The Vergecast - Amped on sparks

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

This week on Vergecast, our usual team of Nilay Patel, Paul Miller, and Dieter Bohn bring in senior editor, tech expert, and friend of the show Dan Seifert to discus Samsung and their new Galaxy Note 7. Dieter gives us his review of the Xbox One S, and the Flag Ship goes deep into Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages and what this means for the web. 01:28 - Xbox One S 15:43 - Google AMP 37:15 - Paul's "The gadgets have eyes" 41:16 - Galaxy Note 7 48:40 - Samsung 57:29 - TV talk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, hello, people, Yeager fans. This is the Vergecast. Chuck Yeager. Chuck Yeager. Here's what I'm going to tell you before the show begins, this show, the Vergecast, the one you're listening to. We've been talking about Forloko and Sparks. You might remember Sparks as an ill-fated energy drink with booze in it in 2002. And you might remember Forloko as an ill-er-fated energy drink with booze in it from 2006.

We literally had an argument of the timeline of the release and qualities of these beverages. They both appear to exist, but they've been, I would say, neuter. Yeah. Yeah, the man doesn't let them exist anymore. You know, neutered is like a really good word for that given they took Torrey note. Fair? Anyway, look, I'm sitting here with a beer and a Red Bull and I'm ready to party. This is the broadcast.

I'm Eli Patel. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter's here. Yo. I'm making the joke again. Don't do it. It's the Fabbitt edition.

Dan Siever is here because he reviewed the, not reviewed. He went to the Note 7 event. Yes. I played with a Note 7. I don't think you're a Fabblet. I think this is the Fabblet edition of the show. Well, thank you for clarifying. I love the functionality and flexibility of Dan, but he's hard to put in my pocket.

I'm not a one-handed experience. This shows over. I haven't even had the Red Bull or the beer yet, and it's already off the rails. It's a real four-local kind of moment. Anyway, we've got to get started. We only have Dieter for a little bit, so no conversation is coming. But Deeter actually reviewed the Xbox 1S this week. I did.

And it's a smaller, prettier Xbox. Tell me about it. It's a smaller, prettier Xbox. The speeds of it are technically faster, but in terms of, like, actual use, no difference. Like, sorry. Like, if you are incredibly, incredibly perceptive, you will notice some differences in, like, the menu or, like, the rendering of some games or whatever. But honestly, all this thing is is an Xbox that doesn't look like an insane, ridiculous VCR. Right.

And they got rid of Connect. And the PowerBook. And the PowerBook. Yeah, I always say the Xbox One, remember there's that great picture of the top of the Xbox one, the first one that was released, and the top of the PS4. And the PS4 is like a miracle of Sony hardware engineering.

And the Xbox was like Steve Bomber assembled the PC. You know, let's just put that in perspective. The PS4 was a miracle of engineering in comparison to the abomination that the original PS3 was. The original PS3 was a supercomputer. And I will not have you speak of it. It was round. It was...

Glossy. It was large and in charge. It had an emotion engine. It was bulbous. Motion engine. Cells and everything. All right, so I derailed that with a 10-year-old talk of PS3. Hey, look, there's still people who want to talk about that.

No, but this is like a mid-consul cycle. So, like, talking about the cycle of consoles that's relevant here. So they... They're a mid-consul cycle console. Anyway, it's three years since the first one came out. Sometimes we wait a little longer for, like, the slim edition. But the original Xbox has not been doing super one. well. So they put this thing out. It's 300 bucks for the cheapest one. You can spend 50 or 100 bucks

more to get more storage. And I don't know what to tell you. It's an Xbox. And the thing that they did by getting rid of Connect and making it smaller is they put the focus back on the things that you expect a modern media console to do, which is like give you Netflix and give you games. And that's what this thing is for. That's what the new interface is for. Like Cortana is there. But like you use it to find those things basically. If you really want to be the person that uses the IR Blaster to control your entire living room, you can. I will say this. My biggest complaint about it is that it accepts HDMI CEC on the input so you can control it with like your TV remote, but it does not kick out HDMI CEC commands.

So if you want to use it to turn your TV on, you have to make sure that the IR Blaster on the front of the console has a line of sight. to your television. By the way, if you're wondering what that horrible noises, that's me hissing like a cat. I thought it I was getting like a snake vibe early on. Literally, nothing has made me more angry

than everything needed to say. How do you get it to be clear? You, what, you put your Xbox on your coffee table and then pointed at your TV? It could face away from the TV. It just can't be hidden away inside a cabinet. I bought this thing because I'm a crazy

person. Are you going to have it control your TV or are you going to switch inputs like an oral person? I'm going to switch inputs like an normal person, but I put all of my shit and my TV in a console where like the doors are closed, so it looks nice and clean. And so the only way to have this thing turn my TV on is to reset up my IR repeater from Logitech, which I have and love, but don't technically need right now because all of my gadgets don't need IRR anymore to be controlled because I've got a Vizio TV, I've got an Apple TV, and I've got the Xbox 1S, all of which get controlled over

Bluetooth controllers, basically. Yeah. But yeah, so, like, right now, my living room setup is completely infraredless, and I feel pretty okay about that. That's pretty cool. All right, I got a question for you, Deter, though, because you said you bought it,

but if we read your review, the main... Nobody should buy it. Don't buy it. Like, who buys this thing? Nobody. Nobody buys it. If, like, I have this whole, like, loop of if you already have an Xbox one, the only thing you're getting out of this is HDR,

which is fine for movies. We don't know if it's going to be worthwhile in games yet, so you've got to wait to figure that out. Those games aren't coming out till, you know, later this fall or, you know, this winter, which means that, like, you might as well wait for Project Scorpio's coming next year. Oh, yeah, by the way, Project Scorpio coming next year,

it's going to actually support real 4K games, not just upscaled 4K games. So if you waited this long to buy an Xbox, you might as well wait to know the year for Project Scorpio, And, you know, third, if you just don't have an Xbox, but you really love Microsoft games, yeah, you should buy this one. But if you really love Microsoft games, you already have an Xbox. Yeah.

So, like, the only thing that's really good about this is, if you want to go get a good 4K UHD Blu-ray player, those things are still pretty expensive. And, like, 4K streaming boxes, you know, it's, like, kind of a mess to figure out. So if you, like, have a 4K HDR TV, and you, like, like really care about that stuff. And for some reason, you haven't picked up a Blu-ray player yet or a streaming box yet that

supports it. Then, yeah, this is a good, relatively cheap choice. Plus, you get to play Xbox games on it. But, like, once you start, like, slivering down who it's for to these, like, narrow, narrow things, you start going kind of shrug. The full story on the Xbox is, like, Microsoft is going to be releasing consoles all the time now. They want to, like, put it on, like, a yearly cycle, maybe.

Like, they want to, they want to just keep doing it. And so the truth is what this Xbox is for is it's the cheap Xbox. It's the low-end, inexpensive Xbox for when the Scorpio comes out. So when you go and you're like, oh, I want to get an Xbox, you will decide how much you want to spend and get that Xbox. And this is the one that's going to be at the low end. They just can't say that out loud yet. Wait, where are you getting this yearly cycle from? They've been talking about how they want to, like, change the way that the console cycle works.

So the, you know, games that work on the Xbox 1 will work on the Xbox 1S will work on Project Scorpio. Games for Project Scorpio will still work on the other Xboxes. They just, you know, work at different resolutions. Right. But what about, what about on the Scorpio 2? Well, Microsoft is basically saying, like, they want Xbox to be a platform for games and not, like, a console that you buy every seven years. They don't want to have these massive shifts in like, you know, shifts and jumps in like gaming hardware for consoles.

They wanted to iterate in the same way that PC gaming is able to iterate. Right, which I like the three-year cycle for that. Three or four years sounds fun and interesting. But that every, like having like a sliding window of which Xboxes work with which games and being confused about which one, that sounds a little scary. Or getting it stuck in the position where you just bought. something in two years or less later like you're not able to play the game you want PC gaming world right where the PC gaming world works like that because you can buy the part

and like upgrade your PC pretty easily you can't do that with a console and also with the PC gaming world you can buy the brand newest game nobody's going to tell you no and you can run in at really crappy settings if you want to play it just for the content why couldn't you do that next one that's what the idea is for Xbox well that's and that's what I'm guessing is Microsoft might like say oh sorry this this title now is oh yeah of course it all depends on them actually keeping their word and having a relatively long window of compatibility for older xboxes xboxes Xbox ones i guess that's what we live through right now on like phones and tablets right yeah kind of i mean does anybody really care if it iPhone games target the newest i mean yeah i mean it's a different

conversation because like the apps and games on a phone or tablet typically run on most every set her out and like there are a few high-end ones that are maybe limited to like nVIDIA's processor but like yeah every year apple does the iPhone demo and they're like their newest graphics chip right it's almost as good as the and then everyone just plays Pokemon Go anyway so it's like and they demo the game and I always sit there and like this is beautiful it's great it's almost as good as an Xbox 36th but who is who on earth is buying a new phone to play this game and they might play Pokemon There was actually a pitch of Samsung's with the Note 7 as well there. Vulcan gaming API support.

Vulcan's actually hot shit. It's really cool. And it's going to hit more Android phones soon. But the fact that Samsung was out ahead on Vulcan, even though there's no real content for it yet in a massive way, they deserve a little thumbs up for that. So a little thumbs up to you, Samsung. The smallest of thumbs ups.

I can't confirm that he really only half raised the thumb. It was like a Bob Dole thumbs up. Yeah. I'm just, I just, like, I mean, the way that Deter explained it. The 4K PS4 with VR, I'm just going to buy that. I'm going to wait to buy the new Madden. Well, like, the way that did you explain it with the whole, you know, they want to like release hardware more often and stuff like that,

kind of makes the most sense. But that's my biggest question is like, why release this now when Scorpio is coming next year? And console generations are usually multiple years apart. Because this is the cheap one. This is the cheap one. But yeah, like you said, it's the cheap one, which is still 400 bucks. Well, it won't be next year. Does Microsoft have a plan for Scope?

I feel like both Sony and Microsoft have said, like, the good ones coming. You know, the full K one. But just you wait. But like they haven't. It's like they're both making plans against each other's shadow plans.

Like Microsoft's like, ours will have a microwave. And Cindy's like, ours will also. But it will also be convection. Yeah. It's just like this thing. They're just like dancing the spec sheets back and forth

about really talking about what it is. And I just want the PSVR. That's like just giving me that. So you can play Madden in VR? I just want a VR thing in my house that is not the big Oculus nonsense and not the garbage of the... I finally got to play PlayStation VR for the first time and it was fine. It was great.

And the headset is pretty comfortable. Not as comfortable as Oculus. I don't know why everybody's saying the Sony headset's the most comfortable. Because it looks the coolest. It does look really cool. But it needs more power. Yeah. It needs more graphics power.

And so you definitely want, if you can, to get the new PS4 for VR. Which I desperately want to get. But what if Scorpio is like it comes with like two VR headsets? I mean, that's like, that's the game these companies are playing right now. What are you going to say, Deere? I was going to say, I'm sure that Microsoft's goal is to have Scorpio be more powerful than the Sony PlayStation 4K, whatever the hell we're calling it. I'm sure that's the plan. Note that Microsoft

isn't even willing to come out and say who it's partnering with for who's going to make the VR headsets for the Xbox. Yeah, I want to believe that, but also it took them three years to put the same components of the PlayStation 4 into a box the size of the PlayStation 4. Wait, you don't think you know who Microsoft is going to partner with? I think it's really obvious.

Yeah, well, it's interesting that they won't say it. Right. This is a part where I have to remind people that my wife works for Oculus, I have no inside information. Get out, Dieter. Pedal your sparks somewhere else. I feel misled. No, I know.

So, Deeter's recused. But, I mean, Microsoft's and Facebook are historically tight. Yep. Microsoft screwed over Oculus with the game controller shipments. That's fair. So, yeah, Palmer Lockie is, like, in a raid. He's like, I won't give you my headset. Shueless rage.

Shoeless rage. I cannot hear his name without the fact that he doesn't wear shoes. He's trying to kick down a conference room door, but it's just... I know these controllers are in here. I'm going to ship him on time. I just got to keep working on the store. Shoeless rage, the Palmer Lucky store. Sorry, Palmer, if you're listening, just...

I love the work that you're doing. You're doing great job. inspirational to the whole VR community. And also my new book about hobos, Shulis Rage. No, they're historically tight. Facebook just put out a press release saying it was going to switch all of its internal business software to Microsoft Office.

Like that's the tightness. Maybe it's because office is a good product. They're competing on bots. They're not. No, Microsoft is making canvases. Facebook is making agents. They're all the same words that need nothing. And nobody's using them.

Literally no one will use. them. Alexa, play Creedon's Clearwater Revudge. Can I tell you a story? You are such a bad person. So stupid. So we are shooting the Mr. Robot After Show. That's my little plug.

And on the first episode, there's an Alexa on Mr. Robot. So we had it on the after show, so we could, like, talk about it being on Mr. Robot and what they were doing. And, like, this demo, one of the characters, asks Alexa when the end of the world is, which I just did accidentally tell the people listening in their homes.

And Alex has an answer. So we had it and we're like, taking the show. And before the show, we were just using it to like listen to music. And I was like, we need some like good time music. Like it's like behind the scenes. It was like Credence. So I had it playing Credence like during setup. And we're like in rehearsal in the live rehearsal for the show.

And I was like, do the demo. So like Alex, when's the end of the world? And she just started playing credence. Just like blasting. And like the lawyers are like, we don't have the rights to that. Is that what's going to happen? Like we can't. We cannot play credence on the show.

Anyway, we got through. The lawyers. We made it. Yeah, the NBC execs, like the Mr. Robot execs were there. And they're like, we can't clear credence at this time. We can't afford those rights to credence. Anyway, I don't know what we're saying. Anyway, Dieter, come on back.

We're done talking about Oculus. Okay. Are we done talking about Xbox? We are. We are. So there's one more thing that I really, I desperately want to talk to you about. You in particular, because I think you and I have very similar ideas about this, but you are so much smarter about this stuff. Google, this week, announced that it's bringing its accelerated mobile pages AMP.

So right now, Facebook has instant articles. So if you're in the Facebook app on your phone, you click an article with a lighting bolt. It slides you over into a custom article page. The Verge supports it, so you see a Verge. particularly circuit breaker articles are all instant articles. Fox.com has them. There's a bunch of insert articles everywhere. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post,

insert articles all over the place. Google has a competitor to this called AMP. Right now, AMP pages only show up. If you search for something on Google, you see a carousel of news results, and you click it, you see the AMP page. So we support AMP as well. And there's like a little logo.

There's also a lightning bullet. A little lightning bolt. It'll let you know. Google is now, when you do a search on mobile, their plan is for the actual results, not just the carousal, the actual results to lead you to AMP pages, which is a real something.

Isn't that right, Dieter Bone? Yeah, so they're, like, it's in a developer phase now, so they want to collect feedback and whatnot. I don't even know where to start with this story because there are so many different ways to, like, come at it. I do know where I end,

which is me frothing at the mouth, complaining about the open web, dying and everybody is going to live in a completely fragmented world controlled by Apple, Facebook, and Google. So how do you want to get from here to there?

So let's talk about how it's on the surface of benefit to people. Oh, well, the benefit is radically obvious. Amp pages are shit hot fast. They load incredibly quickly. And they use less data and all that and they use less data. And the reason that they are so fast

is they are way more limited. in what you're allowed to do and what kind of hijinks you're allowed to play than full HTML web pages. It's just a subset of HTML. It's built on top of HTML. I mean, technically, like, Apple News and even Facebook and articles are similarly built on HTML tech.

But, like, Google stuff explicitly is, like, really obviously built off of HTML and feels like it's part of the web. You can have it, you know, have a canonical. link to the full web page or canonical link to itself. It's like compatible with it. You can look at it in any browser. Yada, yada, yada, yada.

So there's a lot of really good benefits to this technology. The question is, are all those benefits worth the various tradeoffs that come with it? And like I can list them all and they just keep kind of growing. So number one, unless you want to completely refactor everything you're doing, you need to now be supporting not just your HTML pages, but your AMP pages. and what inevitably happens whenever you need to support multiple platforms is one of them gets attention and one of them doesn't.

So I'm sure you know lots of apps that don't seem to be getting updated all that often and get kind of buggy and crappy. No, apps, like publication apps, right? They keep up their webpage but not their app or vice versa. And having to support multiple platforms means that some of those platforms

are going to get short shrift. On top of that, AMP isn't as fully capable as full HTML. So although Google will tell you that like there's all kinds of cool stuff happening and eBay just started supporting it and This travel app can do app like stuff on it. It's still not going to give you the full like what the web is capable of That you know it's just can't do that on top of that you have to like be able to actually make multiple versions like are you to make a web page? Sure are you going to make an Apple news article? Okay, let's see if we can get the partnership right sure maybe

Are you going to make a Facebook article? Okay, sure it's another thing, but maybe it's not that hard we'll make sure we got a partnership there too. Are you going to make an AMP version? Well, it looks like I don't have to set up a partnership, so that feels nice and open, but it's more work, but okay, sure, I'll do it. And all of a sudden, just to, like, be on the internet, you have put yourself into, like, publishing four different versions of the same thing. And deciding what you do or don't get to opt out of gets really hard, because, like, are you going to bail on Facebook instant articles? That social is where the traffic is coming from. Are you going to bail on AMP? Well, 20% of, like, your views, your total page views are, like, coming from mobile search. So you, like,

feel backed into a corner to support this new platform. Additionally, I mean, I could just keep going. So the point about the whether or not to choose to support AMP, right, is that Google says they're not going to be prioritizing AMP articles specifically, but it's like a de facto prioritization, right? Because Google prioritizes speed and AMP articles are faster than normal. So if you aren't supporting AMP, you're hurting yourself in a Google ranking. You could still show up in the listings without it.

But if you're, I mean, these are things that, like, publishers and media companies that we work for agonize over. But, like, you know, if you don't, if you're not doing AMP and your competitor's doing AMP and you're really kind of covering similar topics, Google's, the competitor article is going to float to the top. I mean, Google, Google saying we don't favor AMP, but we favor faster pages. By the way, AMP is the fastest page. It's like, I don't, I don't favor fast cars, but I do prefer a Lamborghini. It's like, the thing, I want to figure out about this.

Like, my personal website, I made it with, like, hand-coded H-E. Gmail, there's static files that are served off of like Amazon S3 bucket. They have no weird functionality. They should qualify as AMP because I am using the subset. That is AMP. You can flag it as an AMP article. But like there's other things besides that where I start to get into like the fears of control. So although Google will tell you up and down that it is an open source project,

You can go look at the stuff on GitHub. Anybody can make contributions, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, like, Google just to decide what is and isn't in the spec. And there's other weird things. Like, an AMP page can either get served from your Amazon S3 server or whatever server you choose to serve it from. Or you can flag it to, like, be allowed to be cashed from Google servers. If you do that, it goes from, like, pretty fast to holy shit fast because Google knows how to cash stuff all around the world. And, you know, it'll be closer to the phone that's loading it.

you know, it's just going to be faster. Which is part of how Facebook, Insta articles work as well. Right. Well, Facebook just takes your stuff. Right. And then re-renders an IA page. There's, the devious thing with Facebook is IA, Instant Articles, is built on URLs. Right.

So is AMP. But AMP is like at least a subset of the web. I don't know. It's like, it's part of your web page in a way that an IA page is not. Well, the, yeah, you can't direct link to an IA page. So when you look at the world through Facebook, which is how people using their phones tend to look at the world, and you see a URL, up until about now, that URL has pointed to one thing. Right? It's literally a uniform resource look at it. It's pointed to one resource.

Now there's Facebook's version of the resource. There is the actual resource, the web page, and there's the AMP version of the resource. Right. And the AMP page and the web page are generally tied together as far as I can tell. But the Instant article... It's the canonical URL. So the AMP page says the real canonical version of the URL is over yonder. Right.

I'm giving you this one because I know it's faster. But Facebook is like remapping URLs inside of the Facebook web. Well, yeah. Google is just crazy. So if you click a link in an instant article on Facebook and it's a number, instant article you don't actually go to the web you load another instant article so now you're fully outside of the web right which is I know that that sounds very weedy but just like the web the web is built to be like literally the thing that connects us

all and Facebook is gluing a superstructure onto the web sucking at all the information and one day they're gonna like what you know there's like this visual metaphor where it's like you replace the structure with like sugar crystals and then you like you pull the thing out and everything collapses does that make a sense? I'll give you a better metaphor. Yeah. Think about what I'm saying.

Facebook is embracing and extending the web right now. And the third part of embrace and extend is extinguish. Yeah, the web is dead. That's like what I'm saying. I would not, if you ask me to start a media business right now, I would start a YouTube channel.

Like straight up. I would just be like, you know what, Marquez Brownlee? I love you, dude, but I'm coming for you. It's a better place to make a business than a website. A thousand percent. Because where are you going to put your stuff? Where are you going to make your money?

Where is your audience going to be? All of those questions. That still doesn't get you out of the problem that you are publishing to a platform that's not under your control. Right. The nightmare scenario here, I got in a huge debate with this with somebody last night, Gabe from TechMeme, actually. Not that he was debating me, but I was like trying to explain it. The nightmare scenario is with Google Amp, Facebook Instagram article, Apple News, if it still mattered. is that they will exercise control over the way that we distribute information out to the world.

And the beauty of the web is that nobody gets to control it other than a crazy consortium of a bunch of people arguing with each other. And that sucks and that's really boring and it's led to like the shitty situation of the state of the mobile web right now. It's really bad. But would you rather like run through that bad process where you are guaranteed that you're not going to hit the darkest timeline of, Google deciding winners and losers or Facebook deciding winners winners and losers? Or do you take the fast way, you know, this is like some real Star Wars, you know, dark versus light shit right here. Do you take the fast way where you get the faster web pages or quasi web pages, but you run the risk of going down the darkest timeline of these big companies deciding who gets to publish, who doesn't, and what the rules are? So today, here it is. It happens all the time. Today, Facebook said,

We are going to start doing keyword scanning and headlines published to Facebook to figure out what is clickbait and, like, remove it because our users don't like it. It's literally the word police. I'm not saying, by the way, fully in support of this idea. This is a great. This is a great idea. But Facebook is like, we notice that when you use, you won't believe in a headline, that's probably, we're just going to, you just, we're just going to disappear you. Did you see that they're a scary kind of power? Like, they could choose to deploy that power to, like, anything.

Did you see that their example was, um, of clickbait was Gizmotechno teco? Gizmoteco.com. Yeah. So Gizmodo's like up in arms that this is them calling out Gizmodo because Gizmodo like had a bunch of really good scoops about like how Facebook decided what and wasn't news back, you know, a few months ago. Like, the circle is crazy. But I bet the good people at Techno Buffalo are fucking pissed. Come on Technobuffalo didn't do anything wrong to you

They just picked a really esoteric name Does anybody know Why the Buffalo? They got a good YouTube channel I've never understood the name I don't get it I don't know either And Facebook hates their clickbait headlines

If you if you know why Why the Buffalo and Techobuffalo Please tweet at DC Seifert DC S-E-I-F-E-R-T That's a good Mark Lansangan was there. Yeah, Mark was there. Yeah, he did great work.

And his work was so good. We, like, reeled and rhythm right in. I just think on this whole thing that everybody's a bad actor. I think the publishers have made a bunch of sheper... Shitty whips. Merrill Streep is wonderful. And a national treasure. A global treasure, I would call her.

Paul gives no opportunity for anybody to persmurch the name of Merrill Street. Stopps his point. I don't know what kind of show you think this is. Stops his point, derails, and to make the point that Merrill. street is unimpeachable. Yes. But to resume my point. Have you seen the Devil Wars Prada?

Yes. Best fucking movie. I will, the Devere Wars Prada is the movie that when it's on TV, I stop and just watch the rest of the Devil Wars Pratt. And Becky's always like, you think that you're Anne Hathaway. But you are the villain. And then I'm like, that is all.

Carry on tall. Publishers have made a bunch of slow-loading shitty websites and just piled more and more shit onto them to make them slow and terrible for users. And companies like Facebook and Google want all power and control of someone's entire day all the time and of all information. And so everybody's just kind of, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I have a more evil view of this. Like the web displaced apps on a PC, right? Like the web browser became the web became the new platform. There was zero switching costs between web browsers.

So for a while, we could all use IE and then decide IE was too slow and then go to Firefox. Then Firefox is too slow. Then we went to Chrome and then Safari came out. And then we went back to IE. Like a never-ending platform war was happening, but the cost was still low. We didn't think about it that way. That was great. Now there's a new platform war, but the browsers are baked into the O&S.

So there's incredibly high switching cost for the web, right? Like, mobile safari is what you get on an iPhone. Basically, Chrome is what you get on an Android phone. I know the Firefox people are going to come screaming at me, but come on. Just look in the mirror. Think about what you've done. Wow. But we've come to a place.

I'm fired up, man. I've had, like, three sips of a Red Bull and half of Stella and it's got four look at. I like I just think about what you've done about Firefox, who has like consistently been probably the most pro open standards, open web company. They were idealistic and pure and innocent. And they made a shitty browser because of it. Sorry, bro. Anyway.

But now we're at a place where it's who owns the icons on your phone. And Google basically owns the browser icon on your phone. To this day, even Safari, you open Safari, you almost certainly search for something on the web as opposed to going directly to it, home page. of a website unless it's the verge.com which you go to right now several times in a row but you generally search for something and they own mobile search at a really high level Facebook obviously owns like five apps the billion users on your home screen Twitter owns one one sad app right hundred million users still there they got there they are but it's who owns you you know Google owns YouTube which is like the default

I want to watch a video about something I click on this icon on my phone and go get this video it's who owns those icons is that's the war and All of this, let's make the web faster, is about making the experience inside of those platforms faster, which is, to Paul's point, like they want to own more of your day. But none of that reflects or extends the idea of the web is the uniform way that we distribute information, and the actual competition, action, fervor happens on the display of the web, which is where all of the power used to be. Who owns the web browser used to be the power? And that's why there's so much competition, we all used to switch web browsers

over 18 months. Now it's, I have an icon. How much power can I exert over everyone else to make the experience this icon better? And the methodology of exerting that power, it's fundamentally different now than it was back in the web, especially for publishers and for people that made stuff on the web. Like, if I wanted to compete, I made, you know, I wrote better, I took better pictures, I made a faster website,

and we would compete head-to-head on those terms. But in this dystopian hellscape future, if I want to compete, I score a better deal with Apple than, you know, my competitor. And the actual, like, direct competition of, like, the quality of the web page and the journalism is secondary to who scored the better deal. Sounds an awful lot like the music industry. Or cable television. Yeah. Like, old media. But that's where we are, right?

Like, we've created, mobile created a new class of gatekeepers. I mean, in the Halcyon days, the desktop web, the gatekeepers are like AOL.com and Yahoo. Now known as AOL Yahoo, powered by Verizon. But, like, those are, that was as much gatekeeping as existed at that time, right? There were, like, these massive portals that would, like, you know, send you traffic or whatever. And now it's, if people, enough people click on the Facebook icon, Facebook will send you a bunch of stuff. and they can exert control over everything. Wait, are you saying the web is dead?

I think you need to write a new article. The internet was fucked two years ago. The internet is dead now. I wrote, before you guys hired me again, I wrote, maybe the web should die. Really? Why should the web die? Because publishers, like the verge. That's fair.

We hired you right back. The inside job by Paul Miller. I assumed you'd read it. Oh, was that that word file you sent me shuless rage. back. I wasn't shoeless my choice. I was just poor. And I really appreciated the job,

Dela. Terrible. Put your shoes on, Paul. And walk right out of here. No, I mean, the thing that Deeter's talking about where everyone had instant access to everything all the time, that was the web. You could be a publisher as one person in a bedroom. You can't build that business

anymore because of Facebook. Like, you couldn't start the drudge report today. You probably couldn't start something like Daring Fireball today. And yeah, and the, the thing that's incentivized clickbait is Facebook. Right. Facebook's like, hey, we hate clickbait. You know why clickbait exists because Facebook? No, it's because people click on it. Yeah, but where would you put that before? I don't know. Right. On the internet. Right. You'd put it in our... How would anybody see it? We got accused of clickbait and gadget in 2007 all the time. when people are reading our shit in RSS feeds.

No. Yes. No. All the time. ClickBays. Paul Miller and right, like this, this Motorola StarTech is the one to beat. And people are like, clickbait, Paul. You'll never believe how thin the new Nokia engages.

The Motorola Zoom, one tablet to rule them all. I think clickbait is a word that happened after Twitter and BuzzFeed. No. No way, man. Really? No way. I think clickbait and the curiosity. gap headline that BuzzFeed pioneered and upwardly pioneered, that's that was like the moment that clickbait became a thing that people understood when when that style of headline that was like hyper optimized for social that you won't like you're saying we were being shitty and tricking people on the reading our terrible stories back in the RSSS days.

Generally think any article they don't agree with is clickbait. Okay. So we would write like Windows phone they're trying again Windows mobile 6.5. Remember that? Yeah. The honeycomb. We got accused of clickpate every time we wrote about Windows Mobile 6.5 because we'd be like, yeah, it still only supports resistive touch screens and doesn't have any real apps.

You'd be like, what is this clickbait nonsense? I feel like there was a capacitive touch. No. They were resistive. No. They were resistive. It was one. At least it had like a hard surface.

They had hard surface, but it was still resistive. There's like one engineer at HTC. It was like, I can do it. And Microsoft was like, that noble engineer. Whoever he is. We're going to slap our honeycomb launch around that. Let's move on. I'm going to find this.

Do you say let's move on so you can refute my Windows mobile 6.5? Capacity. Now, if you're listening to your car for the next few minutes, drive silently. HDC, HD2, first Windows mobile with capacitive touchscreen. The HD2 was the phone that wouldn't die. Boom. Remember? Boom.

Take it back. I refuse to take it back. That was the one noble HDC engineer. Yeah, but I said. Remember they brought it on the end. And I was right. I don't know, man. I also remember that phone had a 4.3-inch screen, which seemed enormous at the time.

Gentlemen. Goodbye. Do you have to go? I have to go. You know what? Why don't you walk away to the sound of this pre-recorded Citibank had? Okay. Goodbye, Dieter.

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Android Pay is available for eligible city, consumer credit, and debit cards. All right, we're back. Paul. Yeah. It's time for your recurring consistently named segment. The gadgets have eyes. Hit me. Okay.

So this is not a full product yet. This is a prototype, but Intel is working on a depth sensor for the HTC Vibe. And it just looks badass the way it's bolted on to the front here. Bolt it on his right. And like the Vibe is kind of weird. Like I don't think the Vibe holds the Magic Leap as well. So like on Oculus, a lot of people put the magic leap. No, that's not the right word for it.

What's it called? Leap motion. Leap motion. Thank you. Thank you. Literally just combined words. So the leap motion lets you see like right in front of it. of your face so you can put your hands up and you can use like hands and it's really fun to interact

with things like that but this new intel sensor is like putting like a connect on the front of your head yeah and so it can like 3d map and scan your room and show you when you're about to run into a cat or your couch or something like that um because the the vibe has like a pass-through camera but it doesn't like have that depth sensor so i just think that would be really cool and i also Really like the idea of someday having a VR headset that has enough sensors, outwardly facing sensors on the front, that it could give you really great vision. So, like, you want something that you could wear walking around the street, and it has enough sensors to see and map out the street in front of you as you walk

so that you don't run into people, but then you can also, like, zoom in, like, four blocks ahead or something like that. Yeah, like, maybe so that you have superpowers, but I also think it would just be hilarious if we completely, completely re-engineered the eye, put two eyeballs in front of a screen that blocks our vision, and then the screen, you know, it's just cool. Two eyeballs in front of a screen. Think about it. If you're putting sensors on the front of a VR headset and then passing that information to a computer that then passes it to the screen that's in front of your eyes on the inside of a darkened VR headset,

what you are doing is creating new eyes, right? Yeah. Right? You're creating eyes for your eyes. I'm into this. And then you would add probably notifications. Probably a lot of notifications. What would you do if you had bionic eyes?

Eye message. No, there's actually a lot of research about this early on in like the wearable computing thing of what a passive notification could be. You know, like it's kind of the equivalent to like tying a string around your finger. but like something that just kind of vaguely reminds you of something and you tie that information. So like one of the researchers had, and I think he ended up actually working for Google, had like a little light go off in the corner of his vision. And it was just to remind him to like sit straight, sit up straight. And you couldn't hardly even really see it, but it's just passively, I don't know.

There's some cool psychology to that. But that's probably like something like the lights in your room changing when it's time to like do something different. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And then just like that is a memory cue to you to, like, since memory. You know, we have since memory. So, start using sense memory. I mean, like, if you really want to go back to that, then that would be like the sun going down and telling, you know, primitive man to go to bed.

There you go. And then the sun coming back up and that tells primitive man. It's time to wake up. But Future Man is wearing an H-C vibe with an Intel depth sensing. I mean, this thing looks like a giant shark fin. I don't know how to describe it. By the tweet was deleted. This is now a leak.

This is great. The Intel engineer tweeted it, but then deleted the tweet. But the photo lives on. Because the guys have eyes. That's good. Yeah. See what I did there? Good segment.

Thanks. Yeah. Let's transition. I just called Deter. Speaking of eyes, the Galaxy Note 7 also has eyes. Yeah. Because it's got an iris scanner and you can use your eyes to unlock it. You might say it's irish.

Why would you ever want to do that instead of using it? your thumb. That's a great question. And I'm not convinced that you would. I would like to note for the record that Dan just did finger guns at Paul when he said that's a great question. I did a double, I did a double snap into finger guns. He did not make the finger guns sound, which is a requirement on the show, which is, puky-poo. I think I heard like a silent a. All right. Finger guns aside. Tell me about the note. So the note seven, it is, The Note 7 is not the Note 6 for whatever reason. So that, you know, Samsung sells against the iPhone 7.

Yeah. So, I mean, like, if you're a huge nerd, you know that it's actually the seventh note in the generation because they had the Note Edge a couple years ago. So it's the seventh note that Samsung has produced. But last year it was Note 5. This year's is note 7. The real reason is because the iPhone 7 is coming this year, and Samsung doesn't want to sell something with a 6 next to the iPhone 7.

Well, it also makes sense. The specs of this are the same, like, generational specs that are in the Galaxy. S-7. Why don't they release this at the same time? Why don't they release them at the same time? Yeah. It takes some time to stretch the screen. Come on.

So, yeah, the Note 7 has an iris scanner in addition to a fingerprint scanner, which is a first for Samsung. I think it might be a first for Android, at least for any Android phone that somebody would have actually purchased. Microsoft put an Irish scanner on the Lumia 950 last year, so it's not the first on smartphones.

But Samsung's argument is that it is a more secure system than a fingerprint scanner. And we've seen a few reports lately about fingerprint scanners getting spoofed with 3D printing and et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, there's that. It's kind of just like the note line has always been kind of Samsung's line a product to, like, throw out its craziest technology and, like, brag about its technology

advancements. And I think part of that is here with the Irish scanner. I tested it out. It definitely works. It uses infrared, so it can work in really low light. And it's pretty quick if you line up your eyes right. The only thing that's weird about it is you turn the phone on. You have to swipe the screen over to do it.

Then it starts scanning for your eyes. and you have to bring the phone kind of like awkwardly close to your face because it won't work with it if you're further than 18 inches away or so so it's pretty awkward you have to press the home button swipe the screen and then put the phone really close to your face to unlock instead of just touch your thumb on the on the home button to do the fingerprint screen you can also use it to lock a section off of the phone that has content and apps and stuff like that if you want like super secure privacy stuff but I think that most

people are probably never going to use the Irish scanner. Right. I mean, like, it's a party trick. It's definitely a great party trick. Yeah, it's a great party trick. I think the real world, you know, a fingerprint scanner is a way more practical and secure enough for the vast majority of things. And then you...

Is that the only thing that's new? Well, yeah. I mean, like, technically... It's got higher resolution pin drawing, right? It's got advancements. It's got like, so like the screen is dual curved, which is new for the note line. It's similar to the Galaxy S7 edge, but the curves are a little less dramatic than the edge. The back of the phone is curved the exact same way as the front.

So the whole thing is super symmetrical, and it, like, feels really cool in your hands. It's just really, like, polished and well done. And it's got the same size screen. It's got the same processor and RAM and camera and kind of, like, all the internal guts are the same as the S7 edge and the S7. I don't buy this phone. Water-resistant. It has a headphone jack. It has a headphone jack.

So they, like, through shade at Apple. Yeah, it was really, it was so forced. But, yeah, they were like, and it has a headphone jack. Just saying. I don't know. I'm just saying. it has a headphone jack. That's like literally what

didn't they say some other stuff too? They threw shade at the fact that they include the stylus. You know, it's not an extra thing that you have to buy on top of the phone or the device. It doesn't require charging. Zero human beings to buy a stylus for a phone. It's an aftermarket accessory.

Well, I mean, hey, Apple sells the pencil for a hundred bucks. That's the note, right? Yeah, the reason you'd buy a note. Well, I think the reason you buy a note is that you want a big screen. That's really the reason. The stylus is like there. I don't think after like the honeymoon period,

a lot of people use a stylus. Samsung says it's like rising and importance in the things people want. But the reality is they want a big screen. The note is a premier big screen phone. If you use the stylus or note, tweet it, DCC. I hate you so much. Draw a little picture. So I bought a Note 5 myself because No5 was really great fun last year.

And I used a stylus for a couple weeks. And then I just like forgot about it because it's a fun. You use a stylus with your with Evernote on your iPad. Yeah, I really tried to make that work too. Kind of haven't done that a while later later. I really want the stylist dream to come true. I just really want to make it happen, and it's always too much of hers. I like stylists theoretically because I drew, like all through childhood,

I always had like a pad of paper and a pencil, and I was always drawing. And I was like, this would be great to have like a stylist always with me, and I could do a little sketchy. But I'm just bad. I'm not a good drawer, and I can't take notes with handwriting. I mean, the mobile operating systems aren't doing you any favors either. They're all built to be used with your finger. And so a stylus is pretty redundant

Unless you're using very specific things of writing notes or drawing Samsung edit a few functions to the S-Pen this year So you can use it as a magnifying loop and for translation The coolest thing is that you can create these gifts from video Why would you need your pen to do that? I don't know why it's tied to the pen, but you have to use the pen to do it Okay But it's really cool because you can like start up a YouTube video

Grab three or four seconds right away and make a gift from it instantly Which is pretty trick It's another parlor trick I'm getting this phone. That's more than a pilot trick because, man, you want to make funny gifs on the go and tweet them right then. Yeah, I mean, I suppose. I think I'd probably just search for it. I'm an entire...

I'm tired of seeing the same gifts. I want more gifts. Well, I have an entire thing about, like, TV shows have, the way we watch TV shows have changed completely because people watch them on computers instead of on televisions. And they can insta gif every... Like, Game of Thrones. There's a riff with this, though. And that's... Samsung says if the content is DRM protected, can't make a GIF with it.

And like there's like a security DRM level in Android. So like if you're trying to use net, like you can't screenshot Netflix on Android. You won't be able to use this gift maker on Netflix on Android. What's the point? It's that fucking police, man. The man. These were crippling your ass in. This is what happens.

You kill the open web. That's why Torrance is still alive. Paul. This is another Mr. Robot show. Last night, a literal, like literally a. Torrent Freak came into our IRC channel during the show while the show was airing and was like, what's up? Where's the torrent of this episode?

And everyone in the IRC channel is like, it's literally still on the air. Like you can't have a torrent right now. And then there was just an argument about what the best place to torrent Mr. Robot was in the official Mr. Robot is in the official Instagram. And then finally someone was like, maybe we shouldn't do this year. And they all left and went to different. They went to the unofficial Mr. Robot. That show. Well, on Frino, there's V-Corps.

which is the Verges Mr. Robot Channel. It was the official Mr. Robot Channel. And then there's the one that hates us, which is F Society. And F Society is very bad at us. They don't like that we exist. But they're the Renegades. They're trying to hack us.

Our moderator got like booted up. He keeps on getting hacked an IRC. Anyway. So in addition to the note, we actually got some insight into how Samsung builds phones. Right. Yeah.

So Sam Biford did an interview with Samsung's chief designer. his interview was kind of like right around the time of the S7 launch but we just published it this past week and it's a really interesting look and candid look at the decisions and the thought process as Samsung goes through when it's been developing these phones which have now had for the past couple years Samsung has put design

given much higher priority than it had in the past but like it comes with a lot of compromises that we don't usually hear about like things like you know when the S6 came out didn't have expandable storage or water resistance And so, like, that was pretty much just a thing that Samsung couldn't do in time and they had to ship the product. So there's a lot of those really interesting things about, like, how Samsung thinks when it's developing a product. It's totally killer read, really interesting.

Sam asked a ton of great questions and actually got answers on them. So if you're interested at all in the product development process or, like, how that phone in your pocket actually came to be, it's a great read. Samsung has come an extraordinarily long way. I was playing with the Moto G4 upstairs. Yeah. All the phones have sort of just arrived. $199 phone, by the way. I mean, Vlad hated it.

But in terms of a piece, like, compared to where industrial design for phones was, even like two years ago, that thing is a revolution. Right? It's just like, it's actually well constructed. It's not like well-designed. It's well-constructed. It's got a good screen. Usually, like, you're used to a garbage screen. It's got a competent camera.

You know, it's like all the stuff that. They didn't have a competent camera. For $200? Think about what you got for $200 before that. Paul used a phone that was $60. and its camera was a literal shoe. So awkward. It was a shoe.

I was like, I wish I had a shoe. I was like, I keep hitting myself when I tried to take this movie. But like for 200 bucks, I mean, it takes, like, even if it was as good as the iPhone 4, and I think it's probably better than an iPhone 4's camera, it's 200 bucks. Well, that sets up the, you were saying to me earlier, the GS7, last year the GS7 was by far the best phone. Yeah, yeah, well, the S6. Yes, because it has the best camera. The best camera phone, yeah.

And then now the note, but all the other phones are sort of like at parody right now. Yeah, I mean, if you go buy an Android phone especially, you are looking at the premium things. We're talking like 550 bucks and up. You're looking at the same processor, the same amount of RAM, largely comparable cameras, same screen resolution. So, like, what it comes down to is which design do you like better? Or, you know, maybe there's slight differences in battery life, maybe the slight differences in display. but really it comes down to which phone do you like better to look at and use every day. And that's a great thing.

I think there's also like a layer of, do I trust this company to give me stuff for updates. There's some of that. There's some of do I trust this phone not to break? I mean, there's some minor things. Like, Samsung has its water resistance, which kind of sets it apart from others, which I think is a super useful thing that every phone should have. But for the most part, the experience of using it is going to be largely the same across almost every major premium phone that you look at. I'm buying a note.

Is this Gorilla Glass 5? Is this better? Every year they come out with a new Gilli Glass that they say is better than that last one. Because I always forget the name of it, but I'm still blown away at that Moto Force. So what Motorola does with on the Force is they have a different kind of display that they do call shatterproof. And it's actually a plastic screen. It's not a multi-layer plastic screen. So it's not a glass.

It's not Gorilla Glass 5. I'm sure of it will shatter a few. drop it. Like, maybe it'll shatter less. Maybe you have to drop it harder. But it'll shatter if you drop it. I'm buying a note. So wait for Nexus. This is the thing. I'm switching Android. I'm ready. I'm so ready.

Because the iPhone 7 is going to come out. We think it's going to say. Without a headphone jack. Now that's a snake. You're going to vote with your feet? See, this is a kitty. Okay. This is the worst podcast in history right now. No, it's going to come out. Whatever. And the story of that phone is not going to be its designer. It's feature.

or whatever, it will be the camera. Right. We can see it and already in the leaks, the camera's way bigger, they might do the dual lens thing. Like, the story of that thing is going to be the camera. If that is the story, then like, maybe it's time to take it off. And next year, they'll put out their weird, all-glass, like, alien

phone that, like, wraps around your face. Yeah, no home button. Like, it knows you. It just, like, comes to your house. You know, it shows up your house. It's like, hey, and you're like, I love you now. And then you just have it. be great if one that's how i feel about the iPhone if one year like apple just gave everybody the next

iPhone they're like we have a trillion dollars did you guys you guys when you turn like was it 18 or whatever jillette sends you your first razor did that happen to you that i believe that's in the u.s when you turn 18 and you have to register for what are they call it for the draft yeah jillette will send you a razor that's where i get they get it from i think that's what happened to me shouldn't have the draft. You could have gotten a free razor. Should have gotten a nap. It lasted you for a week and then you had to spend $40.

Select. Selective service. Yes. Selective service. I did that. Yeah. I signed it for two, but I also got Gillette. Razor, my first razor. Yeah.

Which lasted a week and then you had to pay $40. It's time. It's the phone. This is the phone that we want to give to the world. We've been saving up all this cash to give the world a phone. I believe that in Apple's minds. set every time it releases the phone, it's giving the world a phone, but it also

wants you to give it $700.00. Right, but they have almost enough cash to literally give everybody in the world the iPhone 8. You know that there's like, in Hitchfriker's guy to the Galaxy, there's a guy who has the spaceship that's like the most black spaceship. Yeah. Zaffod, Bibelboxes. Yeah. It's like the most

black. No, it's the rocker guy. And you open it happens like full of speaker. Oh, you're right. That when I, actually, I think the iPhone that's coming out this year will be iPhone 6th. I, I feel it that they won't they won't iterate the number until it's like a different design what but next year the iPhone seven what i think will be iPhone seven every time i picture it i just picture like

the most black phone like it's just like it like you hold it aren't they already talking about a black themselves up for like it's a it's a black piece of glass with with a display that literally sucks your eyeballs out of your face you lick it to unlock yeah you just hold it to your face and then it molds itself around your face and the antennas are built directly into your skull and if you put your hands on your skull your service goes down you scratch your head the wrong way

drop a call and they're like we tested hundreds of thousands of skulls in our anarcho chamber I just can't wait for the future it's gonna be great I just say there's so much hyper on the seven but this one it's obviously gonna be a camera story like that's how I feel about it

and like that's really interesting and if it, I just don't know how much, how much incrementally better you can make the camera on a phone right now, such that I'm willing to give up, like, the phone I have. So like, why not, why not take a year off before the phone that literally changes everything about how we view ourselves, society and one another? Maybe they'll call it the iPhone 10, because it's the 10th year of the iPhone. I stole that theory from Higham, Gartenberg, one of our great interns, by the way. Gartenberg. In all credit.

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Let's end here. This is like big news in the world. Two things happened this week related TV. We started with the Xbox. As always, TV is my favorite thing to talk about. Who will defeat the TV? No one. The answer is no one.

It will be a mess for the rest of our lives. But Peter Cofco at Recode broke some great news. Great news. Had a good scoop. Apple, after years of trying to get a TV service, after Eddie Q walking around in sandals and a Hawaiian shirt trying to get a deal, has apparently decided a different tack. Instead of actually launching a TV service,

they're going to take all the apps in the Apple TV, suck in all the data about what's in them, and actually just build a guide, content guide, for the TV. Isn't that obvious? I don't know. This is just the content in the apps, right? Yeah, so you would... This isn't helping you watch cable TV better.

No, I mean, so that's the thing. So Apple, there's kind of like two classes of apps in the Apple TV in general. There's the VOD stuff, so there's like HBO Go and Netflix. And then there's actually a huge number of live channel apps. So, like, you can watch CBS Live and the Apple TV or whatever. You can watch ESPN live. So Apple will help you search through that. So, like, you turn on your Apple TV.

presumably this is kind of the scoop in the rumor you'll turn on Apple TV it'll show you but basically Kowlok's guide like here's some stuff that's on that you can watch live and here's some like VOD stuff that you might want to watch and then you click it and it will automatically launch the app open the appropriate stream and send you in but they won't actually build the service their goal is to get all the apps in one place and then do it and Peter's point in the article which is really interesting is they already have so much of this metadata because of Siri so they might be able to just do it now or they might need permission or they might just be letting people know they're going to do it.

They already had some sort of search interface for. They just have some very basic search. But it's, this will be better. No, but this isn't search. It's a, it's, the main interface of the Apple TV right now is a bunch of tiles. Right, right. Clear that from your mind. And dream up.

And resurrect a cable box. Yeah. A cable box without the cable card. Yeah. Well, no, I don't know. What about that? So they also. So the cable car thing is interesting because they also have,

these are two other dynamics playing out. Apple also is rolling out single sign-on for its apps, which I thought was a big story at WWC, and everyone just made grumbled boring sounds at me. You really do love TV. It's my favorite goddamn thing. I mean, if you've ever sat through signing into every goddamn app on your Apple TV, then single sign-on is like a blast.

So you buy Comcast, you buy Time Warner, whatever. You get your authentication password for TV everywhere. You sign into your Apple TV, and then all your apps automatically work. Apple knows what apps you get. So you are still paying for cable. Yes. And you could switch over to your cable box if you wanted to.

But theoretically, you pay for cable and then you don't use your cable box. You don't pay the rental fee. Ooh, you pay for cable, but don't pay for the cable box at all. Just out Apple TV. Yeah, sure, run out. Anyway, that's a version of this. You sign into your cable credentials. Maybe you pay for a skinnier bundle if you were channels or some other thing.

You don't rent to cable box. You get this Apple TV. Sign into it. Apple talks to your cable provider, knows what you're authenticated for, pulls down those apps automatically, populates a guide with, here's what's streaming live right now,

and here's some stuff you might like. And if you want to, like, dig into the HBO catalog, you like press HBO Go and you get the HBO Go app. What would be interesting, I wonder if cable providers would like this because if they really liked it and got buddy-buddy with Apple, which is hard to imagine right now,

like you search for something that you do want to see. Like somebody told you about this hot new show on CBS called Zoo. And it's like, oh, it turns out you don't have access. CBS is a bad example because everybody has. But you don't have access to CBS for some reason. And then they upsell you right then. Like for me, to be honest, like I know Apple wanted to do this with phones.

Apple would love to just sell you a phone and like you just turn it on and it's like, hey, which carrier do you want? Well, that's essentially what they do with the iPad now. Yeah. And so if you could buy an Apple TV like in some. Someone like me, it's like, I've never had cable. Yeah. And it's like, okay, here's your cable options.

This is the great dream of service. So then Comcast is finally going to get Paul Miller dollars. They never got Paul Miller dollars before. So the fear for a cable company. No, but Comcast is regionally limited from providing that service to you because you live in New York City and Time Warner is your provider. So you would have to buy Time Warner Internet and then somewhere Comcast would have to get a deal that allowed them to sell channels to you over the internet in a region that they don't properly operate.

What if you could, I have Time Warner internet. What if I could sign up and have prorated one day of Time Warner internet to watch a Time Warner show I wanna watch right then. And then it just disappears. I mean, that's just, that's just buying the on-demand episode, though, right? It's like just baby steps.

Because once you get all the way to what you're talking about, Apple Monazil just sell you the service. Right, right? They might just like, bill your iTunes and whoever gets, something in the end. But they can't get that deal. Right. They don't have that deal. So they're building all these half measures along the way. And it's just fascinating to me because it's still not enough, right? Like it's a really good idea. It will make using Apple TV much nicer. But they rolled

out the Apple TV and said the future of TV is apps. And then they're rolling out a guide that abstracts all of the apps away and gives you a guide. But to their credit, the apps got the content onto the thing. and now they need a way for you to find the continent. Right. I feel like this is progress. Okay, let me say the second TV thing. Because this is up, and Peter's very well sourced, I'm sure this is correct, but it's Peter's scoop.

This is all connected to the fact that Apple has been rumored for years for wanting to build the TV, and they killed that project. And Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg what TV to buy in 2006. Walt bought that TV. That TV just died. There's a pioneer leap plasma. Just made kissy fingers. Yeah.

It's beautiful. Goodbye. A lot of sounds on the Vergecast today. It's all that four loco. Dude, living that loco life. Anyway, so Walt's TV died. He bought a new LG Ola TV. He reviewed it.

We talked about it for an hour on a control of the yesterday. You should listen to that. Here's the thing that happened for real in our lives with the Verge yesterday. Walt likes the motion smoothing on his TV. He wrote about it. He was like, it's a buried, confusing setting. He and I disagreed about it. When this edit went back and forth forever because I was like, turn it off.

He's like, no, I like it. He's like, I don't, I was like, you can't say you like motion smooten in America in 2016. It's like not politically correct. America's not ready for this. Anyway, he likes to put it in and we talked to, and we got to a great place in the edit where I was like, you wouldn't even know how to turn it off. Like, it's so confusing. And he was like, yes, that's exactly right. So we put it in there.

I mean, he's tweeted out of the column, Ryan Johnson, the director, writer director of the next Star Wars movie, like tweeted at Walt. Turn off your motion smooth. He tweeted disappointment at Walt. He tweeted sadness. One of the tweets was Samsung, Achilles, Mossberg. Every great hero has a tragic flaw. Which is most interesting. Walt has been, like, chastised by the internet today.

Walt's like a genius. Like, I love working with him. Our podcast is great. He's sticking his guns. No, he turned off. Like, literally so many people tweeted him to turn off. He turned it all. He tweeted today.

I understand now video peers. I've turned it off. But that gets to the point. Like, TVs are so hard to use, which is what Walt's column was about. And we're adding now this other entire layer with this Apple's potential guide that still doesn't make your TV necessarily look or perform better.

It's just a way to get it content better. And at some point, I'm going to sound like Gene Munster here, at some point Apple does all these half steps and they have the service and they have the deals and da-da-da-da. Isn't it then time for them to just like suck it up and build the TV that like doesn't call it true motion and do motion smoothing. By the way, you should turn motion smoothing.

If you're listening to this and you're at home and there's motion smoothing on your TV, I want you to shut it off and go turn that shit off. Like, shut off the podcast and you're not allowed to listen to it again until you've turned motion soothing off on your TV. I mean, I feel like if they did, they would just like license, like a good panel, like the LGO lead one. I mean, when you think about an iPhone, the parts, for the most part are licensed. The screen, Apple does not produce a screen.

It buys them. So, yeah, I mean, that would be the approach. I felt like a weird fit for them, but I'm sure they could convince you that this is great for some reason. I mean, but the thing is what I truly want. I can't believe we're talking about Apple making a TV. I want a dumb screen. I want a dumb screen. I want somebody to dare to make a completely dumb screen.

That's what Vizio did. Vizio made that TV. The Vizio P series that came out in 2016 and soon to be the M series too, I think. They do not have an OS. it's all controlled by a tablet. I wrote a feature about it. Yeah, he wrote a feature at Chris Welch, wrote a great review of it.

It's all on Theverge.com, media company on the current internet, also in AMP and Facebook Instant. Yeah, load this up in Facebook and Starcles. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe search for it in that open web of yours. I'm sorry. I feel like the worst person.

No, but Paul, I mean, like that's what a lot of, I think, you know, enthusiasts have been asking for. And so, like, you know, I don't care about the stupid smart TV interface and stuff like that. But when you think about, like, the average person, they turn the TV on. They need to go somewhere. It needs to take them somewhere, whether that's to take them to input one for their cable box and they understand that concept. Or it's to go to the Netflix app. Like, I have a Vizio.

I use the Netflix app on my Vizio because it's the only real easy way I can watch 4K content from Netflix. It's by the big din. Which is one reason I'm excited about the Xbox one. as we then talk much about that. Yeah, 4K. I mean, there's other ways to get 4K. I could buy a fire TV that has 4K. I could buy the Roku. You can buy 4, 1080p TV.

It's just like you don't want to have to use the TV operating system. But I understand that some people do. I mean, I think that's probably for the average person, it's most straightforward, but as Walt's column points out, it is still a dumpster fire. Okay, and on that note,

it's time. To talk about Ted Morthy. Now, we're done. You know, what's another weird thing? I was like trying to find, like, jail breaks. for TV operating systems. Most of them run on Linux or FreeBSD or something. There's very few TV because there's so many different models.

I think it's hard to like pick one to be the hackers TV. There's no like WRT 100. And they all run proprietary operating systems. Right. No, it's typically based on Linux. You say there's no hackers TV? Like what is the hackers TV that like

I want something that is like the, what's the link says WRT 100? WRT 54G, I believe, is what you're thinking about. Why would you want to do that? You can just plug a PC into a TV. Yeah, but they have a computer and I'm... You can just glue a Mac Mini to the back of the TV.

There's a computer in the TV. Why can't I do things with the computer in the TV? Because those computers are... Think about it. Like, when you turn on the TV, you don't know what's going to happen. I mean, there's a computer in a car. I mean, this is the same argument, right? You could change what's on that computer and what it does when you boot the computer.

things happen. You can break it. I was looking at this for like an art project that I wanted to do. It's like you want it to be built. You know, I want to have to like bolt on a raspberry pie to a perfectly good TV

when there's a whole computer inside of every TV basically. You know you can follow the Verge on Twitter and Snapchat. I wasn't aware. At Verge. No, Paul, you're exactly right. But here's the thing.

The effort it would take to hack the computer in a TV. It's too high when you could just take the HDMI cable and plug it back. No, there's that, but like not everybody has the same TV. Like Samsung makes 90 models of TV. And I think that's why there isn't the hackers TV.

Like somebody has probably hacked a TV. But tweet me at D.C.C. They went on Hacker News. Yeah. tweet DCC. If you hacked your Samsung TV. Written to my mentions. No.

I bet somebody like hacked their TV and like then went on like hacker news or SlashDot or something. It was like, I hacked my TV. And everyone's like, what model? And like they typed in like a 30 character Samsung model. And I was like, I don't have that TV. And that was the end of that conversation. Anyway, that's it.

We're at a time. Sadly, it's a good one. Rocking. rolling sounds for loco sparks with two xes we're at virgin twitter virgin snapchat virgin instagram hit us up on itunes press five stars if you think about any fewer number of stars shut your mouth uh what's tech with chris plant it's on tuesdays control athlete hits on thursdays with waltz and myself virgysp with emily and liz is on fridays there's a bunch of other podcasts and recode side loren hood has too embarrassed to ask paul's going to say something

i have a special announcement andrew can i say this we're gonna do the describe pictures podcast as a special edition episode thousand words with paul miller yeah and domi domi's gonna help and there for it uh well look out for that yeah that was vortcast we're back next week see you rock and roll paul words