The Vergecast - Apple and OpenAI make a deal

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss takeaways from WWDC, this week's gadget news, and Elon Musk dropping his lawsuit against OpenAI. Further reading: Apple and OpenAI aren��t paying each other yet, says Bloomberg MKBHD interviewed Tim Cook. Tim Cook is ‘not 100 percent’ sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations Can Apple Intelligence fix the iPhone’s broken notifications system? The AI upgrade cycle is here Here’s how Apple’s AI model tries to keep your data private The best small updates Apple didn’t mention at WWDC Apple IDs are becoming Apple Accounts Apple skipped over the best visionOS 2 updates iOS 18 will let you record calls — and tells everyone for their privacy SharePlay is coming to Apple TV, HomePods, and Bluetooth speakers  Finally, offline maps with turn-by-turn guidance. The new versions of iOS and macOS will let you rotate your Wi-Fi address to help reduce tracking. Xbox boss: ‘I think we should have a handheld, too’ Microsoft announces a discless Xbox Series X console in white Xbox chief confirms more games are coming to other platforms Jabra’s earbuds are going away, but the impact they made isn’t The best thing about Jabra’s new earbuds is the case  The Light Phone 3 adds a better screen, a camera, and new ways to replace your smartphone The Windows on Arm chip race heats up with a challenger to Qualcomm Did startup Flow Computing just make CPUs 100x faster? Here’s the white paper and FAQs Google is putting more Android in ChromeOS Elon Musk drops lawsuit against OpenAI Elon Musk has unusual relationships with women at SpaceX, WSJ reports Sony buys Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Pew: A growing number of Americans are getting their news from TikTok Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast. I'm thinking we should have a handheld too. We should have a hand held.

We should. I would be awesome. I'm going to make one. We should do it with an LCD screen that we claim as an eating screen. Just play the games. That's coming for later. But if you know, you know, I'm just hinting towards. There's going to be a real theme on Vergecast this year, which is, are you telling the truth? And then we just look into it.

they can't. Does it work the way the people think it works? Or does it work not at all? Hi, my friend, Eli Alex Cranes is with me in the studio. Yeah, I'm your friend who's excited to talk about all the gadgets that are definitely real and work. It's a 2024. It's probably broken. I don't believe you. David Pierce is here. Hello. This was more fun when we were all sitting in like a needlessly fancy house together. Can we just do that like officially as the first cast? But with air conditioning. Yes. Oh, my God. So if you watch us on YouTube, you probably I saw us glistening. It's because that house was 5,000 degrees

when we were doing that episode. When we stopped recording between segments when they went to break and Liam, our producer, hands me a paper towel and goes from this angle, your head is a mirror. And I've been thinking about that

for four days now. That's what we do to make the verge cast for you. I don't want to go too far down this road. I'm saying, this is why you should do bangs. Yeah. David would rock some banks.

I would say there are several things preventing me from growing good bangs. And I'm happy to talk about them any time you want. That's a whole episode. David gets bangs. That's what AI is for. If someone can make an AI generated image of David with bangs, I have very, like, bouncy, curly hair. There's a lot of stuff in my hair to make it not do that.

Yeah. But we watched the fall guy and I came out of the bathroom the other day with just like full floppy bangs. Yeah. And I was like, back, should I do this? And she was like, no. She was like, just don't. Just sit you right back into the bathroom. Yeah.

I appreciate that you, like me and most men, watch Ryan Gosling for an hour and a half. And then it's like, what if I changed everything about myself? Could I be more like him if everything about me was different? I've had a lot of those moments recently. Becky met me when I had blonde highlights in my hair. So I think there was like an immediate. She's like, I can't go back. I suffered through this already.

No, thank you. All right. A lot to talk about. We promised an entire episode of the show. not about the AI stuff Apple announced at WWC. There has also been a ton of gadget news. We know through that. And then Lightning Round, unsponsored.

And I've seen the tweets from people who are like, I'm trying to sponsor the Lightning Round. Quite frankly, you've got to just bring a suitcase of money to our office directly. Yeah, you're not trying hard enough. That's all I'll say. You can't just be tweeting at me or posting on threads. Physical money in a suitcase. A good suitcase.

Yeah. I don't want Amazon Alphabet suitcase. We want to see you in the lobby. Just make icons. Samsonite, Toomey, you know, like good suitcase. That's actually, it's not the money in the suitcase. You just want a suitcase? Do you need a new suitcase?

This is now sponsored by a suitcase company. I don't know any other luggage brands. American tourist or do they make topo? Yeah. I would say away, but we wrote that story about Away one time and they threatened to sue us. She doesn't work there anymore. She's not to see it. Anyway, that's deep verge lore.

set that aside. All right, so we should talk about all the other stuff from WWC that is an AI. But first, we should mention two quick things about Apple AI, Apple Intelligence, if you will. Oh, yeah. One, we talked last week about the confusion over who was paying who and the way Apple was treating Open AI, which was just a plug-in to their system, to basically do all the risky stuff.

Apple will do a very small set of things. And then if you're like, this might create horrible brand risk for us by telling you lie. So, would you like to use chat GBT? And then they had said, eventually you'll plug Gemini into this and maybe some other models. So it seemed like they were just

extending the capability of their system. And we couldn't tell who was paying who. Mark German has reported, no one's paying anyone. Apple is paying open eye and exposure. And the idea here sort of makes sense. Yeah, like everyone in media

starts there. You get paid an exposure. This is just like... I haven't paid crayons in a year. Yeah, I just live all. of like McDonald's that I steal from dumpsters. It's great. No, but the idea, right, is people will see the chat GBT logo. They'll see the capabilities.

They'll want to go and log in. This is where it gets real fuzzy. And then they will pay for chat GPT, the 20 bucks a month or whatever. And then Apple will take 30%. It's always in the background. What's Apple's plan? 30%. Yeah.

You walk into an Apple store, 30%. Show up with a Samsonite. You know, like, that's Tim Cook's vibe. Yeah. And I don't know if that's going to work for a few reasons. One, I asked very specifically while we were at WWC, is there going to be an interface for people to sign up for the chat GPT subscription? And the answer very clearly was no.

Yeah. The Safari is available to you. You may go and sign up over there. Okay. So they need to build the flow, which means Apple has to upsell you to someone else's product inside of its own interfaces and then take 30%. Lots of question marks there. Does that exist anywhere? I'm trying to think of a version of that that exists currently on iOS, and I can't think of one, where you're buying someone else's product inside of an Apple product and how that flow would work.

I don't think that exists. Oh, streaming. For like some of the streaming channels. That's fair. That's probably the closest analog. That kind of works. That's all I got. Yeah.

I don't know. It's new, right? But the economics, as reported by Mark German, would look like you use the stuff. You like it so much. You say to yourself, I wish this robot would remember me. And then you go pay the money. So it has a, it has statefulness, which is the thing you would basically pay for at this point. Aren't people kind of like getting fed up with paying the robot for money?

Yeah. I don't know. I think the question here, how this works out is if you're getting the basic version for free, which you are, the full GPT 40, all of its features somehow for free, what you are not getting is, does it remember you? Can you use the chat GPT app on your phone for free? I think not. I think you get to use it inside of Apple's experiences for free.

That's right. All of the custom instruction stuff doesn't work. It seems like the custom GPs wouldn't work. So there is a lot of stuff. Like the access you would get, as far as we know, through the OS level thing is very limited. And so the upsell for chat GPT seems plausible. What seems wild to me is how expensive the customer acquisition cost there is going to be if I'm OpenAI. I can see two things going on here.

One is that OpenAI is going to launch a search product, which I think everybody believes to be true. and seems to be true. And it's possible that that is going to be part of this, right? That, like, maybe one thing Apple will be happy to do is kick you to the web through OpenAI's search product. And one very good thing you can do there is have ads. So it's, there's like, there is maybe a version of that that is like a direct correlation to Apple's Google deal where when you search, you look at ads and Apple gets some of that

revenue. That's very straightforward. That product doesn't exist. We have no idea what it's going to look like. So who knows? We'll see. The other one is this is just like open AI spending a tremendous amount of money giving you free stuff in the hopes that it can find some way to get you to pay. And I think it's going to be so fascinating to see how Apple implements that because you'll be able to tell everything you've ever wanted to know about Apple's priorities by when it tries to upsell you.

You know what I mean? Like if the first time you do it, Apple's like, wouldn't it be better? Then it's like, oh, this is a 30% company. Like, this is what you're after. You are immediately trying to get me to pay more money to do a thing that you have promised me is baked into the operating system. Or if Apple is, like, happy to push this all the way out and just make it a teeny tiny box you can find in Safari if you want to, that's very different.

And I think that, that tension between these two companies and that product is going to be so weird and so interesting if this is the actual business dynamic here. And it ramps up even higher if you can just switch it to Google Gemini or whatever next model in China they have to use or whatever models come out of Europe or whatever, right? The idea that there's this other architecture beyond Apple intelligence that these companies can plug into and that will drive them customers sort of also implies that Apple believes the economics of all these problems are subscriptions. Yep. You plug Google Gemini into this, but how is Google going to make money? Well, it's not Apple paying Google. It's hopefully they, you sign up for Gemini at $20 a month.

Right. I don't know if that's the way it will actually. play out, I think there's not, I mean, I think there's not a lot of risk for Apple in this right now. Like if they're paying for exposure, then if chat GPT is just sucks and nobody uses it, right? Which probably won't happen, but could. Then it's fine. Apple's like, okay, yeah, there's something that will close down in a couple of years when everybody stops talking about it. But if it like actually takes off, okay, they make money. And it's just like, okay, we get free money now.

It doesn't feel like there's a huge risk for Apple in this. You know who you sound like Alex Cranes is everyone who argues that Apple is a monopoly that needs to be broken up by antitrust law. That's true. I totally agree. Like this is all, it's Apple is an incredible leverage point where it has the distribution and nobody else does. And if you're open AI and you want to get in front of a lot of people who are not otherwise

likely to go to your website or your app, this is your move. And that gives Apple all the power in the world. This is huge for Open AI. Right. Like, they have that first mover advantage, and that's it. Scale everything else, everybody, all their competitors just have it all. So, like, they need this. Well, except that their big competitor is Google and Apple has been very clear that Google is coming to the same plugin system.

Yeah, but not yet. But none of the chip. So this is my second point. So that was point one on Apple intelligence is it appears we understand the economics. Based on Marx reporting, no one's really refuted it. Apple's not saying it doesn't seem like anyone at Open AI is running around crowing about a windfall of profits. That's what we know so far.

I will say, though, everyone at Open AI is running around pretty aggressively overstating the extent to which they're involved in all of this. There have been a bunch of people tweeting, like, we're so excited to be working with Apple to help power all of the AI experiences on the iPhone. And it's like easy buddies. Like, you're a like last resort checkbox kind of situation here. like let's pump the brakes on what's happening here. We're so excited to bring the voice of Scarlett Johansson,

the series. But only if you get past three pop-ups. It's going to be great. You're going to love it. So that's one is, right, we seemingly understand the economics. Two, actually directly read to what you just said, Alex. It is important, I think, to note that no one has seen this work yet. Yeah.

There have been some briefings. We've talked about reporters, Apple, had briefings, they showed a bunch of stuff on rails. Great. Very cool. Love a controlled demo. Yeah. But having just gone through this with the Vision Pro and the rabbit and the

everything else, I would just caution everyone that there are only two kinds of news where the truth just comes out. One is sports and one is tech products. one team wins or loses you get an answer or the gambling economy forces the wrong answer but that's like whatever it's whatever happens over there

but like at the end you get a result right it's like there's not a lot of dispute about what happened at the end of the Super Bowl in tech the products work or they don't and then real people get them and then all bets are off and I've said this a million times now on the show this year

all bets are off once you start shipping the thing to thousands or millions of people they're just going to do stuff you never expected. They're going to break it in extremely esoteric ways. They're definitely not going to read the instruction manual. Nope. All of your great ideas just fall apart once, like millions of regular people get this stuff. Apple is going to ship this to a billion people, the Oprah line.

They're in a billion pockets, y'all. That's what Oprah said when they announced Apple TV Plus. Why did you make this deal with Tim Cook and Apple Oprah? They're in a billion pockets. That's a real quote. You can go look it up. Yeah. I remember.

You put this in a billion pockets. Some weird stuff is going to start happening. I guarantee you some weird stuff is going to start happening. Tim Cook said to the Washington Post opinion section, they're not 100% sure they can stop AI hallucinations. And he would never make a claim because you can't. Don't worry about hallucinations. It's fine.

It's just going to lie to you sometimes. That's what you expect from your iPhone. It's just some creative lies. Kevin Roos was at the event, just waiting to see if Apple Intelligence would make life. love to him. By the way, I saw him at the event. I apologize directly to Kevin for getting so much mileage out of that joke. And he's like, no, everyone is. So I love you, Kevin. Including his family, he said. So it's good for everybody. Rest assured he knows I continue to make the joke.

We haven't concretely seen the phone handoff from local inference to the private cloud inference that Apple wants. Like, we just haven't seen any of this work out. outside of a very controlled context. And I'm just reminding everyone gently, the AI economy so far has largely run on hype. And then they ship it. And it's like, you should put some glue on your pizza. And I'm not saying Apple doesn't have a better track record than everyone else.

I'm not saying that people, it's wrong to believe that they can out-execute most of their competitors. Apple can definitely out-execute most of its competitors. The last time the company out-executed most of its competitors, it shipped the Vision Pro, which is easily the most technologically advanced VR headset ever made. Yep. It's still a VR-heads, right?

Like, it has all of the problems of the category. It does not have a bunch of really novel solutions to that. And it's just the best engineered, most complete version of the thing that it is. We have yet to see it. So I'm just... Didn't Apple also have, like, the disclaimer of, like, sometimes it lies. Yeah. So yeah, it's right in the interface.

Chatty sometimes check this info. Just built right in. So I'm not saying it's not to work. I just want to call that out gently. Gently. We have months to go, like maybe even a year or more to go before all of the features we saw demo to WWC ship, shipped to thousands, if not millions or billions of people. And then a bunch of stuff that no one anticipated happening is going to happen at massive scale.

I'll give you an example. Casey and Platformer wrote Apple is now in the business of content moderation at scale. And I wrote back, I was like, they have the app store. He was like, no, no, no, no, no. Someone's going to ask this thing to draw a gun, and Apple won't do it. And then Tim Cook is going to end up in front of Congress. Like, that is the level of chaos that is coming for these systems. They have to bear the pressure.

And so it doesn't mean they've won. It doesn't mean they're ahead or behind. It just means, like, we came off a very good show. And now we have to get the thing. And I keep saying, like, there's only two categories where you definitively know at the end if it worked or not. It's sports and tech. Like, I would even say a lot of people, when I bring up this comparison, say politics because there's elections. Look around, man.

Like, a lot of people don't think that's one of the categories anymore. I think this will probably be the same thing, too. I think a lot of people are going to debate it because, you know, well, I've heard this a lot. I'm very vocal about thinking hallucinations are an enormous problem and everybody is glossing over them and should stop. Yeah. And I get a lot of comments being like, don't worry about it. The goalposts on hallucinations have fully moved. Yeah.

I've noticed this recently. We just had the CEO of Cohere on Decoder. He's one of the people who wrote attention is all you need at Google, the paper that famously described Transformers, which Google loves to remind me I read up. And I was like, can you fix it? if you program a computer and it delivers some answer to you and sometimes it's wrong like that seems like a bad computer and he was like well you get stuff wrong too sure and he's not that's a totally correct answer but it's like that's why i have a computer yeah is to be far more reliable than yeah my computer does the math correctly like that's i feel pretty good about that every single time yeah uh the example i gave him was like i would not let an l and like like An F-22 cannot be flown without a computer. Like a human being cannot operate an F-22 fast enough to keep it stable in flight. And so you would just not give it to an L-L-1.

He did make the point that the rate of hallucination is coming down. And importantly, in the context of Apple, Apple intelligence is doing such little stuff. They've scoped down what they want it to do, what they want to be responsible so far. And then anything else is chat TBT, which can lie to you. I think that's a smart way to do it. So, like, I think chat GPT is being hugely irresponsible by being like, yeah, use this for everything. But Apple, that is a much more responsible, like, approach, right?

Saying, you know what, it's bad at that. So we're just not going to let it do that. We've let some of series, we've improved some of series, natural language process. But what if it, like, hallucinates meetings for you? Oh, that would be great. Because if I could, if I could incorporate a lying robot into my meeting scheduling, I take it. But speaking of scoped all the way down,

this is another really important piece that I didn't even think about while we were there. But Gen 2e has a piece coming up on the site, but it'll be up by the time you read this. The new Apple Intelligence, the new Siri won't work on the HomePod. It won't work on the Apple TV, and it appears it will not work with HomeKit.

Wait, it won't work with HomeKit at all? Like, the devices thing makes sense, but to not even be part of HomeKit is really fascinating and seems bad. It will, like, fall back to the old Siri. So you'll be like turn on the lights and I'll like do it's not going to not work, but the complicated orchestration piece where you're like, I'm just talking to my phone and stuff is happening. It's fuzzy. We don't know yet. Is all of this AIification of Siri going to improve the fact that Siri doesn't understand me half the time?

I think this is like the thing that they're going to fix. Yeah. That was my impression is that they're going to fix that. That is the thing I'm most confident about with new Siri is that. is that, like, text to speech and speech to text have gotten very, very, very good, very fast. And I think if Apple can't do that better with Siri, it would be. It's just a gigantic failure. Like, I have a lot of faith in Siri recognition being very good and the transcription stuff being very good. Like, there's no excuse for that stuff not to be very good anymore.

The state of the art on that is really good. Does this mean that it would work or not work with HomeKit? I guess we'll just have to see. Right. So I think that you pay. I can be throwing you open Siri and say, open the garage door, that appears like it will not get routed through the Apple intelligence version. The command will get recognized and I'll go to like whatever was happening. And hopefully they've kind of like made all of Siri smart. And then old Siri will say, here's what I found on the web for turn on garage lights.

Yeah. So again, we don't know because it hasn't shipped, but the idea that HomeKit is not yet part of this appears to be like what Jen has. Like that's what she's writing about. And I think that's really fascinating because so much of what you want Siri to orchestrate, all the examples they gave, right? The canonical example is tell me what time to leave for the airport to go to my daughter's dance recital, right? And it's always this like made up very transactional thing you want to do. Yeah. Right?

Like I'm going to go to a place because I'm cool. I have a family and a means of transportation. I leave the house. My daughter's in dance class. it's this is all very normal you sleep in a race car bed exactly i've got a phone um but like one thing you would want to do is like tell me when to leave the office to catch the train also turn on my thermostat yeah right it's like you would just add that in or like a very common thing people script in the home kit is like turn on the lights by the time i get home like you can see how you'd

want to have this more complicated conversation about stuff in your head. house and it that all feels like not yet. Yeah. Well, and that's also one of the big things they're talking about with Apple intelligence is context awareness. And the, the deep rabbit hole of context awareness is like inside of your smart home, right? Like, knowing where you are and what you're doing and how you're feeling,

like that's the, that's how we get all this stuff going down the road. So I, I'm actually surprised that that wouldn't be like a flagship feature of this. But they really didn't come up at all during the keynote. So I guess I'm not shocked. Yeah. And that is more or less what Jen's entire piece is about.

By the way, there's also another piece in Business Insider that came out today, Red Jips who we started recording, about the Alexa unit at Amazon that is like ringing the bell about how bad Alexa is at this stuff and how Amazon is underinvested in it. And the pivot is just not easy to do. Yeah. Like you can't have had this thing and be like, we're going to turn it off. And here's a somewhat unreliable, extremely horny robot. like you're just going to like brick a bunch of Alexa devices that people depend on.

So it is a very hard pivot. And, you know, because Apple is Apple and I can just do it, especially because Siri is bad. Like I feel like most people are like, oh, Siri is bad. Yeah. Here's a newer hornyer. Fine. Let's try that out for a while. Whereas I think Alexa exists in your house in no other context.

And you cannot break people's houses in that way. Right. Okay. That's enough on the AI stuff. There's a bunch of other stuff that we've. promised people we would talk about from Dubdub. Do you want to do the small updates? Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff

that people have found some of it we already talked about, like the buttons, the volume buttons. When you press them, there's like a cool little animation. And now that I've seen it, it looks sick. It does, but they're definitely going to take the buttons off of the phone. I don't want to talk about it. I'm fine. It's okay.

But also, bilingual typing is going to be a thing now, which I'm super, super excited about because, like, some of us speak a little spanglish, and it sucks when it tries to auto-correct you, and you're like, no, I know I'm bad at Spanish, but like, come on. I knew this one. So, and it won't just work in Spanish, but we'll work with a lot of other languages. And so that's going to be, like, really, really cool. Also, the light is, like, the flashlight only on the iPhone 15 Pro. You'll be able to, like, control the beam of it and, like,

the brightness of it. The interface for it looks awful. Cool feature, but it looks insane to try and manage. I am excited to watch people use that in the movie theater when they're trying to find their seats. That's going to be a really fun time. If they can make like a shortcut to just do like a movie theater mode, that would rule. The widgets are going to be a little easier to customize, which I think we kind of, we saw a little bit of that during the event. But it'll be nice. Wes, our like Vision Pro lover on staff.

is super excited that he can see his keyboard now. Yeah. When he's like, if he puts the headset on, he'll be able to see his keyboard. Whereas before, I guess he just like typed in oblivion and hoped he was right. Yeah, that's very much the Vision Pro experience until recently. So less oblivion. Also, you can use any Bluetooth mouse you want. Yes.

Which incredible future update for $3,500 computer. Now you can use your own inputs on your computer. I mean, as we heard Tim Cook say to Marquez this week, He loves the magic mouse and it's perfect and nothing has ever been wrong with it. So it's surprising that they would allow this at all, frankly. He didn't. I'm sorry. He didn't.

I don't want to be a pedantic about this. That was more information about the magic mouse than existed in Tim Cook's brain at that time. I encourage everyone to go watch that clip. We posted Marquez's tweet of that clip. He was like rank product launches and he did a bunch of easy ones and you see like the devil on Marquez's shoulder like, magic mouse. and you just the grin on his face. It's very good. And then Tim Cook, very good.

I interview a lot of CEOs. I watched them scramble. And you just, the dust in that man's brain where he was like, what's in this wild cabinet is in an evening? He was like, magic mouse. And then, yeah, he came up with ergonomics. He's like, what's a word I can say about mouse? Yeah.

It wasn't, we love the magic mouse. That's true. It was ergonomics. Are they good or they bad? They're ergonics. He's like, it doesn't stab you when you hold. it. That's the Apple design. Low bar. Low bar they sat there.

There's also going to be some new wallpapers that are very retro-looking and look kind of cool. I personally love the one that's the green and gray. Of course you do. Yeah, bring me back to that 80s monitor experience. We know. You know. After last week, everyone else knows too.

There's like listeners who might have skipped an episode. Why? But I want them to know as well. But they're like animated. They look really sick. So we did a whole story kind of chronicling a lot of these things, and there's a video in there, and it just looks dope. Yeah. Like it's the Susan Care wallpaper. She was an original Mac designer.

They have a lot of her iconography. It's very cool. It's very, very cool. And then now when somebody leaves you a voicemail, it'll like just transcribe it. So it looks almost like a text in your phone. So that'll be really cool if the transcription actually works, because if it's anything like the Google. transcription. It does not understand my mom.

Interesting. Also, my best friend who says mayor, mayor the same way, that the horse and the office those came up the same way as Siri, she was telling me yesterday,

cannot comprehend that. Wait, she often talks about mayors and horses. She often talks about mares. And the problem is that they're confused. Yeah. And so it's always like, Yeah, there's a lot of mayors in your area. And she's like, cool. Okay.

So just to confirm, you have a friend who calls you and leaves you voicemails about the number of horses in your area. In her area. And the problem that we have identified is that Siri thinks that she's talking about local elected officials. Yeah. It's just checking that I understand. Like I said. Tim, if you're listening, that's right up there with Magic Mouse. It's up there.

Like, let's fix it. Well, it struggles with like, she was telling me she's got a really strong Texas accent. And it like, like, Siri does not comprehend her. Yeah, that makes sense. But then she's got, she speaks Spanish and she has like a lovely Mexican accent in Spanish. And it understands it perfectly. So a lot of times she's just like, I'm just going to talk to Syria in Spanish because otherwise it's going to be like, let's talk about elected officials. I don't know how to say female horse in Spanish.

But if I did, rest is short, I'd be doing it right now. Same. I don't know either. And I'm going to try to keep it that way. for as long as possible. Don't tell me. My friend will tell me and I don't care. So,

but there's also, there's more options for charging too. So I guess you're going to be able to, like, change how you want your phone to charge. Oh, right. Like limits, like to save the battery. Which is nice because we've been able to do that on computers. Yeah, a lot of Android features here.

Yes. Or, yeah, like everybody, thanks, Al. I appreciate you bringing parody. So there's still a lot more. I know people are really looking into it. And if you see something who will like tag one of us, mainly David. There's just a lot of like useful quality of life stuff. Like the now if you if you paste a link into messages,

it'll show you the link preview before it sends the message, which is like it's one of those things that's like, am I going to send a link that is 90,000 letters long or is it going to do the nice preview thing and now you know before you send it. There's just, there's just a million of those. And I think that's great. I will say the one I am most excited about is that you can make the app icons bigger and get rid of the label underneath it. So instead of saying like having the Safari logo and then saying Safari under it, you can have a bigger Safari logo and it doesn't say Safari under it. It looks nice. Unbelievable. This is the stuff like I really, I cannot shake the idea

that Apple had a whole two hour long WWDC planned that would have just been all this stuff and they would have told us about all of it, and it would have been a very normal WWDC. And then at the very end, they were like, we have to do a chat GPT thing and just like blew it all up. I'm sure that's not what happened. But like, we're finding out about much more of what's going on on these platforms than we typically do after the keynotes. And Apple's, the last few years, they were doing kind of a thing, right, where one year it would be like small updates. Like, they're nice, but smaller. And then the next year would be like, oh, there's some really sick stuff in here. And this year was kind of going to be one of those years where it's like, okay.

We had a kind of smaller year last year, really sick stuff this year. And then also Apple Intelligence. Yeah. So I think I'm totally in this like theory with you, this conspiracy, David. All of my productivity nerd friends are so excited that you can now see reminders inside of calendar. Ugh. I'm like, it's so much done. The installer audience is freaking out.

They literally are. It's very exciting. Well, what's interesting, Jay Peters from The Verge, who's back on Prince of Lee's congratulations today. He wrote that the AI upgrade cycle is here for Apple. So a lot of this stuff would have never driven an incremental upgrade. Yep. You've got an iPhone 13. You can see reminders and calendar.

You're not buying an iPhone 16. Except now maybe Apple Intelligence is going to make you excited to buy a new phone. And Apple's kind of banking on this. I mean, they need to. that like that cycle has gone down right like people just don't upgrade as often anymore unless they're verge listeners in which case they're like who who is doing that? Yeah, we have eight gigs of RAM. Yeah.

Disgusting. Gross. I have more mares than that at home. Which ones? Eric Adams is like, who's there? Eric Adams does not have eight gigs of RAM. I don't know exactly what kind of insult that is, but I know it to be true. No, but the idea that these features that are cool, that we're excited about, I think regular people are going to experience me happy about, the theming.

Yeah. Get ready for just a wave of just bananas themes and all the phones around you because people are excited about those things. They're not going to, if Apple gated theming to the next generation of phones, one, that would be outrageous. Two, it would not inspire one person to buy a new phone. Yeah. But if they gate, you can talk to Siri now. naturally to the next generation of phones. And I can do all this stuff for you, and we can make ads about it and market these new capabilities.

That might drive the cycle. So you can see why they just sort of like put all the stuff aside. Yeah, because they did it for that. They did it for the watch. The watch is like the new update is not going to work with the series four and the series five. So it's just like I think iPads too are affected. If the iPad doesn't have an M1 in it, it's not going to get a lot of the AI features. Oh, they finally got me.

They got you. Or did they? Go get it. It's so good. Zero regrets. Spend all of your money irresponsibly of iPads. I've bought so many speakers this year. I can't be buying iPads too. You're kidding me? She's like, no. It's no more stuff, please. But yeah, like, it's very interesting that they're pushing it this way, but they also got me because I'm on an iPhone 14 pro and I'm like, okay. You're going to do it. Yeah. And I was going to hold out for the folding one. I just, in my heart of hearts, I fully believe it's any day now. and I mean in a year now not day but instead I will get it do we think Apple is running out of things to take 30% of and that's that's why we're I think the European Union is taking away things it can take 30% from fair which is which is then it spins back to now we have to keep selling you an iPhone every year because Apple has been on this run for good or for bad of saying you know hold on to your hardware longer like you know you know the thing Amazon has always said like we don't

make money when you buy your hardware, you make money when you use it. Apple has always been a hardware company, but has increasingly made money when you use it. And so I think they've always pushed you to make new stuff, but, or to buy new stuff, rather, but I don't think it has been as existentially important for you to upgrade your iPhone every year as long as Apple keeps getting 30% of everything you do. But I mean, they were still feeling the pressure on this. This was like something we'd see earnings after earnings after big iPhones. It'd be like, okay, they did it, but not as many people bought it this year, but it's fine.

because, you know. Yeah, but I don't know that. I think everybody kind of got used to that. And it was, it was the services revenue was coming up to supplant it. I think we got used to that. I think Tim Cook was always probably looking for, okay,

what's that thing that can drive the next step? Well, sure. He invested $10 billion in a car and is now trying to build like home robots. Tim's got a lot of plans. They don't have, they don't have like post phone hardware plans. Right.

Right. But yeah, so that's kind of my point. It's like I think it does seem like Apple in a very real way is back to, we have to sell you an iPhone as often as possible. And it feels like the move for a bunch of years has been away from that. And now it is like back to that in a real way.

Yeah. As someone who loves gadgets, I love that. Maybe that'll be like cool stuff. Do you think that's why Apple made the iPhone 15 Pro scratch so easily, which is why mine is scratched to bits. And now I desperately need a new one in September. If they would just make a phone whose battery consistently lasted for a whole day, six months into it, I'd be very happy.

But my 15 Pro is like, I'm done. I'm out. you want screen time controls what if I don't turn on that's good script that okay well you should take a break one more thing I want to call out something I noticed when they were talking about customizing control center see all this they added one control from one app

that I thought was very interesting which was the Ford Pass app and you can lock your doors and start your car turn on the AC right from control center because Ford Pass has a thing and then Jim Farley see you of Ford tweet it we're excited to partner with apple and blah blah blah i think there i think there's there's there's gm walked away from car play towards getting tighter are you are you saying

that they're gonna make an apple like ford's making the apple car jm you just did the the brian windhorst on ESPN like let's let's see i don't i don't have it do you understand i don't have it all the way I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm suggesting if somebody does know this information, they should tell me this information in a way that I can report it. So there's a skunk works team inside a Ford that is building good cars instead of stupid ones. Is this a four red? What if that's just Apple? There actually is the skunk works team inside of Ford. I know, this is what I'm saying.

What if all of those people are just Apple moles? No, I, I'm saying GM walked away from car play. And the other giant American automaker is like, what if we integrate? more tightly with Apple software. And that is suggestive that they might do something else. And if you are a person who might know what that's something else is. They're going to bundle a phone with the car. They're going to buy Verizon.

Whatever. Look, you know. Buy an iPad, get a Mustang. Here we go. I would do that. There's a person with a used iPad and a used Mustang. There's a super cycle. You know.

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I just know that there's a button that makes you go from the end of one segment to the beginning of this segment much quicker than we think that happens. Welcome. Sponsored lightning around. I'm saying just keep us, keep us afloat. We're just going to start integrating ads at completely unpredictable moments of the show. There was one. We got a bunch of tweets from somebody, I think it was two weeks ago in the episode. Did you guys see this? Where the way the dynamic ads were happening was such that it, we hit a pause. And then you said, we're back. And then the ad started. It was like, it was just a perfect, like, oh, you thought you knew when the ads were in your face. The ads are now. That's the pop-up ad of podcasting. It was great. I enjoyed it very much. All right. Lots and lots and lots of gadget news this week. Starting with Xbox, I think, but I really want to talk about what's going on with Google and Android and Chrome West. David, do you want to run us through all this?

Yeah, let's start with Xbox because on Tuesday's episode, I promise we were going to talk about the stupid Xbox and I got some questions about what the stupid Xbox is. So let's talk about it. Basically, there was an Xbox event earlier this week, got a little bit overshadowed by WWDC, but lots of interesting stuff, new games, all kinds of stuff. But I think for our purposes, the two big gadgets that were talked about were a new white discless series X, which looks very nice and is inexorchested. explicably not shipping until the holidays. It's just like a thing that should be sitting there. And for some reason, they're not shipping it for eight months. No internal upgrades.

It's just got no just. It's just, give me it. Yeah. Cool. It's so weird. Anyway, but I think the way more interesting thing is Phil Spencer, who runs Xbox at Microsoft, has been, I would say, like, aggressively and loudly hinting that Microsoft is going to build a handheld gaming device for a long time.

and then just said out loud in an interview, I believe with IGN, quote, I think we should have a handheld too. So like, there it is. He was basically like, this is a time we're doing software. We're talking about games. They also talked about bringing more games to other platforms, which made a lot of Xbox people mad in the way that it did before. But he's just, they're just making a handheld. Like, it's just coming. I think the big difference here is we've heard these rumors about a handheld from them for ages, right?

Like when they were really pushing cloud gaming right after the Xbox Series X was launched, everybody was like, okay, yeah, they're going to do like a cool cloud console. And then that didn't happen because of the cloud gaming stuff just didn't kind of take off as they wanted, right? There was also the streaming box and it got killed. And so all this stuff got killed a couple of years ago. And it's like, okay, you're going to make a handheld now. Cool. You've been saying that for like half a decade at this point. But the difference now is it sounds like it's going to run Windows. And that rules. The dream. As someone who uses these little consoles, that's awesome because the current version of Windows on one of these little game consoles sucks now. What makes us confident that Microsoft can overcome the nature of running Windows on a handheld? Nothing. Okay.

You heard about our Lord and Savior arm processors. Yeah, I mean, it is like, it is the arm processor. And we think the games, well, I guess you can rise them down, right? You're not trying to run them at full quality. Yeah, like the Steam deck automatically. resizes this stuff down, right? And so the idea here is that it would do this. We've also, we were hearing rumors about like Nvidia getting back into the arm stuff. They used to do the, the Tigra, which notably powers the switch. There's also media tech. You know, everybody

knows media tech. There's a media tech processor within 50 yards of you right now. Yeah, probably within like 50 inches. Is that a threat? Everywhere you are, there's a media processor. If you're going to, that TV right there, guarantee you there's a hundred percent. You guys can't see it, but there's a TV there, and it definitely has media tech in it. But media tech is also, like, going to be doing the processor stuff and doing arm processors. And there's even rumors that you, just to be clear, they already are because they're everywhere. They want to make good ones. Thank you. Thank you. That is an important clarification. They already make arm processors. Now they want to make the ones that don't suck. And there's rumors that they might be partnering with Invidia. There's something happening there. So like, the potential for it is the media. That is the media. tech invidia combo is like oh boy that dude probably has a lot of money right like

that's not a yeah that is invidia being like is the rock and Kevin Hart is that what you're saying right there's a movie called she's out of my league yeah this is accurate this is accurate but I think that's kind of all

is what's driving some of this like hype for a new Xbox handheld console is there's a lot of potential that could change. But they also have to make Windows not suck visually. Like, I don't care about how it runs. It needs to not suck visually. Just run, run the Xbox app. Like, done. It's just sitting there. Like, all that software is just sitting there. That's true. Microsoft could do it, and it just hasn't for some reason. Well, I mean,

theoretically, the Xbox itself is running a version of Windows, right? Remember that? Right. Yeah, yeah, it does. And they just cut it down to run one app well. Right. Yeah, they could do that again. And then all of these other consoles, which suck so much with full windows on them, could suck less. That's what I really want, if you can tell. There's stuff already out there that's really sick. And the software is garbage.

So that's the thing, right? And I think to me, the reason this is very exciting is that we really haven't had Sony or Microsoft make a really truly like first class competitive hands. hand held. Lately. Yeah, I'm sorry. The PSP was a... And the Vita? I mean, come on.

The PSP was incredible. It was. I don't doubt it. I know that Mita fans are out there. 50 years ago. Fair. Did you want a lot of movies on your PSP? No, no, no, no.

But it had a Sony disc format, like a custom U.M.B, I believe. Yes. Those are the days. It was right up there with Megabase. By the way, shout out to all the people wandering through BestWise, sending me photos of ULT speakers. There's a Sony marketing person who's like, this is off the charts.

And that's because of us. The chart was flatlined below, just to be clear, the chart is on five. But we're doing it. We're making a difference. They're like, that's so weird.

Nobody ever presses the button. Yesterday, six people press the button. What's happening there? But yeah, that was all the Xbox stuff. My guess would be, it's,

there's, I just feel like if you're Phil Spencer, you don't say that if there's not something happening in the relatively near future. Yeah. Yeah. And he's been sort of sneaky about this. Like he's liked tweets and has sort of intimated that this is a thing that he thinks is interesting.

But I think you look at the continued success of the Steam deck, the fact that Nintendo has a Switch 2 coming that everybody's very excited about. Like this idea is not going away. Like I think handheld gaming is going to be the next big thing for a very long. time and it seems very clear that Microsoft also believes that. But they will also happily ship

you a white version of the same thing they already have seven months from now, if that's what you'd rather have. Congratulations. Microsoft, Phil, has been very direct being like, we did not do well in this generation of the console wars. This is why we had to go buy Activision and like figure out a way to compete. We just did an episode of Dakota with Ash Parrish about the game market and she was like, desktop PC gaming is going down. And then a million people wrote us an email to point out that it's going up if you count the steam deck. Right. Like that's where the growth is.

We're part of the market. So if you're Phil and you're like, okay, we're not going to magically start a new console generation tomorrow and win against Sony and it's various advantages. We are looking at Nintendo going to launch a switch to, I really hope they call it the Super Nintendo switch, by the way. That will be a dominant moment. Where are we going? Where is the action? The action is immobile. Good.

We bought Candy Crush. Settled. Yep. Well, and... And then the action is in these handhelds where we're getting growth against PCs, gaming PCs are, like, we can maybe get some action there. And also a lot of, like, the Switch's success has been on the backs of indie developers, right? And Microsoft actually has a pretty good relationship with indie developers.

They put a lot of these games out on their... The Xbox in general. And people are like, I would like to play that on a handheld. And maybe not the Switch. Right. And that would be like, oh, I can play... big AAA Xbox games that aren't exclusive because Xbox apparently doesn't make exclusive games anymore. And you can play like Hades 2.

That would be sick. Well, I think the exclusive game strategy just didn't sell off Xboxes. Yeah. It's like the other way around. They're like, fine, just play our games in your PS5. Yeah, they didn't. Buy some stuff in this game. We'll be happy.

Yeah, because all the ones that they want to make exclusive, the FTC will be like, I'm sorry what? Yeah. Now they got other problems. Yeah. Anyway, the idea that they made a white one and they just won't sell it. is like, this is your big holiday marketing push? You're going to build demand for the white one? Kills me.

Kills me. Anyway, the next one I want to talk about while we're just rolling through gadgets here is Jabra, which put me on a real, like, emotional roller coaster this week. It launched a pair of headphones, two pairs of headphones, the Elite 10 and Elite 8 active, new versions of it with a very cool feature that I was very excited to talk about on this show and then promptly announced that they're not making headphones anymore. Within a couple of hours, they were like, here's this dope new thing. that we made, never mind, we're out. Goodbye.

Well, they're still making it. It's still, it's still gonna come, but that's it. Right. They're closing the door behind them. We'll support these for the next few years. And on the one hand, I'm like, okay, do I need like ongoing software support from my Bluetooth headphone manufacturer? Like, not really. But on the other hand, like, the last death knells of a company's headphone lineup seem like a silly thing to recommend. What's the cool feature? So the cool feature is they, these are wireless earbuds and they come in a case. and you can plug in the case to an audio source.

You can plug it into a headphone jack. So they're a Bluetooth transmitter. Yeah, they're a Bluetooth transmitter. And so they'll turn any wired thing into a Bluetooth thing that then streams directly to your earbuds. This would have been great. Unbelievable. Like years ago when planes still had?

No, they do. Not a new. Well, you're a fancy. Do it. I was on a United Flight yesterday. And not only did they have a screen. The screens had Bluetooth. and you could pair your AirPods to the screen.

But if you had ever done it before on a United flight, the first thing you had to do was go in and forget it in order to then go repair it. So this poor flight attendant had to give us like a four-minute speech about how to connect your AirPods to the screen in front of you. But it's a thing. You could do it. It was the first time I'd ever encountered that,

and it was very exciting. Well, now I'm just disappointed in Alaska and American then. United is a trash airline with one good plane, was, I would say, my experience. so far. You were just on the one plane. I was on the one good plane. Wait, can I issue a very, very small complaint about Delta?

Yes. And actually, in general, a thing that I think should be legal. Because I flew home on Delta. Yeah. They had Infinity War, but not end game. Because you get on the plane, you know, like, I got to kill five hours. And that's sitting right there for you. You nod in and out.

Yeah. I was telling Alex, I'd won too many drinks on the plane home. You know, it was one of those fights that started the afternoon but ended late in the evening. Oh, yeah. And you're just like, I'm just going to ride this way. You just go. You have to have both. I think Lena Con should get involved.

You have to have both. Yeah. That is consumer protection right there. Even though I've seen both of these movies. I was like, do you know what happens? I believe, you know, the Avengers do a good job. I mean, that's largely crap. Eli Recaps movies.

In the first one, they don't do a good job. And in the second one, they do a good job. Yeah. That was a really good spoiler-free recap. I appreciate it. Well, I did spoil the first one. But if you haven't seen the first one, here's what you do. You get on Delta because that's all they got.

I'm actually, I was talking to Chris Welch about this story yesterday and Liz Lapato was there. And she was like, I believe that taking the headphone jack away from phones led to the proliferation of people just listening to stuff out loud on their phones. That's such a Liz Lapato take. Yes, it is. No, but she's, she's correct because of the path train, people are like, no. Yeah, she's like, whatever. My headphones are dead. I don't want to dink around with these.

I'm just listening. Yeah, you're going to enjoy whatever I'm enjoying and suck it if you don't. All right. New idea for a phone. No speakers, just headphone jacks. Yes. Yeah, there's your courage, Apple. Don't get rid of the headphone jack.

Get rid of the speakers. Yeah. Give me a power button and no speakers on my phone. Done. Let's do this. I'm ready. It's the opposite. It's like the shorthy.

Shiller nightmare. He's like wakes up in a cold sweat. He's like, what's happening? Speaking of weird phones, the light phone, people love talking about this phone. They do not love buying it from what I understand. They love looking at it and talking about it. David, you saw it, the light phone three. I haven't seen it. I've seen it over Zoom, but I talked to Kai Tang, the co-founder of the company, and I've talked to him a bunch over the years. The weird thing about the light phone too was that it was never a huge hit but also according to him it has sold more units every year it has been around this thing is five years old and it's sold more this past year than it did in its first year which i think is fascinating and it's not something you normally see from a phone

and they're in this position now of the the sort of intellectual idea that i would like to change my relationship with my smartphone i think is bigger than ever we are also more investing in our smartphones than ever. And so what they tried to do was basically figure out, okay, how do we get away from the idea that, like, what you need is a phone that doesn't do anything at all and give you a phone that just does the right things and not the wrong things? And actually, that is like the dream of the sort of minimalist smartphone and has been forever.

And there are a lot of people who say, oh, why do you need any of this stuff just, like, have more discipline and be more responsible on your phone? to which I say, that's a stupid argument. It's true, but it's also like if just discipline was the answer to all of our problems, like the world would be a really different place. And what it actually is, is like the one good thing about the social dilemma, which is an otherwise, I think, disaster of a documentary, was that it framed the idea as like you against thousands of engineers trying to destroy you.

And I think that is like a pretty correct way to think about your smartphone. And so light phone's idea is like how do we just reset that balance, right? So they've, they added a camera, but gave that camera much less to do. They added NFC, but they're only going to do payments with it. They have a better screen, but it's because apparently people were having trouble with E-ink. Like one of the things Kai said to me was that the single biggest issue people had with the phone that like 50% of the reason people returned it or stopped using it was because of the

refresh rate of E-ink, which I thought was really interesting. There's just something about it that just didn't work for people. So instead they switch to a matte OLED, which should refresh much faster, should be much easier to type on. It should look a lot better, but should have some of those same kind of monochrome, not quite so blaring properties. And battery-like support, right? We'll see about battery. The light phone two lasted forever. This thing is, it's substantially bigger, so it definitely has more battery.

But it does run that screen, but it's not doing all that much with it. it most of the time. And since it's O-led, it should only have to power some of the pixels and not the other. So I have reasonably high hopes for this thing. But at least according to the traffic to our website, people are very interested in this thing. It looks like I don't need it and I want it. I will never use it. I know that, but I'm still like, oh, this is. So I would love to get to a place where I could just take a phone out of the house, depending on my mood. Like sunglasses. Yeah. And it would just like have my phone number and take my messages.

And like, I don't think any of the carriers or smartphone operating system vendors or smartphone makers want that to happen. Nope. And it's funny because if it did happen, I would buy like six phones. So the reason it's the carriers. I have been like meaning to write a piece and I need to just sit down and write it that

the reason dumb phones won't work is because Verizon won't let them. I've had this moment recently actually where I got the new iPad Pro. and just turned it on, logged into my iCloud account, and all of a sudden, I had LTE on it. And it was like the most magical experience. And it was my data. It's connected to my account. That it was just like, oh, because all this e-sim stuff works,

I just have all of my stuff on this new device, and it is connected through my account. And it's like, oh, that's how all of this should work, and it just super doesn't. And even you go to a place like Europe where, like, physical SIM cards are much more important, and you can just pop your SIM out and pop it into another thing. and that kind of works,

it's just not how it works in the US, and it sucks. And so as a result, I think what light is trying to do is buy a phone that actually becomes your primary device. Like, I think the light phone plus laptop or light phone plus iPad is very much the thing that they're going for. They want you to have this sort of simple,

minimal thing that goes in your pocket that has like music and podcasts and directions and that's about it. And then if you want to do more stuff, you sit down at something else. And I think in a certain way, that's actually like a much healthier way to use technology and to think about all of that. But it's probably, I mean, it's not probably, it is definitely still not realistic for most people.

Did they show you like the photo app? I just want to know, is it showing photos in color or monochrome? I don't know. That's a really good question. I would assume it's showing them in monochrome. Because what, and he said this very pointedly, that they don't want you spending a lot of time on your device looking at your photos. Apparently, the thing that they heard, one of the biggest reasons they put the camera on

was to have a QR code scanner and because people like to take pictures of receipts. And it's just like the little sort of toolsy things you need to do with the camera rather than I want a thing to take lots of beautiful photos. They're like, their ideas, again, like you should not be looking at your screen very often. And even when you're looking at something through it, you're still looking at it. Right. And so, yeah, the way he described it is like it's about documenting, not about like, fiddling.

And so my, again, I haven't seen it. There's things not shipping until next year, which is a real bummer. But yeah, exactly. But I think the idea definitely seems to be like get in and get out as quickly as possible. I'm utterly fascinated by this, but I just am laughing at the idea that a good computing outcome is you have a pretty useless phone and then an iPad. And at some point, you're just like, none of this shit can do anything. I mean, iPad is probably the wrong idea. I'm going to sit down on this iPad and not do a whole lot.

Not looking at Instagram on that. It's very good. But the idea that you would like pick up a phone, be like, push a button that's like, this is my phone right now. Take my calls, send my messages. Yeah. You should be able to get there. Yes. But you can switch between laptops more easily than you can switch between phones.

And some of it's carriers because of phone numbers and where you're going to route calls. And some of it is RCS and I messages and all that sort of thing. I mean, even switching WhatsApp devices is a pan. It's gotten better. Yeah. But it's still tough. Yeah. But that is like ultimately the dream. And I don't know.

Maybe Apple needs to make the cut down phone or just make it easier to put an iPhone into a mode like this. Apple will never do that unless they can figure out the apps. 30%. Yeah. Just 30%. For $20 a month, we'll give you a chill phone inside of your phone. You know? given the interest in the light phone?

Yeah, it's real. It's worth a shot. So, all right, yeah, we should keep going. Alex, the next thing on my list is literally, I should have just put these two links as just Ask Kranz, is any of this anything. Two different chip stories. One is basically MediaTech,

the flower of the verge. Our favorite chip company is claiming it's out here doing Qualcomm level things. and everybody is out here basically being like, we now have fast chips too. And then there was this company Flow Computing that just published a white paper being like, we haven't made any of these chips, but we know how to make chips

that are a hundred times faster. Yeah, the flow thing is interesting in that they're basically saying we want to compete with Arm and you buy our engineering that we have never actually proved out. And then you go and you engineer and do cool stuff. Yeah.

That's my idea, too. Look, if you want to make a chip that's 100 times faster, you just come and talk to me and then you do the work. Yep. But Niela's going to be like, yeah, that looks good. Good job. Good job. I have an idea for a building. If you bring your architect to me, I will describe that building to them an extraordinary.

Well, it's kind of like they are the architects and now they're looking for someone to go build the building. Now, that's normal. That's much more normal than I think what this is. Yeah, yeah, I guess it is in a weird spot, huh? Yeah. I don't know what the comparison is. It's one level away from like we've done it. Yeah.

And more like we have an idea for how to do it. Yeah. We know the architect firm we want to hire. And it's you. And it's you. And then also can you find someone to build this? So yeah, that one is very interesting. Their claims are really, really big.

I know a lot of people are talking about it right now and trying to figure out if it is anything. And I think it's a little bit of the verdict. is still out there. But the idea here is that they have a new thing, a parallel processing unit, that it can be inside or outside the chip. And you can run parallel workloads through that much faster than any other chip that exists today. Right. This is the core of the claim. Yes.

And it's also weird because parallel processing is having kind of a moment right now. Or like people are rethinking it. So there's just, I'm one of the same. to say verdict is still a little out on this. Just because most of it, like, I know enough to be like, hmm. Yeah, I'm going to stay in that headspace until proven otherwise. Yeah. But I think the media tech thing potentially exciting.

Like, there's no reason everyone couldn't start making good arm chips. Like, if this is the thing that's out there, more power to them. Look, anytime somebody is saying, hey, let's compete, that's always good, right? even though it's MediaTech and they are not known for their super powerful processors, it's going to be kind of cool because they're saying that they'll be as fast, they'll be capable of doing copilot PCs. And that means that they have to do, their MPU has to do at least 40 tops. And while we still don't fully understand what Topps means in this context,

that is still like 40 is the number Microsoft gave everybody. And so if Media Tech can get there when like even Apple, the M4, they were claiming 38. So if media tech can do that, cool, great. Will companies put this in? We'll see. What are your thoughts on tops in this context, Neelai?

Wow, you guys. I know what you can do with 13 tops. I've been given an answer. You go to Fire Island. Well, there's the time. the episode today. No, no, I do. I actually have a real non...

What is... Family-friendly answer? What is 13 trillion's operations per second? So we had someone wrote to us not about the other interpretation of what you can do with an incremental time. We should say lots of people wrote to us about the other interpretation.

Thank you guys. Lots of people made jokes about one thing. Although I will say that regardless of context, no one has said what you can do going from 35 to 38. Just saying, that's fair. Hasn't been proven out yet. But, hey, the Raspberry Pi has

13 trillion operations per set. We're like, why? So we got an email from Scott and he's like, look, there are lots of IoT applications where you have a sensor and then you have like something like a camera and you want to know what happens. So the sensor detects a motion in a parking lot

and you're like, is that the right car? And you can take a picture at the camera. So the sensor fires the camera. And then you've got to send a bunch of data somewhere to do image recognition. And if you can bring it down to the edge, you're only sending bytes of data instead of megabytes of data. Okay. That's a good one. That's a good one.

That's extremely good. Yeah. Good. I'll take it. Here we go. Yeah. I think the idea that there is some sort of like race to put all of, like, that's great. That's a great workload.

I like it. Yeah. You can see how people can do all this stuff in all kinds of places. But Microsoft is like, this is how many you need. Yeah. And they haven't, they have not done. Even that example, we can detect a car. Like, that's fundamentally the example.

This computer can now recognize a car in a parking lot. Microsoft has not come up with one of those things on a Windows PC for consumers that matters yet. I can recognize a car in a parking lot, too. So many people can recognize a car in a parking lot. Yeah, a lot of them. It's true. But Microsoft is just out there being like, you need this many because it's going to unlock what exactly? The future.

Down the line, don't, not right now. Just the future. Last thing we should talk about before we take a break is this bit of Google news that is either a small piece of news that ultimately doesn't matter that much or the little tiny butterfly flap of something. sort of enormous. And basically the news is Google announced that it's going to be putting a lot more of the underlying Android stack inside of Chrome OS. So essentially, slowly but surely they're going to build ChromeOS to resemble Android in such a way that they can build stuff faster that will work on both platforms.

I find this fascinating because there are lots of rumors that say essentially, well, I mean, there have been rumors for Jesus, like a decade saying that Google is. going to merge Chrome OS and Android. Was that Fuchsia? I can never remember all the codenames. Okay, so there was Fuchsia, which was, I think, even showed up on like a random nest device or something and then that got killed. But these things have been separate projects that should never have been separate projects.

And then there have been rumors that there's going to be some combination of them that gives you like a desktop mode on your Android phone that essentially looks like ChromeOS. And it's just all these little pieces are coming together that is like maybe we're actually going to get this cross-endous. device single thing combination that we should have had a really long time ago. Boy, do I disagree with you. Really? Tell me. Yeah. Fight.

Well, I mean, it also comes down to like how complicated you want a Chromebook to be in the end. Right. So like an Android phone is a lot, right? It has like a full app model. It has a bunch of capabilities. It is just a, it has interface metaphors galore. Right. It's more of a computer arguably in a Chrome book, which initially was Linux running Chrome. Yep. And the whole model was like, all you need is a browser. Then I think they realized, and I think that's great. I think for a lot of people, that is actually what you need.

Yep. But then you got to add things like windowing and background apps and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you end up being like, ah, shit, we made a computer. Like, now this thing is just Windows with the app model instead of Win 32 is Chrome. And then you're like, ah, but we have this other thing. We should let it run Android apps. oh, we need to put Google now in here because that's what we decided to announce it.

I know, like, whatever. And you just, like, end up junking up ChromeOS. And so then you come to this, like, final place where you're like, it's just an Android laptop. Yeah. Okay. Like, fine. But you're just, I think you're just so far a field

of the initial vision for that product. But the initial vision for that product was kind of bad in that, not like the, just this is a, browser go forth. I think that was a great vision. Execution was bad because it was always like, oh, the idea was that it's only the browser, therefore it's super cheap. But that cheapness also meant your monitor was garbage. Your keyboard was garbage. Everything was garbage. And so people kept saying, well, I want a more power. Like, I don't want it to be garbage. I would like a pretty

display. And they're like, okay, well, that's going to cost you more money. And so it just kind of creeped up. Right. And then you go, oh, but it's only a browser. Why would I pay all that money? And then back. It was always this fight back and forth. And so it was, I think for a long time, it's been like, well, just make it Android guys. Come on. Like, stop, stop messing around. You're not doing this other thing. That was a really cool idea that doesn't actually exist in a world where you have different partners who want money for the things they provide you to put into that computer. Yeah, I mean, look, is one of the few people in the world who's ever bought a $1,000 Chromebook pixel.

It worked really well when you threw Windows, like high-end Windows horsepower at it. Yeah. Like that Chromebook pixel, I believe, an I-5. Yeah. Like 16 gigs of RAM. That thing was so good. It was beast. It was great for its time. It's still going. My mom still uses it.

But no one's going to spend that much money because then you think you need a whole computer. But I would challenge you. I'm looking at my Mac right now. It's running Chrome and then like mostly electronics. Oh my God. Files. You got a. You're testing.

It's just screenshots. You can make them go away. Oh, my God. It's really upsetting. Oh, that's be, okay. It was just an open stack of screenshots. But like, the only native app really in my dock is Lightroom. And like most people are not running Lightroom. And you just look at that.

You're like, oh, this is just a bunch of electron apps. Fine. But I don't think Google, I mean Google. Like, what else do I have to say? Like, they never ran the idea to completion and used the ecosystem. So now they're shuffling up all those teams, right? Dave Burke, who ran Android for a long time, is gone. That's today.

That news broke today. Hiroshi, who was in charge of the whole thing, left. Right? He's off finding himself on some other projects at Google. And they're just shuffling up those teams, and this seems like a natural outcome of that. Yeah. You will recall, like, a year ago or two years ago,

they're like Android tablets are going to make a comeback because of folding devices. Hey, the pixel tablet is cooler than people think. That's my hot take for the day. But I will say, I mean, on this one, I think the Google's sort of stated reason for doing this is it lets them roll out AI stuff across these two platforms faster. And I think that's fair, right? Like you look at some of the stuff Google's already doing with Chromebook Plus devices. It has the journey of AI wallpaper and the magic editor and Google Photos.

Like, that's stuff you want to do on device as much as you can. And so building that into the stack for both of those platforms makes a lot of. sense. Nilai, to your point, I'm very bullish about this combination for Android phones, and I'm very skeptical about it for Chromebooks. So I'm kind of with you in that, like, the idea of being able to blow up my Android phone, whether it's for Android tablets or foldable devices or whatever, like a thing that gets more ChromeOSI, the bigger it gets, I find very compelling.

But a Chromebook that looks more like Android is an experiment that Google has tried many times, and it has typically gone very badly. Right, because Android developers do not want to put their apps on a laptop in that way. Right. And it requires a huge amount of work to do it well. And when you don't do it well, it kind of sucks. And it mostly doesn't get done well. And I, yeah, so I agree.

I think this is a thing that for Chromebooks is going to be complicated. If we are, in fact, getting the sort of big combined user interface thing that might happen here. Or Google is telling the truth. And this is just like the bottom of the tech stack so that they can get. g-mails help me write to run 4% faster on your chrome which is fine love the idea that they're going to put like full android on a on a chrome book and then just completely dumb it down just like no you only open the chrome app that would be hysterical they've been there before yeah you know what's funny about that is the chrome app for android is so so so so much worse than chrome on

Chromebooks that like what an unbelievable Chromebook down downgrade that would be if they did that. Yeah, because they had to make Chrome on Chromebook a real browser. Right. Because that is the application model. It is the best version of Chrome that exists in the world. Yeah. I know a lot of designers who run Figma in expensive Chromebooks. Oh, interesting.

And expensive is like a, but they just like don't have MacBooks anymore. They're just like, we just run, we live in Figma. We might as well have a Chrome book or some of them have Chrome boxes, the Chrome desktop. and fancy monitors, and that's just the end of that. And it's like that's the application model. And if you bring a browser of that capability to a phone or a tablet, you can't take your 30% anymore. And that's why the iPad browser sucks, everybody. All the way around.

And that's also why Android tablets have the not great version of Chrome instead of the Chromebook version of Chrome. There's no reason a powerful Samsung tablet shouldn't run full-on Chrome. Same business pressure exists. Anyway, that's totally separate. It's fine. 30%. Bring me a suitcase. Actually, Apple and Google, I would pay a subscription fee for a full desktop class browser on my mobile devices.

That would be one thing. You want to get me to pay a subscription fee for Apple One or Google One? But what if it's the same garbage? No, it has to be the good browser. All right. Arc. What if instead of a browser, it's just a chatbot. That lies to you.

Can I interest you in that instead? Is it sexy? All right. We've got to take a break, everybody. We'll be right back with lightning round. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns.

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Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. and we assess that individual.

They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people,

all of the folks that are getting screwed over, against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything.

I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig in. All right, we're back. I will say that there was not as much hoardiness in the history of the Vergecast until AI hit the scene.

This is true. We've done the show for 13 years. You know, a wide variety of people. David has come and gone from the show. Hi, David. It's only until AI hit and honestly crans that we're just like butts. They're inherently funny, man They're just

People are giving me like beautiful horses I saw that horse is not beautiful There's also a shocking increase In the amount of horse talks Since Alex showed up It's the friend that the mayors And the mayors It's time for the lighting round

It's always unsponsored This is your shot Right I'll sell out You just tell me what to say You just show up No one's fired the gun It's a problem.

All right, David, what's your lightning round item? I think I want to talk about this survey that Pew did about how people get news on social media platforms. We've talked, obviously, a lot about this. This is like the only thing anyone on threads ever talks about is news on threads because Adam Masary, like, keeps saying how much he hates news, but loves news, but hates it, but doesn't want it, but loves it. And so Pew did a study basically looking at four platforms. So it was X, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, and essentially asked people, do you get news on this platform? And is it like a primary reason you come here?

And the numbers are sort of fascinating. Like, in almost every case, like I'm looking at this now, over 80% of people on all platforms see news content on all four of those platforms. So like on X, they call it news related content. And it's sort of like news and news adjacent things. and 92% of people on X reported seeing it. It was 90 and 91 for TikTok and Facebook, Instagram, the lowest at 82%. All huge numbers. But in almost every case, most people said it's not the primary reason they go to the platform.

X was the exception. Two-thirds of people said it was either a, I think it was a major or minor reason to go. But TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all somewhere between like 30 and 40% of people said that's even a reason they think about going to those platforms. which I just think is very telling, right? We talk a lot about news, and these companies keep telling us news as a tiny percentage of what people do and people don't actually care

and they're not here for news. And the only people who care about news are the people who report on the news and everybody should shut up about the news for once. And I just thought this was a really interesting way of looking at that. And Pew has also come out and said over and over and over again that for young people in particular,

TikTok is where they're seeing a lot of their news, even if they're not seeking it out. That's how news finds them. So there's like a there's just at the amount of like accidental news consumption that is happening on social media right now just fascinates me. Especially in an election year, all of this is going to get very weird. I just thought it was really interesting. Well, particularly because the news isn't always packaged well. No.

Right. Like it's always it's frequently packaged in to get you as upset as possible. Can I can I just like roll this into my lightning red idea? Yeah, go for it. Uh, so mine is a bunch of Elon stuff. Um, so one is just a victory lap for me. Elon dropped his lawsuit against opening eye.

Shocked. Because he didn't have a contract. And I super told you so. You can't fix a contract you don't have. Would you say that's a fair legal reason? Literally, when back it looks at that post, hundreds of comments being like,

you're going to assemble a contract on it. And it's like, no, you can't. You just can't. You have. And if you could, you would. You would. If he wanted to, he would. Yeah.

I'm just saying, He didn't. So whatever. If you want to sue someone, come up with a good idea. One, but two, a bunch of stuff about SpaceX this week. The culture at SpaceX, the actions towards women at SpaceX, the sexist culture at SpaceX, in two stories. One, the Wall Street Journal, big expose, talked to a number of people. And then the second one, a lawsuit from former SpaceX employees saying,

It's a culture of harassment. We wrote them both up, right? What you do? And the headline we wrote on the Wall Street Journal one was not as just aggressive as people wanted. And I got tweets about it. And it was like, we have to be really careful when we write these headlines, especially when it's not our reporting. Right? We're talking about a Wall Street Journal story.

And if you look at the Wall Street Journal story, the journal story is very carefully reported. And it's mostly about one woman. an intern who lawyered up with the same lawyer as Elon and SpaceX to refute the story. And she sent a bunch of affidavits in, which

confirms some of the reporting of the story, but she's like, none of this is true, which is weird. Like, the construction of that story is weird. And the thing you're saying, David, is, like, people encounter their news, and the thing Alex is saying is that news is not packaged well. Right. What everyone wanted us to say was like,

Look at how bad this is. And indeed, there's a lot of bad stuff in there. If you're rolling around your own company being like, will you have my babies? Don't do that. And then you retaliate against the women who say no. That is very bad. When the president of your company who's a woman retaliates against a woman who was helping to plan your birthday party because she suspected that the phone call from the husband to the woman was evidence of an affair

as opposed to the planning of a birthday party, that's bananas. Yeah. Maybe that should have been our headline. Birthday party affair situation at SpaceX bananas. But this tendency to overread the news for maximum emotional value or to assign some emotional value to something, even if that's not what the evidence of the news is. Like that is the thing social media does. It is in particular the thing that threads does because that is how you get engagement in that algorithm. So there's no news there.

Adam Sari is like. We refuse. He's like, we just want, you know, people to talk about politics. He's like, we don't want people to talk about politics. We just want them to talk about, you know, things that are not politics, like sports and fashion. It's like, I don't, okay. There's no politics in sports famously. Yeah.

No politics there. And either of those. Nothing about the fashion industry has anything to do with the way the world works. No. Anyhow. All I'm saying is then you look at the threads algorithm and it's like, just rage bait. Like, that is algorithmically what it will show you. Yep.

And it's like old rage bait. bait lately. Yeah. And I just like that little bit where it's like are the people that are being serviced here being careful and maybe we're too careful and we'll accept that criticism. I don't think you can that our story is written by Liz. By the way, like the verge and Liz Lapato are too easy on Elon Musk is a very hard case to make based on our work.

We are careful because we want our shots to land. And we're especially careful when it's other people's reporting, right? That's just the way it goes. But I would just say, like, what social media has done is allowed a lot of people who don't have to practice that care to participate in the media ecosystem, which is great. But it is also, like, weird. I think people are confused. So you accidentally encounter a lot of news. But there's not the part on the other end where it's like, I know how this was made.

Or I am being careful. It's like if you optimize for engagement, you will get engagement. Yeah. And oftentimes that engagement is done to like, it's just really explosive, right? Like it is just, I see it on TikTok a lot because I went through and was like, we were hearing a bunch of different news was popping up on TikTok. So I went and like search that news. So now my feet is just all of that news. And the stuff, the rhetoric is really heated.

The rhetoric is very different than how you would normally report on the story where you would be really cautious and careful without every single part of it. Instead, it's just like, yeah, these people suck. This is evidence. Let's just get into it. And I'm like, well, no, you can't. That's not how you cover this stuff. And there's a lot of reasons we cover it that way, both because we want to be accurate and honest and because we want to like, yeah, there's just a bunch of reasons to do it. And these people don't seem to have the same concerns.

Well, and there's also, I think one of the things that really jumped out to me in this Pew study was that, I think across platforms, somewhere between like half and three quarters of people said they pretty frequently see. inaccurate news on those platforms. And at some point, the only response to that is just total nihilism. Right? Like, you just assume nothing is real. Everything is chaos. You can't trust anything. You can't bleed anything. This all came to you by

accident, right? Like, it's killing the idea of sitting down and reading the news. Like, that as a behavior that people do on purpose is dying because this stuff is just bombarding at you all the time. And so, like, it's hard to be a news consumer now. And so I think all these people, especially when

these things are coming up. They're used to that inflamed rhetoric. They're used to have this stuff being wrong anyway. And so you don't know the provenance. You don't know how this stuff works. You don't know the story. It's just all sort of happening around you. And it's like, how on earth are you supposed to make heads or tails of anything in that ecosystem? Wait, what is the what is the source of truth? Right. Like all these platforms want to say they don't want to be arbiters of truth. Mark Zucker, famously, I don't want to be the arbiter of the truth. But then you need a place to go. Right. And that's what media institutions are supposed to be. I'm not saying any of us do a job of this.

Like, that is the thing that we have allowed to wither away in the platform era. But it's stories like this. Like, if you go look at the comments of the Wall Street Journal article, the comments are full of people being like, this is just a hit piece. Right? Like, their own comment section is a disaster of people being like, I don't even, I don't even read this. I think it's bullshit. Because we have now conditioned a bunch of people because of social media to believe that everything is overdone or sensationalized or just done for outrage or just done for clicks. And in this case, what you're looking at is, boy, the culture at SpaceX appears to be a disaster.

Like from top to bottom, there are a whole bunch of very unhappy women. There are women who have been retaliated against by the most senior woman at the company. None of this is like, when I first saw this story, I was like, oh, didn't we cover this already? Yeah. Because we've seen this story from SpaceX before. Lauren Grush used to cover it a lot for us. and to just see it crop up again. It's like, oh, and now there's all this additional reporting in the journal where it's like,

just like, again, if you're listening to this and you think about starting company, one thing you should not do is walk around your company asking employees if they will have your children. Just don't do it. It feels like a very basic rule that we have to lay out at this time. It's not a rule that appears to apply to Elon against whom there are credible allegations that a woman who accused him a sexual harassment, he responded to by offering her a horse. It does come back to horses a lot.

It always does. On that note, Alex, I actually have a question for you. What's your lightning round thing? My lightning round thing is also related to horses. Yeah, because did you guys ever, did you guys go to Alamo draft house, either one of you? Yeah, all the time.

They just opened one like a mile from me maybe a year ago, and it's now my go-to movie thing. So I'm going to be real old right now. In my 20s, I spent a lot of time in Austin, Texas, which is where Alamo Draft House started. I went to a lot of screenings, went to a lot of parties, went to a lot of things, sort of new Tim League. Is that the one that's also like a movie museum and they have like the most incredible collection of old stuff from movies? The Alamo Draft House there?

I think it is. I could be wrong. One of them might be. There's a bunch of different ones. Some have come, they've gone. It is great. Every time I go to Austin now, I'm like, oh, that draft house is closed. And I once saw people run for their lives because they didn't want to talk to the audience because we were so mad at them about the movie.

It was super cool. Poughkeepsie tapes. But so Alamo Draft House, famous, famous institution, one of like kind of the core movie theater franchises. And very terminally online, it ran its own blog for years, badass digest. It really, it was famously huge friends with Harry Nulls, who is like the original movie blogger. We don't talk about him anymore. You can go Wikipedia Y. And they have been in a lot of trouble the last few years.

There was allegations of labor issues there and sexual harassment and lots of sorts of things. And then COVID hit. And they like every movie theater company got bodied really, really badly. they filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Whole new, like, re-org happened, got in a bunch of investors. Tim League was still in charge. Then last week, I believe, they suddenly closed a whole bunch of their theaters in Dallas, and that was a real bummer because I was planning to go to them.

And it was, it's fine. I'm through it. And then this week, they announced that Sony has purchased them. So, so, yeah, Alamo is now going to be completely owned by Sony. I assume you're going to see some Sony movies there. but you should probably still see all the other ones because Disney still has the biggest market share of films. And I don't think Disney, like, excuse me,

I don't think Alamo is going to be like, no, we're not going to screen a Star War. Well, I think the, you know, Netflix owns a bunch of theaters and they do limited theatrical runs because they've got to keep the stars happy and get them some awards. Yeah, it's all for awards. I think Sony actually wants to like have a chain of movie theaters. I think it's very different.

It is very different. Like Sony is just like, no, we want this to be a business again. And there was a reason it wasn't allowed to be a business. And the ramifications of the Paramount Decree were huge, right? Like we got independent film. We got more queer film. We got more women in films, more people of color in films. There was just like misogynation was illegal to show on film.

And then the Paramount Decree came out. And they started to soften those rules a little. It took a long time. But the Paramount Decree was very, very important for. competition in the filmmaking industry and the fact that it has gone now has always been kind of a bummer even though streaming has really taken a lot of that audience and Sony's like okay we're just going to follow back and it's 1938 well yeah but just to make the argument times have radically changed yeah there is not a booming theatrical business anymore it seems to be declining does alma draft house even exist unless the studio like Sony shows up like Sony doesn't have a streamer yeah they have crunchy role they got Sony picture core I was like, Bravia court. Wow.

Just like, just like, just really hurting yourself there. But they were like, do you want to watch Madam Webb at 80 megabits for second? Did you? And I said, no, sir. The only way to do that is going to be at an Alamo draft house. Yeah. Like at 2 a.m.

A little drunk. No, I think the answer to your question, Eli, is no, it doesn't. And I think the, like, the idea that we have to, you know, protect the movie industry from the big, bad studios and theaters is like such a long, gone phenomenon at this point. I disagree. What we desperately need is someone with real money trying to get everyone back

into movie theaters. Yeah, but I don't think it should be the movie theater. I don't think it should be the people making the movies. But no one else is incentivized to do it. Alamo's issues were not necessary. Like, some of Alamo's issues were declining viewership. That's totally true. A lot of Alamo's issues were over-extending

themselves. They've got a theater in Fidei and I can always get a ticket to see movie there because no one goes to the sea of the movies in FIDAD. That's all the financial districts now. That's everywhere. That's not true. It's like a handful of blockbusters that get sold out and then no other movies. Like Alamo has famously been very good at programming big events around their other movies.

And they were really, really good at it. But they've overextended themselves. They never recover from 2021. And I don't think it necessarily needed to be Sony that went and did this, right? I don't think it should be these movie theaters because they are already. control, they're already so vertically integrated. We shouldn't just add more on and give up. We should in fact say, hey, you shouldn't be able to own everything all the way down because it does actually measurably make the entire industry worse and less creative.

Yeah, I just, they didn't buy AMC. They bought Alma Draft House. I know. I went there so much. Right. Like, I'm with you and I'm usually the one who's like the most pro diversified competition on the show. Is this just me being super film nerd? We are diversified, though. Like, the idea that the movie theaters is this, like, gigantic business that we can't possibly let the studios back into is just not

how it works anymore. Like, if anything, we should be saying Sony can't own a streaming service. Like, that's the, that's the scarier way to take too much control of the industry right now. What's already happening in the industry. Right, so be mad about that. I mean, I am mad about that.

I just, again, I just want to remind everyone that the streaming companies at Sony owns are Crunchyroll and Sony Picturescore, which I use. That is Crackle erasure and I will not stand for it. It streams at 80 megabits per second. Only to Sony televisions. No, it does not, sir. Crackle has long since gone 90.

No, how dare you? I can still make a free account on crackle.com, sir. To do what? You can watch. There's the Alfred from Batman prequel where like Alfred, I never watched it, but apparently he solves crimes. I swear to God, Crackle. No, Crackle still exists.

I'm literally on their website, and I'm not positive. It still exists, which is telling. Are any of those things real? But it's here. I can watch, I can watch. You have to name a movie that actually exists. Can I interest you in season one, episode one of Dominion Creek? That's not true.

That's AI. You have to give you something that doesn't sound like AI made it. Abandoned, Colen, Angelique's Isle. How about that? What about I see you, but it's spelled EYE? and it appears to have Celester Stallone in it. Okay. All of this is fake.

I don't believe this website is real. Sorry, I have to stop looking at crackle.com. This is too much. I'm enjoying this too much. Oh, me. Okay. I see what happened here. I just want to point out,

Sony exited Crackle and sold it to a company called Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. Ooh. Which also owned Red Box and I think is also in the middle of going out of business. I'm just going to just going to say, That counts is going 90. All right. It's not, it is SEO Honeypot now for self-help content. Fully gone 90.

Although it's now David's preferred streaming service, from what I understand. You watch Ghost Squad. It's something called Crossbow. Angelique Ziles, my favorite movie. When you click on the Crackle FAQ, this is a real thing that I did. I clicked on the FAQ, assuming that it would tell me who owned Crackle, but instead it showed me a list of trending support topics. And one of them, number two,

on the list of trending support topics and the Crackle FAQ. How many Vizio devices can I add to my crack? This is real. I'm not kidding at all. The other one is how do I troubleshoot issues my Xbox Series S? So I think we know a lot about this

version of Crackle. Yeah. All right. Crackle has gone 90. That's one thing we've learned about this. I'm with you that consolidation is bad. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm mainly just bummed to see Amazon.

I'm mainly just bummed to see Alamo go. this way. I spent a lot of time there in my 20s, seeing some of the worst movies and like two, I got to see Marotos, Maroters, Maroters, Metropolis there at a 24-hour movie

festival, colorized, absolutely spectacular. But I also saw Poughkeepsie tapes, and again, we chased the filmmakers out of the theater. I'm just saying when I was in law school, I got absolutely hammered with my friends and went and saw Broken Broken Lizards Club Dread that it out of

You can have experiences at movie theaters. It's great. All right, that's it. We got to re-en wrap this up. We're like 500 years over time. There's still so much to say about crackles. I was like, we're just in a whole episode about it. We'll do that next week.

By the way, one thing we didn't get to is as we speak, the Tesla vote to give Elon his money or not his money is still ongoing. It looks like he might win. We'll cover that on another show at another time when that is over. But now we have to rest. We have to go and watch Crackle at 80 megabits per second. That's it. That's the Vergecast, rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.