then Alex Cran comes on to tell us all about this week in gadget scoops. That's coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of

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We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler 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, the form over function. It looks good. David. What's up, man? Hi, I'm David Pearson.

I'm your friend who will always loan you a billion dollars when you want to buy Twitter. There you go. Oh, by the way, I'm Nilai. I'm also your friend. I will not give you any money for any reason. We got a great show for you today. David and I are going to talk to you, Tripp Mickle, who just wrote a book called After Steve. We talked about the show last week. It's all about Apple in the 10 years after Steve Jobs died. Very much focused on Tim Cook and Johnny Ive. And then a little later, Alex Cranz is going to join us with talk some gadgets. David, you worked with Trip. I did. So we overlapped when we were both at the Wall Street Journal a few years ago. And I got to see him sort of spin up. on the Apple beat. And Apple, as we have all found many times, is an absolutely impossible company to get inside. Like, it's culture of secrecy goes way back. And it is, like, based on this being this tiny insular thing where, like, even the people who work there don't know what the other people who work there are working on. So I got to watch him sort of piece by piece, like, get inside the company and start to understand how it works. And I think he said he's been working on this book for like five years, which would track back to kind of when I started working.

with him. And he did a great job. Like most books I've read about Apple are about a product and they have this sort of one very specific thread. Right. And you talk to, you talk to suppliers and you talk to people kind of around this thing to understand like how a product came to be. But he got into like how the company works and talked about org structures and relationships between people and the kind of thing you just don't get a lot of. I really enjoyed the book and I know you did too. I did. I think you'll hear it when we talked to Trip. But, you know, the book is structured around two big characters, Tim Cook and Johnny Ive. And you can read it in a couple different ways.

All of those ways will make people mad. You can read it as Johnny I was the soul of Apple's design, and he left, and now Apple is this, like, services juggernaut financial company. I think a lot of people think that about Apple. And that some of that, there's evidence for that in the book. But that's not the whole book. You can read it as Johnny Iv got disengaged, and Apple's design went side. sideways with iOS 7 and the first generation watch, which was pretty messy. And then he left and everything got better.

You can read it as Tim Cook grew into the role and became very confident after taking over for Steve Jobs. Like there's all these ways to read this book. And like I said, I think all of them make everybody mad. But I think that's like the sign that it's, it has the reporting to back up all of those claims. Totally. And I think the other only one I would add to that is that there is just like, there's

an unbearable hugeness of Apple now that like the company. just got so big and had so much money. And like there's a there's a bit in the book about when Warren Buffett invested in the company. And there's this feeling of like, oh my God, this means like regular people's money now depends on the stuff that Apple does. And just like what that did to the culture of the company and the fighting internally and all the people who wanted to be in charge of things. And everybody's making hilarious amounts of money along the way. And it's, it's just wild. But yeah, you can kind of take anything away from it you want. And you're probably right. Yeah, and it's, again, I think it's because Tripp did a great job reporting it.

That's enough of us. We should actually just talk to Tripp. Here we go, Tripp Mickle. Trip Mickle, you are the author of After-Steve, a book which on this very show I described as making everyone mad. Welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks so much for having me. I like getting people riled up. That's why I'm here.

Yeah. The book is absolutely fascinating. It is about effectively a relationship between Tim Cook and Johnny Ive, famous appell. If you're listening to Vergecast, you know how these people are. I don't know what you're doing here, but it's about Tim Cook and Johnny Ive and how they grew into their roles and out of their roles after the death of Steve drops. Why did you start chasing this book down? It's interesting. When I landed at the journal in 17, after coming off what we called the Sin Beat, alcohol and tobacco, I had a cup of coffee with John Markoff.

And he was like, you know, one thing you should really look into is Johnny Ive and the battery. And that's about all John said. And I started asking questions and learned pretty quickly that Johnny, was growing disillusioned with Apple. And I just thought that was so interesting. How could you help build this great company and then begin to kind of fall out of love with it, so to speak? It just made me wonder what was behind that.

And so I just kept asking more and more questions. And eventually he left in 2019. Did this start out to be kind of a Johnny and Tim story? Because part of what was so interesting to me about this is like the initial frame is like it's the story of Apple's decade. Right. And then almost immediately it's the Johnny. and Tim's story, which to some extent makes sense, right?

Like, they're the two most important people at the company. But, like, was it obvious at the jump that, like, those were the two main characters of this story? The privilege that you're granted when you get to do a book is you're given time to think and let the story kind of unfold as you think through structure and you're, and what you're focused on. And from the outset, I was planning to do the decade at Apple after Steve Jobs. That was really the intention.

But the more I looked at that, the more I felt like the best way to do that, you know, to tell that story was by chronicling the history of Johnny and Tim. And so for a lot of readers who come to this, they're going to say, well, why am I getting the history of Apple all over again? I've learned this from Isaacson's book, etc. But you're going to get a different window into that because you're going to be looking at Apple's history through Johnny Ives' work and then through Tim Cook's work. And it just lent itself to tell the entire Apple story through these two characters and figures

that are so prominent at the company. And really, we're who jobs set up to lead the company forward. It kind of naturally evolved that way, honestly. Yeah, so one of the central dynamics in the book at Apple is before Steve Jobs dies, he anoints Johnny is the absolute head design and says, I set up the company so no one can get in his way, and then no one got in his way. And some of the products went completely sideways. meantime, Tim Cook is casting about for Apple's next big thing.

And I don't know if anybody remembers that first year, 2011, 2012. Tim Cook was like going on TV and saying, we're going to do it, we're going to do TV stuff. Because Jobs had ended the book by saying he'd finally crack TV, which seems like just a masterful troll at this point. It is very unclear what he meant when he said to Walter Isaacson and I've cracked it. And so Apple like chases after it for a year and they chase after a car and they do all this other stuff. And it seems like Tim Cook is looking over there, and he's given I've control over the product portfolio, which, I mean, Apple is like the most successful company in the world, but some of the products went completely sideways during this period, right? The butterfly keyboard. The phone's got thinner.

Like, it just, there's a really weird moment for Apple design in there. That's my perspective from the outside. But reading the book, it seems like there's actually more tension between the two than ones ever revealed. I mean, it's an unspoken power struggle kind of over what will be core. to the company's future. You know, Tim needs a new product category, essentially after Steve Jobs' death, because that's what the outside world is demanding and pressuring Apple to deliver. There was a lot of expectation for that. And Johnny Ive was a natural person to bring that forward. And the watch was that answer. Ultimately, that's what they went with. And then at the

same time, Wall Street's never satisfied. So Tim Cook has to almost think about, well, what's the next thing beyond that? And the answer winds up. being the services business that Apple unveiled really officially in 2019, but was gradually building through the course of the B-Tacquisition and some of the other product introductions along the way. I think power struggle is a really interesting way to put it, because there's a weird dynamic between the two of them where they never seemed to fight. I kept waiting for like the meeting where Johnny and Tim like had it out. And it never really happened. They just sort of increasingly like diverged paths. And Johnny did his thing.

while Tim did his thing. And because Tim is CEO and because they were making a hell of a lot of money, Tim's way kept winning. And Johnny just sort of fell further and further apart from everything that Apple was doing and then started to distance himself and everything went away. But it was just so interesting to me to watch just like Tim just sort of like subsume everything, at least as far as I could tell, without any particular like angry power grab over the design team. Well, some of that's just a reflection of Tim's own inscrutability, right? I mean, there's this, there's a certain degree of unknowability about him. His relationships with people aren't as strong as, say, Jobs' individual relationships with a lot of people were. And so it's a natural outgrowth of that.

And then also Tim's decision to be deferential to the creative people. The way Apple was structured when Jobs was alive was at the center of it. And the creative people were in the ring right around him. And that's what he was kind of migrating around. I mean, from meetings, with design team, to meetings with the software people, to meetings with the advertising people, to come up with the next creative ads and everything else. And then beyond that and the ring outside of that, whereas operations and finance and legal and some of the other aspects of the company. And what happened when jobs died and Tim Cook became CEO is all of a sudden the operations people came to the interior of the company. It's almost like throwing a rock into a pond and there were

just ripples that kind of flowed across everything and everyone tried to reassess how they fit into this new world. And Tim's choice in that new world was not to try to replace Steve, not to get involved in a product because he didn't feel comfortable doing so. How do you see that playing out with things like beats, right, where he actually brought in some very powerful creatives? Like, the idea that Trent Rezner was ever an Apple employee is like, to me, very funny. Right? Like, it just doesn't track. But, right, he buys it. his company because he wants to get into services and he sees that they've already built something they want. He's got a headphone company to deal with as well. That's a big integration.

It's like still one of Apple's biggest deals ever. But he brought in these huge creatives that, from my perspective on the outside, never really did anything. But in your book, they're like in the background of a lot of things in complicated ways. Like, how did that dynamic play out? There's pressure at that point in time, right, to satisfy Wall Street, deliver more growth. And one of the easiest ways to deliver growth is to acquire it. The fascinating thing to me in reporting this and the fascinating thing to a lot of the Beets staff who were acquired was once they got inside Apple, they realized that Apple had been at work already on building out a subscription music business. But there was some, for whatever reason, there was some dissatisfaction internally with what that looked like and a feel that they needed some help from the Beets creative team. So that's why they went out and they brought in beats.

They refashion beats. They release Apple music. It's, of course, flawed. And then, you know, lo and behold, not that long afterwards, all of the beats staff kind of peel away eventually because this is a giant company with very well-defined rules. And it's not kind of the, I don't know, the kind of rambunctious, rebellious place that Jimmy Ivan had fashioned at beats music.

But that to me is like, right, as Apple becomes a, this bigger content company and that they've got these big Hollywood ambitions, the interplay between the inscrutability of Tim Cook, the nature of Apple's brand, and then the reality of making good art, whether that's music or movies or whatever, those things are like in conflict. And that seems like one of the hardest challenges that Tim very personally has been dealing with outside of Johnny Ive making iOS 7 look insane, right? Like it seems like that was more of a distraction than the products, which is really fascinating to me. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I think while I was at the journal,

we had a, we had fun with a piece about Hollywood adjusting to Apple's arrival and its expectations for what content should look like and include. And there was some real trepidation inside Apple early on about showing anything with too much vulgarity, nudity, et cetera. They really wanted kind of a clean cut image. And they've since a band. some of those inclinations and they've adopted a bit more of an HBO style approach. There's obviously some, I don't know, some interesting content, like within the morning show and everything else that suggests that they've made peace with being more dynamic. But I found it fascinating to see that they won a Best Picture for Coda, which, for all

intensive purposes, like, Disney could have made that movie, right? I mean, it is a really feel-good film. Yeah, it's the exact kind of thing that I'm sure Tim Cook was, like, thrilled to win. for. Whereas, like, I've been watching the show Shining Girls on TV Plus, which is basically just all about women dying and being murdered. And going back and, like, thinking about that piece you did where Tim Cook is, like, mad that there's cursing in some of the shows is like, boy, things have changed. And part of that speaks to, too, this, this kind of like persistence and cautiousness that they approach things with now. I think for a lot of people, that's, that's been the jarring thing about

watching Apple lately is they remember the 2000s and kind of all the perfect products that they felt like they just arrived perfect. Some people forget that it took a little while for the iPod to be as great as it was, but they have this recollection of it being a perfect product. And they're watching and struggling with like, well, why are they only having like 10 shows on this new product that they've launched? You know, why is it taking so long to build this? Why is, why is Major League Baseball? Why are there three people in the booth and why are they, you know, why are they struggling to explain what's going on in the game? There are these like moments of imprecision that people are unaccustomed to, but I think that's emblematic of this giant company trying to get things

right and having the leeway to do so because it's got so much great reach with how many people who have an iPhone and everything else. So the reason I wanted to start with like TV and content and just lay that foundation, because right now it's very clear that Tim Cook cares about Hollywood and he wants celebrities on his streaming platforms. I think that's all just a cover for the real services revenue, which is in-net purchases and games. And he gets to talk about Reese Witherspoon said. But it's very clear that he's engaged that part of the industry. Like Hollywood and Apple are very close now. But a huge part of the book is Johnny Ives saying, we're a fashion company now and bringing in a bunch of fashion people, especially around the watch,

and losing focus on products. Like he's like, there's a line. I actually said, I took a picture of the book and sent it to Walt Mossberg, where Johnny is like, our future is in the hands of like Anna Winter or not Waltzberg. And Walt was like, well, it turned out that we're still pretty important. But that dynamic, right, you see, I'm just curious how you see that evolution, that they went really hard at fashion with the watch. You know, it distracted them for making their products really great, the watch in particular. But now they're back to Hollywood.

Like, they're back in that same cultural sphere. they tried really hard with Johnny, but Tim has sort of like diligently got himself back into. It's interesting that you raise that and you bring up the fashion thing. I really wrestled with that and came into reporting on that with the same mindset that a lot of people look back on that period with this day and age where they say like, why the heck did they do that? And I was curious about that as I went into it and I left through my reporting somewhat persuaded that that actually was not a misguided focus. There's a scene that a lot of people point two who worked on the watch from the Devil Wors Prada, where the woman who's kind of

playing the character of Anandwinter, upbraids the Ann Hathaway character over having on this cerulean blue sweater and not realizing that it was introduced in fashion two years earlier. And the entire reason that Gap is selling it is because that it was on a runway two years before. And internally inside Apple, for those who kind of were on the fashion-leaning side of this thing, that was important because they were introducing a watch that was going to look identical. And if you, if you think back to your early reviews of it, that was one of the things I think you struggled with was, well, this looks the same from, from on everybody's wrist. And that's not the way watches typically were. So they needed the endorsement of society's

tastemakers in order to get that thing off the ground. The problem was that maybe they leaned too far into that. And they had to course correct relatively quickly and get into the fitness aspect of it so that people could use it. But really, ultimately, the problem was it just didn't have any battery life. Like if you look back, you know, it just, you know, it was dead. Half the time it was on your wrist. Like, that's, that's not the most useful product. Yeah. The thing that really jumped out to me was that, like, there's a lot of the Apple marketing team in this book, which I think is appropriate. And, like, I've had, I still remember a bunch of years ago an Apple exec who was, like, leaving the company, he was talking to me, and they were like, yeah, the only smart people

who work at Apple are all in the marketing team. And they're kind of all over this book. And the thing that struck me about the watch thing was that, like, the fashion piece of it was smart marketing. I think you're right. And they were like, they were talking about it as like the most personal device. They had all these different bands. And like, there's a world in which that could have worked. It's just that the product wasn't that good. And there's so much of it in this book where it's like, Johnny really wanted to build a watch. He didn't really know why. The health stuff didn't really work. The fitness stuff wasn't ready. The battery wasn't very good. It's just like they didn't have the thing to sell in the same way that they did with the iPhone.

So if they had like had a very good product and then sold it as fashion, it would have worked. But that was the only thing it had going for it in those earliest days. And the only thing they were selling about it. And it felt like that to me was where it was like, okay, this is just the part that they missed. And that's some of the shakeout that you see kind of post Steve. There's a great moment at the end of one chapter as they're about to launch the watch where you have the lead engineer pull aside Jeff Williams. and say, Jeff, I got to ask you a question.

If you came to work today and you forgot your iPhone, what would you do? And Jeff said something to the effect of, I'd go home and get my iPhone. Like, I need my iPhone to make it through a day. And the engineer looks at him and says, well, if you forgot your watch, what would you do? He said, I guess I'd get it when I got home. And the engineer's point was that's the reason we can't launch this product. It's not ready. It's not something people need to have yet.

I think they've gotten there over time, but it's taken quite some time to get there. So two things. One, I love the double wars Prada. I watch it whenever it's on TV. It's a good scene too. It's a good scene. And I think that I'm in Hathaway, and my wife is always reminding me that I'm actually going to be.

It's a real problem. Explains a lot about how the verge works. But in that, I just want to put our focus on the watch as a gadget, right? My pushback, when I wrote the review of the first watch, was like, this thing is a mess, right? It's actually not a very good gadget. And maybe you can talk all this game about fashion, and you can tell me that the digital crowns,

is a revolutionary input device on par with the mouse and the touch group, which is what they said. Right? But the underlying work to make this thing a great gadget isn't there. And it's when they made it a great gadget that it became this huge success. And they didn't actually need all the fashion focus. If they had just made a great gadget from the jump, the fashion stuff would have just come along for the ride. That feels like to me where Apple got lost. When they started taking for granted that they would make great gadgets,

and the industry would follow them. And what they really were was like a lifestyle company, right? And that's where you get, at least from my perspective, as just someone who thinks about the products themselves, that's where you get, well, we're going to take all the ports off the computer. And you're just going to, Johnny Hyde is going to change the industry because he wants fewer ports on the computer. Or the phone's going to be a little too thin,

and maybe it'll bend a little bit more easily than it should, or the battery life will be really low. and then he leaves and like Apple corrects that stuff really fast, right? They go back to making really great gadgets. Is that all Johnny in that moment that's like pushing it towards more aesthetic features or is it a push and pull? It's certainly a consequence of his philosophy and a push gradually towards thinness. And a lot of people will come at this book and be like,

why didn't you write about the butterfly keyboard and the fiasco there? And anytime you're a writer, you guys can appreciate this, you do this all the time. You've got to pick and choose. You got to make choices. And especially with something like a book, it's got to connect across like a long period of time. That was something that I chose not to focus on because in my reporting and you all's reporting may differ from this, I kept hearing that that was more of an engineering shortcoming than anything else. And that engineers had allowed that to happen rather than the designers. Now, philosophically, what were the engineers trying to do, fulfill the expectations of designers

who wanted things to be thinner, that those were kind of the marching orders and is partly an outgrowth of this culture that was directly descendant from Jobs empowering design so much and turning these guys into kind of the Jedi's who can do no wrong inside of Apple, right? That worked when Jobs was there as an editor, but it got out of whack when they were, I guess, left to their own devices. Well, and wasn't it jobs who I was used to say, like, design is how it works, right? Like, it feels like that's the part that seemed like it just sort of fell apart over time to the Eli's point that, like, and I think you even kind of say it at the end of the book

that it became like a form over function company. And then Johnny is off like spending helping build an office where people keep running into the glass walls and which is just like, what a perfect metaphor for the whole thing right there. And he's spending his time on this like one like a camera and work. about the soap dispensers on his plane, and you could just sort of feel it fall away into fashion, right? It's like, it's not about how the thing works. So let me ask the hard question to follow up on David's point. I think everybody should read

this book. It will make everybody mad in different directions. It's a good time. I would say the most, based on the excerpts that have been published in the Times and elsewhere, the thing that is like most focused that sort of anger is the sense that the book is about Tim Cook letting Johnny Ive get away, right? And that Johnny I. drifting off and not feeling engaged is somehow an error, and Apple has lost its magic because of that. I would argue that actually he should have clipped Johnny earlier and let him go when he was on his way out the first time and spared the company that weird middle period where his focus was split. That's my read too.

But I think a lot of people are mad about that idea too. So like where do you come down having written this whole thing? I think that's a fair point. You can pick apart flaws in what both men did. And then you also have to ground those flaws in the fact that both men were grieving. And that's something that I think is just fundamental that gets misplaced whenever you talk about this company. Like for those who worked with jobs, you know, his death and the fallout from that and having to come back to work and facing criticism and expectations externally, that's really hard. That's really hard to deal with.

And in the wake of that, they galvanize themselves around the watch. And one of Johnny's errors in doing that is he takes on a bunch of other different projects concurrently with it. He takes on the watch. He does the like a camera at the same time. He's working on Apple Park. And in addition to that, forstall is fired. And he assumes responsibility for an influence over the software design and the user interface. And all of a sudden has dozens of more employees that he's responsible.

for. I mean, jobs had kept his responsibilities pretty narrow in terms of like bureaucratic responsibilities of like HR and managing staff and so on and so forth because he wanted him to focus on design and dreaming up products. Tim Cook allowed those things to happen. And also, if you talk to people at Apple on the creative side, one of their frustrations is that he didn't turn to people who had a sense of how to work with creatives and either listen to their advice when they said like, hey, go by like see Johnny in the design studio, work with your talent and recognize that talent has different needs than some of the people you work with in operations. And so they were working inside the same company, but really just speaking a totally different

language. And that's where the breakdown is. I think there's shared shortcomings in that. And you're probably right. In 2015, if Johnny I've, if you were the Monday morning quarterback and Johnny Ive came to you and said, like, look, I'm burned out, I'm tired, I want to leave. The better thing to do is probably just let him go. You're right. But Tim Cook was so afraid after taking over the reins of CEO that the core leadership group that Jobs had left behind would abandon him, that that was something that he just couldn't stomach the idea of Johnny Ib going at the time.

People said that he didn't want to be remembered as the CEO who let Johnny Ive walk out the door. So the interesting juxtaposition of your book coming out is, It's coming out right next to Tony Fidel's book about building things. Fidel was obviously at Apple. He was just on Decoder last week, and I asked him, you know, Steve Jobs managed this team of gigantic personalities. It's Scott Forstall and Tony Fidel and Johnny, and just down the line, these are huge forceful characters. And you look at Tim Cook's Apple, and it's not there anymore. That just feels like the best U-2 fan club that has ever existed in the aisle drive.

Heston Martin's around together. And that's obviously a very cultivated image. Fidel's point to me was, look, you just don't know about the absolute blood support politics inside of a big company unless you see it. But that is the image that Cook wanted. He did let go of Forstall, who was the biggest personality in that team, had the most forceful vision for how the software should work. And he has sanded off the rough edges of the company.

Do you think that's, I mean, obviously Apple's, like, very successful. So by one metric, it's worked. But do you think it's worked? That's what you lost when you lost jobs. Jobs. You lost an Uber ego who really enjoyed managing other egos and could do it because his word was final and everyone respected him. He was able to kind of balance those things. And what Tim Cook saw to create was a more egalitarian world where everybody had a voice and came to some consensus before charting a path forward.

And for Johnny Ive, that was incredibly disorienting, right? He had historically been sheltered from those kind of conversations, and all of a sudden, somebody with artistic sensibilities and an aversion to conflict was thrust into a world where he had to build consensus to achieve what he wanted to do. It just stood in such contrast to what they were accustomed to. The force-call bit, to me, is still fascinating. I don't know what the answer is to this, but not only had he jostled, as Tony Fidel put it, had some sense of blood sport, political blood sport behind the scenes,

before Jobs' death, but he was also understood by his peers to be the only one who considered himself to be capable of being the CEO of the company. So Tim Cook takes over, and who's the first person out the door, it's the only other person who really considered himself potential successor as CEO. I don't know. I mean, I just think that's really interesting choice. We got to take a break, but when we come back, we're going to talk to Tripp about how Tim Cook became adept at working over politicians.

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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. We're back with Tripp Michael. A big piece of the book is Tim Cook having to become a politician. So I would, right, he's got to manage all these egos. He's got all this Apple stuff. if he's handling the internal politics of Apple, but then there's just the rising pressure for Tim Cook to handle actual politics and to be Donald Trump's best friend.

It's a great moment in the book, by the way, when it just like you just like turn the page and all of a sudden it's just like, oh, and then Donald Trump happened. Yeah. Donald Trump happens. There's a trade war in China. There's a moment which is not in the book, but I think it's a signature moment of that Cook era where that he allows Trump to announce a factory that already exists. and it's just a dead lie. Like the factory was there before, making the same product before, and Trump got to re-announce it.

And this is just him learning to play a game that maybe he didn't want to play, but now he has become quite expert at. How much of that, as you were reporting out, came to the fore that this actually became existential for Apple and became more important than butterfly keyboards? Yeah, it's there for two reasons because it is existential for Apple. And in many ways, it is more important than the butterfly keyboards. It's representative of what Apple's become, which is a $2.5 trillion empire unto its own. It's really a geopolitical force in the world, not unlike the U.S. government or the Chinese government.

Both are dependent on them on Apple. The U.S. government, because it's such a central part of our economy, and China, because it employs so many people in China, you know, who are working on the iPhones and everything else. hope in people reading that is they have a deeper appreciation for what Apple is today versus what it was in 2011 when Tim Cook first took over. These are the type of concerns that are really taking up his day. There's a certain extent that that just seems like it was, it was coming anyway. Like, it's a really interesting sort of what if to imagine, like, how Steve Jobs would have dealt with those same things because you can't see Trip. He just shook his head very strongly. Yeah. Because some of them were coming anyway, right? Like,

I think there's a lot of Apple that has sort of led this to happen, like, the way that Apple decided to work in China and the way that it decided to think about privacy and stuff like that. But, like, Donald Trump was going to get elected president no matter who was the CEO of Apple, right? And so I think it just is an interesting sort of sliding doors moment to see, like, how would that have gone under a different CEO? And would they have had to sort of learn how to play the same game? There are a lot of people who've worked closely with Tim and just have complete admiration for the job he's done. And they just think that if jobs were in charge that the company probably would be much less valuable and that everything that would have

happened in the Trump years would have just been a total fiasco and disaster. So full credit to Tim for being able to not only increase the company's value financially, but also navigate those political, those chubby political waters that he did in that period. And honestly, like, that's probably more urgent for the company going forward, you know, what they're going to, what they face in relation to China, then whether or not. not they're going to make a car. I know that's disappointing for listeners of the Vergecast, but that's, I think that speaks to Apple's role in society today in a way that you would have never imagined it would in the 2000 to 2010 Camelot era of Apple and all these amazing products.

I'm just curious who to read on this. I would say that Cook's ability to manage Trump and China and the trade war in the increasing political scrutiny and regulatory scrutiny of Apple, on the one hand, his greatest success, right? He's done a. masterful job at that. His, I think you called it, his inherent inscrutability, I think, is an amazing asset. You know what Elon Musk thinks. Do you know what Tim Cook thinks? You do not, right? And I think that's an asset for him. On the flip side, there are some values that he's very clear about, right? He very obviously believes in human rights. He very obviously believes in equality. He came out of the closet publicly to inspire young people. And then you're like,

but you do all this business in China and you just brush this stuff under the rug. And that, it might have been his greatest success, but you could also levy it as the greatest criticism of Cook that he has made this deal and he will bend to the Chinese government because that's his only path forward. And because he's so inscrutable, like, I don't know how he feels about that. But does he like walk the streets at night, like contend with this deal that he's made or does you just like go to bed on a bed of money? It's impossible to answer without asking Tim directly, you know, about how he feels about that.

it's not something I was able to get into from people around him. And I think it's become something that's become more pronounced as I've finished the book because I think we have a deeper appreciation for the plight of the Uighur community in China and the human rights violations that have taken place. That's become more pronounced over the past year, year and a half, not to mention like we're seeing all these like severe lockdowns in Shanghai and some of the trauma that that's created as well. when it comes to that disconnect between what he says here at home and what, you know, their presence and dependency on China, that's going to be the one thing that they're going to really have their feet held to the fire over, especially if there's a change in congressional leadership in the coming months and next year.

We're already seeing some of that from the FCC and Brendan Carr, who wrote a pretty critical letter about Apple and how it has this position on privacy. and how there's a disconnect between that position on privacy and it not allowing Voice of America in China because the Chinese government don't want it to be available there. That to me is very complicated, right? There's a long section in the book about the FBI and encryption and then the out in that conversation all the time as well. But in China, you just let ICloud be hosted by the Chinese government.

Why wouldn't you just let us do that? Why wouldn't you provide us that kind of access? And their answer is always, well, because in America, we really respect privacy and we would never let you do this. But in order to do business there, we have to accept the laws of the country. Right. But you never see Tim Cook, like, put those ideas together himself. Right.

You don't see him say that in the congressional hearing. You don't hear him grapple with the contradiction. Then I'm just one, like, if you think that that, like, having done all this reporting, when that moment comes, which it might, if Congress flips or there's a new president a few years or anything, if Brennan Clark continues trying to angry. letters. I know, Brennan. It's fine. How do you see the company contending with that and keeping focus on the stuff that makes Wall Street happy? It makes Wall Street continuing to make the products they need to make, right? I mean, you're seeing them kind of wrestle with how to deal with that as they try to spin up manufacturing in India and Vietnam and elsewhere and really struggling with trying to find a way to move on from China and diversify their supply chain beyond China.

That's really the only answer. I mean, because up to this point, there hasn't been a plan B. But they've got to reduce that dependency. Otherwise, they're going to continue to run into the type of headaches that they announced in their most recent quarter, where they're saying we're going to have $4 to $8 billion less than sales because there's a COVID outbreak and people can't get into the Shanghai factories. You're looking for something more pointed. Like, when is Tim Cook going to comment on this? Yeah.

I mean, Tim Cook is fond of this turn of phrase often, particularly during the Trump years, you saw it around immigration, where he would say something to the extent of, I wish Trump would put more heart into this. There's a great scene in the book, right, where he goes in to meet with Trump as part of this giant CEO meeting, or right before that meeting, Axios has a teaser story that says, Tim Cook's going to confront Trump on immigration. And so everybody from the Trump administration comes in there and is like wide-eyed for this moment when Tim Cook is going to challenge Donald Trump about his immigration policy and totally afraid of what Donald Trump's going to say back to him. And they go through the whole meeting, it never comes up. And then as Tim Cook is leaving, he kind of quietly says to Trump on his way out the door, I wish you put more heart into your immigration strategy. And the next thing everybody knew, that wound up in Axios. And that was what was kind of broadcast back to the work, you know, back to Apple workers, Apple customers was Tim Cook confronted Donald Trump. But for everybody who witnessed this, this was a far more subtle interaction and subtle episode than some big squeeze.

And that's, that's just his style, right? We're not going to see him come out and say to Xi Jinping. Like, I really wish you would shut down all those Uyghur camps. that you have spun up in Ging-Gang, you know, so that we can continue to manufacture stuff there. Such a confrontation, we'd be, I don't know, naive to think that's ever going to happen. How do you think about the next CEO of Apple in that context then? Because, you know, he said to Carrey Swisher, I think a few months ago, I won't be here in 10 more years. He's already started talking about it.

Like, there's obviously a succession plan inside of Apple. It's what is the most fun game you can play in a podcast? It's talk about who might take over a company, right? It's right there with casting a movie. Who would play Johnny I? But when you think about the qualifications for the nexus of Apple, right, now it is just a company. You're not necessarily in the shadow of Steve Jobs in that way. It is very successful.

The product's really successful. The services business is built out. I think a lot of people look and they think, oh, it's a product person should run this company. But the argument you're making is actually you need a politician. You need an operator and a politician to run a company of this size because it is effectively a state unto itself. Yes. And that's what's interesting because the person who's most likely to step into that role hasn't demonstrated up to this point the type of statesmanship that we've seen from Tim Cook. He'd have to develop that. That's Jeff Williams, right? I mean, he seems to be the

successor in waiting. He and Tim Cook have worked together since their IBM days. Granted, they're, you know, similar in age. So there's that to contend with. But he's still the most likely successor. The one thing that he has that Tim Cook didn't have, if he were to fill that role, is more product experience because he led the watch product and he's been deeply involved in their health care efforts. And he also, before that, was fairly involved in the iPhone. And when Tony Fidel was fired from the company, he filled Tony Fidel's seat in terms of making some product-related decisions on the iPhone.

And a lot of people were quite impressed with the degree of savviness that he was. brought to kind of understanding both the engineering issues that they confronted, but then also some of the design sensibilities and aesthetic decisions that they were trying to make as well. In the realm of thinking about like where Apple goes next, the car comes up a bunch in the book, the like mythical Apple car that either will or won't exist. They just hired a new person. They just hired another Ford executive to run the car. It's a real pipeline from Ford to Apple back to Ford.

That's what you do. To Tesla to, yeah, it's good. It's great. But so the car factors in pretty prominently. And then there's this, like, great what if moment where it was going to be the watch or it was going to be the TV. And it turned out to be the watch. And it's like it is now my favorite alternate history. Like what if instead of getting super obsessed with watches, Johnny and I have gotten super obsessed with TVs.

But like as we're looking out towards sort of what's coming next, like my first question is, is the car ever going to happen? Like if you were a betting man, is there ever going to be an Apple car? Yes. Okay. And the reason I think it'll happen is I think they've got to move into a category that big. They just do. I mean, you know, the growth, the growth expectations of Wall Street will demand that they enter something that new and that ambitious. And we haven't, we've seen them kind of dabbling in health care for a long time, but we haven't seen them show the ability to turn health care into a real financial opportunity for the company yet, I would argue, beyond the watch.

I mean, that's still the primary income stream for health care. And Apple's tried pretty loudly with the health care stuff. Yeah, Tim Cook has said our biggest contribution to the world will be in health. But that doesn't seem to be. I think you're right that that is whatever that's going to be, it's not that yet. I would say the COVID tracking initiative did not stop COVID. No, no. I mean, how many notifications did you get about your close, close brushes with COVID through that?

The one thing that the reason I'm more, I left reporting the book more optimistic about the possibility and potential of a car was weirdly because of what they did with Apple Park and what they pulled off there. I know this is going to sound like a bizarre leap. Why are we going from cars to construction? But the big feat with Apple Park is that they took this incredibly ambitious design to make this curve glass that had never been made before in the world. They persuaded a German manufacturer to build a giant warehouse, to make this precisely curved glass.

And then in doing so, they not only built this unique building for themselves, but they unlock the possibility that architects and people in construction could start designing things with similar curvature. It's kind of radical to think about the idea that a company that makes electronics change the construction and architecture industry in a fundamental way. And so when you think about that and you think about like auto, you know, could they jump into the auto industry and change the way that's been done for some time? I mean, that's what makes me optimistic.

It's weirdly the design sensibilities and the design history, which is now, you know, Johnny Hives departed. So TBD, how that manifests itself going forward. But it's the operational sophistication and engineering talent of that company to pull off a feet like they did with a building that makes you look at the car thing and be like, Like, they could, they came into this. They could do something that nobody else has thought of or done. But why have there been so many restarts along the way? Because this is like, right, it's their white whale. I agree with you.

It's the next biggest market that they can enter. But they can't seem to figure out how or why or what they should do. It speaks to some of that political blood sport that Tony Fidel was alluding to. The book, the book hits on this. But basically at the outset, you had these two competing ideas for what the car could be. one of those ideas was that we just jump in super efficiently and we displaced Tesla with an electric vehicle. And the other idea was, well, if we're going to come in, we need to go full autonomy. And Johnny Hive was really the one who was pushing for that, that idea that we go full autonomy.

And this was in the kind of go-go years where we were all going to be riding around in autonomous vehicles. And that's just, I mean, I don't know. You talked to anybody who really believed that around 20, 2015, they've given up an abandoned hope that that'll ever be a reality until there's a major breakthrough in AI. But they were all by-ended, though, you know, the promise and the illusion of that in 2015. So that's been the biggest hold-up. That was a major problem.

It feels like there's a third notion there, which is, we'll just make an electric car like Tesla. We'll do this. There's a great scene in the book where Johnny Ive does like a fake Siri demo for Tim Cook with an actress pretending to be Siri in the car. That's just nuts. Everyone should buy the book just to read that scene and be like, imagine that actually happening because that is just nuts to me. But then there's like the third option, which is we'll just make software for everybody else's cars, right? And we'll just colonize all the other cars and Apple services will be in them.

And they seem to have vacillated between all three of these things. Where do you think they are now? Right now, literally what they're doing is they have cars rolling around on the streets with these mattress pads. I don't know if you guys have seen those locally. but there are these mattress pads that are atop the car and they look like giant iPhones in terms of what's driving around. So they're still looking to refine

the autonomous capability of it and then I guess combine that with some of the battery pack sophistication that they've developed over the years. So you think they're going full autonomous car still? How long do you think that? Do you think it'll be? God.

And no one wants to make this bet. This is how you get fired from leading the Apple. Oh, no, thank God, yeah. We should call the guy at Lyft, right? When were we going to all be riding around with cars that? Yeah, I interview a lot of autonomous car CEOs on Decoder, and they're all like, I'm not, I'm not making a prediction. Not at this time.

But you think they're going to do it. You think they're just going to keep piling money into it, and Wall Street's going to let them keep piling money into it. There's no shortage of cash over there. I don't know if you've noticed that, but I think they can afford to continue to bet on it. I think the bigger question is, and if you look back at the tension, it's like, who's going to step into that void? and provide some direction. That, to me, was the more interesting thing when you looked at the car project

was during the jobs era, jobs could come in and chart a path forward and everybody could rally behind that. In his absence, in this age of consensus, you increasingly have conflict without resolution. And that's what I think has been the hang-up. All right. Well, we are running out of time with you.

Thank you for giving us so much time. Just to wrap this up, you've now spent a lot of time paying attention to these two figures inside of Apple and how the company has worked. What do you think Apple's biggest challenge right now is? I think it's biggest challenge in particular for Tim Cook is finding his next pair. I mean, when I look back at the history of Apple, it's really stunning when you analyze it.

But Jobs built Apple with WOS, Jobs returned and kind of saved Apple with IVE. That was his key partner. And then Ive and Cook have been key to this past decade and the success that they've had, both in the development of services and the development of the watch and AirPods category. So who's Cook going to team up with now? I mean, if they're pressing issues are China and figuring out how to reduce their dependency on that, that's certainly something that Tim and Jeff can work on. Is it Johnny Shrugi?

Is Tim Cook's Johnny, really Johnny Shrugi? And it's going to be about ships that you can predict how much power is going to improve on machines on a given year. and you're going to be more focused on what goes inside the machine than how the exterior of a product looks. I mean, that seems to be the direction they're heading. But identifying that person and unleashing their talent is going to be key to their ability to get there. There's not a lot of chip talk in the book, right? There's not a lot of PA, semi, or Johnny Strudry. But this is actually the engine of Apple's success over the last two years in particular,

is that their chips design power performance, power consumption, far outpaces the entire industry. Their strategy to let TSM build the chips while they design them, set the model for everybody else. And the Mac is having a renaissance because they've moved to their own chips and they brought them in house. If I had to point to one, like, here's a criticism this book is going to get. It's not in there, right? Why is that not in there? This gets back to the choices that you have to make, right? You know, if you want to bring the reader along and keep the focus relatively tight, the company that I found myself falling and the issues that Tim Cook was most concerned with were developing services, right?

And then also dealing with these extraneous issues of the empire that he had built, Trump and China. They were less about the product and where the product was going. And by that point, Johnny was gone. I mean, the book does end in 2019. So when you say like the last two years, well, the book, literally the last page is Johnny Ibe walking out of the door. And that was summer of 2019. So you're highlighting a period that the book doesn't cover and these are choices you have to make. Yeah.

And there's like one line that you cut out at the end and it's like, and then Johnny Shrewgie peaked over. Watch Johnny. The sequel is called New Johnny. Right. Trip, this has been amazing. The book is really good. We could obviously talk for another hour. Like I said, it's going to make everyone mad.

which I think is the sign of success for a book like this. Everyone's bad in different directions. I have to ask this last question. You're not going to like it and you're not going to answer it, but I have to ask. Is Johnny I have the source for the scenes where Johnny I have is standing alone in rooms contemplating his own future? I can't get into the sourcing. But you guys know full and well, and it's been hilarious to watch Jonathan Martin and the guys who just came out with a book on Trump field these questions. Like, who gave you the McCarthy audio?

It's never who you think it is, right? It just never is. I mean, it's not the obvious person. And that's why people are having a hard time with the SCOTUS thing as well, who leaked this. Like, nobody's got a clue. It's just not obvious.

That was a really good deflection. I got that's well practiced. All right. Tripp, it's great. I recommend everybody. If you're listening to this show, you're going to love this book. You should go read it.

Congratulations, Tripp. It's great. We'll have to have you back on soon. Thanks so much. I appreciate you having you. We've got to take a break, but when we come back, Alex Cranz will join us for a gadget lighting round.

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We're back. Alex Kranz is here. Hey Alex. Hey, I have no new news about sexy clipy. Sorry. All right.

There's some gadgets to talk about. Yeah, there's a lot of gadget news this week. There's a bunch of gadget. Like, exciting, leaky gadget news. Well,

let's start with my favorite Starlink. Yeah. So I got an email. I think a lot of people got this email. If you're a Starlink customer, they will now let you move the dish around wherever you want and use it wherever you want, which is a big step.

Huge step. Because before you kind of like, Starlink divides the world into like little hexagon shapes and your hexagon is where you could be and if you left it, you got in trouble. Yeah. But now you can go to any hexagon you want. As someone who has never used Starlink to find trouble, like what would

happen if you previously tried to move your dishy? They would shut you down. Oh, okay. Like first it wouldn't work and then if you try to move it on the website too many times, they would like catch you. So you weren't allowed to like change. your location on the website too many times. Because they were just protecting the network. None of this is nefarious.

They're just like, but they've launched a bunch of new satellites. I think they have the capacity now. So they're enabling portability, which means you can take it anywhere. Here's the rub. $25 a month. Oh, or they're waving that fee, I assume, in Ukraine. I don't know what Starlin's price in Ukraine is like. They've raised the fees for everyone else.

So they went from 90 to 110 for the base service. And now if you want to move, move around with Starlink, you're at another 25. So $135 for your portable Starlink experience. You still can't put it on a car, which I think a lot of people want to do. But anywhere you are in a service area, if you pay the extra fee, you can set the thing down and it'll point itself to the sky and go. And am I right in thinking that Starlink has said it's working on the like you can use

it in motion thing? Because that seems like that's pretty clearly like the thing it ought to be is that it just works. Yeah. Yeah. Again, the technical limitation of Starlink every time is that even a single utility pole will degrade your service. But one tree will degrade. So yeah, you're driving around, but like if you drive next to a tall car, you drive next to a sunlight truck. Or any 18-wheeler? Like you're hooped. So I think there's a little bit of that for them to yet figure out. I'm pretty sure the answer, like all things Starlink, is more satellites.

like Tony Stark style like a suit of armor around the world. They're just going to follow you. The satellites will just be like drones. I think we just need to put satellites on drones. That's the next Starlink. They're launching more satellites. They're opening more service. And this is a big step for them because this is the thing you were not allowed to do before.

And when we reviewed it, I actually tried to give it to Monica where she had bad internet service at her parents' house. And Starlink was like, what are you? The police are coming. Stop that. And actually part of the thing that people had mad at me in the review, is like, you know, my house have got big trees. So to test it in a place where the installation worked,

I drove down the street to where there were no trees. And so then the criticism is, well, you were out of your service area. And I was like, I was just down the street. But now, for $25 a month, I can make that criticism go away. So watch out Starlink fanboys. I'm paying the money and coming for you. Re-review. I find

this super exciting. Like, as someone who does not have any need whatsoever in my life for Starlink, because I have, I mean, I was going to say fast internet, but as Liam our producer can attest, it's not fast, but it's internet at home, and it works fine. Like, the appeal of Starlink has never actually hit me as a person. But, like, now Starlink goes from, like, thing you get if it's your only way to get internet because you're somewhere far with bad connectivity or no connectivity, to, like, it now does things

that my Comcast internet connection won't. Like, I can take it with me on vacation, which is like a meaningful, real thing that I think is kind of cool. Doesn't your phone also do that, though? Yeah, but if 5G was real, this would be, 5G would be cool and exciting. But here we are. Right. Starlink doesn't have data caps yet.

They're not doing, like, they are a better, they are still an ISP and they, in their terms of service, have reserved the right to do all the bad things. Yeah. Right. You do too much torrenting. Starlink is looking at your packets and they will shut you down for copyright infringement, just like anybody else. But right now they're not doing any of it. I think question is, does the network have capacity? And also, traveling with Starlink is, like, it's an unwieldy.

and complicated thing. Like, there's a dish, there's a power injector box, there's its own custom router. That's all a lot, you know? So, like, you're trying to take Starlink through the TSA. Like, let me know because I want to be there on that day. Like, if you have an RV or you're, like, doing van life, I think this is, like, ideal.

I was, like, those TikToks of people building their vans so they can live off the grid. So excited for the Starlink episodes now. Notable Verge, expat, Evan Rogers, building a van on his Instagram right now. It's pretty good. Will he put Starlink in it? Probably, knowing Evan, like that's coming.

We'll get him to review Starlink on the road. Next lightning around item, this is actually really cool. So you can now play Fortnite on iPhone or Android in the browser through Xbox cloud gaming, which is like the browser's the out for all of these services and all the and that same app purchase stuff. It's pretty cool that you can do it. And this was like after Epic pretty notoriously didn't want to work with Microsoft for a long time because they're competitors.

And they're like, we don't want you to like. We compete with you. We don't want our stuff on your services. And then they're like, oh, in this particular instance, this is a win for both of us. And Microsoft gets to look very magnanimous. Yeah, I was like an enemy of my enemy as my friend moved, this one pretty clearly. Like, they both have a lot to gain from screwing up this whole app store thing. Apple has going on.

And this is like a pretty, it's a pretty good way to do it, actually. They're like, it's in the browser. It works. It's Fortnite magic. One of my favorite things is how Microsoft has just been egging everybody on in this whole saga. And they have their stake. They want an Xbox cloud gaming app. They've tried repeatedly to do it.

They can't. They're doing the browser. And so instead they're like just being friends with everybody else and being like, you know, that's right. That would be cool. We should be able to have our apps. Yeah. And they're putting out open letters being like, we're the most open company except for the Xbox. Yeah.

It's wonder. Like I just, I love Xbox. It's just like, don't pay attention to that side of things. But you wonder, right, Epic versus Google is marching right along. You have to think Google's going to be like, well, why is this a problem? You can just play it in the browser on Microsoft's platform. Look at how competitive this is. If you're Google's lawyers and you just had that thought just now, I don't know what you're like, you should.

Come on. You should have thought about this already. That should be first on your list when you've seen these like this. But I imagine we're going to hear this argument. So there's a little bit of like gamesmanship inside an announcement. What's the counter to that? I know the counter in this room would be, well, have you played things on the browser versus an app? But like, what's the legal counter besides being like, judge, judge, please play Fortnite on an app right now while we watch?

So for Apple, the counter to all the browser stuff was Apple Nerfs the browser, which is not really an argument you can make about Google, right? And there's other browsers available. You don't need to use the Chrome engine on Android phones. You can download other browsers with other browser engine. So there's a lot. I think that case is going to be the much more interesting. compared to Apple. Apple is interesting

because you got Tim Cook on a stand and the judge was yelling at him and like the Google case is like that's all deals right?

Google licenses Android the deals have the control embedded in the language of them so like I think there's more to come from that case

like I don't think the Safari team is like writing a contract with the apps team but like that's how Android works

like they have a contract with Samsung and with the carriers and like all this stuff so we shall see Chris Welch continues to just ruthlessly scoop the Sonos team about this new thing, the Sonos Ray.

There will be nothing left for the actual announcement. They'll just refer to the verge. I hope they'd go crazy at the actual announcement. They're like, it's actually a TV and Patrick Spence like pulls up. He's like, aha, I got you. It's like it's a projector screen that pulls up out of the sound bar. Yeah, exactly. It's actually a good idea. I'm just going to say, like a screen that pulls up out of your soundbar. It's a pretty good idea. It's a tiny little screen. But like short throw projector in my soundbar throws up on the, on the pull-up screen like you used to have in middle school, this is a good idea.

I just invented something. With the name Sonos Ray, it could be a short-throw projector. That's true. Ray is kind of a silly name. Apologues to everyone named Ray listening to this. Ray for the name of a sound bar is a silly name. And like,

maybe it's beaming rays of light onto a short-throw projector screen. Yeah. Well, it's $250. It's supposed to go on a matter of weeks. But the more interesting piece that also Chris Welch League, they're going to introduce their own voice assistant, which is fascinating. So as you know, Sonos and Google are tied up in patent litigation. All started when Sonos wanted Alexa and Google Assistant to operate simultaneously.

Amazon doesn't care because they're the winner. But Google apparently said no, very vociferously. That led to patent litigation, Patrick Spence and the chief legal offers of Sonos or on Decoder talking about it. But you can see, they're like, we'll just do our own to do the things we want to do. So in order to extend your platforms, they are building this home theater OS, there's job listings for it. But here's a really funny thing about this. So Sonos voice will be on all S2 Sonos devices that have microphones. So it will support Apple Music, Amazon music, Pandora, Dizer, obviously Dizer.

How could you forget Dizer? And then Sonos has Sonos Radio. It's Spotify and YouTube music are not on board. And it's like, well, yeah, obviously YouTube music is not on board. So close. Spotify's a big one. Yeah, I was like maybe YouTube like, I get it. People will survive.

But Spotify, that's a really big one to not have on there. Spotify's an interesting one in that range, actually, because Spotify has its own voice search thing that it obviously has incentives to get people to use. But also Spotify has been pretty open in working inside of this space. Like Spotify Connect is very good. It's everywhere. my guess would be, and I have absolutely no inside knowledge on this, but my guess would be that that is a, like, a timing thing rather than a philosophical difference because it, unless there's something we don't know about this voice assistant, it seems very surprising to me that Spotify would not be interested to be part of it. Or Spotify wants its voice assistant on there too. Maybe. Right. Because like, you know Sonos is like, we'll have Siri on there if Apple would let us. And Apple's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don't need that. You don't want Siri on your speaker. Siri exists to be launched by accident on my computer while I'm downstairs.

That's what Siri is here for. My current Siri moment is I've installed a smart garage opener. It's very fancy. So I leave the house and I say close the garage. And Siri on my watch is just like, I'm working on it. And it actually says that. It's the worst thing in the world. This is the dumbest thing that you can do as a computer.

You close a relay. That's all it's doing. Like, the box is very, it actually patches into the switch itself and just closes the wire. Like, it's not a complicated. I'm just imagining Siri is like a very tiny person hanging from your garage door, being like, come on. Get it down. It's like, I'm working on it. I'm going to just like, like, Doc Brown back to the future.

Like, I got. And then about 50% of the time it fails. Yeah, that's it. Whenever she says I'm working on it, you're like, Like, oh, I'm just going to have to say this in 20 minutes once you finish working on it and failing. Yeah. Like, every time. But it's funny because it, Siri, it suggests all these, like, very optimistic automation routines.

Yeah. Like, when we detect that you've come home and we're paired to the car, we'll open the garage for you. And I'm like, you can't open, you don't, you can't open the garage. Like, I don't. Yeah. What do you think you're going to? That's like me saying I'm going to run a marathon. Like, I'm definitely not going to do that.

I had her set up so where she was supposed to whenever. the camera detected motion and I wasn't home, it would turn all the lights red and sing that song I'll be watching you to really creep, freak out whoever had snuck into my home. But that it only activated when I would get home. Like, you wouldn't, like, the trigger that I was home would come later. So it'd be like, I'm watching you. And I'm like, no, I know. I made you know. Something's wrong. Alex, you don't know this way. I have to remind, I'm obligated to remind you that Siri on our show is an it. do not gender robots on the Vergecast. Sorry, I apologize.

It only comes up because Amazon is so insistent on gendering Alexa. It's rude. And it's like... They don't have gender. They're robots. Yeah. And not very smart ones. Yeah, they're very stupid robots.

I have a question about this Sonos thing. So I think, like, leaving aside whether Sonos can do this in a way that is good, which I would say, given Sonos's software experience, is just an absolute coin flip. Who knows? Sometimes Sonos does cool stuff. sometimes it's a total disaster. Coin flip, we'll see. I think this is a very good idea,

both for like strategic reasons because Sonos is just going to like middle finger Google and Apple and Amazon and everybody else who doesn't work with them. But also because my like longstanding thesis about voice assistance is that actually we should have lots of them and not just one. Like I want to talk to my TV by talking to my TV,

not by talking to Alexa about my TV. And I think like, Roku has worked on this in the past, and to be honest, has changed its plans so many times that I have no idea what Roku is doing with voice assistance anymore. But I think this idea that Sonos is like, okay, you want music. Talk to Sonos. Don't talk to Sonos. Don't talk to Sonos. I actually think is a really good idea for a bunch of reasons, especially as they want to get people like used to the idea of using its products in lots of different places.

So if they can pull this off, I actually think it's going to be really smart. And music assistants work. They're good. Yeah. And I also think they have a great. So I know they've told us, they've told everybody. They make products on microphones because a huge segment of customers do not want microphones and everything. Right.

Because privacy implications. So if you're Sonos and you're like, this isn't Amazon, this isn't whatever else, this is us. And what it does is it plays music, which is the thing you want to do. They throw in multiple timers. Like, watch out. Give you the weather? Like, yeah. Bezos, your empire will crumble.

Yeah, maybe not even the weather. Like maybe it's just that the things that people do, which is set timers and play music. Yep. And they're like, this is what we do and it's private and, you know, we're not going to sell you ads or we're not going to pop up and say, like, have you heard about the games? Like, we're just going to do the two things. Very smart. Question is, are they going to make you pay for it? Oh, that's interesting question.

Ooh, I hate that question. Like, is this like a premium sono subscription situation? I mean, that makes a lot of sense for them looking for, like, additional revenue streams. Like, everybody wants that consistent $5 a month. These customers all have money to pay, like, right? Who doesn't love recurring revenue? Well, and especially as they're going to start to like, if they're going to make headphones and they have these Bluetooth speakers, like being the thing that stitches everything together is Sonos's whole thing. And then add on to that like this amazing control system, I could absolutely see them charging for that. I feel like there's two things that will make this kind of dead on arrival, not having Spotify.

Yep. Like that's a huge one. And also the fact that if you already have other smart assistants in your home, you're now having competing smart assistants. and you have to remember their names and remember to activate the right one at the right time. Maybe that's just a me dead in the water thing, but I will forget the names immediately. I will absolutely call Siri what I mean to call Sonos

in the other way around because I do it with my dog and my brother now. Like, when one of them isn't even a human being, I will mess it up constantly. I think I'm with David, though. I think that's just timing, given historically or Spotify is, or Spotify demanding that they get their weird voice thing on there too.

We'll see. This Chromebook seems amazing. It's amazingly expensive. But I'm like down with a $1,000 Chromebook. So I added this one to the rundown, and that's the exact conversation I want to have, because this has been tried a bunch of times. And as far as I can tell, this new Chromebook, which is, it's called the HP Dragonfly. The HP Elite Dragonfly.

You're right. I apologize. The elite Dragonfly. It has, I mean, high-end chips. It has Intel's V-Pro platform. It gets super bright. It has an HDMI port. It's like it's a whole ass computer.

And it starts at $1,149. And I think the question I have been wondering for years is like, will anyone want to pay this much money even for the best imaginable Chromebook? And I'm actually really excited for at the idea that we're going to find out. They didn't do it with the pixel book. Why would they do it? What's the difference between this and the pixel book? Well, the pixel book is a little shaky. It was like a little too much.

Yeah. Right. I love it. I will say this. I bought my mom a Chromebook pixel who was $1,000. And it is the single best technology purchase I've ever made because you do not have to support that thing. Yeah, that's a web browser. It just goes.

And there's all the other stuff that Chromebooks can do now. Like they have. They can run Android apps for some godforsaken reason that hopefully Dieter will figure out. Hey, buddy. But like, it's just a web browser. And you like hand somebody a beautiful laptop that isn't like, have you heard about services revenue? we've opened the Apple TV app is on your laptop for some like none of that no no windows garb it's just like here's a web browser but it's beautiful like it's still my mom's like primary computer year and this is years now like maybe five years she's still using this thing and like well it's time to upgrade like here we go you're an elite dragonfly now mom you're a real gamer oh god if only it wasn't called the elite dragonfly I do love that this is the first one that's kind of like had a really good display, or sounds like it has a really good display. We haven't seen it in person,

but a thousand nits, like, that's nice. Yeah, the pixel book had those bezels. I wasn't about to put those bezels near my mother. I respect her. She's a brilliant and accomplished woman. I tried to say that I liked the bezels. And as I get older, I'm like, why did I say that? I was like, it's good for my fingers. When I'm in... You said you liked the bezels? When I was in tablet mode, it was really nice. I played a lot of fallout shelter on the pixel book. And it was great for that. And that's it. That's a wild take. And then I tried to put fuchsia on it and broke it. So. Yeah, I'm definitely going to buy this one. I can see it coming. And this is like a thing. There's, there's a, these are starting to trickle out. These computers that are like very good

computers that ordinarily like could have run windows one day and now are running Chrome OS. And I feel like if I'm Microsoft, that's real bad news. But as a person who loves Chromebooks, I think that's super exciting. Wait, it's just an I3? Oh yeah, that's it's it's a Chromebook. I mean, it doesn't need a lot, but also, yeah, it's an I three. I think it even has less, it has not a lot of storage, eight gigabytes of RAM, 128 gigabytes of storage. So for the same price, you can get a MacBook. Yeah, but the MacBook will like, the MacBook will just like find ways for Tim Cook to ask you for money at like the slightest provocation. The MacBook will, I mean, I got my mom one over Christmas and the calls about that I get. I feel. Oh, yeah. I'd still do it with the Chromebook,

but that's just because my mom's annoying. But like, I love to the eye cloud troubleshooting for me. You're a wonderful. It's the eye cloud troubleshooting. I can't do it. Well, she doesn't, she doesn't want anything in the, she's like, I don't want anything in the cloud. No one has ever cared about anything in my life as persistently as my MacBook has cared about turning on Wi-Fi calling. It's just like, I don't, I do not wish to ever receive phone calls on this device. I'm like, please stop it. So persistent. All right.

Last one. This is like Leaks week. It was. And this leak actually blew up. So the Sony's got new headphones. Yeah. I always get the name wrong. The WH dash 1000XMH5.

No, just XM. XM5. I think the H5s are the earbuds. Yeah. I always get this mixed up. Anyway, I have the XM2s. You know, they're great, but the battery's starting to go. And every year I'm like, should I get the XM3?

Should I get the XM4? And like, no, because they're the same headphones. But these are appreciably different, which is all the matters. Yeah. So these are still, these were my go-to airplane headphones and I stopped wearing, or my XM-2s were my go-to airplane headphones. And then I stopped playing airplanes. But now I'm on airplanes again. And I'm like, oh, the noise-canceling, like, noise-canceling technology has improved dramatically.

Yeah. So I'm in it. But Sony still has a problem, like everybody else does. If you have an iPhone, you're stuck with whatever Apple will let you do. So you can't do high-quality audio. You can't do it on-compressed. Like, you're just kind of stuck at Apple's sound quality situation, which I am sure the next versions of the AirPods will overcome in some proprietary way.

And like, you just have to look into your heart and be okay with that. Yeah. And truthfully, I think for most people, like the thing that Sony's have going for them, which is stupendously long battery life, especially if this leak is true and it's 40 hours. Like, that's a crazy number. really good noise cancellation. They're super comfortable. Like that's the thing about the Sonys that always gets me is just the...

They're like little clouds. Yeah, I can just wear them for like an eight hour journey and it doesn't feel bad, which I love. And I also think their microphone is really good, which is a thing that it's possible. I am the only person on Earth who cares about, but matters to me a lot. Yeah, I'm very excited about these Sony's, especially if they have, like the new design is a little sleeker. It has kind of a little sort of candy cane looking thing attaching the band. to the cups instead of just being like all banned.

And yeah, these Sony's, I think, have consistently been the best noise-canceling headphones for a bunch of years now and the XM-5. Since the XM-2s. Yeah. Right? Like, I got the XM-3s. I love them. I wore them to Taiwan and back.

Like, with my glasses on, which is normally like a recipe for pain. Totally comfortable. It was great. I mean, 14-hour flight wasn't, but the rest was really great. And like, yeah, they, they, you know. just, and the noise cancelling, like, the way Sony does noise canceling and their approach to it, where they don't kind of, the sound profile still, they still maintain quality in the sound profile, whereas Bose goes really flat. Apple goes really just expensive. Nobody wants to buy the Apple ones

because they're, I don't even know how they sound because they're. They're also heavy and weird. Yeah, and like these are like. The AirPods Maximin. Yeah. These are clouds. These are clouds that shut off the airplane for you, but still get you where you need to go. I haven't tried. new Bose ones. I have quiet comfort twos and they are so bad at low end that they're almost unlistable to me. I have the QC 45s, which are not like the highest end one but are pretty recent ones and it's exactly the same thing. Like I I love the way they sound. I love the way they feel. And if it is like if it's been if it has been breezy in the last five days, my headphones

will sound like trash and it sounds like I am blowing away in a storm. It's awful. Otherwise they're great though. But no, I think that like yeah, these sonies are very exciting. and I'm absolutely convinced that if they had a better or more memorable name, they would have absolutely already eaten the headphone market alive, but because no one could Google them and find them, we still have to tell people they exist. Yeah, I do this for a living, and I still can't say the product name correctly.

All right, we spent a long time talking on Tripmichael, so we are officially over on the Vergecast once again. Alex, thank you. Yes. Some stops to plug. You should listen to Decoder this week. Tony Fidel. It was a real ride.

And then obviously the Fidel conversation and the Michael conversation you just heard play off each other. Fidel, by the way, there's some people who are like actively and aggressively fact-checking his conversation with me on Twitter right now. Like X Dropcam employees. So that's pretty good. Alex has got her mini series. What's going on with creators this week, Alex? So this week we talked to Jacob Alexander, who is one of like the first guys who started selling keyboards online. People were selling keyboards online, but he was selling them on Kickstarter, making.

his own keyboards, and we kind of talked about where are the spaces and how we got there and where it's going to go next and how it's like small creators like him who are doing it. It was very fun. It was a great episode. And next week, we're going to talk to the guys from Plupy. No, no follow-ups. You've got to have to listen to find out why it's called Plupe. It was the first thing I asked.

It was great. Flupy's coming, everybody. You can tweet at us. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. David is at Pierce. I'm at Reckless. We'd love to hear from you. That's it.

That's a broadcast rocker roll. Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at the verge.com. And if you'd like to the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan.

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