The Vergecast - Apple events, SEO, and other fights

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the takeaways from Apple's Mac event, the problem with SEO on the internet, streaming news, and much more. Further reading: Apple ‘Scary Fast’ Mac launch event: the 4 biggest announcements Goodbye, Touch Bar, you held incredible promise Here’s what Apple means when it says its event was ‘shot on iPhone’ Amanda Chicago Lewis’ excellent piece about the web SEO built Some thoughts about The Verge article on SEO Sundar Pichai argues in court that Google isn’t evil, it’s just a business Disney is about to own all of Hulu  Joe Rogan’s big Spotify decision HBO Bosses Used ‘Secret’ Fake Accounts to Troll TV Critics Max is taking 4K away from its legacy ad-free subscribers Netflix’s ad-supported plan will reward binge watchers with ad-free episodes Streaming is more expensive than ever — and it’s only going up from here YouTube is getting serious about blocking ad blockers There's a surprising new top-five player in the smartphone market Excuse me, it’s “really an aftermarket sound solution.” The best robot vacuum for me is the one I hacked  Chrome on iOS now lets you move the address bar to the bottom Google is officially trying to make .ing domains a th.ing The EV transition trips over its own cord  Closing time for Sam Bankman-Fried  What stalking a delivery robot taught us about AI’s limits Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm 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, welcome to the Verchast, the flagship podcast of the Touch Bar. It's good. Only one of us thinks that, Alex.

It's true. Two? Okay, one thing that is true is that I became friends with a very famous record producer on Instagram because of the touch bar. That was the best humble brag. It's pretty good. Okay. So Neely and David Getta are best friends. No, Oakfelder, you should follow him on Instagram.

He's orchestra. Yeah. Uh-huh. He's super cool. We're just like dad friends. We just like pictures of each other's kids now. I like this for you. But he did a video with us just about how to make music with a Mac and one of our music video series.

And he was like, and he was using the touch bar in his computer. And I was like, what are you doing? And he's like, I love this thing. And he was like swiping through logic on the touch bar. And we just started, that's it. That's the beginning of a beautiful friendship. That's beautiful. Yeah.

I should have talked to him. A beautiful dad friendship. Yeah. He doesn't post about the touch bar. Instagram. It's mostly like him doing recording artist stuff and pictures. I think more people had, it probably wouldn't have gone away. Yeah, if more Grammy award-winning musicians were like the Touch Bar rules, I think we'd be in a very different spot in America in 2023. It would only be on the 16th. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Kranz is here. Hi, I'm your friend who loves the touchbar

and the Texas Rangers who now have a World Series pin it. I don't know how the World Series works, but I've been waiting 30 years. It's awesome. You've been waiting 30 years and learn none of the vocabulary. None of it. None of it. I learned to Nolan Ryan and Jose Canseco were in 1993. Nice. And nothing until this year.

And apparently the Rangers rule. You didn't miss that much between the two, to be fair. Yeah. I think I'm okay. I follow one of those threads accounts. It's like freezing cold sports takes. And they had one about the Rangers. I don't know who any of those names are.

Or are what baseball is. David Pierce is here. So, guys. I'm in my sick gamer YouTube channel set up. David's in our DC office, the Vox Media DC office. the Vox Media DC office, which is... AKA our sick gamer YouTube channel set up. I feel like I said that already.

That office is mostly populated, but like the corporate staff of the company and then Vox.com and a little bit of espionation, I think. And of course, when you think of Vox.com, you think of gamer lights. Yeah. Yeah, obviously. I will say I am here because I lost power today, just out of nowhere on a sunny day, in the middle of an interview for the Vergecast with two of the people who made Planet Earth three. we were having an unbelievable time talking about cool drone photography in caves, which someday, Lord willing, you will hear on the first cast, and my power just disappeared.

And now I'm here. I hate it. It's been a day. I took a meeting with a developer who's making a cool app. The David was supposed to be on. And I said, David lost power. And he looked at the weather and said, it's not raining out there. Yep.

It's not. A bunch of news this week. There was an Apple event, which we, we, We should talk about a lot of people have a lot of feelings about this event, and particularly how it was shot. Oh, my. Sometimes, The Verge, you're on a publication. You're lucky if everyone's talking about one story. We had, like, three different groups of people, sort of like up in arms about three different stories this week.

And I was like, oh, we are the only tech site that remains on the internet. There's no one else to yell at but us. But Apple event, new Macs, we should talk about those. we published the next installment of our big Google package about sort of where we are on the web and what's going on with search. Now, AI is coming. I would say that really got a lot of people going,

and those people happen to be search engine optimization experts. So their comments are impeccably formatted for discoverability. That's true. It's a nice reminder every once in a while. Do you have those moments where a corner of the Internet wakes up in response to something? And you're like, oh, I didn't even know you were there. There. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like when the kniters get really angry, they're just like, oh, all the people who love to knit, they just hang out together. That's so cool. That's not a when. That's a permanent case with the knitting community. Just constant rage. They're holding needles and they're not afraid to use them, sir. Yeah.

But it was just like it was like we accidentally walked into the SEO bar this week. No, we barged into it and said, you all suck. That's what we did. I don't want to shy away from it. We'll get to that. More Google News are about to go to try. trial in the antitrust case with Epic. David was in the other antitrust trial this week.

Sunnar Pachai testified. We got to talk about that. There's some spicy documents from Apple that were revealed in that case. That's pretty good. Spicy documents. I love a spicy document. I love a spicy document. Eddie Q's like, put some hot sauce on that before you send it out.

It's just a little salt. In a cold storage for the prosecutors to find 10 years from now. And then there's a much of streaming news. Yeah. People are buying things. Prices are inevitably going up. And then we got a lightning round, which is still not sponsored. And I implore you, major American shipmaker, to call our financial Malthusack, our business development person, make it happen.

Yeah, there's some good stuff in line around too. Okay, let's start the Apple event. Scary Fest. I would say I was very disappointed. There were not more Halloween jokes. There were also just wrong. Like, we should just call this what it. You were, you were wrong.

And I feel like this is, this is the time when you should atone for how wrong you were about what Haffle was doing here. Yeah, where is your scary costume today, Nielai? No, thank you. I did dress, I dressed, my parents were here for trickery. I dressed them up as a witch and a warlock. Uh-huh. Which means I put hats on them.

Yes. And that's, and then my dad was like, oh, no, I lost the hat. What a surprise. My prediction, if I recall this correctly, they would just be like, over the top TV production, they're going to compete with money at football, Craig Federigi doing a vampire voice the whole time. That did not happen. And I want to make it clear I was wrong about that, but also that I was right in that it should

have been what happened because the actual announcements were so lackluster that Craig Federigi doing a vampire voice, I think, would have been more fulfilling to people. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On threads, I think something to the effect of Apple has lost the plot of why people actually watch these things. What did you mean? This one in particular. So if you go back and watch a Steve Jobs Apple event, he was the master of making you feel like, one, he understood the problem. And two, only he could solve it.

And three, the product was cool as hell. Right. And that here is the solution to the product. And that first part, I understand the problem, is the, I think is a person who came up covering these events and watching them unfold and watching them grow to what they are now. That's the part that's gone, but it's also the thing that was the most fulfilling. Everyone knows the first iPhone event, right? The problem is all these buttons down here. So we're going to make a touchscreen.

And he put up the problem. He was like, here's a picture of other people's idiot problems. And I'm going to fix it for you. And this is how smart phones are going to work now. He did that, like, all the time. And Apple traditionally kind of does that, right? They, like, identify the problem and, like, here's how we're going to solve it. And this one in particular, I just felt like identified no problems.

It was like, the problem we're solving is that the chip is even faster. Right? And you look at how they were trying to sell it. They were like, this one is for creative professionals. If you're coming from an Intel Mac, it'll be 11 times faster. they just weren't solving any problems with the products. It was just like pure marketing. There was just a moment in the middle of it.

I actually didn't put it on threads. I just said that to you privately. You docks me. My bad. Whatever. I'll say it now. There was just a moment in that where I was like, this could be any company. This is how basically every company markets their products now.

They're just like, look at how good it is. It was just an AMD keynote. AMD also loves to do an evening keynote. Everybody loves to wear all black. There's usually some leather involved, but not in a fun way. And then they talk about a bunch of processors and show a bunch of charts. So Qualcomm had an event the same week. Allison Johnson was in Hawaii for the event.

You wrote a great piece about it. Festival of Marketing. And the piece is basically about the festival of marketing. Qualcomm's processor graphs are the same as apples. They're the same unlabeled graph. And you could argue that they're just copying Apple or Apple's copying Qualcomm or there's a long history of these graphs. but just from the perspective of, are these events different? Do these companies act differently?

The answer is, oh, they're converging. They're all converging on the same sort of marketing. I don't mean to say that the products are bad. I have a 16-inch M1 Pro, MacBook Pro. It is the best computer I have ever owned. You put a better chip in it. You do some software tweaks to make it 600 nits instead of 500. I'm happy.

As long as the battery life lasts as long as this one does. The problem is they have so fundamentally solved the problem. Yeah. That they're just going, they're kind of reverting to marketing. And they've been doing it, honestly, for a little while now. Like, it's been a couple of years of they're not really solving a problem. They're inventing problems to solve on stage. And so I think we see that a lot with a lot of the camera stuff they're doing.

They're like, don't you hate that you can't see every fiber of a sweater? And it's like, three people hate that, but most people are fine. And I do agree with you that in the beginning, it really felt like there was a problem. and they were solving it. And in some cases, the problem was Apple's own making because Apple was at that time, like, a pretty crummy company, and it got better. And now it's just like, okay, you're at the top of your game.

What do you do next? And they're like, we do it at night. Right. That's not enough. And mostly that we have solved a problem involved the introduction of a new category, right? So the iPod, watch the iPod launch event, right? He's like a thousand songs in your pocket. creative jukebox in the audience furious.

Right, he put up a picture of that thing. It was like, this thing sucks. Yeah. Like, he really did. He was like, here's the MP3 players of the day. Here's the ones that are flash memory. Here's the hard drive ones. These suck.

I made a good one. Yeah. And then every iPod, every year after, he invented a reason why they were bad and they like fix it. Whatever. The iPad, if you watch the iPad one, it is remarkable, actually, because he's like, you have a phone and a laptop. and there's space in between.

He brought like a comfy armchair on stage. Like that was the thing. It was the armchair computer, right? Like that was, he did such a good job of that. Yeah, he had a show to put on for you. You know, whatever, Steve Jobs or Steve Jobs. I'm just saying that was the thing. And I think Apple has now gotten to this place where these are, it's an infomercial.

We all sat around and watched a 23-minute infomercial the other night. It was produced like one. It was shot like one. I understand people a lot of feelings with that. But it was a TV show. Yeah. They should have done more vampire voices. Tim Cook kind of did one with the first good evening.

And Johnny Shrugi was like, welcome to my lab. And he was clearly, if they had allowed him, he would have done the whole thing in the voice. Yes. But those are the only two I got out of it. There were some eyes blinking in the background, whatever. All I'm saying, and this is the most minor of criticism, because we should actually talk about the products. The show of it, ever since it's become a TV show, his veered. into just sort of regular marketing

and not the Apple will identify a thing that everyone is frustrated with or has never thought of and show you something. The Vision Pro is arguably that product right now. Right? It's the new category. It's the new use cases. But they didn't have a problem to solve for it.

I would say is the problem. Yeah. And we'll see how it goes. But yeah, we don't need to overindex on whether the 23-minute, last-minute, Mac infomercial was like the best Apple keynote of all. When I say they've lost the plot on why people watch these, it's if you just watch them now, the only problem they have to solve is like five years ago you bought an Intel Mac and now you should buy a new one.

And that's not a great problem to solve. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is why they're leaning ever harder into pros, right? And that's like, that was so much of what this event was about. I just keep thinking about when they launched the Mac Pro and we were getting demos of it and seeing how things worked. The demo was literally Avatar. Yeah.

That it's like, these computers are so good. imagine if you were making the most complicated movie ever made in history, you would need this Mac Pro. And you're just like, all right, sick. Like how many Chrome Taps can it handle? Like what? We've just gotten into these tiny niches where this stuff, especially having to do this every year. Right? Like if Apple only had to tell this story every five years, it wouldn't be that hard.

Telling everybody who bought a computer in 2018 why the M3 MacBook Pro is going to blow your mind is not complicated. But they have to keep telling this story year after year after year. And it does – you can just see it get sort of smaller and smaller and smaller the people who are sort of actually meaningfully going to notice the thing over last year. And again, in a lot of ways, that's a really good thing. Like, these are great, super mature products. It just makes this particular job much harder, I think. Yeah, that's why Qualcomm does it in Hawaii.

Because they ran into the same issue. Like, all of the processor companies have been – dealing with this for a very long time, and Apple's now having to reckon with it, too, where these speed improvements are nice, but they're mainly nice for when you look back five years, and most people in our industry don't care about that. And a lot of our readers probably don't care about it. Like my brother, who has a five-year-old computer, might care. But those people who tune into these events to see the next big thing don't care about a small speed bump.

Yeah. I will say there was one problem that they created that they solved to grow. great acclaim, which was the touchbar and the butterfly keyboard. The butterfly keyboard. And the utter lack of ports on the MacBook Pro, and they fixed that a couple years ago. Again, best computer I've ever owned. And then this year was the end of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the touch bar. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like we've kind of been memorializing it since it stopped getting a lot of the same updates as everybody else. It was kind of sitting off in the corner by itself, clearly, on its last legs. Yeah. But this year they were like, no, we're done. We're out. Yeah, we're putting the steak in the heart.

We're salting the earth. We're closing the door. We're done with it. And it's a bummer. Good. Vampire imagery. Yeah. I'm bringing it. Apple didn't, but I did.

I still liked the concept of the thing. I still wish they had, like, leaned in on the touch bar. But the touchbar was really a placeholder for the M1. Like, the touch bar came out because they wanted to show everybody they cared about laptops. Because in 2016, they didn't care about laptops. They were running all the MacBook posts had Haswells in them from like 2014 or 2013. And they were like, no, no, we care. We care. So look, we've got this cool new way of thinking about computers. We're putting a touchbar in it. And everybody's like, cool, what can we do with it? And they're like, we'll get back to you.

Yeah. But it's cool. And then a few years later they're like, we've got the M1. And this is really cool. And everybody's like, oh, that is cool. I want that. And so I always feel like it was just a placeholder to keep people invested in Apple laptops until the real deal showed up a few years later. That's a very kind way of thinking about the touch for it. I was just, you know, when you care about something that deeply, you're always looking for the good. Yeah. Yeah. I think they made a giant mistake and refused to admit it for some of years. Honestly, I think that that was the period where they thought the future of computing was the iPad.

And they were pushing everyone towards the iPad, and then Mac was languishing. Yeah. And everyone thought you need to put a touchscreen on the Mac. And they were like, no. Maybe some people kind of do. There's a Bloomberg report, by the way, this week. the week before where German said

a forthcoming touchscreen Mac. What? Wow. This is a real thing. Who knows? Yeah, one day. But this was the height of what you might call Apple's touch era.

Uh-huh. And they weren't going to do it on the Mac because they didn't want to cannibalize the iPad anyway. So they're like, you want a touchscreen on the Mac? Here's a weird little one. Also, the keyboard is garbage and it has no ports. And people resolutely refused to let the Mac die. Until they re-up the Mac with Air,

and then eventually the M1 came out. And then the weird thing was they did the good MacBook Pro, the 14-inch MacBook Pro, they did the MacBook Air, the MacBook Air got all the way to M2, and this weird, dumb 13-inch MacBook Pro with the touch bar just persisted. It's like two years beyond its expiration date, at least.

Yeah, I want to know who are the people, who were the people still buying it there at the end? Some people. I don't know, man. We wrote a story a couple of weeks ago about somebody who bought a Wii U the other day. There's people out there. There's people out there doing stuff.

But no, I think Apple made two mistakes with the touchbar, which I do not believe still to this day was a fundamentally bad idea. It was a good concept. Mistake number one, look down at your laptop right now. And if you're in your car, imagine a laptop. If you're in your car and you have the ability to look down at your laptop right now, pull over in your car. And also call the Virchcast hotline because you are our people.

do you see how you have all the function buttons on your laptop? Do you see how there's still some space above it between where there's just space? Put the touch bar there. That's the answer. Like, they said, what if we took away a bunch of buttons you love and replaced it with mostly nothing? Like, that's terrible. Yeah. That's not anything.

I still believe to this day that if the first version of the touchbar had kept the escape key, the touch bar had like a 60% chance to be successful. But it was because it didn't have the escape. Gabe Key and all of a sudden, this very basic thing that professional computer users do all day, every day became harder because your finger couldn't find it anymore, like instant disaster. That's mistake number one, was getting rid of keys people use to add this weird thing that no one ever asked for. Mistaker number two was stopping investing in it.

Apple has a good history of saying, we care about this thing and thus you developers should figure out what to do with it. And if it does that long enough, it usually works. And on the touchbar, for like 15 minutes, they were like, come build cool apps. And then they were like, ah, never mind. We're probably going to bail on this idea. No, so they had a huge problem here. They do this all the time.

The best example is iPhone, right? They bring a high-end feature to an iPhone pro, and the next year the regular iPhone gets it. And then everyone has it. Yeah. And then developers are like, wow, look at all this cool stuff Apple made. I've got some ideas in you, too. They never brought the touch bar out of the MacBook Pro. Exactly.

And even out of the... Because they knew it was bad. They were watching all these pro users stare at their horrible keyboards, and they thought to themselves, we cannot give this to the general public. Hence mistake number one. Yeah. Like you can't get rid of the function keys. Yeah. It's like if Apple was like, look, we built this cool touchbar, but also we just scrambled all your letter keys around.

Like, no, don't do that. Look, it's dead. Here, it's amazing to me that we've spent this much time on the touch bar, which I have finally vanquished. They announced like three new processors and four new computers. We talked about all that on Wednesday. Who cares? You know what? We talked earlier about how they didn't solve a problem during this event.

They did. They got rid of the touch bar. Not having enough processors. No, they got rid of the touch bar. They solved a problem. If they had led with that, like... See, that's a good Halloween show. Yeah.

Tim Cook dressed up as the Grim Reaper chasing Eddie Q and a touchbar outfit down the hallway. I would have watched two hours of that. It's pretty good. I probably would have pre-ordered at the end. I don't want to watch that show, but I would have watched that show. GIFs of it. I would watch the TikTok clips. It's pronounced GIF. To be on the deep dive on the main announcement, the Wednesday show is there for you.

Quickly, they basically spec bumped the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. They spec-bumped the IMac. They did not do a bigger screen size. They spent an inordinate amount of time saying that 24.5 inches, 4.5K display was perfect. Sounded a lot like the touchbar is going to revolutionize computer. It was just a lot of like, this is the perfect size in between 4K and 5K. And it's like, is it? Or is it just the size in between 4K and 5K?

It's just the one you already made a lot of. I'm dying because I really wanted a new 27-inch I Mac to replace my 2015-27-inch IMac that I already rescued from its planned obsolescence in our studio. Couldn't you just get like a Mac studio and slap it on the end? Yeah, but then I have to like buy any monitor, all this stuff. Anyway, they just sent me a new USB audio interface for recording at home because my old one is kind of flaking out. Yeah, I'm aware. It's USBC only. So I've got to get a new Mac.

So I was like, I'll just buy the new 27-inch I Mac. Have to get a new Mac. That's the only solution. I got to do something now. But I'm not going to buy this little baby Mac. Yeah, my in-laws had a 27-inch IMac from, I think, 2011, possibly even like 2008. They had this thing forever. And it finally got to the point where it's like they tried to load the tax website and it just didn't.

It was like this computer is a security risk. Like we can't do this anymore, guys. So they've been asking me for like a year and a half. When is the 27-inch IMAQ coming out? And I kept saying I went from, I think it's going to happen, give it a minute to I don't think this is going to happen because the Mac studio and the studio display are the answers. So I got them to buy a Mac Mini and a monitor, which I actually think is a cheaper. combo and works just as well. But setting this thing up for them gave me like a real new understanding of why the IMAQ is

great. Yeah. Because I had to buy them a webcam. We had to go through this whole crazy rigamarole with their keyboard because you can't set up a Mac without a keyboard and you can't connect a keyboard without setting up your Mac. So you need a wired keyboard, which no one has because it's 2023. No way. And I'm not a PC gamer.

That's real. Yeah, it does not like Bluetooth. I always have to scramble. The advice they give you on the internet is keep a wired keyboard around just in case you have to set up a computer. Full chaos. So I went through this whole thing and we eventually got it set up and I was like, boy, it would have been really nice if I could have just pulled a thing out of a box, plugged it in and turned it on. Look, I'm an IMAC person. That's why.

Although my AIMAC has all this stuff plugged into it, including an ancient, flaky USB audio interface that needs to be replaced. So you've got to buy a new Mac. So you got to buy a new Mac. Yeah. That's how you do it. That's called Verge Logic right there. It really makes a lot of sense when you think about it. I'm just going to buy like a 2017 IMac with USB.

This is my idea. All right, let's talk about shot on iPhone for two minutes. Okay. So at the end of the event, Apple puts up a label. It says shot on iPhone. Yeah. I know why they're able to do this now. We will come to that.

And then a little bit later, they release some behind the scenes. And they show massive production. Like cool. Like cool stuff. Big lenses bolted to the stuff. the front of iPhones and stuff like it. Yeah. Yeah, big lights, big lenses. You know, there's like drone shots and CGI. It's a TV.

They made a TV show. Yep. Mm-hmm. Apple is a TV company. Like a high-end one at that. They made a TV show. Great. So we have a story that's like, here's what they mean when I say shot on iPhone. And the story, it contains almost no take. There's, I will get to it, but it contains almost no take.

It's just here's all the stuff. Here's the, if you want to do this, it costs us so much money. People are freaking out that we're like, accusing Apple being liars. And it's like, no, this is just at the end of the video, it doesn't show you the stuff. It's just a shot on iPhone. Yeah. And the very obvious

thing that they want you to think is that you can do this with an iPhone. And then it's cool. They show you behind the scenes of what you need to do if you just want to do an iPhone. And they did the same thing with Olivia Rodriguez. Right. She has the music video. They shot an iPhone. They're running national ads during football games

showing the thing in a gimbal. Like, they're not hiding the ball. But shot on iPhone is meant to make you feel good about the iPhone, not make you consider the production. It's just marketing. Yeah. I feel great about iPhones. I don't know. I bear no ill will towards the iPhone because they put it in a gimbal.

But the point of it is like, look how cool the iPhone is. If you had an iPhone, you too could be some combination of vampire Tim Cook and Olivia Rodrigo. that's how I feel every time I pick it at my phone. That's the dream. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. I think people are upset about this for like the I'm smarter than you reason.

Like you know it. Like if you're a verge reader, you know instinctively that Apple has a lot of lights when they shoot the thing on the iPhone. And the idea that other people would know that and that would be surprising to them and make them feel feelings about Apple just made a bunch of Apple people mad. That's like basically my summation of this. controversy. Whatever. All it did was make me realize that all of those shot on iPhone photos might also have had lights.

Have had lights and lenses. So here's the thing. You can do, if you give me enough lights, I can make any camera look good. Actually, not me. If you give Becca enough lights, you can make any. Yes. That's great. Like, that's well known.

Any person who is played with photography knows, like, give me enough lights and lenses and stuff, you can pretty much make any camera look good. I think the reason they're able to be shot on iPhone with the iPhone 15 Pro Max or whatever, is not the camera system. It's that they can get the footage off the phone at USBC speeds. Yep. And it shoots in log, which is software. I bet if Apple wanted to write a custom version of iOS that could shoot in log, they could do it.

But the 15 can now do it for everybody. And it has the hardware capability of getting the footage off the phone. And so these are two things that are very important for pros, and Apple's showing off. like, look, the sensor and this thing, and the thing is good enough where you can replace a professional camera in some context if you have enough lights and professional things. But that's, like, a very hard thing to communicate. Like, we've changed the port to USBC, so now you can shoot a professional production on the phone, and you don't have to wait six days to get the files off the phone.

I would say not the world's greatest marketing message. Shot an iPhone. Very good. Yeah. Yeah. I think to me the challenge is always that when we talk about smartphone shooting, it's kind of two different things that actually are totally different, but everybody kind of wants to have the best of both ones. So on the one side, you have something like this, which is like a very high-end production. And basically all they did was take out a fancy camera.

Like they took out a Canon camera and put in an iPhone. Otherwise, the whole setup is essentially the same. And that's actually what they say in the behind-the-scenes video is that one of the coolest things about it is how little of the process they had to change. They can still see the footage in all their monitors. They can still do the stuff in real time. They can get all the stuff that they need. Like, plug-in play into an otherwise very expensive professional setup is one side of thing, right? The other thing we talk about with smartphone photos and video is that it lets you do stuff you couldn't do otherwise, right?

I remember Anthony Bourdain's team used to talk about this, that like when they started shooting with iPhones and restaurants instead of big TV cameras, it changed. the vibe and you can just get places you couldn't otherwise, like nature photographers talk about this too, that like you can get up close to things with a phone in a way that you can't with a giant camera with a giant lens. And so we have this idea that when we say things like shot on iPhone, the mental image is like a person holding a phone up in front of their face. That's obviously not how it works. Like no professional anything is actually shot that way.

But the mental image that I think Apple and everyone else wants you to have when you think about that is that it's essentially Tim Cook standing there and like, I don't know, Craig Federigi standing there just like cleaning his eye on that Tim. If you think about it for one and a half seconds, that's obviously not what's going on. This is what I'm saying. I think this is what people are, they're like mad about is they've thought about it. And sometimes when other people learn something, a reaction of people on the internet is to get very mad about that.

I mean, I do that anytime someone says, have you heard of this film? Yeah. I get so annoyed. It's just weird. It's like, I've heard of all the films. Every film. I think it's very human. I'm not blaming anybody for this reaction.

I'm just saying, I think I'm identifying a thing that is happening that has nothing to do with whether marketing allides the difference between a professional camera shoot and Craig Federegi holding a professional. Like, of course the marketing alides the difference between those two things. It's an ad. Like, it's the richest company in the world is making ads. Like, duh. I really want Craig to shoot the next iPhone. keynote. He's just chasing Olivia Rodrigo around while she crashes cars in a vampire outfit.

All right, that's that, whatever you can feel however you want. I hope you enjoy your iPhone. Please shoot more music videos and send them to us. Olivia Rodriguez. The other group of people that was really mad at us this week that I mentioned at the top the show was SEO professionals who, again, I really encourage you to, one, go read our piece by a man of Chicago Lewis about the culture of SEO, which no one ever writes. about, and we can get to the piece. But then read the comments from the angry SEO people,

because the comments are some of the best formatted, most, like, if they could have put H-2s in the comments for better search discoverability, they would have. It is amazing. The keywords are impeccable. It is the funniest thing about this whole situation is the SEO professionals being mad at us, but doing perfect SEO by instinct in all of the places where they're yelling at us. Ah, it's chef's kiss. So we have this big package all year. It's been the running theme of our year, if you care about AI and you think AI is transformative, which I think a lot of people do, and you are looking at the canon of C-plus AI generated content that is being fired at every platform in the world, you're like, oh, boy, the web's going to be weird. Oh, boy, what's Google going to do? What Google going to do

when it starts doing more of the generated answers instead of just 10 blue links? What's Apple going to do when Google starts doing that, and their search revenue deal changes in big ways. Like, if you undo search in any way, the knock-on effects are gigantic. It is the architecture of the web. So we're just like writing about it. Did we talk about the melting egg thing? No. On this show yet.

Did you guys see this? This is just the tiniest little version of this thing, and it's just my favorite. So Quora, the question and answer website, has been doing work with AI-generated answers to people's questions. It's possible that I'm misremembering this, but I don't think so. There was a question on Quora that said, can you melt an egg? And so chat GPT through Quora answered, yes, you can melt an egg, which you obviously cannot. Google indexes Quora because it's a higher ranking site full of good user-generated content.

So now if you Google, can you melt an egg? Google says, yes, you can melt an egg, even though that's not true. So then a bunch of news outlets pick up this story about being able to melt an egg. which feeds more data back into these generative systems. And so now there's all kinds of data on the internet in which phrases like, you can melt an egg exist on high-ranking websites. And so we got to the point where the question, can you melt an egg became like absolute certainty to Google through all of the

signals that it wants about how things should work because one little tiny AI system said so. They fixed it. They have fixed it since. But that's like there are going to be literally in. I don't know if they did. Literally an infinity of examples like that. Because I just Googled it.

And apparently the most common way to melt an egg is to heat it using a stove or microwave. That's from TNNSupport.com. It's good. Trusted source for egg melting. So if you, good, good example, everyone. We did it. If you think that these things are worth talking about, you might direct your resources at covering the present state of Google and the web and how we got here, Google Search, so that you might be better positioned

to cover what happens next, which appears to be a snake eating its tail of melted eggs. Delicious. Pretty soon we will all be melting eggs, thanks to Google. These are just crazy outcomes, right? And they are culture shaping outcomes. A real reason that the flat earth conspiracy has as much traction as it does is because every time another NBA player says they believe in the flat earth conspiracy, people Google it and then a million websites see that in Google trends and they write about flat earth stuff.

Yep. And that is just a feedback loop that has made more people be like, flat earth is a reasonable debate to have because I see it in the information ecosystem. People are stupid. We've written that story. We'll put it in the show notes. It was just one of the weirdest things. I was like, go explain how search made the flat earth happening.

And we did. It's kind of weird that people forgot that the Google bomb exists. So we wrote that story. So in our package, right? Yeah. We wrote an entire story about how the culture, our broader pop culture, for a minute, the algorithm at the center of it was the Google search algorithm. Ryan Broder wrote that story for us. And now the algorithm at the center of the culture is the TikTok algorithm.

Maybe three years ago, the algorithm at the center of the culture was the YouTube algorithm. There's a brief enduring moment where it's the Instagram algorithm that provided you the car. Kardashians. Just you open Instagram. It's like, here's another one. I just watched them on E. Yeah. But they were like masters of one platform.

They haven't jumped to another. Right. And it's just, I think it's important to look at the search algorithm and say this thing once ran the culture. It's still how information is organized around the world. Everyone writes to it. I mean, I think about SEO. Like, it's not my Roman Empire, but it's up there. What a phrase.

See, that's a TikTok phrase. Yep. The algorithm at the center of the culture is, it's ever-changing, but you can almost always identify it. So writing all these pieces, we'll link to all of them. Last week, we had a piece about restaurants naming themselves near me. Mia Sato wrote it. It's incredible. That's great.

Thai food near me is a real restaurant you can go to New York. Food's actually quite good, Mia says. So we'll link to that. We've got a bunch of these this week. It was Amanda Chicago Lewis writing about the culture of people who practice SEO, not technical SEO tips of which this piece contained none. And everyone's like responding to it as though this is how to do SEO. No, no, no.

This is a piece about the culture of the people who practice it professionally and the conferences they go to and how they talk about Google. And a five and a half foot long alligator. And a five and the conferences they go in Florida. Generally Florida is a concept is in this piece quite a lot. And what is I would just point out to everyone, this is like a well-known thing you can do. You can say, we're sitting. in the Financial District in New York.

I would like to write a piece about the culture of finance pros. It's like a real thing many magazines do all the time because they're cartoonish. And then they make movies about it and they star Leonardo DiCaprio. True. And very rarely do the movies contain technical explanations of what the finance pros are doing all day long. Oh, to do finance. You get right, like many television shows are about the culture of being a lawyer. very rarely does suits ever get any part of the law right?

I can't watch the show. It's so bad. It's everywhere. The algorithms just want to make me watch suits. But this is just a thing, right? The culture of a profession is a reasonable thing to write about. Yeah. So our piece is about the culture of the profession and like how they feel about doing a thing that scammers do to make money and that other people do to just get you to go to their doctor's office or whatever.

Right. Peace is great. And it is a bunch of characters because the people who are best at SEO make a lot of money. And they have silly cars and they buy alligators for their conferences. And they're just loud characters. And one of the central points of this story is the guy at Google who used to sort of manage the SEO industry. It was a guy named Matt Kutz who talked to us for the story. Matt has been out of Google forever.

He went to the U.S. Digital Service under Barack Obama. So he was in the government. He was a CTO, I think, at the U.S. U.SDS, and Google, to replace him, hired a whole bunch of people. One of those people's guy named Danny Sullivan. Danny Sullivan used to be a journalist. He ran a site called Search Engine Land. I used to be a regular reader of Search Engine Land.

Now he's a guy who works at Google and sort of interfaces with people who want to do SEO. The people in our story are like things changed when one guy left and another guy came in, which is a totally reasonable thing to say, right? The posture of the company changed when the sort of ad hoc guy in 2009 was doing it. and then he left and they built an entire function to replace him, and the face of that function is this guy. Danny's been doing this long time. I think having, I know a lot of people who are reported on search,

we've done a lot of stories about search. I think the scrutiny of search and what it is and how it works is frustrating to people at Google who are in general, idealistic about what it should do. Right, there's a trial. Like, David this week published the list of the, was a top 10 most lucid. search terms in 2018.

Yep. And the idea that search is a deeply commercial business really rankles Google. But it is their entire business. I don't think that's true. No? Like, I actually don't think Google is, like, afraid of the idea that it makes money from search. Like, I actually think that that's one step too far. I think what Google believes earnestly, like, at its corporate center, is that what's good for Google is good for the web.

Yeah. And by making Google better and giving Google better and giving it. more people, more access to Google, Google has made the web better. Like, Sundar Prasai just said that in court this week, I genuinely believe that that is a thing that Google as a company believes. And so for us to come in and say, essentially, that what you've done is you've created a game to be won. And what everybody is doing is doing these things in order to win it.

And by doing so, they're ruining the internet. Essentially, what we're saying to Google is like, and I think it's true. I think you look at the internet and it is like provably true at this point. But what we're saying is Google, by trying to grow Google, you've not only grown the web, you've re-incentivized the web to make it worse in order to serve you better. Right. If I was to say to you, how do you win the Instagram algorithm, you have a mental model in your head? Yeah.

Absent reels or whatever. But like in the moment of Instagram's greatest power, you have a mental model of how that incentive structure worked. If I was to say to you, how do you win the TikTok algorithm, you may or may not have a mental model? How do you win the Logan Paul era YouTube algorithm? You probably have a mental model, right? It's not a good one, but yeah. But it's there, right? Like you do a bunch of pranks with your bros.

Like whatever. All those things change and they come and go. But the idea that there's an algorithm that can be gamed, people try to game it, that leads to a type of content or a culture of those creators. When we go talk to the platform companies, the idea that we're doing a story like this never surprises them. It never rankles them and ever irritates them. It's just the thing that we do. When we have been going to do it with search, hey, there's an algorithm that creates a bunch of incentives,

and there's a bunch of creators out there who are trying to game the algorithm, and that means the culture of the web and the content we create looks like it responds to your incentives. That's where I think Google is very frustrated. Oh, I think that's right. Yeah. Because I think what Google would tell you is that it is designed to reflect the best of the web. And in reality, what it did was decide what the best of the web is and then force everyone into that specific box. Right.

And the particular thing that Danny read our piece, he doesn't like it because he's characterized as being somewhat unhappy with our reporter in the piece. And we link to Danny's response on the homepage. You can read that too. But where he and I then going back on threads is Google keeps saying we publish all of these guidelines and we tell people not to do the thing. that the guidelines don't say. The response to every one of our pieces about Google Search this year has been, that's not what the guidelines say.

Thousands of pages. And then also, in the next breath, they're like, the best thing to do is not read the guidelines. Yeah, just make great content. Just make great stuff. And it's like, well, why do you publish all these guidelines if you don't want

anyone to read them? And there's a real tension in there. Like, if you are a person who builds a website, our website, a lot of the schema of our website, is designed for Google. like the underpinning of the layouts of our pages are designed to be predictable for Google. Okay, like I don't feel bad about that.

I want our stuff to be searchable and discoverable, but I also don't want us to write headlines for the Google search robot. Yeah. And I want us to write headlines for people. And like there's a real tension there. And one of the things that makes that tension worse, I think, on the web in general, is Google doesn't like recognize that tension exists. So when the people, when scammers write headlines to fool Google, they win.

Right. Or when a company, like we see this a lot in our industry and elsewhere. I think we all think about SEO a lot. And that is one of the reasons this story means a lot to people at the verge is because we have to think about SEO. It's important. And we have to think, okay, well, how far do we go? Because there is that way where you can win the web. Yeah.

And you can prove everyone that you can melt an egg. We are six months away from one of our major competitors, emerging is like a totally AI written content form. Exactly. I feel it in my bones that that is the thing we will compete against with next year for search traffic. And I mean, that's exactly what's happening. We're seeing our major competitors go down that road after we already watch them go and do things like, you know, say, hey, check out the hands-on for the new iPhone 15 Pro two weeks before it was announced. Just so you can game.

Can we just do some SEO scam rundowns? Yeah. Competitors have, real competitors have done. Yes. So the one Alex is talking about, we have a lot of. of competitors who a month before a device, any device is released, they will put up a page. And it's a hands-on page. It's basically a holding page. The headline at the top, a lot of the copy is about the hands-on, and it'll be like, come back on this day to check it out.

This is just an SEO game. Like, I think that's fake. And now we have covered this a lot, too. We have big competitors like GeoMedia and CNet and others who are running trials of AI-generated content. And their staffs are furious about this. They're not happy. The people who make the work, I don't happy about this, but the corporations are doing it. And they all say the same excuse, which is we have to learn how to use this stuff. And it's like, you're learning nothing. Yeah. What have you learned?

Well, the other one, I think my guess would be one a lot of people have encountered is when you search for some kind of coupons on the internet. The number of sites that you would not expect to have a sneaky hidden coupons page for bed, bedbath, and beyond that nevertheless has a sneaky hidden coupon page for bedbath and beyond is like alarming. I just, look, I just bought a solo stuff. I took the coupon right from Wired.com. There you go. That was a totally weird experience, but I was like, I'm supporting my friends. Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is a thing we've talked about a lot on this show, right?

There is, like, there's an internet for humans and there's an internet for robots. And Google is the robots. Yeah. Like, it's, it's, AI is becoming the robots, but Google has been the robots for a really long time. And it has demanded a lot of people's time and energy. Because at the end of it, it's the discovery engine for the internet. And Google, like, really would love you to believe what they all. always say, which is just do good stuff and we'll help people find it. And I think anyone who has ever

tried to do good stuff on the internet can tell you it's just not nearly that simple. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the dispute. You can all evaluate disclosure. We have a website. There are people at our company that professionally do SEO. Yeah. And if you Google things, you might find our website. Yeah. Our website is designed to be surfaced in Google search. Oh, there's one part. Can I tell this story? Yeah. No, no, no. I was just going to say, I love it. I love it. I think about it. I was just going to say, I I love SEO. I want people to read my stuff. All right. Maybe not that far.

Alex is like running chat. She's the corner to replace us all. There's one, Danny calls out, when we were redesigning the site, he says, Neil, I emailed me and wanted to know about some SEO question, which is true. I emailed him and said, we're going to have these quick posts. We're redoing this thing. Our internal SEO team, we're having a debate about whether to index the quick posts. This is a true thing. I say, Danny is the search liaison. I know him. I emailed them and said, hey, I've got this question. And he was like, read the guidelines. That's what Danny said, which is the thing that he is supposed to do.

Professionally, what he says to everybody is read the guidelines. No special treatment for anyone. And I was like, I don't think the guidelines are helping me here because they are designed to tell people who spam affiliate links, not they'll get downranked. And our quick posts aren't that, but they're also very short. And like, the folk wisdom of SEO is that short things are bad. Like, there's all this stuff and we just don't know the answer. And his answer was like, do what's best. great.

That's a totally, I presume a totally reasonable interaction. And then we didn't index the quick post because we didn't want to tank the traffic to our other pages by having something that might be whatever. Okay, that's like a normal sort of like business conversation that you might have. We didn't have any terms. It was just advice, right? Like I'm operating to the search liaison. It's not a commercial conversation. It's not the wrong side of house.

And I know Danny. So he calls this up. As to say, us caring about SEO somehow negates us from criticizing the practice of SEO. In fact, it makes us more, like, qualified to critique it. I feel much more qualified. Yeah, we do the thing. Yeah, like, I do it all the time. I feel very qualified to critique it.

And we have a lot of commenters who are like, but you have posts that are best laptops. We do want you to read our website. But also just like, just turn the knob all the way. I will concede that we are the worst SEO scammers on the internet. But the worst. We're going to find you and we're going to sell you some car insurance tomorrow. You looking for a wireless plan? Get that solo.

That would be great if we sold wireless plans. We're like, don't buy any of them. None of these will let you do surgery on a grape. I'll concede it to you all the way. That doesn't change the idea that people who practice SEO have a culture. Anyway. You can tell that I care about this lot. Yeah.

David, I want to come back to a thing that you said real quick, and then we can wrap this up. Like, Google doesn't care if you think about search for the business. You were in the courtroom this week where literally the CEO of Google was talking about Google search as a business and what it means and how it works and this big deal with Apple. What's going on there? It was really interesting because the deal with Apple has been the story of this trial so far. Like fundamentally, if you really want to boil this entire antitrust trial down to one question, it's, is it anti-competitive for Google to give Apple what we now know to be $18 billion a year in order to be the default search engine in Safari? Like, that's it. That's the whole question.

Because even if that one deal goes away, everyone else testifying is saying that blows the search market wide open. But so Sooner-Petri gave this like long, most important. mostly unspicy testimony. Like Saty Nadell was very spicy, Sundar, less spicy. But essentially what he argued over and over is that Google is a business. It's a competitive business. There are a lot of things out there. Part of Google's line is that, like, everyone is coming for search all the time.

Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs search for Google, talked a lot about TikTok and vertical search engines in this idea that, like, people look for information in lots of places. And that's fundamentally what Google does. It's very competitive on and on. And sooner Prochita just kept saying, look, we give all these companies all this money because it makes us more money. And like, it's just that simple. Like Google wouldn't give Apple $18 billion a year if Google didn't make more than $18 billion a year as a result, right? Like John Spintline, the lawyer for Google asked him about like, you have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to make money, right?

And sooner was like, yes. We do these deals because they are good. value and Google is a business and when people use our search engine, we make money from it. Like, that fact is not unclear to anyone, right? I think if you want to talk about the ways in which Google search has gotten worse over time, which many people perceive that it has, if you want to talk about whether there are too many ads or Google hides the fact that their ads or AI is going to ruin the quality of your search results, like that's all really interesting questions, but Google's coming out here and basically saying, like, we are a business,

we make an awful lot of money, what do you want from us? Like, the idea that Google started out as this company in the relatively early days of the web and said, we are going to bet on the web. We are going to bet that we can be essentially infrastructure for the entire web, and that if we help more people do more stuff on the web, that will accrue value back to Google. That has been one of the great bets of business of all time. Like, holy God, was that a good idea? from Google 25 years ago.

And the question in front of Google, and that was kind of put to Sundar a bunch of different ways, is like, has that turned? Like, are you no longer good for the web? Because you're so big, because you're so powerful, because you're so sort of singular in your power as that infrastructural layer. And that's obviously a much harder question to answer,

and obviously Sundar is not going to say, yes, we're too big. It's a huge problem. But that thing that they bet on the web and the web got to take over the world and so did Google is like the central tension of all of this

because it's like at what point does that go from I think we all rooted for Google for a really long time because it was true that I think a lot of our listeners are still rooting for Google. For sure.

Like it was a company that believed in the internet at a time that I think it was good to have a company that believed in your way. In many ways when we interact with people from various companies

the people from Google are easily the most sincere. Yeah. And they want the web to be a good place full of good things that people can access and use. Like, I think that rules. When does that turn on you?

And you become, you have to tamp down the web to keep it the way that you want it. That's the question. And like, has Google tipped over that line was what Sundar was kind of being asked indirectly over and over. And it was just, it was fascinating to see it distilled down.

I would point, we're going to link to this too. David wrote a story about Google AMP is part of our Google package when Google clearly went over the line and had to roll it all back. But that's such a fun example, right? Because Google is like, okay, if we don't do this, Facebook will. Right? Like, that's a response to a real threat from a company that was, like, actively trying to destroy the open web. Like, that's just like naked aggression against the open web. And so Google did what it decided to do, I think, was way too far over the line.

But to respond to that in some way and say, we have to preserve the open web. Not wrong and not out of bounds with what Google had always said that it was. But it's just it's that same thing. It's like, where do you go from what's good for the web is good for Google and everybody wins to we have to keep the web just like this so that Google can keep winning? Yeah. And I think that the interesting thing about the sort of like dominant algorithm theory is it's weird that the web is shaped for search, that there's no other discovery engine, that there's no other competing incentive. You can't just make a weird website and sort of like assume Google will find it.

Right. And it's really telling that Google now is even struggling to do that. It's trying to find all these new ways to show you stuff. It's trying to do the more multimedia search. And it's just like, I don't know. Have you found yourself on one of those pages where you do a Google search? And instead of getting a bunch of links to stuff, they just show you like vertical videos in a row. It feels bad.

I don't like it. I click out every time. Especially if it's like I'm trying to figure out how to grill something. You know, I know I feel bad. It's because you don't know that you can ever get back there. There's something really permanent about. doing a Google search and finding a page. I mean, all right, I looked through some of these.

I'll come back to it or whatever. For me, it was just, oh, God, I'm going to have to watch a video. I just want to, like, go and scan up. I'm told that video is the highest fan. Yeah, that's just because you're old. Sorry, sorry. I'm just old. That's fair.

Yeah. Okay, we got to take a break. I'll just say this at very end. We were getting documents out of this trial. Apple had an internal presentation that said Android is a massive tracking device. And they signed a big deal with good. Fantastic. It's very good.

All right. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work?

What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From established brands like Allbirds and Heinz to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks.

So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. that's Shopify.com slash Vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited.

Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back.

We went very long talking about Google search. Yeah. Yeah. So we're doing the back half of the show is two lightning rounds. This one is the streaming lightning round. That's my streaming news. Take it away. A lot happened this week.

I'm going to kick it off with Casey Blois, who is currently running HBO. And during the early days of the pandemic was a little too into his phone and was directing people to direct interns to harass. Or not to harass, but to troll critics online of HBO shows. This is like Warner Media classic move. Yeah, hysterical. He has since apologized. Oh, my. Because this all came out because one of those interns is suing the company for wrongful termination.

So it all came out from that. It was in this big Rolling Stone piece all about the company. A lot of really good reporting of that piece. She'd go track it down. But since then, Kissy Boys has addressed it. And he was basically like, I was too into my phone. And now I just DM when I'm angry at critics instead. Oh, my.

Is that, that's really, that's the, you know, huge feat of self-realization that he's gone through. This is just direct message. I just tell you myself. So he's DMing his criticism more. And honestly, I would rather, I would rather have Tim Cook come into my DMs be like, that was a real rude thing you said about that phone. The flash was good. Yeah. I would, I think I'd rather like prefer that.

What do you, what are you trying to say, Casey Boyce? Okay. I have two things to say to Casey Bloyce. Casey, I know you're listening. So pull over your car, take notes. Thing number one is use your own burners, man. Come on. I'm all for having burners.

NBA athletes do it. Everybody has a burner that they use just for looking at accounts just in case they like one by accident. Everybody, everybody has burners, but you've got to have your own burners. And if you're not going to have your own burners, at least like do it for real and get like a bot farm. You know what I mean? Like, he did this like half measure that it's like if you're going to go for it, go for it. Otherwise, just pretend you're like a random stranger and defend yourself and you'll inevitably get caught and it'll be very funny. This is the weirdest worst way to do it to like yell at your dissistance to defend you on the internet.

Like don't do that. It's not great. No. He says it's much better now because he has, many of them are gracious enough to engage with him back and forth. So it's much better now instead of having the intern. say, you suck. Because that was the gist of the ones they confirmed were coming from

this person. I mean, okay. I'm going to disagree with David. It's not even good. I want an army of interns with burner accounts to tweet it our critics. And if you're interested in this job, you can just email us at vergecats at the verge.com.

We'll see what happens next. We'll pay you in merch. Also, those critics are not being very gracious because they didn't know that the army of anonymous interns was tweeting, you suck at them. It wasn't like, it wasn't. It wasn't like Casey was like, hey, so all those weird Anon accounts that have been tweeting you suck at you, that was me.

I prefer to start DMing now. And they're like, oh, yes, of course, Casey. Come in. No, he just started DMing them. All right. Here's my staying on HBO Max. Here's my lightning round one. In the grand scheme of everything getting more expensive, if you're on HBO Max and you

add free, now they're going to charge you more money for 4K. God damn it. You get a legacy ad-free account. How much am I paying now? I miss this and I'm very upset. You have to go to $20 a month. So if you're on the standard, if you're on the standard ad-free one that you used to get 4K on, which I think is $16 a month, you're going to lose $4K. You have to upgrade the ultimate at $20 a month, and then you get $4K back.

I'm not going to have any money for my children. I don't have any. Did we get— Mine is named Max. I get nothing for this. I should get a substantial discount. You should. Where did we land on our, would you cancel your streaming services before you gave up 4K?

A lot of people agreed with me. That's what I'm going to say. A lot of people agree that, yeah, they would rather cancel than give up 4K. Yeah, that was the most of the feedback I heard too. Honestly, the audacity of Max, who was late to 4K and half-assed 4K and is still half-assing 4K to expect me to pay more. I'm going to do it, but I'm going to be so furious the whole time. this is the problem with Millennials. This is the same energy.

You and your avocado coast are $20 a month of garbage 4K. No children. What am I doing with my life? Do you know what I realized recently? So I've been sort of systematically going and downgrading everything to the ad plans because I just want the ads. Like I'm good. Give me the ads.

You want that Myrtle Beach timeshare. The strangest thing I have discovered is that I kind of love it because it's a phone break. I now like four times an hour I get a phone break. So I don't look at my phone during shows anymore. because I know that in seven minutes, I'm going to get three minutes to look at Reddit or check my texts or whatever. And then it's perfect. It's just like a tiny little intermission where whatever's happening on the TV happens on the TV, but I get to look at TikTok. Your house sounds horrible.

You're watching like 480P Survivor on a garbage fast service looking at your phone for three-minute chunks. Anna's sitting next to me doing Spelling Bee. And I'm sitting here. I do connections during one. I look at Reddit during another one. I check my email and Slack during another one. And then it's the end of the hour and I've watched the whole show. It's perfect.

I don't know about this. All right. What's your lightning round one beyond your bad idea about watching ads? Ads. What if there was an ad break but just no ads? It's just silence on the TV for two and everything. Everybody gets a phone break. Yeah, exactly.

Sponsored by Intel. Mine is Disney appears to be actually for real about to own all of Hulu, which we've kind of known as coming for a while. But it seems like approximately one minute after. Comcast was allowed to exercise the clause that would force Disney to buy the rest of Hulu. It did so. Now comes the part where Disney and Comcasts have to figure out what Hulu is worth, which I think it's going to be really fascinating. They set it up in such a way basically, and Alex, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I understand

this right, which is that a bunch of years ago when they made this deal that would allow Disney to eventually buy all of Hulu, they valued Hulu to about $27 billion, which meant that the roughly third of the service that Comcast owned was worth like eight and change billion dollars. Now, that's the minimum price Disney is going to have to pay. If the price has gone down since then sucks for Disney, they still have to pay that money. I don't think it has. If that price has gone up, Disney's going to have to pay the eight and change plus whatever percentage difference there is based on the new valuation of Hulu.

So the question now is what is Hulu worth in the market? and we're about to find out it's a deeply weird time in the streaming world. Streaming is both like ascendant and a mess. I have no idea, but I think figuring out how much money this is, especially for Disney, which is not in a super good position to be writing checks for $8 plus billion at this moment in time. It's about to get really weird. I think it's going to force Disney to actually think about what it's doing and what its strategy is. I don't think Disney's been doing that lately.

It is a weird time to announce a steal when the cover of variety is Marvel screwed? Yeah. Which is a piece worth reading. Yeah. It's a great piece. I wrote kind of an addendum to it. It's on the site right now. They don't know how Marvel, like Marvel's just in a bad spot.

And the piece was very kind of weird because it refused to blame Kevin Vagy who runs Marvel Studios for anything. but then everything seemed to quietly like, they'd be like, yeah, there's someone at the top and we don't know what to do. It's like, weird story. But yeah, I think Disney has to figure out, it's got multiple services for a long time. It was like, this is for adults

and Disney Plus is for babies, and maybe it's going to merge the two together. It's also got the Hulu live subscription, and there's a reasonable amount of subscribers there, but not as many as you think. Hulu is still way below Disney Plus and subscriptions. So it's kind of be like, they already own all of,

they own everything on it because it's all Fox and ABC shows. So they own everything. It's just like, what do you, I don't know. I think that all the people who have to figure this, the price out are going to fight, like the Comcast and the Disney folks,

I want to be in that room watching those two groups fight each other because that's going to be really cool. One assumes that Disney is planning to sell ESPN and Comcast knows this and they would like some of that money to come back to Comcast. That's fair. Disclosure, NBC Universal Division of Comcast is the minority investor in Vox Media, our parent company. We produced a Netflix show, which you should go watch. It's called The Future of.

I was the executive producer of that show. But I'm hopelessly biased in favor of that show. Which you should watch on Netflix. You should watch. Yeah, that's it. I think that's all for now. We all have televisions. I think those are the ones that are implicated in this conversation.

Again, our site is discoverable. We have a TikTok account. We use YouTube. Two more. We won an Emmy this week. Hell yeah, we did. We won an Emmy for her YouTube series, Full Frame. Big bias in favor of winning Emmys.

You can't trust anything we say if it's not going to win us an Emmy. One more thing before we move on from the streaming stuff. There was a big debate on our comments on the Hulu Disney thing about whether if you're going to, if you're Disney and you're going to combine all your streaming service, is should you call it Disney Plus or should you call it Hulu? I think this is the most obvious question ever, but I'm curious what you two think. Ooh, I think if Disney knew what they were doing, they would call it Hulu. No.

Yes, 100 percent, because Disney itself has a very specific brand identity and that's what they're terrified. You mean the best brand identity potentially of any brand anywhere on planet Earth? But also. Disney is the good brand. That's literally what it is. Yeah. It's the good brand. It's goodness and happiness and joy.

I literally heard one of Becky's aunts say out loud, what is the difference between Hulu and Roku? And I looked at her and I was like, you know what? That is a surprisingly deep and meaningful and good question. It's a good question. It is. Right. I think that's a good question. Like, it's just TV stuff.

Yeah, but the problem with Disney is that Disney is not just Disney. It's ABC. Well, for now, it's ABC. It's FX. It's all solvable problems. All of these things, and they're running into the exact same problem as HBO or as Warner Brothers. And Warner Brothers obviously went with the incredible Max. And here's the real opportunity for them to be like, we're not going to do that.

Disney Plus was always kind of a stupid name because it was. And instead we're just going to click to Hulu. Here's what they're going to do. They're called the Everything app. It's going to be called X. It's going to do payments. You can date Minnie Mouse. It's going to be amazing.

It's all going to be great. All right. We got to take a break. We'll be right back with Lightning Around Part 2. We're right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire.

Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that.

It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for, developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, we're back. Can I start with my favorite thing of the entire week? Yes, please. Absolute favorite thing in the entire week. It's not even a thing we covered.

Oh. It's a, it's a thing that TFL truck covered on TikTok. By the way, TFL truck, one of my all-time favorite. They're just, it's just a website about trucks. They rule. It's great. Uh, There at some car show, the guy's like, I'm here with a Ford F-150 Lightning at the Borla booth, and he goes to the Borla guy, and he's like, so you've built an exhaust system for the F-150 Lightning, and the guy looks and he goes, it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. And then he goes, it can play futuristic sounds too. This is a thing that happens in this video. I lost my mind. I've watched him say, it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. a thousand times.

Did he play it? The confidence. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. What he means by this is that there are speakers mounted under the bumper of the truck. What? And then when he pushes the accelerator down, it makes engine sounds. And it's all very complicated. Right?

He's like, look, we're plugged into the systems of the truck. We're measuring the distance. The accelerator pedals push to the floor, the load on the engine. We've got simulated gear shift sounds. on an electric truck. And then he's like, and there's buttons and knobs. So there's one knob switches between four presets. The one is the volume.

You can change the presets on your phone to futuristic sounds. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. And then he's like, here's what you can set it to right now. Mind you, this is a four truck. He's like, a Chevy Silverado. What? A Dodge Charger. And I'm like, there was a meeting that,

the exhaust company. Borla is a famous exhaust company and they had a meeting. And they're like, this EV thing is killing us. No one's going to buy exhaust pipes from us anymore. Heathers out the window. We're not doing this. What's our plan? And someone's like, aftermarket sound solutions. We're going to put speakers on the trucks and we're going to make Ford trucks. Sounds like they have Chevy V8s in them. How are they going to roll cold? There was a meeting, Alex. I love it. Just go watch this video. It's not even our video. I just quick posted a TikTok from a another publication because I can't get enough of this guy saying it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution.

There was a period of time like two months ago, I would say, where Neli, you missed a couple of shows in a row. You were super busy. You didn't do the iPhone review this year. You were doing code. You were moving. A lot was going on. And we got a bunch of emails being like, is Nelai leaving?

Is he going off to like some big job? And I want everyone to know that when Nelai does leave, it will be to do the thing he just described just now. Eli will leave us to go do aftermarket sound solution truck TikTok, and that will be the end. If ever Nilai disappears, look for him on truck TikTok. That's what it will be. I just got to go watch the video.

Well, it's just the confidence. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. You're very, like, I feel confident listening to you say it. I just like, if you're buying. The way it just. The number of companies that are solving the sort of like political culture war of EVs by being like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put speakers on the car

and we're going to make them sound like they burn gas. And that'll fix it. Dodge is doing this. They are. They call it the fretsonic exhaust system and they won't admit that they're putting speakers under the car. At least Borla is like, yeah, it's a... What does it sound when it's like crossing water?

Like the speakers are drowning. That was really good, actually. It was really good. What you want us to drive your... battery-powered truck into some water and make it bubble. Everyone very confident that that's a good situation. Neely, did you say it's called fret-sonic or frat-sonic? Frat-sonic.

Frat-sonic. That's fantastic. Frats. Whatever, man. All right, what's yours? Okay. Mine is Chris Person, a friend of the verge, has a great story up on the site where he hacked a robot vacuum to make it more like secure because robot vacuums, you know, they're

going around your house. You're hopefully wearing pants when they're going around your house. Yeah. Always wear pants. And they're mapping your house. They're mapping everything. And then they're uploading all of that to the cloud. And while it is typically pretty secure, it is also a privacy, potential privacy nightmare.

Yeah. And so he had to go use this project called Valletudo. It's a great name. Bill Tudow? Valetudo. Valletudo. And so he used this project to hack a robot vacuum and disconnect it from the cloud and still make it work and do all this stuff. And it worked, but he, you know, he's hacking.

This is not just, yeah, he's in the system. He's physically removing boards and adding new boards. And he was working on this for a while. He's working with, I believe, Dan Sefer, and Dan would just be like, oh, yeah, I'm just getting all these pictures of robot vacuum guts. And you're like, why have this going on over there? Has you thought about adding an aftermarket sound solution to his robot vacuum? Full Silverado Viet powering through the living room.

It's going to sound great. But the story is really cool, and I love the idea of it, especially as the other day, like, I kept having to stand in front of my robot vacuum cleaner, and it would, like, bump into me. And I was like, oh, my God, none of these photos can ever, like, be leaked. Because it's just the worst look for you. Just horrible. Because it's like, it's like, it's basically even worse than that one when you pull your phone out and you go to check something and the camera's facing you and you're not expecting it and you've got fortunes. There's like 12 chins on your ass, on your face. There's a lot of chins happening, and nobody needs to see that.

So I feel like I kind of want to hack mine now. My robot has become a super villain in my house. The noise, the little like boop-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-thing that it does right before it starts scares the hell out of my dog. For some reason, she like literally as soon as she, the vacuum doesn't you have to move. As soon as she hears that noise, which it for some reason will occasionally just make randomly out of nowhere, she just goes flying upstairs and hides in the bed under the covers and will not come back for hours

and our 11 month old he is now crawling like a maniac and he sees this little glowing light and he presses the button because that's fun and then it moves and it hits him and he doesn't like that and then it's like oh well I have to get around this so it just keeps moving a little bit like an inch at a time and just bashing into his legs

over and over so I have to figure out a place to put the robot vacuum that is somehow accessible to no one but can still vacuum my floors. So if anybody has any, like, sneaky hiding places for your vacuum place. I think you just get, like, a drone apparatus for your child. Oh, yeah, I'll get the ring flying camera. That'll go super good. My dog will love that.

That'll go really well. Every time I've ever bought an expensive vacuum, it's been shittier than the, like, $30 vacuum we bought when we were, like, very young. We were in a hotel in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago, and the, the, the, The one vacuum that they had in there was this like piece of crap dust devil that weighed nothing. And all anyone talked about all weekend was how nice it was because it was so light and small. Yeah. Just like this piece of junk vacuum is like my favorite thing I've ever used to clean floors because it weighs nothing.

I have a thousand dollar LG vacuum with Wi-Fi that empties itself into a stand. I thought this was so cool. It looks so good, man. Oh, I just like looking at it. Yeah. We have a $30 shark that just outperforms that thing coming and going. Yep. Just all that money is in the Wi-Fi chip and not in the part that sucks up dirt.

I have it run four times a week, and that kind of helps. I've never had any luck with robot vacuums, and now I've heard about the ass-chin situation, and I never will. Yeah, don't go and look at the images. David, what's your lightning round item? If we could title this episode of the podcast, the As-Chin situation, I would very much appreciate that. That'll be great for SEO. No one's Google an Ashton situations. Mine is, I was picking between two Google things.

One is that now you can put the Chrome URL bar on iOS down at the bottom. Most controversial decision on the internet for a while there, if you guys remember. But the one I ended up choosing was Google is now selling, like in pre-registries. Dot ING domains. A fun fact about me is I'm obsessed with domain names. I find them totally fascinating. And there was this thing like 10 years ago where, I can was like we're going to put out a million new kinds of domains.

You can be dot pizza. You can be dot restaurant. You can be dot online. And we're going to reinvent the way people think about web pages. Instead of trying to be a dot com, you can just be, you know, Alfredo's dot pizza and that's your restaurant. That didn't work at all. And if you go to like a messaging system or email or Slack or whatever, most of those

don't even show up as URLs, which I would argue is like pretty spectacular failure. So now Google's out here trying to make dot-in-G happen. And their thing is like if you want it to be, you know, if you're a flight booking company, you do book.org or fly.org and they're charging a ton of money for it, R.org, which would be ring, obviously, it's like if you want to, if you're Victoria, not Victoria's Secret, if you're Tiffany's or whoever, $130,000 a year for this domain name. And I just think Google has been way out in front of these. They're called top-level domains or TLDs.

and all these like alternate TLD's Google has been out in front of for forever. Dot XYZ has actually been fairly successful as a kind of catch-all thing. Dot AI had a moment. Dot social has kind of had a moment. And now Google is going to try really, really, really hard to make doting a thing. I really want to have they see me roll. That's very good, Alex. But I don't have, $200,000 a year.

Like, Nilai, can I have some money? I got an idea. Wait, didn't Google leave the domain's business? Google domains business. I had not even sold, I think, just gave to Squarespace, which some people are very mad about. Yeah. But it still has its like overarching TLD registry thing. So it like administers these domain names, but it doesn't do the buying and selling and management of them.

Are they going to have messageing? That's a good one. They should just call it G-chat. Just put it out there. Put full manifestation. Just call it G-chat. All will be forgiven. The government will give up their antitrust trials.

We'll stop covering SEO. Just call it G-chat. We're so easily, bot. That's your disclosure. If they just call it G-chat, we'll back all the way off. Huh? Deal? No deal.

Last one I want to call out, X had its first all hands with Elon and Linda Yaccarino. Alex Heath has the first. full transcript of that meeting, you should go read it just to witness the wild vacillations of Elon making stuff up and Linda having to pretend it was part of the plan. Yep. There's one point where I don't remember exactly what he was saying, but Elon was like, I'd like to start with this. And it was obviously a surprise to her.

And she was like, I'd raise my hand to be a part of that. Perfect. Yeah. Just perfect. It's very good. That's what you want out of your CEO. Just complete. The Fuddlement and surprise.

Love chaos. That's a good piece. We got a bunch of good stuff on the site this week. Liz, in addition to the things people are very unhappy about, Liz has been covering the FDX trial. Sam Bankman-Fried was on the stand. He is lighting himself on fire. There's no other way to describe what is happening in this trial. That dude's going to jail.

But you should read the coverage as Liz is a great writer and she's having the time of her life covering this trial. And also, it's probably going to be over very – there's a non-zero chance that by the time you're listening to this, a verdict has come in. And we're going to talk about that on the show next week for sure. And it's going to be guilty. I agree with that. It would be a shock if it was not. We have a great video Andy Hawkins made about delivery robots, which is very cool.

You should go watch that. Like I said, Becca won an Emmy this week, which is incredible. Go watch them full frame and celebration. And then, like I said, we've talked about this whole lot. A big feature this week on SIE. You should go read it. We'll link it in the show notes. And then speaking of Andy,

he has a great piece about the EV transition and the weird liminal spot it's in right now where it seems like it's ready to start happening, but instead culture war. Instead culture war, America, 2023. Go read that, but it's also the carmakers have kind of blown it, right? They assumed that all the demand for Teslas could be applied to their existing business models. And so they made big, stupid trucks instead of like little EVs that people want to buy. Like, like Chevy is like, look at our $100,000. Silverado instead of look at our bolt, which is, it feels like an error. Like the people who want to buy EVs are not up there.

Yeah. Anyway, that's a great piece. You can go read it. There's also, obviously, some coverage of charging networks in there. And lastly, before we break, we want to know how you feel about the Redcast on YouTube. Are you watching it on YouTube? Are you catching the Easter eggs in the background? Or are you sticking with the podcast player?

What do you like about the show on YouTube? What don't you like? We know you want us to cut to more pictures of things in that chapter. We'll do all that stuff. But beyond that, what do you want? from us on YouTube. We're growing on YouTube. It's great. It's fun to be in the comments on YouTube, but we want to make it better. Let us know what you think. In the comments on YouTube. Bringing the multiple ashtims to YouTube. Amazing. That's it. Thank you so much.

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