The Vergecast - App Store chaos, ray tracing, and new Macbook Air rumors

Episode Date: August 24, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Paul, Nilay, and Dieter start off the show with the news that Netflix is testing a payment feature to bypass Apple’s App Store fees, which leads into a larger discussion of (as Nilay calls it) “App Store chaos.” Paul seems pretty excited about “ray tracing” — a term that Nvidia is using for its upcoming graphics cards — so the crew explains what that means and how far ahead Nvidia is compared to its competition. Competition is a general theme in this week’s episode. We’ve also got our two recurring segments in the show: deputy editor Liz Lopatto’s “This Week in Elon Musk” (which is now a newsletter) and Paul’s segment “Cold ears, warm heart.” And we must not forget the latest Apple rumors that have hit the news in preparation for the likely Apple event in September. But there’s a whole lot more in between that, so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 03:35 - Netflix is testing a payment feature to bypass Apple’s App Store fees 20:39 - ‘Ray tracing’ could bring the biggest graphics jump in a decade 30:59 - DJI’s new Mavic 2 drones have upgraded cameras and zoom lenses 34:34 - Nikon strikes back at Sony with first full-frame mirrorless cameras 40:09 - This week in Elon Musk with Liz Lopatto 44:15 - Apple’s MacBook Air successor will reportedly have slim bezels and high-res Retina display 51:14 - Microsoft to bundle Xbox One consoles, Xbox Live, and Game Pass into a monthly subscription service 52:56 - Paul’s weekly segment “Cold ears, warm heart” 53:52 - A day in the life of a Waymo self-driving taxi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This episode of Vergecast also brought to you by the Audi E-Tron. The electric car has always raised questions. Can we contend with the elements? What's the range? With high-speed charging low... Bluh. Sorry, whatever. Sub-so of VergeCast also brought to you by the Audi E-Tron.

The electric car has always raised questions. Can you contend with the elements? What's the range? With high-speed charging, long-range capabilities and quattro all-wheel drive, the fully electric Audi-E-Tron could be the answer. Visit AudiUSA.com slash Etron to learn more and stay informed. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Paul Miller.

I'm sorry, I'm late in you. Paul was late to our recording today. I deserve the flagship. You're not getting a 90-minute verge cast today. No, we're going to be fine. Hi, Paul. Hey. I'm your friend, Eli.

This is Paul. Hello. The delinquent. Dieter, tell the audience about your relationship with that. I'm your constant companion. I'm always there lurking. Use your PDA. Your Palm Pilot, if you will.

There's kind of like a lot of weird and wacky stuff talking about this week. A quiet week, generally. I want to start by just plugging a couple things. One, our new show, The Future of Music with Danny Deal, who is legitimately the coolest person who works at The Verge. Went up today. She's got imaging heap in VR, like volumetric VR. It's first time an artist has done that.

So go watch that on YouTube. It's a cool show. We've got more episodes. coming of that. Home of the Future with Grant Amhara continuing to go. Somebody tweeted at me and Deeder that like they were watching the episode and they started screaming vendor lock in at the screen

when Grant was... Warmed my heart. I was like, yes, we've trained you all well. So go watch those two shows on YouTube. They are great. And then you might have noticed that we've been doing some interviews and segments and experimentation on the Vergecast. We're going to start, we've gotten a lot of feedback. People love the interviews, but they just want

an hour of us goofin. So we're going to start working on like splitting out the interviews. So next week, I recently interviewed the President and General Counsel of Microsoft Brad Smith about what's going on online, how they're moderating their different services, election interference, the whole thing. So next week, we're going to publish that as a standalone and we're going to start publishing some standalone interviews as kind of a trial balloon. So just keep an eye out for that. I know people like podcast listeners hate it when weird things happen in their feeds. Nothing should change. And I get it. But the feedback we've got

suggest that we need to split the interviews out from the main show. So we're going to try it out. If it goes well in September, we'll just go for it and start doing it all the time. So that's happening next week. I just, I don't want listeners to be surprised when suddenly other stuff happens in the Vergecast feed. But I think it's going to work out. That interview we recorded it is great. He's great.

He's very illuminating. There's a little bit of news in there. I don't want to give it away. Some like wild stuff happened as they think about moderating all their services. That'll happen next week. So just keep an eye up for it. Let me know what you think. I feel very confident that's the move, but if you feel differently, I want to know.

All right, let's start with the news. I should just have this written down here as App Store Chaos. That's like basically how I feel about it. The basics are we all understand how AppStores work. Apple runs one, Google runs one. Google got slapped by the EU, so you have to disintermediate play services from Android. That's a big deal. Right after that, we talked about in the show, Epic Games pulled Fortnite off of the Google Play Store, said side-load it.

This week, Netflix is testing a payment feature to bypass Apple's App Store. This is not quite the same thing. You don't still download the Netflix app from the App Store, but it's a subscription service. And previously, if you wanted to subscribe, you just hit the button, and it would go through Apple's in app billing, and you would just subscribe to Netflix. Now that button is gone. But you would pay more if you did that, right? Well, yeah, yeah, I'll get to that in a sec.

Now that button's gone. Netflix says, go to the web, sign up on the web, give us your credit card details there. Come back, log in, you're good, watch Netflix. What Dieter is saying is correct. This is true for Netflix or Spotify for a number of other services. I did it for YouTube. I was just the world's laziest man. It's like, I know it's $10 on the web.

I could pay $13 a month. I have YouTube Red. I feel bad. So Apple has a 70-30 split for every transaction that happens through its store. And so companies are smart. They just pass that cost onto you. So it's $10 a month for YouTube Red on the web. It's $12.99.

If you buy it in the YouTube app, because it has to pass through Apple's payment service. Companies are starting to, like, resent this. I think there's a lot of big questions about these app stores, whether or not they're, like, monopolies on these platforms, basically. Ben Thompson today, very smart. Analyst who writes Stratereckery, wrote Apple has an app. Wait, what was that?

He writes Stratacary. Stratikery. Stratikery. Okay, sure. And it's got a line over E. I got it. Anyway, it's really good. If you don't subscribe to it, you should subscribe to it.

I'm clearly missing out. Pay him directly so you don't have to pay the extra fee. It's really good. He's really smart. But in his newsletter this morning, he wrote, Apple is an absolute monopoly over app distribution on the iPhone, and they are nakedly, baldly charging rent. Right?

Like, they can just do it. And I think a lot of developers are saying, what am I even getting for this money? Like, I don't have a human contact at the app store. I don't, the rules seem capricious. And that's, I mean, that's why I just wrote down App Store chaos. Like, this moment is here. Well, I just think of it from the user perspective.

What makes life easier as a user? And I know, for instance, every time that I flirt with buying a digital product, it's typically a land on Amazon, and I'm going to maybe buy a Kindle book or maybe buy an audible book. And Amazon, I'm just go through this crazy redirect carousel because an Amazon link in Safari wants to open the Amazon app. So the Amazon app launches. And then Amazon app's like, oh, no.

He wants a digital product so that it bumps me back to the web so I can buy it on the web. It's just bad user experience and it's confusing. My question is, how can Netflix, can they put a link? Because I feel like part of Amazon's thing is they can't even link directly to their store. Neither can Netflix. So they just have to say, hey, we've heard about. this thing called a web browser. Yeah.

Why don't you see what happens if you type of Netflix. I mean, if you need to sign up for Netflix, visit Netflix.com. I mean, it's not. They're Netflix. How many people left have to sign up for Netflix? No, but it's gross in the sense of that possibly, you know, this side loading thing works for Epic. Yeah.

This web browser thing might work out for Netflix. Well, so I saw Walt and Steven Sinovsky tweeting today. And Stephen Sinovsky, who used to run Windows. knows who he's talking about in this industry, was like, look, every distributor and every supplier, they're always at war. Walmart versus Procter & Gamble was a war, and that's like a thing you have to manage. And Walt pointed out when Apple introduced the App Store and he said, I'm only taking 30%. People like applauded because previous to app stores, developers had to pay Verizon to get weird bad apps preloaded on feature phones. I think that's a good point, but we're 10 years away from that now.

Previously to the App Store, if you wanted to get an app on a phone, you went to the web. There is a genuine question of what does the App Store provide to developers? It provides some level of promotion. It provides, like, payment stuff. It provides users the ability to have, like, a single place where all their subscriptions might be. But I think most of all, the number one thing it provides is trust. if I install an app from this store, I know it's coming from this store. It's not coming from some weird malware redirect.

You know, back of the day, if you went to go download an app on your computer, you'd end up at, I don't know, downloads.com or, you know, max something, something, or this other thing. And then you're like, okay, well, where's the download button? I can't find it amongst all these ads. I got to make sure I click the real one and not the fake one that's going to take me someplace else. And you'd look for a developer. And it was like, it was a mess. And so if your brand is big enough that you can solve some of those. problems without needing Apple?

Why wouldn't you? Or Google, in this case. The thing that's different with the iPhone is they do, in fact, hold a monopoly. You cannot install an app on the iPhone without going through the App Store full stop. Wait, just for all the people who just screamed actually in their cars. Because they did. You can. If you run a big business or your developer, there are ways to.

Right. But the normal person who buys an iPhone has no requirement. course, to install an app on their own. So the reason it has, one, we know that Apple makes money on it. It's not net zero for them. And two, 30% just seems high. It is the case that if you do a subscription, it goes down to 15% after the second year. And that's a very interesting incentive. It sort of seems like Apple saw this coming a couple years ago, right? But I don't know, like absent an app store, the web created app stores for other platforms. There was a really great site that you can trust called Palm Gear that provided almost all of the same services

that you get out of an app store. The Mac had Corellia, which was a sort of a clearinghouse for stuff. These things are possible to create, but having it be official from the company and knowing that they have an infrastructure of robots and people that are checking for malware and quality and whatnot is a genuine service. The question is, is it worth 30%? And then the second question is, if you don't need those services, do you have recourse to something? And so Netflix is in the enviable position of not needing that stuff. And they also are the avial position of having another way to, like, get money from people. Wait, no, Netflix.

It's important, I think, to distinguish Netflix from Fortnite. Netflix is still putting its app in the store. Right. I think that's a key element here. They're not shipping a binary to you. they're just opting out of... If we're talking iPhone, so is Fortnite. Right, because they don't have a choice.

But just to be clear, like Netflix, all the trust, all the malware checking, whatever, they're just bypassing the payment service because they get literally nothing for that 30% country. They just pass it directly to the consumer and Apple takes some money and Netflix gets nothing. So like, why not just lower your price and say, sign up over... Give us your credit card number over here, and then your experience in this app is going to be almost exactly the same. But Fortnite on Android is shipping you a binary, which I think is really, really different. Because that's what gets to what you're talking about, Deere, which is, are there alternative ways to get code onto your phone? And that opens just a vast number of questions.

Can I make a bit of a tangent? This is at the start we haven't really covered. Yeah. But, you know, Discord is launching a Steam competitor. So Windows, one beautiful thing about the Windows ecosystem, and there's lots of stores. Steam is the most popular one. Steam is trying to get all Discordy and added voice chat.

Discord. I don't know if they had this in their pocket. I'm sure they had to be playing this for a while. Paul, you missed your shot. You could have said Discord's getting real steamy. Discord is getting real steamy. and they're launching a game store. And there are a lot of value ads that,

especially on a PC, that you're managing updates for people, you're managing sort of like the reputation system for the different publishers and like ratings. And there's also the online presence aspect. Like, game center is basically a lag to launching a game on an iPhone. That's about all it is. I know Apple doesn't want this at all, but I would love alternative stores on the iPhone.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's where it's funny. If Apple's store was better or offered more flexible pricing or more options for developers to sell upgrades or all the things developers have been talking about, I don't think you would see this sort of agitaph from that community about how Apple treats them. And it's just there and it's real. And of course Apple isn't offering that stuff because they don't have to. They're just the only choice. So if they had some competition, maybe they would like change their policy. In all, I think the app store has been a huge boon to everyone, right?

Developers have distribution they never had before. Consumers are getting more apps. There's just more activity. But what is it done? It's inexorably lowered prices to almost zero. Consumers are overwhelmed. And we all forgot how to use the web. Yeah, everyone, no one knows how to use a computer anymore.

That seems like, you know, the comparison between Walmart and Procter and Gamble is like, what could Procter and Gamble do? They could, like, go to Target, right? They could go to Amazon. They have these other distribution options, and particularly on the iPhone, they don't. And I think what we're seeing with Google is this huge amount of interest in other distribution options. So, Fortnite, you know, Samsung's exclusive was you could get it on the Samsung store, which is not particularly exciting,

but the idea that Samsung has this app store and they're going to buy exclusives and sort of claw their way into relevance is somewhat interesting. Deider, what are we going to say? I was just going to point out as long as we're talking about pure monopoly on the iPhone, there is this idea out there.

I don't really know if I'd buy into it, but that one of the reasons Apple chose not to ban the InfoWars app was because it would make very clear to everybody what a pure monopoly they have on the app store, whereas with, you know, podcasts, you can still get a podcast, you know, via other means, via other apps, via, you know, knowing how RSS works or whatever. I've heard this conspiracy theory.

Yeah. Who didn't know that? Who is, is there anyone, like, is there one senator who's like, oh, I can't get Info Wars? I better look into whether there's an alternative source of apps on the iPhone. Are you suggesting that senators might not be, like, tech savvy? I don't know what I'm suggesting. Okay. Another part of this, this whole free speech debate is like, oh, you don't like Twitter, leave Twitter.

Apple has kept GAB.AI off of the app store for offensive content, quote, unquote, which is kind of weird because you have a web browser on your platform. And we talked about this from the very beginning. Apple used to ban porn apps and we'd be like, yo, Safari is, you can go to Tumblr.com anytime you want. I mean, I think they, but that's, they want that. I think they're actually okay with that. I think they know this is Apple's space for our values, our curated, quote unquote, curated selection because it's massive. And then the web is the open space. And I think they're very comfortable at that distinction inside of Apple.

The question is whether anybody else understands that distinction, whether that distinction is important, whether in the face of regulatory scrutiny, that distinction even means anything. Those are wide open questions. I have no idea. But I think that's the distinction they've certainly made. But okay, so step back from, I shouldn't have opened this Pandora's box, but step back from, like, giant, like, regulation questions and just look at who else has the opportunity or the, the wherewithal to do an end around of either Apple's App Store pricing or Google's store entirely. Because the going assumption right now is if you're Epic or if you're Netflix, yeah, go for it. You're big enough. You've got your own brand.

You've got your own direct customer relationships. Like, you could totally pull that off. But, like, who else? Spotify. I don't know. Immediately leads to mind. Google. New York Times, like, has got a mixed model, actually.

You can subscribe on the web. Well, they all had mixed models, right? Yeah. All of this company said Spotify, for years has been, like, to sign up on the web. Like, don't do this. Yeah. But we have to do it. So, yeah, I think the Times, the Post could do it.

Amazon, bizarrely could do it. Well, Amazon's doing some crazy shit on Android, right? I think they finally are getting rid of that Netflix or that Amazon Underground App Store that they had, the Underground App Store for Google. Remember that? Yes. Oh, God. I mean, I think there's an endless list of these services now.

The point I was making earlier about it being 10 years later is this ecosystem is fully developed, it's mature. The companies that have come up as companies who built software for the phone are now as big or bigger than the platforms themselves, they have options. There's no reason they wouldn't use them. I think the question is just, how will Apple and Google react?

And I think they're in vastly different positions because Google is required by the European Union to unbundle play services in the store from Android. So, like, whatever is going to happen on Android is going to be drastic. And I think Apple, being Apple, will probably be more conservative. But the pressure is definitely there from these businesses that after a decade of shipping mobile software are now deeply aware that they have their own customers and their own customer relationships.

If Spotify tomorrow is like, hey, sorry, we're canceling your iOS in that payment membership. Go sign up on the web. By the way, it'll be $3 cheaper. Is anyone going to get mad at them? No, but I think that Spotify actually has different incentives. I think that Spotify is in a customer acquisition race with Apple. And Apple's doing really well with Apple music on the iPhone. to Spotify, especially in the U.S., and so I think it's a lot riskier for Spotify to try and take a

hard line on this than people realize. They're popular, but they're not, like, dominant. All right. We got to take a break. This is going to be a weird ad. I want you to know what's going to happen. There's going to be Mythbuster on the show, but it's like sponsored. So Carrie Byron, famous Mythbuster, is now going to do an Audi ad. Go on this adventure with Carrie Byron. Hi, my name is Carrie Byron. I'm a former Mythbuster. So I'm always, very curious about new technology. Today we're going to take a peek into the future, the future of the American Highway. It could be filled with electric vehicles supported by an ecosystem of technology like super fast charging stations. Right now the future is being built by people like

Jonathan Levy at EV Go, the nation's largest network of fast charging EV stations. All right, Jonathan, let's start at the beginning, the charge. Now EV charging stations, are they going to be available everywhere? Yes, because we want to integrate charging into people's everyday lives. And that means putting the chargers where people need them, whether it's in metro grocery stores and other things, or just off the highway or sometimes a combination of that. How quickly will we be able to charge an EV from zero to 100? Today, the typical EV can get to 80% using a fast charger in about 20 or 30 minutes. And a lot of people are starting to think about 350 kilowatt charges to be able to do things in

about five to 10 minutes. And tell me about these charging corridors. What does it look like when it all comes together. Yeah, so I mean, ideally you have a mix, right, where you have some things that are just off the highway, just like a regular old rest stop. Some of them are a mile or half a mile off so that you can still pull into a strip mall, grab a sandwich, and let the car charge while you're doing that. We want to have both. And so there's a big concerted effort to make sure that we're pushing the envelope and putting fast chargers out there that can work for all sorts of people, whether it's their road trip or just their day-to-day life or if it's a ride-chair driver that's taking people to and from the airport. To learn more about going electric with Audi,

check out AudiUSA.com slash E-Tron. That's Audi-USA.com slash E-T-R-O-N. Well, thank you again to Audi E-Tron. Thank you to Kerry. Okay, there's big Nvidia News, R-T-E-T-E-T-T-E-L-S. Here's a great segue. Did you know you can ray trace a car? That's true.

All right, Paul. Tell me about these GPs. Remember when the next-gen came out, like the PS4, Xbox 1. Yeah. And everybody, you know, more power, graphics are going to get better. But there was no, like, thing that you could just point to, like, that makes it next gen. And then they kind of, like, mid-gen went, like, 4K.

I feel like we have now seen next gen. And it is real-time rate tracing. And so, what was it, a week or so ago, Nvidia released, like, the workstation version. They're quadro. Is it quadro or quattro? Quattro. There workstation cards. And like going up to like...

Quadro. Quadro. Okay. Thank you. I was thinking about the Audi. There you go. You win, Audi. Like the cards go up to like $10,000.

Like the dye size is like enormous. It's like the second biggest chip ever made. And I remember there like even just a couple weeks ago, there was speculation. Oh, like, invidia is like holding back on consumer cards. Consumer cards are kind of like no wind for them right now because they're still leading with their 10 series. And AMD is not catching up. And people just buy all the new cards for cryptocurrency and then resell them later. And it's just like a busted market right now.

No reason for them to release a consumer card. And then they released the 20 series, which is amazing. So it does real-time rate tracing. So the basics of real-time ray tracing, I just didn't see this coming. So this is really exciting. So this is something, I believe it's Pixar that was doing it first. But basically, have you ever seen a rate-traced image in progress? Yeah.

It looks like a really low, a high ISO image, like really, really grainy. And it slowly fills in over time and gets clear and clearer and smoother and smoother. So now there is a neural network-based denoising algorithm that can take. take a noisy ray traced image and fill it in so that it looks just like fully rendered. So you're saving a ton of time because instead of taking like the hundredth pass of a ray trace, you can take like the first or second or something like that. So that's big boost number one. The other big boost and the way that Nvidia is applying this to like games that we will actually play

is that you'll still have rasterization so the way games are typically rendered. That will happen. and then ray tracing is basically being added on top to do the lighting in real time. And everything I've seen that they've demoed so far looks beautiful. It's just an obvious leap forward. So you're going to get better. Like typically like depth of field effects,

bloom effects, stuff like that. A lot of that stuff typically is done with the CPU right now. So that can be done in engine with actual light rays. Well simulated. You can have refraction. You can have reflection. It's just, it's good. And you can have cooler shadows. where you tilt the light and the shadow does wobbly things.

I love it when new hardware comes out and gamers are like, we can get cooler shadows and then like it settles it and they care about games again and that pendulum just always swings back and forth. Like I will buy any game just to be like, check out that 4K. Real time global illumination. Imagine it. That sounds like your conspiracy theory YouTube channel. I'm telling you.

Globally illuminating in real time. So here's what I don't quite understand about NVIDIA's, like, pricing model. They don't actually make consumer products, right? They farm them out to Assuse and EVGA, but they set the prices. So the RTX 2070 starts at 49, the 2080s at $699,000. Then there's Founders Editions. Yeah, what's the Founders Editions? I think you get a sticker.

You get $599, $7.99, $1,200, right? But they're setting the prices for their third-party vendors. How does this work? No, they typically set basically like a base price, like a stock price. Here's what the stock model is. And then vendors can try to like basically lose money and undercut that price. But more typically, like, they'll have a stock version and then like this one's liquid cooled and this one is overclocked. So vendors can make, but they've been setting prices like this for a while.

Yeah, I just, I'm not in this market. And I'm like just looking at it. You can buy it from Assus, EVGA, gigabyte, MSIP, and Y, or Zotech. How would anybody make a decision about which one to buy? It's just your favorite. Is that just the answer? Which everyone hasn't sold out their entire inventory to cryptocurrency miners, I think is the answer. Also, I don't know.

I bought an Asus motherboard, and so I was like buying my video card, and it's like, oh, This ASUS 1070 is the same color. I'm going to vertically integrate my desktop PC. But you want a brand that you could relatively trust, that you trust that they're going to do a good job cooling it. Are these good for cryptocurrency mining? Can you ray-trace a good coin? I don't know that.

I don't know if that's a phrase. So, Nvidia is doing some, this is something I've been like thinking or talking a lot about. I'm not trying to say that I predicted real-time ray-tracing. But most of the gains that we're seeing in computer performance, I mean, full stop, cross our phones, desktops, servers is through very application-specific. I mean, that's what is mining most of the Bitcoin now is ASICs, like chips that are specifically designed for a purpose.

These are chips that are very specifically designed for NVIDIA algorithms. You know, they've worked with Microsoft. They've worked with the Unreal Engine to allow developers to use this pretty easily. But you're basically, I mean, Nvidia is more and more. more, it's like being an app, like an iOS developer. Like I'm going to use Apple's SDK APIs and make an Apple-like thing. And so you have, like, there's this, I forget what the acronym is, but there's this specific algorithm for basically chopping space into little chunks

so that when you're doing ray tracing, you don't have to go everywhere. You can kind of just focus on one little spot. And that's specifically accelerated by NVIDIA. Yeah. So, like, they, and obviously this neural network that fills in the noise, that's specifically accelerated. So they do have like a TPU tensor processing. It's a tensor unit. Yeah.

It's just called tensor. Well, because Google's chips are called TPUs. They're tensor or flow processing units. So anyways. Google has a flow. It means it does rate these on, especially their workstation cards on, on AI workloads or neural network network, TensorFlow workloads, basically. It sounds like the sort of thing you usually hate.

I just want to put this out there. You're so excited about ray tracing that your general hatred of proprietary, like, API calls and SDKs is like out the window. Yeah, because I'm very excited about, so this is part of my whole. This is my whole vision of how I believe the world works. You start with a walled garden. You tend the garden, then you tear down the walls. And this is definitely the walled garden section. Nvidia's out in the garden with a little watering can, hoping rate tracing will grow.

And where can the listener subscribe? What was the phrase? Real-time global illumination. Yeah, Paul's available on YouTube now. You can pay $3 extra. But I mean, have you guys seen these videos? It's beautiful. Yeah.

No, I watched all the videos today. They're incredible. I think it's just one of those things where it's what you're saying. It's like it's very limited to like Nvidia's view of the world. And they're just seems to be really far ahead. And that's fascinating to me because they, it's, you know, like the Xbox is on AMD chips. Apple's on AMD chips. PS. It's like, they're just like off pushing these incredibly high horsepower desktop PC

experiences. And it's fascinating to me that the sort of rest of the industry can't find a way to work with Nvidia better. I mean, maybe they're, I don't know, like, what is this thing, what was the power draw? I tweeted this. It's like 250 watts. It's like insane. It's insane. It's just completely insane. What do you want slow time, break tracing? All right. The other thing, my hope is that because they're accelerating more workloads, and yes, some of these are very specific to specific algorithms, hopefully that horsepower will be available,

and developers will figure out how to use it for tasks that are beyond just ray tracing. So hopefully we'll find other things in our lives that will be accelerated by this. But, you know, obviously launching a gaming card, you're going to emphasize the gaming application. Yeah. I mean, I think Nvidia is just so far ahead. It's like what you said. They didn't have to.

Yeah. And they just like did it. And now everyone else is kind of way behind. I think it's deeply fascinating that all of that effort is localized into one corner of computing when all the other things we talk about tend to run these wacky AMD processors. Well, and there isn't something kind of thrilling about that. It's like if NVIDio came out and like we have. have solved messaging.

And they launched a proprietary hardware and messaging platform. That would be hell. Now it's coming. Now that you said it, it's real. If they're hunkered down developing the future of graphics, I'm going to love it every time. Yeah.

Yeah. Speaking of which, I just want to do some camera news real fast and then go into the next thing. Mavoc 2. D.J. I had an event today, Thursday. A MAVIC 2 came out, Mavc 2 Pro, Mavik 2 Zoom,

both have Hasselblod cameras. They look great, and they're also apparently very quiet. Yeah. I was all set to be salty about that there's two versions and why don't they just find a way

to put something modular in there so you don't have to pick between the two different things and why, you know, it's like you're buying the camera and then you're stuck buying this stupid drone that's attached to it, right?

Which is a weird way to put it. But you know what I mean. But I don't know. Like, actually looking at what they've done and looking at the decisions they made and looking, you know, there's the bigger sense around the two. I don't know. I'm actually weirdly hyped for these things. Yeah, I really actually want to. I'm trying to sell my Phantom 4.

It's not going great because newer, better drones are available. So I'm trying to get rid of it because I want one of these very badly. But then I'm like, what do I need this for? And I realize I should just get a spark. But you look at these specs. Yeah, but then also look at the footage that Viren shot in Iceland at the bottom of that post. It's just like, oh, I want that. Yeah, I want this a lot.

I mean, they're expensive. It's like, what, $1,400 and $1,400? Yeah. Yeah. The Mavik 2 Pro is 1449 and the Zoom is 1249. This Hasselblad camera. Yeah. I think it's real.

I don't think it's a sticker. How do you think Hasselblad helped improve? Because just to be clear, these drones are not carrying a five to ten. They're not carrying a medium format. Well, so DJ owns a huge truce. trunk of Hasselblad. Right. So I'm assuming.

Obviously they have the rights to use the logo. I don't know. I think that's like a really interesting question. But I think they probably did more than just put a sticker on it. I think there's probably some sensor integration there. Right. I mean, they bought a big fancy camera company. Yeah.

You assume that their camera engineers at DJI were like, hey, can we talk to them? And they're like, stickers only. That's exactly how I think it would tell. Hasselbad's like, no, only stickers. Welcome to our waiting room. There are T-shirts for everyone. No, I think they actually did some stuff. I think they're never going to really tell us, but DGI's been so far ahead anyway.

Yeah. But I think getting that, I think the Hasselot stuff was more about their pro line, right? Like the Inspire. They want to put that logo on the big film drones. They can put them on the Mac too. Why not? I mean, the thing that I love about what we're talking about, like going from Nvidia to this is like here are two companies that are so far ahead of everybody else and what they do.

And there's like ancillaria related, you know, product categories or whatever. There's AMD for Nvidia. There's, I don't know, unique for DGI. But either one of these companies could just coast for a while. And it seems like they're not. Yeah, that's free. The MAVIC also, the MAVAC 2 has insane obstacle avoidance. So you just like set it to fly and it can go around things and above and below things.

The video they put out to demonstrate this was like it definitely seems like it was flying through the Death Star, which I don't know is like a regular occurrence for most people. But as somebody who has crashed a drone, I certainly appreciate it. So you're saying Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are obsolete. Yeah. Their skill set is. They've been replaced by a robot with a zooming camera that says Hassablan on it. Okay.

Also, I don't really know why you need to zoom with a drone because you can just fly the drone. I've been thinking about this a lot. Well, you do that, what's that cool zoom that you do where you're moving the camera one way but you're zooming the other way and it's really disorienting? You do that. I think of that as the Rondo zoom. Yeah. Rhonda was one of our old video directors. Okay.

Other camera news. New LX100 from Panasonic with touch screen new sensor. And then Nikon just released its full frame mirrorless stuff. The Nikon stuff, they, it really feels like they missed a trick. Right? Like what do people think of when they think of mirrorless cameras? It's smaller, easier to handle. So Nikon put out like a full size DSLR body, D7.

Z7 and Z6. I keep getting it wrong. They're huge. the lenses look nice. You can get an adapter for the typical Nikon F-F-Mount lens. I just don't know where they're going with this one. Here's what I think happened. Nikon, a decade ago, was like, hey, these smaller cameras are coming.

Eventually, we're going to need to get rid of the lens, or not the lens, the mirror. We should get ready. We should be ready to make cool small cameras. Well, it was a decade ago. Like, well, how do we do that? And somebody said, I know. Let's bring Ashton Coucher in. And we'll make something called Cool Pills.

And then it was such a traumatic experience having to work with him that Nikon has decided they're out of that game and they're only going to make big ass cameras for the rest of their company because that's just where they live. Can I just point out that the adapter to use the regular lenses is? It's called FTZ. F2Z. Whatever Nike product manager came out with that. Maybe Ashikudder is still lurking. Okay. Okay, but here's the thing.

One advantage of mirrorless cameras is the small size. Yeah. But there are other reasons that people gravitate towards them. Mm-hmm. And what annoying thing about Sony's cameras is they have these tiny little batteries that run out in like 15 minutes. And so you have to like to have an effective professional Sony kit. You basically have to have like eight batteries with you. and then like a dual charger, so you've got two batteries charging it.

You know, so I don't know how these cameras will actually operate. But especially, you know, if you're actually professional, the lens size is going to dominate unless you've got like a pancake lens or something. So I don't know. I feel like there's definitely room for a bulkier full-frame mirrorless camera if it's actually good. And I hope it's good. And also they're doing this crazy lens. the noct lens

58mm, F-stop 0.95. Yeah. Fastest glass in Nikon's history. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. I'm a Nikon person. Right.

I can't believe I just bought a Nikon DSLR. That seems done in retrospect. But, you know, I'm excited. I just think these are going up against a Sony A7-3 in A-7-R-3, and people love those cameras in a way that I'm not sure Nikon can roll in with kind of late to the party. I'm excited for them to do it. I think Sony needs to the competition.

Yes. Again, the only theme of our show is please competitors emerge. Anyway, I'm excited about it. It's cool. And then I mentioned the LX100. Speaking of Sony, I think the RX1006 is, we just reviewed it. Becca, our video director did an amazing video review on our YouTube channel. You should go check that out.

And Stefan worth the review on the site. The six is one of those cameras. Mark 6, everyone who wants to buy it talks to me about buying an older one instead. They talk about buying the 5 and they talk about buying the 4 because they're cheaper. They're virtually the same. People love the Alex 100. I think that class of cameras, honestly, the upgrade from your phone camera to that is just staggering. And I've said it on our show like a thousand times now.

We take so many awesome photos of the baby and I love them all. She's really cute. And the second I like go to look at one closely, I'm like, oh, this photo actually sucks. I don't feel that way about the ARX 100. So I'm going to end up buying a camera. I'm going to buy a drone on a camera. This segment was stuff Neely is going to buy. Microphone, Jack.

That's true. That's true. Does the Alex 100 have a microphone, Jack? No, you don't want to shoot the other thing anyway. The Alex 100 does have a cool thing that Nikon started doing. It has continuous Bluetooth low energy transfers to your smartphone. So as you shoot, it transfers automatically, which Sony's play memories does not do yet. That makes me happy.

All right, I'm going to read this ad. But if you have an Android phone, you can NFC tap it to send one right away, which is really convenient. Yeah. That's just Dieter out there. Do you have like a move where you take a photo and then I click your phone real fast and take another photo? No, I just I take photos. I review the stuff I took and then I find the one I want and I tap it to my phone and then I post it to Instagram. I was hoping that you had some sort of elaborate dance that you did as you took photos.

No, I'm sorry. But Deeter, do you ever need to send money internationally? I want to warn you against using your bank or PayPal. By the way, this episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by TransferRise. Sure, they get your money from A to B, but that transfer costs you more than it should. A lot more. It's the old way. Let me tell you about the new smarter and cheaper ways to spend money internationally, Transferise.

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We're doing something a little different this week. We're going to be creating a newsletter this week in Elon. You'll find subscription links at Theverge.com. You should definitely sign up. And I'm just going to just go through it, okay? So about 12 hours after I recorded last week's this week in Elon, the New York Times published an interview with Elon. So, you know, last week was immediately out of date.

Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff in there that's interesting, but one of the things that interests me the most is that the board is looking for a second command for Elon, which makes total sense because you read the interview, and he's like, well, you know, I've been working 120 hours a week. Sometimes I sleep at the factory. Sometimes I don't really sleep at all. I mean, that does not seem sustainable to me.

And Elon has a great track record of picking successful number two. So I'm thinking specifically of SpaceX's Gwen Shotwell, who has been incredible for that company and who also has taken a lot of pressure off of him and made him freedom up to spend more time with Tesla. So if you could find a Gwen Shotwell for Tesla, that might potentially make things a lot better. Because I know when I'm working like that, I don't work 120. 20 hours a week. But there are definitely weeks where I'm working more than I should. I get short-tempered. I get snappy. I'm not my best self. I make sloppy mistakes. And Elon being human, I suspect

the same is true of him. So having somebody to take the pressure off and run the organization so that he can take a vacation that's longer than a week seems like it's probably a good thing. Speaking of SpaceX, NASA has finally approved SpaceX's plan to load propellants onto its rockets while there are astronauts and board, which some aerospace experts thinks is risky. But the reason why it's been approved is that SpaceX has to demonstrate the fueling method at least five times on the Block 5 Falcon 9 rocket before the process is certified for people. So that's exciting for SpaceX. And now we're going to go back to Tesla drama because there's been a lot of it.

So you may remember Elon Musk tweeted about taking Tesla private. He was thinking about taking Tesla private at 420 Share, Blaze it, and pretty much all hell broke loose. Well, anyway, Goldman Sachs has confirmed they're involved. Morgan Stanley has dropped coverage of Tesla, so that's, quote, spurred speculation they could be playing a role in taking the privatization forward, according to Bloomberg News. And while we're talking banks, it's perhaps worth mentioning that JP Morgan is feeling pretty spicy and is predicting a Tesla stock plunge because funding was, quote, not secured. So their price target for Tesla shares is $195, which is a lot less than 420 and also not a very fun number.

A couple of other things going on. Ark Invest, what I could Tesla's biggest investors, has published an open letter saying they don't want Tesla to go private, that they think that it's actually better for Tesla to be in the public markets. They think it's going to be better for the company. They firmly believe in the company. So there's that. Those are your bulls and bears, my friends.

And then meanwhile, there are a couple of other smaller things going on. Wall Street Journal is reporting that some Tesla parts suppliers are nervous they won't get paid. Business Insider is reporting that Tesla is still having some manufacturing problems, and they surveyed 12 customers who say they got flawed cars. And some of those folks say that getting fixes wasn't easy. I will just note that 12 is not a huge number. One other thing, the Azealia Banks thing is still happening, and I still don't know what to make of it. I'm just going to say the whole thing gives me a really severe case of secondhand embarrassment. And I don't think I'm the only one who's embarrassed because Grimes and Elon Musk have unfollowed each other on Instagram,

Twitter, and then later Elon Musk deleted his Instagram account. I don't know what to make of that. I don't know if they're unfollowing each other because they just want to keep a low profile or if they have in fact broken up. But social media, none of us should be using it. That's this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lepado. Thank you so much for listening and you should subscribe to our newsletter.

Okay, I feel like we need to talk about these apple rumors. Yeah, it's a lot. So Apple's coming up. September is looming. The September often does. That's a real counting croissant. All right. September's doing, we're expecting a new iPhone event because that's what always happens.

And so now this little baby flood of leaks is coming. So Mark German at Bloomberg says MacBook Air replacement with a retina display and a new Mac Mini targeted at pros. I don't know if we're going to get that in September. That might be an October thing. Yeah, it really feels like they're going to have two events. We're expecting three iPhones and we're also expecting the Apple Watch with a bigger screen. I don't know how they fit that in.

There's also like the new iPad Pro in the wings and Mac. Like they're going to, there's no way they try and do all that stuff in a single event. Yeah, I'm with you. Right. Yeah. I can see them doing three products in one event, but not live. That seems like an awful lot. Although sometimes they just like do it, you know?

Like every now and again, they're just like, here's all of the things. I'd have to physically see a Mac Mini in an Apple store to believe Apple is launching. of MacMany. Well, so the report says they understand what people use MacaMinnis for, which is like server co-location. There's one, this is my favorite one, home theater usage

because the HTPC market still beating along. So you can see that's like a processor bump situation. I don't need to do a lot. And they are bad at bumping processors. So they bump the processor every eight years.

I was going to say. Careful. It's a long time. The MacBook Air seems a lot more complicated. So in John Gruber, you can just read his brain breaking in real time on Daring Fireball right now as he tries to piece it together. My brain is also broken. I don't know why this seems so complicated to everyone.

So here's the basic problem. Deeter, correct me if I'm wrong. Standing by to correct you. The report is it'll be the same. You sure you don't want this? Dieter, go ahead. Peter, go ahead. Wait, yeah, let's see this one.

I'll just help you. The report is that there's going to be a new MacBook Air replacement that will have, it'll be about the same size. It'll have a 13-inch screen, slightly smaller bezels. And great, that's what everyone's been waiting for. Hooray. But here's the question. We all assumed that when they released the MacBook and then the MacBook Pro, that that was how it was going to go. there was going to be the MacBook, small and thin and whatever, and then there'd be the MacBook Pro, big tanky, not tanky, but bigger, whatever.

And then the MacBook Air would eventually just kind of... The way it's turned out, the MacBook is underpowered, and the MacBook Pro is touchbarred. So everyone's real unhappy. And so everyone's waiting for them to come out with something else, because the thing I've been, you know, beating the drum about is they don't have a good $1,000 laptop. They don't have a good, like, mid-range. They'll never do low end, whatever. So if they release this thing, assume it's about the size of the MacBook air,

maybe a little bit thinner, has a better real processor, unlike the MacBook. Why does the MacBook exist? To have an arm chip in it next year. That's why it's there. You think so? Yeah. I mean, the problem with the MacBook is it's underpowered,

but Intel is underpowered. But why is the Air the one that's bigger and heavier than the MacBook? Because the air is the one that's going to get a realistic processor in it this year. I think everyone's brain is breaking because you're overthinking it. The MacBook Air is one of the most popular computers ever made. It had an absolutely golden brand. Joanna Stern, for $500 more, you can get a MacBook Air. That's just like all she wrote on our website for two years because it was true.

And they've tarnished that brand, but they could instantly bring it back with this very simple set of updates. They can move the MacBook to Arm and have that be the tip of that spear. and the MacBook Pro can continue to be whatever it's going to be. Here's what Apple should do. Yeah. They should introduce this thing and just call it the MacBook, and they should be like, and the old MacBook is, you know, the MacBook little. We're rebranding it.

The MacBook Little. The MacBooks Little. The MacBook Air. Call it the MacBook Air. Like, whatever. No. Look, if you just think, go with me on this. The MacBook is a computer with an arm processor makes sense, right?

Yeah. Like, just in terms of what it is. the size it is, what it could be, in terms of how Apple wants its consumers to think about the future of computing, right? You buy this thing, it's the jewel, it's a little bit more expensive, but it's the whole future.

And it only runs some subset of our Mac operating system applications. Stocks. And the stocks have it. And it can run some iPad apps over on the side. The MacBook Pro is for pros. It's got last year's chips in it. It's still buying.

A vibrant partnership with AMD. Yeah. That's for pros. It's going to be big. The MacBook Air, the thin and light that everybody wants, which is an Intel chip, the full range of stuff, in a reasonable size of the retina display. That makes sense to me in that you've got your pure consumer offering that's this MacBook, which does not have the range of apps because it runs arm. You've got the pro, which does everything, has a discrete GPU. By the way, I can't get mine to turn off and my battery dies in 10 minutes right now.

just letting everybody know how that DGPU life is working for me. You got the pro which does everything. And then you've got the Air, which is the thin and light down the middle golden brand name. I don't know why that seems complicated. But knowing Apple, they will complicate it in some way. Yes. I mean, the MacBook Air launched when you had a plastic, chunky MacBook and a heavy, powerful MacBook Pro. Probably with a disc drive.

Yeah. Yeah, actually with a disk drive. So the plastic one's had a distrope, too. That's also true. So what they need to do to differentiate is they take the existing MacBook, they wrap it in plastic, they add a disc drive, and they charge $600 for it, and everything is solved. I don't know who I saw on Twitter today, but there was some Mac developer who loaded up the first eyebook, like the tangerine orange one that looked like a toilet seat. And he had Xcode open on it in like 10.3. and it just looks like everything about it

looked like a cartoon and I literally thought instinctively thought that was a brighter time in America I was young the operating systems are bright there are colors everywhere the buttons are pulsing

the computers are neon orange I missed that moment it's gone now now we just want dark modes and everything that's for work bring back Zubas is what you're saying

oh god no it was post Zub I don't want to I don't want to talk about this anymore. All right. One more thing real fast. Tom Warren has been doggedly pursuing these leaks. Microsoft creating a new subscription service for Xbox that bundles a console Xbox Live Xbox Game Pass.

It looks like 25 bucks a month for the Xbox 1S and like 35 for the 1X. This is on its face a bad deal. If you just bought all that stuff on its own, it would be cheaper. And yet, I'm like, this is going to make me. buy a 1X. I don't know why. I don't know why. I cannot explain it. But I've had a 1X in a shopping cart on Microsoft's side, on Amazon, and I haven't been able to pull the trigger. Now you want to owe Microsoft money for two years. I don't get it. Can't you just like return it when you if you're done with it after a year? I don't know. Maybe not. I have no idea how this works. I just know

But the idea that I'm going to pay 30 bucks a month, or 35 bucks a month, it's weird, right? It's breaking my brain. Yeah. Because I would never buy GamePath otherwise, ever. Microsoft has wanted to, they've been talking in vague terms about trying to get like the console cycle a little bit more like the phone cycle. You know, so you're absolutely compatible from generation and generation of console. They can release them more often. And so also copying the phone model of like get a just get a subscription.

to your phone, put it on some weird payment plan, makes perfect sense for the way that they're thinking about the console market. Also, if you're like a kid, it's a lot easier to get 30 bucks a month, like weasel your way into 35 bucks a month than... Yeah. You just like go out. It's good practice for being in debt to large companies later.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Xbox, Capitalism, and practice. It's great. All right, Paul, every week. You have like two minutes. Every week. It's called Cold ears, warm heart. Can't lose.

Can't lose. HP has made a new patented method for cooling your ears with headphones. It's a thermoelectric magnets. Wow. So the new Omen Mindframe headset. They're also cloth, which is nice, USB powered. I just hate having hot ears. Yeah.

But I also like... How do magnets cool your ears? Thermoelectrically. I want to wear these all the time. I get this thing where one of my ears will just like suddenly like get really hot and turn super red and I don't know why. And just the idea of just having cold ears is like

you don't want cold feet but you do want cold ears. Exactly. All right. Dieter gets it. How much does it cost? 200 bucks. Also not portable because it's used to be powered. You get a battery. Come on. It's the future. Okay, that's it. I want you to look at a story on the site.

I just want to plug one more thing. Andrew Hawkins went to Waymo's self-driving big large-scale test. Exclusive. Checked out how they're managing a fleet of self-driving taxis. Which are, to be fair, Chrysler Pacific of minifans. But they're cool. So, like, read that.

It's a great story about a problem that I don't think we think about with self-driving, which is, like, literally who will change the oil in these cars. So check that out on the site. It's great. Home of the future is going. Future is going. We didn't talk about politics this week, but I promise you they are still happening. And Casey Newton is covering them all on the interface.

Check that out at the verge.com slash interface. That's a newsletter you can get every day. You can also follow us on all the social media platforms of your choice. We're usually at Verge. Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow us. I'm at Reckless on Twitter, Paul's Future Paul, Deidier's Backlon. You can also listen to more from the Box Media Podcast Network.

Check out Recode Decode with Karras Swisher and Recode Media of Peter Kafka. This up is the Vergecast brought to you by Audi ETRon. Despite all of its technology, there's a lot that audio Etron doesn't offer. For example, it has no tailpipe emissions and no need to fill up at the gas station. You just plug it in home. The Quachro all-wheel drive system offers no reason not to tackle roads in almost any weather. and with long-range capabilities in high-speed charging, E-Tron is a new way to think about electric mobility,

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