The Vergecast - Apple announces M2 MacBook Pros, a Mac Mini, and a new HomePod

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of automated content creation: 02:23 - The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Richard Lawler, and Alex Heath start the show with an overview of what we've learned from Elon Musk running Twitter over the past few months. 24:50 - Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine 48:34 - Apple's Mac and HomePod announcements from this week Further reading: Inside Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter Twitter Blue arrives on Android for $11 a month  Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine Apple announces MacBook Pros with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips Apple announces a Mac Mini with the M2 and M2 Pro How the new MacBook Pros compare to the rest of Apple's MacBook lineup  Apple is reportedly working on an iPad-like smart display  Apple announces revamped full-size HomePod two years after discontinuing original Apple’s new HomePod unsurprisingly sounds close to the original Apple reportedly shelved its plans to release AR glasses any time soon  Reed Hastings is stepping down as Netflix’s co-CEO Microsoft announces big layoffs that will affect 10,000 employees Email us at [e-mail] or call the hotline at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, oh boy, where to begin. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix is out. Microsoft might be doing layoffs. Elon Musk is still bad at business. There's new MacBook pros and a HomePod big in, and CNAT's using AI to write their articles. All this, so much more coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all.

I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to Vergecast, flagship podcast of automated content creation. Can someone make a chat GPT episode of the Vergecast for us? It would be great. I could use a break. I was on the show last week. But I could use a longer break. You know what I'm saying?

That'd be good. I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Granz is here. I'm your friend who wrote this intro from chat GPT. You didn't know it. It's good. I can't wait to talk about the chat.

I can't. I'm like bursting to get to the chat GPT section of today's episode. Richard Lawler is here. And I have not resigned as co-CEO. A lot of things. You don't know this because you're in your car. You're just like driving along. It's a normal day for you.

We are recording later than usual because right when we sat down to record. A flurry of news took place, including Reed Hastings, Zocosio, Netflix. Just dipping. Just screw it. I'm out. So we're a little bit later, Richard, who runs our news team, a little bit of a scramble. If you hear the frenzy in his voice, that's where that came from. We'll get to all of that. But first, Alex Heath is here. Hey, Alex. Hey, guys. Good to be here. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. You have accomplished a lot in that minute. You launched a new paid newsletter called Command Line, full of dish and gossip. industry goings on. I recommend people go subscribe to it immediately.

Yes, please. Every couple days I get a note from Alex being like, guess you signed up. And I wish I could reveal that information to you. But I'm just telling you, if you sign up for command line, you will be in some pretty good company, I would say. Yeah, we can't disclose, you know, GDPR and all that, but just take our word for it. The European police are outside of Alex's house right now, actually. Finally. Being very European, they're just smoking and grumbling at the ground.

They have no authority here. But Alex, you're here because this week we published a gigantic feature story in collaboration with our sister publication in New York Magazine and our friends at platformer Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer about the first 90 days of Twitter under Elon Musk. Just that list of collaborators, you can tell it. This is a big story. And then obviously a lot has happened in 90 days of Elon Musk. Tell us about that story.

Yeah, this was a fun one. Zoe Schiffer and Casey and I have obviously. been reporting on this saga, the mini twist and turns of it from the beginning since Musk walked in with the kitchen sink. And, you know, if you're listening to this, you probably have been following it as well, a lot of the details. We hoped that with this story, we could put together not only all the just, you know, bit by bit crazy moments that unfolded after Musk came in, but also kind of just show thematically what it was like working there during this time, because a lot of the coverage has been centered on Musk and on Twitter as a business and Apple stuff, which I came on and talked

about last time. But, you know, with this, we really wanted to focus on the thousands of Twitter employees who lost their jobs as a result of Musk's acquisition. Interviewed several of them, some on the record, some not, to really try to show like, this is what it was like working in this place. And it's, it's crazy. I mean, it's, it's, you can't really, you couldn't write it as a screenplay, as ridiculous as it is in real life. And yeah, we hope that it kind of accurately portrays what life has been like inside Twitter. And I think we did that. But, yeah, it was really fun working with Casey and Zoe.

Obviously, they're crushing it on this beat at Platformer. And we're all continuing to cover it. But yeah, get a copy of extremely hardcore wherever magazines are sold near you, I guess. I guess you can also read it online since people do that. But I actually haven't seen a print copy of it yet. But they exist. I'm told I'm told magazines are a thing. Yeah, it's a real, as somebody who has exclusively run a digital publication for over a decade,

this is our third collaboration with New York Magazine. And obviously they run a great website too, but they make up print magazine. And they have for over 50 years. And so sometimes, like, whenever we collaborate with them, like, oh, this is different. It's different. It's just very different. And I'm obviously. kidding about like people don't read.

I actually do New York Mag is low-key like a great magazine and and yeah. I don't even low-key. They're just a great magazine. But like, you know, it's, you got to be subtle with like your magazine flexes, you know, you don't want to be too over the top. But yeah, I, uh, I highly recommend reading it in print.

I haven't gotten to yet, but they did an amazing job. And our team did an amazing job on the site too with, uh, the wealth meter, which I think was your idea, Neil I kind of, My only true contribution to the story. So, I mean, I'll actually, let's talk about that for a minute. So not the wealth meter, it's like, which is very funny. That's the rest of the episode, actually.

It's just me taking credit for the gimmick that I put in the story. Shout out Graham. Shout out. Yeah, our engineer Graham built that for me in like the last minute. But where that came from, and really the story is we were like, we should do a big feature about Elon and Twitter. And then it's like, what is the thesis statement of that story? What is the end of that story? Like a great story, it's like a kindergarten level writing assignment, has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

We barely have a middle of this story, right? There's this really chaotic beginning period. We think it feels, Alex, I mean, this is my question to you really is, have we reached a steady state of Twitter under Elon? I don't know the answer to that question. We certainly do not have an end, right? It is not a success or a failure. My instincts tell me it's going and wonder. and not the other, but we don't know.

So, like, how do you even write this story? And so we picked linear time. Like, here's 90 days. Let's see what happened. And we have reached an end, which was Twitter as it was pre-Musk, right? So all the employees who are not either, basically, you fall into the camp of you're there for visa, health care, work stability reasons, or you're a kind of a mercenary, you're trying to rise up through the power vacuum. Anyone who doesn't kind of fall into those camps has left by now? So the company's a shell of what it once was, both in terms of scale, size of people, but also the DNA of the people who made the company over the last, you know, decade plus. And so, yeah, I think that was the bow on the story. It was just kind of like he's flushed everyone out. And now they're all suing him. And I think the current stand is there's over 800 individual ex-employees filing an arbitration.

cases against Twitter right now, which Twitter has to pay those legal fees, which can be in the tens of thousands per arbitration. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a fascinating, I don't know, C plot of the Twitter story is this arbitration thing. Yeah. Musk, no stranger to employment disputes is now finding himself with even more. Yeah. Well, this is like the cutting edge of employment disputes. So the backstering the arbitration thing is all these companies wrote arbitration mandatory arbitration clauses into their employment contracts. That went up to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court said, then it's fine. And so then the strategy is because of what you're saying, because the companies agree to take on those costs, because the calculation in their minds was, we'll go to arbitration, which is friendlier to the corporation, we'll agree to pay the costs and we'll come out ahead. And so what employment lawyers, like plaintiff employment lawyers have discovered is, oh, we can just find a thousand people who are mad at you.

you and file 1,000 individual arbitration cases that you have to pay for and that you cannot collect and do a class action or join the cases like you would in a normal court. Now you just have 1,000 cases to pay for all individually. And that's like... When they wrote those policies, they didn't realize that they would be laying off thousands of people at once who were all going to be extremely pissed. I just think they thought everyone else's... There's like a level of a giant corporation where it's like,

think everyone's stupid, you know, and that you're smarter than that. And you realize, like, oh, crap. Like, this is an unexpected consequence of this thing. And it is very much the cutting edge of employment law. This is a new development in the past like two years maybe, not even. And so Musk is like at the cutting edge of this style of employment dispute. He's invented a lot of things. The rockets land themselves. I'm not sure that he wants to spend his time inventing an outcome to mass simultaneous arbitration. Yeah. Which is like, there are rich people, there are smart people who are very engaged in inventing the end to this because it's the cutting edge. I don't think that's where Elon wants to be. No, he doesn't, I don't know where he

definitely doesn't want to be anywhere near San Francisco, as I'm sure you may talk about later. He tried unsuccessfully to get another lawsuit over his Tesla tweeting moved out of San Francisco due to apparent, you know, bias, his lawyer argued there in San Francisco. They couldn't find jurors was the argument that didn't, you know, would have a neutral view of must. Yeah. Which, you know, I don't, We need to get into a tangent, but I thought there was a tweet threat of his lawyer arguing in court the other day that the reason the 420 tweet should not be, you know, considered as, you know, something that he has to worry about is that he's a reckless tweeter. And like, this is his personal lawyer being like, this is our legal defense. He is a reckless tweeter, the CEO of Twitter. Let's see how that works for him.

But yeah, no, I think the current state, so now that we've moved from, you know, the really chaotic him, taking over phase to now trying to figure out how to land the plane. I think he drew analogy to like, this is a plane flying into the ground at top speed financially is Twitter Blue is a dud. I just saw some analysis that he hasn't even managed to double the subscription count from before he took the company. So there's less than 300,000 Twitter Blue subscribers. You know what he has doubled? He's doubled a number of people who show up in my mentions. Whenever I tweet, tweet after having said, I have to break my previous relationship with Twitter. That's like, you're back. And all of those people pay for Twitter Blue.

Yeah, that's true. There's a nice overlap of like you have 12 followers and some kind of weird like Joe Byron thing in your bio and you're a Twitter Blue subscriber. Yeah, if you're one of those like sunglasses truck guys, he's got you. But yeah, so that's a dud. The company's revenue was down 40% year over year as of this month. so losing hundreds of millions of dollars since he took over, and they're auctioning off all the furniture. So that's the current state of Twitter. That's a bad place.

Yes. That's where our story ends. Yeah. Did T.C. put, did T.C. put a bid in on the bird logo? T.C. really thought about spending $18,000 on the bird logo. I'm not sure if he, I mean, he obviously thought about it enough that he did not spend $18,000 in the bird logo. But he thought about it more than anyone should.

Like, I thought about it. about spending $18,000 in the board logo on the way that you always think about buying anything. You're like, oh, it'd be great. And they're like, wait, this is stupid. TC. kept going for a little bit longer than you would expect. That's going to be the price of a used Tesla in a few months. Well, that was the opening. That was the opening bit. I'm not even sure where it's at now. Yeah. Well, you know, they need all the money they can get. And that's the current state. But yeah, I guess just to like bring it full circle with the piece, like, I think we accurately captured the frank cruelty of how Musk treated the employees there, which like, you can say what

you want about Musk as a innovator, as a technologist, his track record does speak for itself there. He treated these people horribly. And, you know, it's not that we also talk about how in the piece, like Twitter was not run well, people there knew that it needed a reset, it needed a kick in the pants. But I don't think anyone was necessarily expecting just the cruelty of how, like, like the first month unfolded. Yeah. And now the chickens are, are roosting in like,

you know, there's 800 arbitration cases. So I feel like we have to issue this disclaimer that we do. Every time I talk about Twitter, criticizing the Elon Musk regime of Twitter is in no way condoning or saying the previous regime did anything good at any time. Yeah. It was bad.

Then it was really bad. And now it's still pretty bad. And it's that middle period. It's the transition. This hasn't really happened to any company ever. Where in the middle of the Halloween party, an acquisition closes, and the executives get marched out the door, which is an incredible scene in this story.

Well, to make things even better is that this is how crazy things were that week. Like, there was a scarecrow walking around with a handler at the party, and everyone thought it was Musk at first because of the handler and the way it was going to be the MC for the evening. And they're like, the scarecrow is going to remove its mask. And it's going to be Musk after he just escorted RGC out of the building. But yeah, it was an insane time, and I don't think it's going to get less insane. I think it'll probably just get weirder with Twitter.

But, yeah, Elon's still tweeting through it while we all watch. So, fun story. So here's the thing that I've been thinking about, the question I've been wanting to ask you, we needed to wrap this story up so I want to distract you. It feels like the window, the chaos is over. Like the window of the chaos story, everyone gets it. All the people are gone. the people who are left are either people,

I think the three of you wrote about it in the story is people who see chaos as a ladder. They see the power vacuum. They see the opportunity to move up. They want to be close to Elon. Or it's people who are stuck there on visas or need health insurance, right? So you've got this weird two classes of people. But the kind of chaos is over the everyday machinations of chaos have at least simmered down a little bit. Now it's like, what is next?

Like if Twitter Blue isn't working and the advertisers aren't coming, back and the revenue is down and, you know, the loans are coming due against the Tesla stock and Tesla stock is down. The next turn seems actually way more devastating. Yeah, I mean, there is a real, I mean, he's used, it's hard to separate when Musk is just kind of using a schick versus what, when he actually means what he's saying. He's said before at his other companies that they're on the verge of bankruptcy and it's been more of a way to motivate people to kind of get through a hard time. He's been saying the same thing now inside Twitter. You know, we could go bankrupt.

What a management style. Get through this. I don't think that actually happens. You know, I don't, even with how, you know, Musk appears to be going off the rails in some ways, like, I don't think he's actually going to light $44 billion on fire in under a year. He's definitely on the way. But there's a lot of people with a lot of stake in Twitter trying to figure this out that I just, I think it would be something he couldn't really come back from necessarily. But I mean, haven't. That's been like,

Nobody thought he was going to light the money on fire, but he still did it. Like when he said, I'm going to buy it, Yolo, what was it, 42, 20 or whatever, like that initial price that he did, 54, 20. Like, he still repeatedly has said, no, it's fine, I'm cool. And then absolutely fallen on his face. So I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that he's going to fall on his face again with Twitter. No, it's not. It's not. And I think with every passing week, that looks more likely.

But for now, it's, you know, he said the goal is to be break even this year. And I think he can do that. But I mean, Twitter as a product, I don't know about you all. Like, it's getting worse. It's getting uglier to look at both in terms of what they're recommending and just like the pixels and the way things are organized. So, yeah, I don't know. I want to try to like, you know, I want Twitter to live. I don't, you know, I think a lot of us who have fond memories of Twitter don't want it to die.

So we'll see, but it's not looking hopeful. I also just, like, haven't succumbed to the Mastodon, and I don't really think there's any other clear alternatives. So I don't know. You know, we all came back on Twitter to promote the feature, the cover story. Like, it's, yeah. I was like, where else are doing it do? I should have made, like, a TikTok. One of those tectonics of me, like, on green screened over the story.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think we did kind of summarize the chapter that has now ended and now we're in this uncertain period of can he keep it from totally, you know, burning. And, you know, you mentioned Massadon. So I have not joined Massadon either. I haven't had Twitter my phone for months now. I only use it at work and I just use it to basically retweet people who tweet Decoder.

It's a great way to use Twitter. What I miss, the thing that I miss the most is Twitter during NFL games. And I find myself bringing my laptop to the living room so I can just like read sports writers because they're still using it. That's it. Everything else is like, I come to it and I look at it during the work today. I'm like another scandal that will come to nothing is corrupted on Twitter. It just doesn't, I don't care about the royal family.

It's so good, though. And I close my laptop and I walk away. That's fair. I don't. My people have escaped them twice. Right. I'm an Indian American. That's two times. Fair. And I'm out. It's not for me. That's my go-to line.

Someone's going to steal it for me and they're going to make a million dollars in the back of that line. That person's going to be Mindy Kaling. All I'm saying is like it feels like my brain is healing because I don't have feed-based social media in my life. And I think I might need it back, you know? Yeah, you're like, I'm twitchy now. I'm like Jones. I feel too healthy. Did I tell this, too?

When you guys read, I had massive FOMO at CS. And I actually, I got a text from a dear friend. You can obviously guess who it is. And he's like, I'm jonesing for a vape. And I was like, oh, my body just wants nicotine during the first week of January. Like, that's what I've been doing for a long time. I've been in Vegas. And like that's how I feel like, like this weird feed-based social media that has been at the center of the media ecosystem for a long time.

And I, maybe I'll come back to it. Maybe I'll start a mass time. Maybe we'll turn the whole verge into mass tons. Like, who knows? But right at this second, it's like, oh, I should just let my brain heal. And I feel like a lot of the ecosystem is in that moment where it's not like we have to immediately go to Mastodon. It's like, oh, we can play with this a little bit, but it's actually better for everyone if we walk away from this for a second. Neal, you know the fans, the readers want a Verge Mastodon.

They want us in the Fedaverse. If you are a software developer with a vengeance and you want to turn the entire Verge into a Mastodon instance. That's going to happen. I will hear you out. No, it's going to just happen this weekend. We're just going to do it. I'm not kidding. Like, Madison has really just a micro blogging platform.

It's not a Twitter clone, right? You can do a lot with it. It's like WordPress, but harder to understand. Yeah, it's just a syndicated blogging platform. They just made the UI look more like Twitter than not. So people think it's a replacement. But that means if you were to start a publication like ours from scratch, you could actually start a house.

which is a fascinating thought experiment. Well, Medium did this. They have a Macedon instance, so you know that means Macedon is here to stay. Soon they will begin paying some writers pennies to publish our medium, and then they will take that money away. We're going to clap for our toots. Well, I should probably go and finish command line,

but I just want to plug it shamelessly like you did at the top and say, especially you guys are going to talk about chat GPT later. So by the time this comes out, I'll have an interview with the CEO of Notion. They're doing a really interesting implementation of chat GPT. They have unique visibility into the space. I think people will find that interesting. Already have done interviews with Jack Dorsey, C.O. of Shopify, CTO of Meta, have had some scoops, some people moves. Yeah, check it out. It's an experiment. I'm having fun. Verge.com slash command line. Yeah. Yeah. It is very fun. people are going to read it. And honestly, if you want to be ahead of the curve, that's the place to be.

I'm trying to sell here. First, I'm selling my idea that we should turn the entire version of a Maston server. And now that I've opened the Overton window, I'm like, you should subscribe to a newsletter. You see, it's a tactic. Escalating levels of commitment. All right, Alex, it's great to talk to you, man. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Thanks to Alex. We're going to take a quick break. We'll get back. We have a lot to talk about today. We'll grab back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one.

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There's a lot to talk about. There's obviously new Apple news. There's new MacBook pros with M2 chips. There's a new home pod. making the most sarcastic of air quotes possible. There's a new home pod. I could hear them. There's Microsoft layoffs in this thing about their hardware portfolio.

Netflix just got a new CEO. There's like a lot going on. And all this stuff happened like in the minutes before we were set to start recording. But can we talk about CNET in AI and chat GPT and what's going on over there first? Yes. The robots took our jobs. I don't know what else there is to say. The robots are coming for a job.

So last week, so I called Futurism broke this story. CNet is secretly using AI to write articles. And it was like, I would say it was 90% a secret. Because the byline on the articles of CNET money staff. And then if you like clicked it, it would tell you it was written by AI with a human editor. Yeah. I've run a digital news site for a long time. No one's clicking.

So it was, it was not hidden, but it was hidden. Right. But the story picks up people go wild. Obviously, in the context of chat, GPT, there's just unhinged discourse. The robots are coming for our jobs. Journalism is over. Why do you even need this? We started looking into it.

Mia Sato on our team and James Vincent, who's our AI reporter. He's been on the Vergecast recently. Sign him to a go, figure out what's going on here. And it came back. We just published the story. And we'll kind of get to the story itself in a minute. But they came back with what I think of as just like a dead ahead verge creator story.

Like, there's a platform. It has an algorithm. People try to game the algorithm to make more money. Like the bones of this story are the same as YouTubers gaming YouTube or TikTokers gaming TikTokers gaming TikTok or Instagram or whatever. It's just the platform is Google search and the web. And CNET instead of being a TikToker is a voracious private equity money machine.

Well, not CNA. It's just not as in it. But the basics of it are the same. But not CETT. It's Red Ventures, right? That now owns CET. So we should say at the top, CET is our competitor. This is a disclosure.

Do I need to disclose that the verge competes against CET? The verge is competing against CET for a long time. When we were all little babies and we just started the thing, we're like, we're going to get seen. Like, whatever, we did it. Wired in CET. Those are always our competitors. We are friends with a great many people who work at CET, who have worked at CET, who have worked at CET. We just were talking about Casey. Casey came to us from CET. We've sent people to CET.

So it goes. It's a big industry. CET in 2008 was worth $1.8 billion. And it was, I know this, because CBS bought it for $1.8 billion, which is just a crazy sentence. Just you're in a car. To pull over. And I want you to say out loud to yourself, in 2008, one year after the iPhone was released. CBS bought C-Net for $1.8 billion. That's more than Facebook bought Instagram for, Facebook and Instagram for a billion dollars. That's more than Google bought YouTube for. Google was bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. CBS bought C-Net for $1.8 billion in 2008. You don't think that was a goodbye? So I get it. FM, it's a content strategy.

I'd make sense. I understand it. Fast forward. Many things happen between 2008 and 2020. Again, this is one year after the iPhone is released. So one year after the comet hits the earth, they're like $1.8 billion on C-Net. The comet, it turned out, had hit the earth. Upends the entire media ecosystem.

Upends the world, right? Mobile upends the world. 2020, CBS flips CNet to a company called Red Ventures for $500 million. I think it is safe to say this was not a good investment for them. Flip it to this company called Red Ventures. Red Ventures is, they're not a secret. They've been profiled them in the New York Times.

They own a lot of things. They own the points guy. They own bankrate.com. They own credit cards.com. Are you sensing a theme here? They own things that people with credit cards go to visit a lot. And it's a massive portfolio. They own a lot of like search content farms.

Like when you're searching for some, when you're searching for like credit card of the best points and you land in the points guy. And the points guy is great. We know people who work there too. Yeah. And you land in the points guy. How does the points guy make money?

It's affiliate links to sign up for credit cards. So Red Ventures is buying all of these sites that have lots and lots of search authority. And they're like pumping them full of affiliate links. Which again is a totally like well known content strategy. The wire cutter, another competitor of ours. I feel like I just like, if it's a website, it competes with us. Like, I'll just be honest.

The wire cutter started by Brian Lamb, who started Gizmodo way back in the day. He started it was basically like, here's the best phone. And you know, I'm just like one phone. And here's the link to buy it. Totally monetized by affiliate links. He flipped that to the New York Times for $30 million. And then you can ask a lot of people how it's going over there. But whatever.

Now he surfs. And now Brian mostly surfs. His Instagram is, he's a great carpenter. So CNA gets bought by this private equity. company called Red Ventures for $500 million two years ago. And then all of this AI stuff starts showing up. And so they got caught out last week with me and James go and do their reporting. And it turns out that Red Ventures is pretty much open about the fact that they use AI across their portfolio. They've been doing it on CNET for a while. Every single morning,

CET, again, our competitor, I think it's fair to call them a tech publication. Every single morning around 9 o'clock, CNET publishes, here are today's mortgage rates, and here are today's mortgage refinance rates. Let's just imagine if a verge did that. Like, people would kill me. Like, our staff would kill me first. Quick post. They're obviously doing that because those people search for that. Yeah. And that's a service you can provide people. Here's the information. But why do you do that if you're saying? Because you're huge. You have a lot of search authority. And when people go to sign up for a new mortgage or to refinance their mortgage, you collect an affiliate bounty on the back of it.

And I don't think we can overstate how much authority C-NET has because it's been around, it was created what in the 1990s? Yeah, it was created so long ago that CBS bought it for $1.8 billion in 2008. Like, it has a lot

of authority. And that's one of the reasons that stayed one of the top ranks. Tech sites in the world is because it has so much authority, you go and you Google something, you're probably going to find a C-net link, and you're probably going to click on it because you're like, I recognize them. And so, like, I think that was the reason Red Ventures brought them, right? Was because they wanted that authority.

I mean, if someone's like, hey, this thing was worth $1.8 billy, but you could have it for $500 million. Why not? What a deal. What a deal. Sometimes you just got a tumbler rate, man. This couch just needs to be re-apulstered, you know? You do a thing where you cut the skirts off the bottom, you expose the legs. You sell it on Facebook marketplace for five times what you bought it.

Red Ventures. So, but if that's your game, right, this is your monetization. You're going to buy all these sites. with search authority for really high value search terms. And then you're going to put affiliate links on those pages. And when people click on them, you get paid. And this is a real thing, particularly for credit cards. We were doing some research.

The number, if you click on a credit card affiliate link on one of these sites, and you sign up the bounty, the affiliate bounty is right now, like $250. In the past, for Red Ventures specifically, $900. Wow. Right. So if you, if they can get you to sign up for one of these crazy credit cards, like, you know, the metal and all the, all the point system is all the stuff, the high end, the top tier ones, the visa infinites, and you actually sign up through one of their links up to $900. So this is a totally lucrative play for them, a totally lucrative play for the points guy and all these other sites that they, that they own. But that means you're not really trying to do anything except get people to click those links on your pages. I will disclose. We also have affiliate links on our pages. We disclose them per the FTC guidelines. They're connected to our reviews program. But like our reason for being is tech journalism. And we do that stuff to pay for the tech journalism. I think that makes sense. Like if you read our reviews, a lot of them are like you shouldn't buy it.

It made a lot more sense before you just told me they're getting $900 on each referral link. I don't know. Right. A lot of theirs, well, you should sign it for the Sanx. card. And that's just across the portfolio. So if that's the game you're playing, your private equity, and this is the money machine you're running, and you're just trying to pump Google search with content so you can convert on these links, like, why would you have people do that work? Like, you can't. There's no way an actual human being wakes up every day and seen it and looks up the mortgage rates, fills out this template and hits publish every single day between 9 and 9.30 a.m. for like two years. I bet there's someone on

TikTok doing an absolutely unhinged to get ready with me every morning. Nothing but the mortgage rates and putting on makeup. I can find them. I'll look. I'm just saying, but that's like, you would want a robot to that. You should have a robot to do that job. Yeah. If I assigned one of our reporters to do that job, they'd be like, screw you get a robot to do it.

Or if they were smart, they would say they were doing it and figure out how to make a robot do it on their own, right? Like, if you have an office job in America today and you have not figured out Excel automations, like, you're just robbing yourself of time. time you could be on TikTok. It's like, why wouldn't you do this? And the answer is like, oh, you should just do this a lot. Of course you should have AI write content with a capital C against popular search terms and publish them just at mass volume on your site with an enormous amount of search authority so you can convert affiliate links at $250 or $900 a piece. The problem is one that that can't be self-sustaining. At some point, you're just not going to have a staff left to even turn on the robots because journalists don't want to be around that.

Two, eventually you're going to destroy your brand, right? Like CNA will be known for just being a content farm. And then three, and I think this is like the big story. And honestly, it's like this is going to be the big story of the year. Eventually Google's going to be like, yo, our search results are full of garbage, right? People will type in what is the best credit card and you just get robots trying to get you to sign up for credit cards. And like, why would I use Google then?

And Google hates that. Like, to be clear, Google hates when. you try to game the system. Every couple of years, they do like a big panda update. And they're like, our job here is to destroy this gaming. And then you watch a lot of companies who are like, their whole business is gaming the SEO go, oh, crap, and trying to figure out how to game it again.

And so like, I don't think there's a long runway for this AI. Well, there's a long runway. But I don't think there's a good ending for this AI gaming with Google. I think Google, honestly, to me, yes, this is startup at Sina. Yes, a story itself is great. You should read it. An editor resigned and wrote a letter to hundreds of people that she had the letter written by ChatGPT. Just like a perfect detail. And in the letter, she accuses CNET slash Red Ventures of sending out a cybersecurity newsletter written by AI without disclosing it and saying like there was actually bad advice in there.

That's just a straight up scandal, right? Yeah. You have this line, the last line of the story is CNA employees do not fear AI more than they fear the numerous layoffs for Adventurers insists upon. Everyone at CNA is more afraid of red ventures than they are of AI. Like, there's a, there's a story here. It's not really about CET, right? It's about private equity, gaming Google search and the affiliate marketing ecosystem ruthlessly. And, you know, their private equity.

It's like being mad at a tiger for being a tiger. It's a P company. Like this is what they do. They buy companies and squeeze them for money. they move on. Like, I'm mad at the locust. Like, what are you going to do? Um, seen it, though, is like the story news powerhouse. And it's, it's being gutted by these forces. And honestly, it's because Google search is gameable in this way. And yet they do panda updates. But just compare that to other platforms. Compare that to YouTube. Compare that to Instagram.

Compare that to TikTok. Compare that to even Twitter, right? YouTube is like, boy, there's a lot of garbage on our platform. We're just changing the algorithm to D-WRew. rank it or demonetize it and we'll change the incentive so people make this other thing that we want. And then the garbage slowly proliferates and then it comes back. Like whatever. But all the other platforms do that, Google search is just steadily getting worse. Right. It's like it has it does not incentivize good stuff in the way that the other platforms at least give like lip service to incentivizing good stuff. I do wonder is there is there like like with Google there's an entire industry. They're called like the SEO industry. It's all these people trying to game

Google. And it's been around since as long as Google's existed. Is there like an SEO industry for TikTok and for YouTube and for these other platforms? Oh, yeah, dude. Yeah. But is it as big? It's, I don't know if it's as big. But the difference is like the SEO industry is it's diffuse, right? It's like copywriters and keyword experts and whatever. Like there are agencies and they have different kind of like pieces of the puzzle and there's just like a lot of like generalized SEO knowledge that exists because Google is big and it's like hard to wrap your head around the fact that Google search is a platform. Right. You think the web is a platform. Right. But like Google search is a discovery platform just like Instagram is a discovery platform. The other platforms, TikTok, whatever,

because there's like a unification there between the creation tool, the distribution tool, and the discovery engine, those people are not like SEO experts. They're just like a TikTok creative agency. Yeah. Right.

Like our audience team is like, here are the TikTok trends that we should do on the Verchcast and Decoder this week. And then we don't do it. We should do it more. Like, you know,

there's that one where like people were like sat on a boat. And like the decoder team was like, you got to make a decoder where you're sat on. I was like, I don't know if I can do this. I love. boats, but I don't like being sad on them. And I, there's, I think that unification

for the other platforms makes, makes them easier to perceive, right? You can, like that. Yeah. Instagram is a platform. You can kind of see the beginning and end of it. You can see the whole thing. Google search, like, no one can perceive it, right?

And it feels organic. Again, these are like very sarcastic air quotes. Like, it feels like, you ask the robot a question. The robot tells you an answer it. But then if you like really poke at it, you're like, oh, it's like better to search Reddit, right? Or it's like, there's a reason people think that chat cheap will replace Google, it's because it doesn't return SEO spam to you. It just confidently lies to you.

And like, it turns out, like, what is the lesson of the world of the immediate ecosystem from 2016 on? Confident lies are very popular. I'm sorry I'm laughing. Well, I think something that I've noticed with kind of the way that people are using search engines and we sometimes we talk about how, especially young people, they'll search TikTok or something instead of searching Google. And I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. And I had a thought that it's not, necessarily that they trust the results of when you search on TikTok. Those things are black boxes. You still don't know why it gave you this result or that result over another. It's, but for us old people, when we used to dial into a customer service line and hit zero or we're yelling

operator, you just want to hear from a person. Yeah. And that's what TikTok or Instagram can give you is an, or Reddit especially, can give you an answer that appears to come from a person. Now with chat GP2, who knows. But it appears to come from a real human being somewhere. And there's something about that that. You'd probably rather have that than the correct answer. And Google has been promising the correct answer, and it's not delivering that anyway. Yeah.

And I'm telling you, Google, this is going to be a bad year for Google. They've got to deal with it from both sides. Right. So first, people are going to start talking to chat GPT. And Google itself cannot deliver that technology. They invented it. Like that transformer tech, the T in chat GPT is Google Transformer. Like, they made it.

And they have the big models. They have LLMs that can compete that they, like Google will tell you, are better than chat GPT. But they can't release it because they know it will confidently lie to people. It will tell people the wrong answer. It will feed people misinformation with such confidence that people will believe it. And if you're Google, that is a, that's existential risk for you. We did a, we did a story this week about how this guy had made, used chat GPT to make an

entire voice assistant. And he was like, yeah, it works really well. It works so much better than Siri. I hope I didn't just identify Siri. But the reason he was like, this would never make the mainstream is that this thing will confidently tell you the wrong information or confidently be like, now you're a white supremacist. Like chat TPT doesn't have all those barriers in place that Google's put up.

But Google is also getting so gamed by other people and has like failing to stop that gaming. I keep wondering, is somebody going to make an add-on for Google where you just automatically blacklist sites that you know suck and don't actually give you answers? Right. Actually, I have to go talk to Graham. Excuse me.

But here's what I'm saying. Google, right now. So Google's got an input problem, right? Yeah. I'm going to get this wrong. If you can do the framing of this better, please let me know. Google has a supply problem. That's the first thing.

So Google, it's the suppliers are websites, the Verge, Polygon, whatever it is. And we publish stories and we hope Google searches them. And if you search for inside Twitter's first 90 days, we very much hope that you lane on theverge.com. Okay. Fair enough. The problem is the supply that is being fed into Google is being overrun by SEO optimized AI garbage.

Right. And so Google has to deal with that first. then they've got like a demand problem. This is where, if you have a better framing, let me know. They have a demand problem, which is the people coming to Google are increasingly like, but I could just ask chat GPT and it won't deliver me this garbage. Or I could just ask Alexa or I could just ask Siri or Bing actually has a, you know, Microsoft has a huge funding deal with Open AI.

Bing is going to integrate chat GPT. Maybe people are going to start asking Bing. What the stranger things have happened. Apple came back from the dead, right? CBS bought CNN for $1.8 billion in 2009. Who knows what's going to happen? So they've got like this weird supply problem or a demand problem where the people who use Google increasingly think the product is not good. And they're searching Reddit or they're searching TikTok or whatever.

And the suppliers of Google's results are increasingly cynical and flooding it with garbage, which makes the demand problem worse, right? And how does Google get, this is their money. This is what they got. Yeah. Right? Like, there's not a Google messaging platform that makes money or exists or is used, right? Like, they have this and they have YouTube.

And if this goes away, like Google falls apart. And I think they just got to get, I don't, they have to articulate a path through it. And they have not done that yet. Yeah. Well, and they often refuse to, like, this isn't a new problem. SEO gaming in absolute garbage being the top of the search results is a problem they've been dealing with for the entire time Google's existed. But they never articulate that problem or treat it as what they are. What you said, their platform, they don't view themselves as a platform.

They don't view their problem as a content moderation problem. They view it as like an engineering, really Twitter, Elon Musk kind of way. They view it as an engineering problem. And as long as they continue to do that, I think we're going to just have garbage when you go search Google. Google and then you go to Reddit. You remember before Google when there were search engines that weren't Google that people used and they were just indexes. Mama.

And there was just some guy who was like, these are the TV websites or these are the websites that you can go to for NFL stuff. Richard Lawler's TV Websiteslist.com. You can go down folders to the entire end of the internet because someone had listed every single thing. And there was at its heart of a person. Yeah. And now you have Google, which assumed that all the data coming into it was reliable,

that all those links, they meant something. That if you link something, it must have been a person who put that there because they liked it. And that just isn't true anymore. That just,

that world is gone now. I like that your future, your prediction of like the future of the web is back to Yahoo. Like, OG Yahoo. Infoseek, obviously. Infoseek. We should make a custom cure.

I have so many product of these. Okay, if you can turn the version into a mass sentence, like, let me know. We'll just do that on the side. And I'll go to the CEO and be like, hey, look at what I did, and we'll see how long I stay in this trial. Open to it, hit me up.

And if you want to code like a hand curated, like vintage 1999 search engine. Yeah. Could be pretty sweet. I'm not going to lie. Be sick. But I really do think, like, yes, Sina, yes, AI, yes, it's a scandal. And you should read that story. Mia and James did a fantastic job with that story.

I'm just telling you, that is a scandal that it's like the symptom. and the disease is the absolute rot of the web platform, and in particular how Google Search has influenced the web platform. And like, this year I would tell you is, it's either up or down. Like something is going to happen in there because all of the other places people make content are effectively closed. Right. And I always joke that at the end point of every YouTuber's initial life cycle before they become a butterfly is the video where they're like, I'm pissed at YouTube. And then like, the light bulb goes off and they realize, like, I'm just playing the game, right?

That doesn't happen on the web. And it's because we don't recognize that like Google is the controlling influence of the web. I think it's because its name is Google and it's like logo looks like it was made by a five-year-old. Like we just don't, we can't perceive it. Well, I think you have, you have different paths into websites than you do. Like, Google is the primary path for the majority of people, for like the vast, vast majority of people. More people than most of our listeners probably fully understand Google is that way. But there's still other ways.

You still go and read places like Theverge.com and we point you to cool stuff or your mom sends you a cool link. Like there's still other ways to get to this stuff. That's third product. Third product. And it's just a distribution system for Alex's mom to send people links. It would be terrible. You'd get one link a day. And I guarantee you we'll be able to game that one better than anyone else, but it'll be honest.

Yeah. You'll know a person to do it. You'll know that I made Alex specifically tell her mom to pick the Verge version of the story. All right. We've got to take another break. We'll be right back. We've got to talk about this new Apple stuff. M2 chips and new... It's great. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot.

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We're back. a bunch of stuff we have left to talk about, all of which is like happened in the last eight seconds. Apple announced a new MacBook Pro with the M2 Pro and M2 Max chip, a new Mac Mini with M2 and M2 Pro chips. A new HomePod.

There's a rumor that they're doing some sort of weird Google Homey smart display. Microsoft had layoffs. They're talking about rejiggering a hardware portfolio which is really interesting. And of course Netflix, Reed Hastings, founder and CEO, step down new co-CEOs at Netflix.

Let's start with Apple. I feel like we have to. We've made people sit through a long and winding argument about the future of the web. I would say that's why you come here. But I think you also come here for us to complain about the MacBook Pro. This is more or less what we are expecting, don't you think? It's the same design. And then the M2 Pro and M2 Macs kind of the same basic idea as the M1 Pro and M1 Max.

They just stitched more than together. It's just the M1 faster. And like linearly faster, right? Like faster by core counts. Yeah. They're like, we added more cores. Now it's faster. You're like, thank you.

That's what I wanted. They did say that these are the longest battery life ever in a Mac laptop, which is pretty incredible. That I'm really excited about because the M2 didn't. When we reviewed the M2 in the MacBook air, it didn't get better battery life. But it also had a totally different design than the M1 MacBook. Air. So I'm really, really curious to see how these M2 14 and 16-inch laptops hold up to the

previous version. It's also interesting to me that Apple is starting to just admit that people use Creative Cloud. So they say the MacBook Pro, M2 Pro is able to process images in Adobe Photoshop up to 40% faster than the M1 Pro and up to 80% faster than MacBook Pro with a core I-9. Okay. I mean, I have an M1 Pro, MacBook Pro, 16-inch. It is the best computer I've ever owned. Yeah, you love it. I mean, I don't use Photoshop enough to need a 40% boost, but that's pretty impressive from one generation to another, I think. Yeah.

Yeah, like the jumps sound really, really impressive. And I think we just have to wait and see because Apple is also still learning how to talk about processors and speed bumps. And they still do lots of charts that have no meaning. And so we still need to. Oh, can I talk about these fucking charts? Let's talk about the charts. I think they made them just for you. I was hoping you'd want to talk about the charts.

Okay. So usually I complain. about these charts. You do. And usually what I complain about is that the Y axes aren't labeled. Simply good. Pretty normal.

If you're in the business of complaining about charts, like, this is a chestnut. You just bring this out of your back pocket. You're like, they didn't label the Y axes. And everyone's like, oh, and like, you're playing the hits, you know? Apple has now gotten to a place

where there are effectively no axes at all. Yes. And nothing is labeled. So it's like, see how the M2 Pro and M2 Macs stack up. And then it's just some lines with no axes.

And it just, the M2 Max MacBook Pro is purple. And it just says 15.9X. I want to judge them. But when I was first doing processor benchmarks and I would post charts, I also did that

because I was like, people just want to see a line go up. They don't care about the axes. Yeah. No, dude, who are you talking about? They're chip nerds. Commenters schooled me on how wrong. I was. These are, their brains are graphs. I picked up eventually. It's like an EKG machine in there.

But I don't judge them because I personally, I just want to see it go up. As long as the one number is higher than the other number, that's all that matters. Yeah. I'm just telling you, you look at the truck. Go on apple.com slash MacBook Pro 14 and 16. Like, that's not quite the URL, but you'll get there, you'll click on it. You'll understand that I was close enough. And you scroll down.

And you're like, okay, this purple line is 9.4x compared to Intel-based MacBook Pro. And you're like, what does that mean? Is it in time? Is it in units of performance? Is it in... Just fast. Is it in smiles?

There's not a unit. One assumes it's time, but is it minutes? Is it seconds? There's a three. There's a three. There's a note at the bottom. I'm still scrolling. Go ahead. I'm still there.

Testing can. Oh, this is what it's testing on. Yeah. No, I read the note, dog. It's not going to help you. Doesn't say no answers there. It's just a list of specs in the frame rate of the movie file and the resolution in the file they are transcoded. I'm just telling you, it is, it's bold, it's powerful, it's avant-garde, it's now to say, you know what? Nelah yelled at us with the Y-axis for so long. We're taking out the fucking X-axis and units.

Fine. Like, fine. It's just fast. The next, I guarantee you the next time around, it's just going to be a purple bar with no units. Like, not even this like relative 9.4. It's just going to say fast. I'm sure the chip is very fast. Again, I have a M1 Pro MacBook Pro.

Great computer. Best computer I've ever owned. Every time I look at these on it, every time I look at these charts, I'm just like furious with that. I like that the M1 Max is faster than the M2 Pro, but you wouldn't necessarily notice that because it's a different color. Oh yeah, yeah. And almost the same color as like the back. I'm just, I'm telling you right now, if you just look at these charts. Oh, that's the other thing.

So it's a video, they changed the comparison. So a 16 inch model, which has the M2 max, is compared against a core I9 and Radion Pro 5600 M. That is the, that bar is one. And then you click to the 14 inch model. And it's a shorter bar, but it's a MacBook Pro with an Intel Core I7 and presumably integrated graphics. there's just no way to know what's going on here.

I'm loving it. Probably still bad at gaming. This is great. That's brutal. So they're claiming longest battery life ever in a Mac. The 16-inch model with the M2 Pro is supposed to get 22 hours of video playback, which again, we should caveat. You should go watch Joanna Stern's video.

That's with all of the radios off and the brightness turned all over the wrong and like looping one video in QuickTime. And if that's you, you're getting almost a full day of that experience. Enjoy. Let me know if that's you. And then 15 hours of wireless web browsing. That's supposed to be an hour longer than the previous M1 Pro, which we got 16 hours out of when we actually did it, which was longer than their average.

So we're very excited to test the battery life on these things, test the performance. Again, the chip seems great. I think the Mac Mini at 599. It's getting real close to Impulse Buy territory for me. That's a good. I don't need that computer. And I'm like, oh, but that's, it's pretty good. I, like, I don't want to bully you into buying things, but you should buy it.

You know, I bullied David Pearson to buying an M1 Mini. He was, like, complaining about his computer. I was like, dude, it's like, $5.99. He was like, oh, it's a good deal. Just do it. Well, and this is the first. So there's a, there's some weirdness here, right, with the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio, the forthcoming Mac Pro, which we're now, you know, German at Bloomberg reported it's going to be in the same

case. And there's just some weirdness with. that part of the Mac line. But I would tell you that I'm fully accepting of it because Apple's MacLine used to be weird in the wrong way. This is a good reason. They clearly hated these products and didn't want you to buy them. And now it's weird in the best way and that there are too many good choices. Like, I'll take that. Yeah. Like, I have no FOMO about my, my Mac studio. Yeah. I feel great. I didn't look at this Mac Mini and go, oh, man, I should have waited another year with my 2012 MacBook Pro. The second, this thing goes on.

sale or there's like a good refurb so like i'll be like max you're not going to college but the chip in this computer is named after uh has a cdmi 2.1 what were you supposed to do yeah no that's right right again a k monitor what's the only thing i've ever complained about with my macbook pro is it on ht2.1 do i consistently plug it into a 720p curve monitor curve tv that i use only for zoom i do but should that be htmi 2.1 it should yeah but you can get the Mac Mini. These are fine refreshers. Here's the weird thing.

So they put them out with just kind of like press releases. They both have like long videos with them about the new Macs, the new chips. It feels like there was supposed to be an event. Like this is the cut up of the event video that we would otherwise see. And they just like did it. Right. And like was there supposed to be an event? And they just didn't have, they didn't have the AR glasses or whatever it is.

And they're like, we're just putting them out. Yeah. Because German is saying that there was supposed to be an event and the glasses were going to be there. And now they're like, the glasses aren't ready. Don't worry about the glasses. I am going right now. I'll see. Here's what I tell you my heart.

I think air glasses are in the exact same hype timeline as self-driving cars. Oh, I like that. I think we're going to be a lot older before we see self-driving cars or air glasses for real. Yeah. Like it would be wild if Apple had solved the display issues with air or all of the other myriad of issues with A. Yeah. I mean, we've gone through the stack many times in the show.

You need to build a display that has sufficient resolution to look like reality, but you can still see through that mounts on your face and is comfortable to wear. You need to have a processor that can do all of that in real time. You need to put cameras around that display so the processor can see reality, image it, and spit out an augmented version of reality on top of it. They need to have a battery and then you need to have connectivity. And all of it can't get too hot and needs to last all day. Like, good luck.

Like, we're going to be a lot older. Yeah. Dental coil is never happening. But I don't, I don't know. It seems like they're kind of close with the $3,000 headset that no one's actually going to buy with an M2 chip in it and a VR chip. And it's tethered to something that goes into your back pocket. They're going to buy it and do what? Yeah.

They have the Quest Pro. YouTube videos showing that they bought it. No, this is the Quest Pro problem. The Quest Pro is this product. Yeah. And maybe it's a little worse than Apple's product. Maybe on some dimension it's a little bit better. Who knows?

But it's basically this product. It has worse. software, whatever. But you're like, oh, this is, like, the AR pass through of that thing is, like, not good. And, like, the metaverse is no fun. And the children are still looking for Addie because she was the only girl. Well, we'll see.

But you get the feeling there was supposed to be something else. And this was supposed to be an event. And they can't have an event to announce a chip bump in the MacBook Pro. It's like, here we are. They can't have an event to be like, the home pod's back. So they just, like, put it out. Oh, the home pod's back. And it's still the same speaker, apparently.

We should talk about the homebot. So those are the Macs. We're M2. They seem cool. We're excited to test them when we get them. Cool. The next day, another press release, another video. The HomePod's back, y'all.

Woo. And I think people are expecting it to be changed more than it is. No. No, I don't think anybody was because all you wanted was thread and to not feel like you're going to go to jail when you take the court out. And now you can take the court out. take the court out without feeling like you're going to break something. The European police are coming for you. Yeah, they are right now.

So it's $2.99. It looks, we have to see them in person, but it looks the same as the original home pod. They're saying there's a new color which are calling midnight. Yeah, it's the same. They make, there's a white-ish one and there's a blackish one. I don't know what to tell you before it was gray. Now it's midnight. They've added thread and matter support, although Apple's matter support, it's a little

rocky right now. Yeah. It has temperature and humidity sensors. The HomePod Mini also has temperature and humidity sensors. Those are being enabled now. Which got activated. Yeah, like those HomePod minis sensors got activated with this announcement. Okay. If you have the software update. That's cool. It has a worst Wi-Fi for some reason. Deeply confusing, but honestly, who cares? Unless tweeters. Right. So if you remember the first generation HomePod, I went out to California. I went to Apple's big audio testing facility. It was a cool day, you know? They put, you know, they put me in one of those rooms where, like, you can't hear

anything. Yeah. Are you crazy yet? And I was like, no, it's fine. But, you know, like everyone has, it's like, you go to enough events like this and people show you that they all have the same room with like the foam spikes and you can't hear anything. You're like, yeah, like people have these.

And they play the speaker for you. And they always play Hotel California because Apple is at its heart of a newer company. Yes. It's just real. And so this time, but the point at the home pot at that time was that it was the best sounding speaker, right? All of their emphasis was on speaker stuff. And they had the four inch low excursion woofer. They had seven tweeters.

They're doing all this beam forming. They were measuring how far away you were from the wall. So they could bounce audio off the wall and send it to you all at the same time and create a bigger stereo sound feel. They're getting more bass. It was cool. It sounded fine, I would say. I think I went back and reread my original HomePod review. You should go watch it.

It was very fun to do. I have a lot of speakers in my house. The whole video team came to my house. Set up all the speakers everywhere. It was fun. And our takeaway was, you know, it's like the HomePod that whatever high end Alexa device was back then, the Sonos won. We just had a whole list of it. We had a Bluetooth speaker.

And we're like, of the ones that you think of as the competitors, the HomePod and the Sonos say. They sound different. The HomePod wins some. The Sonos wins some others. If you were not comparing them directly, size. by side, they're indistinguishable. Like, you will just be happy with either one. They both sound nice.

And so you should pick the one that fits into the ecosystem of your life. And for most people, that was not the HomePod. Like, couldn't do two timers at once, didn't recognize multiple users. Just, it was just a weird. It was just a weird product. And like the Sonos products or Alexa products or whatever else, they were all better because they were better smart home products. Now the things back, I think the HomePod mini has been more of a success than, like,

Apple will always success. But it's like doing fine. But the HomeBot itself failed. Now it's back. They've cut down the tweeters from seven to five. They've cut down the microphones from seven to five. They say it sounds better than the original. We've got to do a head to head.

All the same beam formy processing, whatever, we'll see. But the real thing is like matter support is there, thread support is there. HomeKit has been improved. Siri can set two timers at once now, I think. Is that enough? Only when it remembers to be connected to the internet, which it still sometimes is like, I'm not connected to the internet,

even while it's playing your music. So it won't stop your music because it doesn't think it's connected to the internet. That just happened yesterday. Sorry, I'm really heated about it. Oh, I'm sorry, it is slightly different in terms of design. It's a little shorter. It's 0.2 inches shorter,

and it weighs 5.16 pounds instead of 5.5. But that's what you get when you lose two tweeters and two mics. I feel like we saw the same thing with the original Google Home and then the speaker that they came out with after that. The first one was slightly over-engineered in terms of what they were able to do with the audio, with the hardwoods they had in it. And then the second one, they took a lot of that out. They said, yeah, we don't really need all of these parts.

Yeah. We can, we can sell, the people who are going to buy these don't care if it's five or seven. So we'll just go with five. Well, here's what I know. Every tech company, when they sell you, when they sell their first speaker, they like people care about sound quality. And then they try really hard. And God bless them.

Baby's first speaker, you're going to try earlier. And they shipped a speaker. And he turns out people care about it's convenience and price. and people will throw away sound quality at the drop of a hat. And I think that's very much been the experience of the home pod. And now they're here. There's some TV stuff that's good, Richard. So it can pair with an Apple TV.

Apple TV is not support EARC. So in a bizarre signal chain, you can plug your Apple TV into your smart TV, plug your PS5 into your smart TV, have the PS5 send audio to the TV, the TV send audio back out to the Apple TV over EARC. The Apple TV then send the audio to your Apple home pods

and then you listen to your PS5 on your homebots. Or you could just buy a receiver. The latency. I mean, yeah, the receiver crew rise up, you know. With an airplane, with Airplay 2 in it and boom, done. People like

using their home pods with their Apple TVs and now with EARC you can get your game consoles. You even could get an Apple TV plugged in your smart TV and you're somehow using a smart TV app, sending the audio out from EARC through an Apple TV to your home pods. Oh my gosh, that's just nasty.

Just email us. I want to know who you are and how you've come to that position in your life. Dying to know. There was a discussion about where you were going to put speakers, and the only thing that someone would let you put was two home pods that no one can see. Oh, I know why they would do that. Because for the longest time, the Apple TV didn't do like 4K HDR, Dolby Vision, I think it was 4K Dolby Vision on Amazon Prime.

so you could only do that with the native smart TV apps. But maybe that person hasn't updated their Apple TV. But somehow they've updated it to the only the new ones have EARC. Look, I don't know this person's life. They've made some choices. And then lastly, the HomePod supports spatial audio to be outness. I'm just going to say this out loud directly, full honesty, full transparency. HomePod announcement comes out.

I'm like, oh, HomePod, I love speakers. read about the speakers, read about spatial audio. Everyone's excited. I have an atmosphere. I have a real receiver. 5.2.2 set up big, the whole thing. I'm like, I'm going to listen to some Atmos music. Cue up Apple music on the Apple TV, pick their spatial audio show off playlist.

It fucking sucks. Spatial audio sucks. It's horrible and I hate it. It's the worst. Why does it suck? Because it removes all the impact for music because everyone's drunk on having so many channels. Sneaking up on you. Spread everything out. And so everything, like, you just have this massive sound stage for no

reason. You don't need it. And like all the bottom end, all the impact, all the presence is like deleted. And it just every single time it sounds worse. In particular on the low end, it texted somebody who would know. And they're like, oh yeah, you got to turn your subs way up if you're listening to AMS. And it's like, what? Because to compensate for like the drunk sound engineers of Hollywood being like, put it in all the channels instead of concentrating it into stereo channels. The one Atmos track I listened to yesterday on this person's recommendation was boom by Tiesto. It was awesome. I will admit, this was awesome because it is a high energy dance track with lots of beeps and boops,

and it was clearly made to fuck with people on drugs. And the beeps and boops just swirl around you in like an ever, ever escalating soundfield. And I was like, if I was on drugs, this would rule. Like, this would be the best experience of my. life. And that was the only one. It sucks. I don't like, why do we have to keep lying about spatial audio being any good? I don't know anybody who likes it. I ask music executives. Do you think it's good? And I'm like, it's getting better. Tim Cook just standing behind them. We had Charlie Harding on Decoder. That's a fun episode we talked about music and street. I'll shift all the stuff.

And he was like, the only reason Apple is this invested in spatial is because they need it for all their AR Metaverse play that they're trying to do. Right. So they need all these extra channels in the music. They need spatial audio so that when they put you in the virtual reality or they put you in AR and all this stuff and you're moving around, they can manipulate the music properly. And like maybe I believe that. Wait.

Is Apple's AR killer app going to be like going to concerts? Yeah. So it's like if you do, if you have a good spatial mix and Apple puts you in like, like a Metaverse concert or whatever. They already have the content. Yeah. More importantly, they've already built like the spatial audio pipelines and the processing into their consumer devices and AirPods and whatever, right?

Like they've built an ecosystem around spatial audio so that when that stuff is there, there's content, there's user experience. There's lots of people know how to use the tools. Like it's primed and ready in the best Apple way. That's Apple's very good at sort of like stepping you up layer by layer and then launching the device that adds it all up. I'm just like, but right now it sucks. look. It's like a real deal atmo system. It's, it's, I was like, this sucks. Like, this is making my stereo sound bad. Yeah. And I try to get headphones. Like, these are my headphones. I don't know. If you love social audio, let me know. But I, I think there's a reason it's always demoed with like live recordings of the Eagles. Because like one, that's all I listen to. Is the reporters get, is the influencers and reporters get younger. They have no idea what they're listening to. And you can just be like kids.

Back in the day, Don Henley. You know who Don Henley is? Listen to those guitar tones, man. And they're like, a guitar and like, fine. We used to have bands, right? It's like a, you can just confuse people by playing the Eagles at them. But I'm just telling you, just turn it off and just listen to how much more impact, like, literal impact music has when it's off versus on. And you're like, why, what am I gaining?

And the answer is nothing. Sorry, I'm just ranting on special audio now. It's horrible. Like, I haven't turned it on and all. Get it out. You have feelings about. this we're here for you. It's just therapy about space. Sigh. All right. How does it make you feel? Oh, Liam says spatial audio sucks in the notes.

See, Liam's, Liam's, Liam wanted us to talk about the home pod. Liam, would you have any thoughts about the home pod to add here? The answer's no. I'm going to come down. We should talk about two more things. We're going to talk about Netflix first. We got to get through them. Let's do Netflix real fast. Yeah. All right, Richard, tell us what's going on with Netflix. Netflix for the first time in, I guess ever, has a CEO that is not. Reed Hastings, at least as long as I can remember. A co-CEO. Two co-CEOs. Because in 2020, Reed added co-CEO, he had Ted Serendos, who kind of runs the content business as his co-CEO. And now today, on Thursdays we're recording this, Reid announced that he's stepping down as co-CEO and elevating

Greg Peters, who was the chief operating officer, who will now be co-ceo around, along with Serendos. And the timing of this is really interesting because this is at the exact same. time that Netflix is just starting to roll out two things that Reed Hastings does not like. Advertisements and kind of their push back against password sharing, which for the many years of them building up streaming, he's been saying password sharing is not that bad. It doesn't, it doesn't really affect us. He's been saying we won't do ads. Those two things have changed. And now Reed Hastings is an executive chairman and kind of some will be in much less of an active role. And now it's relying on these two men as Netflix becomes a very different company.

They now have hundreds of millions of subscribers. They're trying to get into gaming. They maybe can't find new customers. And they're trying to find ways to make more money from the customers that they have. And that is the struggle that they have. And the case that they're making to Wall Street is how profitable they are versus their competitors who are spending and losing money, hand over fist, trying to build up a subscriber base and content like Netflix has and apps. I guess let's not even get into how all the other apps are. Netflix isn't that great and every other app is worth.

But the tech platform, the content, everything about it, they haven't really matched up to Netflix yet. And they're setting money on fire to try and catch Netflix. And that is what Netflix brings up every earnings cause that they're profitable and the others are not. But that's what they've got. I mean, Netflix set money on fire for years. That's been their whole thing until now when that was no longer adventurers. Yeah. And we saw that.

They've been doing a slew of cancellations. They've been much more mercenary about what shows. get extended in what shows don't. And I think they were even doing like unexpected cancellations, like pulling stuff they'd already greenlit and stuff. Shows that people really like and that that seem to do well, suddenly disappear. And I think it's interesting to me thinking about the history of Netflix streaming and where we went from when Netflix watch instantly had kind of the B list of shows

that no one had ever heard of in movies. And it was really interesting, though. I liked it. And then they started making content. They had that werewolf show. and then they had house of cards and then it just kind of zoomed from there. And now they have a trillion things

and nothing to watch and you can't start any new show because you know it won't get to a second season and the algorithm that Netflix was so famous for it would find something for you that you would watch. Everyone hates it because you can't just find it the thing you're looking for. It won't show you.

You can't just go through the categories and no one's happy again. We all cut the cable and now we have us streaming. Yeah. See, Richard, has feelings on Netflix. Like, keep going. I was like, ooh, keep going, Richard. This is my life. This is a, it's a moment, man. When I saw this come across, I was like, wait, is this really happening? Because I've kind of been anticipating it. We had so many tech execs go away. And I was like,

yeah, Reed's going to be the next one. And now it's here. And I don't even know how to feel. Yeah. So in his resignation note, he calls out Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, right, moving up to executive chairman, piecing out, handing the reins over. But usually you do that at the top. I want to say. Like Netflix is in a challenging position. And the things you call that, the changes it has to make password sharing, adding advertising are things that he did not want to do.

So you have to wonder if he's just like, I don't want to do these things. But there are things that the new COCEO was doing. Like he was in charge of these initiatives. And so now he's coming in to like finish the job. Yeah. I mean, I do wonder, and we don't know and I'm sure there'll be more reporting,

but fundamentally, Ted Serendos is the content CEO, the Hollywood CEO. And Reid has been the product CEO. Right. And it's interesting that he was like, we still need a product CEO. So it's this person. We're a Hollywood company that runs a tech platform, which is very Netflix-y in its way. But you have to wonder if the future of the product roadmap around, you know, they have a big partnership with Microsoft to deliver this advertising. The future of their product roadmap is not the recommendation algorithm. It's not this other stuff. It's like adding ads. It's detecting password sharing. It's figuring out how to make people open Netflix on their phone so they can play mobile games.

And like, maybe Reid's like, I don't want to do it. It's real tech heavy stuff. They've become a Comcast. That's a brutal. This is the same stuff that Comcast was doing 10, 12 years ago. They were like, all right, fine, Richard. I'll do the disclosures. Oh, is there a disclosure? I am the EP of a Netflix show. It's called The Future of You Should Watch it. I'm heavily biased in favor of that show. That's true. And then the Comcast's NBC Universal Division is a minority investor in box media the Virgis Parent Company. The end. I also read a book about HBO last week.

It was good. What, what do you want for me? You wrote a book? I read a book. I said, wow. It's called it's not TV. It's very good. We're going to have the authors on Decoder soon.

It's great. I highly recommend it. Those are all the disclosures. Do we have any more? I invented something called the Go-90 scale of doom streaming services. I was like, we've cruised through like most of the big ones. But you didn't invent it for Quixter because we should, we should say, that. We should bring up quickster.

It's a day to... All right. Go ahead. Talk about Reed's greatest failure. It's a little mean, isn't it? But we'll go there. It was the last time Netflix messed up when they decided they were going to split up streaming in discs. And I remember I got a phone call, like at 11 p.m. that they were going to do this thing. And it was insane. And then they didn't do it. They rolled it all back because everyone hated it. The subscriber numbers dropped. And for 10 years, years, it was just up, up, up until last year when it wasn't. And now Reed is gone.

And I just, I don't know what Netflix is going to feel like, you know, a couple of years down the road. As you're saying, they have a new product lead that is not Reed Hastings. And that just hasn't been the case throughout any of the things we've talked about for Netflix. Everything, the way that it's organized, the entire kind of idea about how Netflix is and what it is, is now going to be different. Well, I mean, they've been, the new co-CEO has been groomed for this. We were seeing him in a lot more of the earnings calls in the last year or so. Like, they knew this was coming. They knew he was probably going to be taking on this role.

So I anticipate the next couple of years, there's not going to be really significant changes from what we've already seen, which is killing password sharing and adding advertising. I think we're going to continue to see Netflix do its thing where it struggles with its viewers and this whole idea of like we can't like a show because it's going to get canceled unless it's the most popular show in which case it'll probably be fine. and they're going to have to deal with that, but ultimately, like, they're going to just continue to print money, probably. On the Go 90 scale, they're like at a tent. Yeah, I agree with you, and I think you're probably right, but two years ago, Bob Chapic

probably thought the same thing. Where is he now? That's brutal. Seriously, where is he now? Nobody can find it. On the beach. Hey, join himself. Iger is facing down an activist investor right now named Nelson Peltz

at Disney. You should just Google it and read the slide deck that Disney filed. to beat this activist investor back. They're like, you know nothing about us. You know nothing about television. And you're a dummy. And like, that's the slide deck.

It's a very, you can tell they had a good time putting it together. But all is not well in streaming world. Just like across the board. And I think read is like, screw it. I dragged this into existence. And I'll still be around. But I, you know, I'm going to do whatever Bezos is doing. I'm going to get yoked and do a rocket.

Like, let's do it. And like, Just shredded. I got to say I see the appeal. Like, I'm the executive chairman. His suits aren't going to close anymore. He's just going to be so buff.

I love this. I need to buy a $10,000 black t-shirt that makes my arms look great. And then we can move on to the next thing. Speaking of the next thing, big Microsoft news this week, they're laying off 10,000 people, which is very sad. Yeah. Condolences to them. It's the second biggest layoffs in Microsoft history.

The first biggest, also Sachs in Adela, you let a 14,000. people when he shuttered the sort of Windows phone division and sent 12,500 Nokia employees away. And he got rid of it. So kind of a different context, right? This is the economy's bad, second biggest layoffs. The biggest layoffs where he shuttered an entire division and got rid of a company. So a little bit context, but huge.

This was across the board. But Microsoft has 220,000 people, so not massive. He published a letter. So there's this paragraph in his note that I think is just really interesting and, like, worth pulling apart and focused on. So he says, we have to continue to invest in strategic areas for future. These are the kinds of hard choices we have made through our 47 year history to remain a consequential company in this industry that is unforgiving to anyone who does not adapt to platform shifts, which is a really fascinating thing about in the context of Nadella and Microsoft and mobile in the

last platform shift they missed, right? And then he said, this is the very next sentence. We're taking $1.2 billion charge related to severance costs, changes to our hard. portfolio and the cost of lease consolidation is we they do returned off this. So he's saying he thinks there's a platform shift and they have to change something to get there. And then they're changing their hardware portfolio. Which we'd already started to see that. I don't know what he thinks the platform shift is. And I asked around and Tom asked around.

And you would think that this hardware portfolio change would be shutting down HoloLens. Because they have effectively shut down HoloLens. and if you'll remember Nadella was on stage with Zuckerberg saying they were going to put software on the Quest Pro. So you would think that like what they're talking about is shutting down Holland. We asked around and it's not, it's more than that, right? Like, well, they also close, they're not doing another version of the duo, right? Like they got rid of the phone. Yeah.

So is it, that's the surface line. So are they going to change the surface line? Are they going to change the Xbox line? Are they going to pair back whatever they're doing in Surface? And then you put that in the context of platform shift, right? We have to adapt to the platform, to remain a consequential company that has to adapt to platform shifts. We have to do this thing.

Okay. What platform shift? And is selling Surface Windows laptops enough to remain consequential through a platform shift? I'm just telling you that paragraph, it just jumped off the page at me. It's super weird. That Microsoft is making some kind of bet that we can't see. And maybe that's just AI, right? they have a huge investment in open AI.

Again, maybe the chat GPT is going to save Bing. Maybe it's cybersecurity. They've talked about that a lot. Maybe it's more Azure work. That's Nadella's favorite thing in the entire world. It might be something more obvious, but they're saying we think there's a platform shift. And we have to change our hardware. We've preemptively shut down our hardware portfolio.

And like I said, Tom and I both went and asked around some reporting because we're like, oh, it's HoloLens. Like, let's confirm that. no it's more than that what the only thing that i can think of that we haven't mentioned is them putting stuff like obviously office has moved to the cloud we've had the office 365 huge shift but windows are suddenly in the cloud if they're thinking that like the kind of concept of the personal pc license is going away yeah or Xbox in the cloud right they're going to stream the games to you they've thought about this a lot they've got you know if they can break through the regulatory barriers and

get the European police to let Apple do game streaming. Like, maybe. There's a lot here that you can get the internet better. The internet's better. They're like they've got a bunch of hurdles. But not in Europe. Yeah. The internet's great in Europe, right?

It's just our country that seems destined to do monopoly internet access. Disclosure Comcast is a minority investor at Foxy. I just think it's fascinating. Like that line and we've seen it, you know, all these are like, But there's lots of tech layoffs across tech industry, except for Google. No one's seen that coming for Google. I maintain that this is going to be weird. Well, Google had, they have sort of had layoffs.

They cut back a lot of those experimental projects. We know that they've put people on kind of these plans where, you know, you need to find another job within Google. They've cut hiring. Apple also has kind of done the same thing where they haven't done the massive layoffs, but they did slow down hiring over the last, like, year or so. So in kind of a stealth way, they all have gone through. that. But what this reminds me of is the meta layoffs just because it was so huge and it was

affecting so many departments. And it feels like kind of everything got cut back. Yeah. We'll see. Again, you know, Microsoft, I think has more focus than meta. Like Microsoft knows what it's selling right now. It's just this line about platform shifts. Just like what, what's he seeing no one else sees? I don't see a platform shift. If you were to go up to the average Vergecast listener and say, what's the next platform shift? I'm guessing most people in their car is just, like yelled out like AR like VR like VR like it's that's what we even told for years but Microsoft is just divesting from all of that right now so that I don't think that's it and so I think it probably looks like cloud operating system or cloud gaming delivery they they got to get that on phones and

Apple does not want to let them do that so we'll see totally fascinating line from Microsoft I do think if there is a platform shift coming Microsoft this isn't I brought up Nadella and the Nokia layoffs at the beginning to be like, this is, that's the fire he was born in as Microsoft CEO. Right? Like, Balmer bought Nokia. Our boy, Stephen Elop just fully eloped the entire nation of Finland, like, destroy its national champion, whatever.

And then Nadella became the CEO, and he had to just undo it all and be like, we're going to lose mobile. And that's like, that's the fire that forged him. So I'm very curious to be like, to see what he thinks that platform shift is and how Microsoft can win because I very much doubt that he wants to lose again, you know, platform shift. Are you going to pitch that he should come on decoder? Are we going to take that opportunity now that if he's listening, he should come on?

I mean, we make that, we make asks all the time. I will tell you that CEOs do not want to go on an hour-long podcast after they've laid off 10,000 people. That's fair. The problem with decoder is you have to want to come on. I can't just be like, all right, sit down for your deposition. You just unfurl your list of notes, all your questions. Yeah.

It's great. It's like, all right. Where were you on the night of October 11th when Stephen Elop crept back into Microsoft's office and destroyed Nokia? All right. I encourage you to go Google the words burning platform Stephen Elop, one of the greatest memos written of all time. Very good.

If you have not read the Zoe Schiffer, Casey New and Alex Heath feature about Twitter, Honestly, go buy it on a newstand and buy a copy and make it. That's cool. It's cool that we get to do that with them. It's cool that we have a company that allows us to that stuff. It's cool they gave us their cover. That's awesome. It's cool to work with them.

So you can read on our site. Go buy a newstand. It's very good. We'll be back on Wednesday. Oh, Alex, what are you guys doing on Wednesday? Yeah. So on Wednesday, we're going to be talking with Dr. Margaret Omarah, who is a professor and knows a lot more about non-competes than I do

and how they helped build Silicon Valley and really weird and interesting ways. This is on the news that happened with the FTC a couple of weeks ago. And then we're going to be talking with Charles Pulley Moore all about The Last of Us and try not to spoil our audience. So if you guys haven't had an opportunity, go watch so you're all primed. And then we're going to be doing a really fun hotline segment. So you should totally call us on the hotline.

That's 866 Verge 1-1. Again, 866 Verge 1-1. Call now. That's very good. I keep trying to get Charles to engage with me on the idea that there's a massive back. clash against the rock because of Black Adam. And he just like won't accept it. If you could just sneak that into that episode.

You refuse. That'd be great. Sorry. I will try. I will try. All right. Thanks to Alex Heath for joining us earlier. That was fun.

Thank you for listening in your cars. Drive safe. Everyone. The self-driving isn't coming. And neither are the air sets. It's just real. You can tweet at us. But there is a platform shift.

There's a platform. It's a burning platform. And Stephen A. Hop wants to push you into the fridge. waters of the ocean. I don't know how this episode got to Stephen E. You can tweet at us for some reason. Alex is Alex H. Cranz. Alex Heath is Alex E. Heath.

Richard is at RJCC. I'm at Reckless. I do open it and I'll throw you a like. But if you tweet at me, it's like, you're back. Like, I didn't say I was throwing it into the ocean. I just said I wasn't going to tweet as much. I haven't been tweeting as much. That's life.

That's the Vercast. Rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice, or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at Vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith.

Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.