The Vergecast - Apple M2 reviews, DOJ sues Google, and this week in Elon

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of staring directly down the barrel of a camera, The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Richard Lawler, and Monica Chin start the show with an inside look at our M2 MacBook Pro and Mac Mini reviews. After that, the crew breaks down the case the US Department of Justice has filed against Google's ad business and of course we try to make sense of the latest Elon Musk shenanigans. Further reading: The Vergecast - YouTube Apple Mac Mini (2023) review: Mac Studio junior  Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2023) review: the core count grows Google is being sued by the US government and eight states over online advertising  Google plans to demo AI chatbot search as it panics about ChatGPT More details come out on which departments saw layoffs at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon  Tesla made more money in 2022 than ever before, but its future still looks rocky Elon Musk is theoretically sad that Tesla investors lost money because of his tweets Elon Musk thinks Twitter is real life Elon Musk’s Twitter is caving to government censorship, just like he promised  Elon Musk gets serious about 420 at securities fraud trial - The Verge   Tesla’s new $3.6 billion Nevada investment includes a ‘high-volume’ Semi factory  Tesla Cybertruck mass production won't start until 2024 Microsoft Q2 2023: Windows, devices, and Xbox down as cloud holds strong Senators and Swifties take on Ticketmaster in Washington  GoldenEye 007 is coming to Nintendo Switch and Xbox on January 27th TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast, of staring directly down the barrel of the camera, whether it's your real eyes or fake computer-generated eyes. These are real eyes here. These are fake. Beautiful real eyes.

I'm your friend Eli. I have an announcement to make. This is going to be one of the first episodes of our show in a long time that we post as a video podcast to YouTube. We used to do it all the time. We used to do it live on video, which was a mistake. Then to pay back the carmic debt of doing that, we stopped. We stopped the video for years.

Now we've slowly started adding it back in with everything that we've learned. Yeah. And what we've learned is that Richard has the invidious software on his computer that makes his eyes stare directly at you no matter where he's looking. and it is terrifying. I can't look away. Hello, Richard. It's fine. These are my real eyes.

This is what I actually look like. This is not AI enhanced by NVIDIA. I am offended by this suggestion that I would use software to enhance the way that I look at you. Because I always look directly at you. It's so creepy. That's what people say about me all the time. It's a lot. We're going to.

If there's anything I love, it's eye contact. That's what I'm into. When I say Carmic Dett, it's like we're already accruing it. Like we paid off the balance. We're like turn the cameras back off. And Richard's like, I'm ringing it up. Just making purchases that we're going to have to pay off

with AI assist. Yeah, this isn't weird at all. Oh my goodness. Alex Kranz is here. I am here. And I've got my own camera in the studio and it's great. If you're in your car, you're doing great because Richard isn't looking at you. But if you're watching this on video, here's Richard looking at you.

All right. And Monica Chan's. is joining us for the first segment of the show. Hey, Monica. Hello. You know, we're two minutes into doing this on video again. There's a reason I turned the cameras off. I think we look great. I think this is the best thing we've ever done. Well, look, let me start with some like inside.

The funny thing is when I can just. Now get out of my frame. I'm looking great. I can just get in Alex's camera. It looks like he's intently examining the wall. This is the worst radio that's ever been made. Here's what I will tell everyone. Just back it up inside media baseball.

We used to do it on video all the time. We were arguably ahead of our time. Yes. In 2011, live streaming a podcast. But podcast? Live streaming podcast, 2011. None of those things existed, though. Younger, drunker, Nilai on camera live.

Many mistakes from me. Some really good gifs out there of it, by the way. It's incredible. Some of our finest moments. Yeah. Who is the Samsung guy, Big Papa Joe? It's all. We hired people off the call-ins for the podcast.

This is a true story. Whatever. Many things happen in the Vergecast. I'm sure people remember or don't. We started the Verchast up again, and we're like, this is a lot of effort for videos. Yeah. That a small group of very passionate people watch. We wanted the podcast to be big.

And so we shut off the cameras to make a better radio show. Right. And our numbers went up because we were no longer looking at each other and telling each other jokes about things we could see. that no one in their cars could see. Yeah. So we're like, okay, we're good at making a podcast. So fast forward to 2023, everyone with a podcast is like, just turn on the cameras and put it on YouTube. That's where all the podcast growth is.

Yeah. So now we're fully back to the future. We have potentially learned something about making a better podcast by just having made a podcast for a long time. And we are not, Alex, going to do bits to the camera. Never. I am not doing that today. tomorrow ever again. Hi guys. How are you?

Let me just talk to you personally. Get out of my frame. All right. So if you are listening to this and we get out of line, send us a polite polite. Very polite. Email. We'll try to rein it in. If you're watching this for the first time on YouTube,

welcome. Liam, what's the YouTube channel people can subscribe to? Just type the Vergecast into whatever text field you encounter on the internet and it will lead you to our YouTube page. Bing. Yahoo.com. No, it's YouTube, the Vergecast.

That's our channel. You can watch us live once again. You want with credit. And Richard, we continue to stare directly at you the whole time. Just unblinking. Let's talk about this technology. We have a lot to talk about. Monica's here to talk about MacBook Pro and Mac Mini with M2 Chip reviews.

Tesla earnings. We have a headline here that just says trouble in Alphabet City, which is very good. So good. which is just about Google. Yeah. There's lots of problems for Google. Microsoft layoffs, Google. There's lots to talk about.

But we should talk about the fact that Nvidia released this software for their video cards that lets you just stare at the camera. This is not new technology, right? It's built in a FaceTime. Monica, you were saying it's built through a lot of laptops. Yeah, it's been on the surface line for a bit. Samsung has claimed to have a technology that does it,

which I haven't personally used it before HP says they have it. There are various people who have been trying it with varying degrees of success. But no one like Richard. No. Well, so the thing about Nvidia, right, it's because you can set any video source to go through it. Right. This is a, this one is a bigger release. So, right, like you can't.

Yeah, because usually if you're doing FaceTime, you have to be in the FaceTime app. On the FaceTime. And it's not as nearly as funny. Yeah. And then Richard, this is just like Nvidia broadcaster and you're just pumping. and OBS through it? What's one on here? Yep. It just connects. It's you. I open up NVIDIA broadcast, pick my camera, and then in our recording software, I just tell it to look for NVIDIA broadcast and it gets whatever, whatever is

piped there. Which is your cartoon eyes. Yes. I mean, it's, it's so beautiful. And occasionally you'll see, like, if it decides that I've looked away too far, it'll go back to my real eyes and then it will turn my eyes back to you. For me, that's the creepiest part. It's the animated term. Well, it would be weirder if they just like blinked out and then blinked to be staring at us again. It's strange because it's looking, it's like looking at like a ghost mirror of myself because I'm looking at myself down in the middle of the screen

and it's looking directly. Which is very strange. That's terrifying. We've done a lot of stories about this tech recently. James Vincent has written a lot of stories about this kind of tech. His one today is very good. It's just about people putting movies through it. Yeah.

So the actors are looking directly down the barrel of the lens. Nope. Don't do that. And all of it looks like high school theater. like the most dramatic high school monologues that you have ever experienced. It's very good. I don't know if this is the future of all video conferencing.

I know that it's very funny. And I also know that it's been on FaceTime for a minute and no one has noticed it. Yeah, true. And I think it's just because NVIDIA is letting basically anybody pump anything through it. And how many people use FaceTime? Like lots of people, but my mom is not like,

you're looking directly at the camera, aren't you? Yeah. She's more like, where's your baby get out of my face? Like you're old and dusty. Don't want you. I already raised you. Show me the child. All right.

So this is amazing tech, Richard, and enjoy. It's just so weird, man. I'll just flip it on and off randomly during meetings and during this call. It's fine. No, but we came into a meeting last week up, and Viren, our video producer, he was on, and I forgot that I had turned it on the first day that it came out. And we were talking for about 10 minutes, and I don't know, he must have thought I was moving on. Because, like, I'm just talking to him, and I wasn't looking at the video preview.

so I didn't realize it was on until a while in. And he was like, I was going to say something, but. Yeah. Who doesn't have an entire meeting staring only directly into their webcam? I do it all the time, actually. I was like, you're really, really good at it. Like, annoyingly so. I like mugging directly into the webcam. Yeah.

I'm doing it right now. So I. That's enough talking about this. It's so creepy. But it's out. You should go play with it if you have an Nvidia card. The fact that you can pipe any source through it, I think is deeply hilarious. But I would expect, again, it's in FaceTime, it's in a bunch of laptops.

I would bet the next generation of, like, Apple laptops has it because they already had the technology and they're using the same chips. Which brings me to the chips. Do you see that segment? Oh, I like that. That was good. I did it. I loved it. It was perfect.

All right. So, Monica, you have been reviewing the new MacBook Pro 16s with the M2 Pro, the M2. Max. Chris Welch reviewed the Mac Mini, which is the same chip, the same computer, a little case without a bit. battery and a screen. What's going on here? So the MacBook Pro 16 looks very similar, identical even, to the 2021 MacBook Pro 16. But the chip inside is called the M2 instead of the M1. There's the M2 Max and the M2 Pro, which is not the M1 Max and the M1 Pro. It's the two. Yeah. It's the second one. It's dose. Yeah. Is it any good? Yeah. For the workload that I do, which is, you know, while it's at Google,

docs and lots of spreadsheets and lots of Zoom calls, it's like not a noticeable difference. It's not, that's not anything that it impacts. It is an upgrade in graphic performance and an upgrade in CPU performance. And it is something that you will notice if you are doing heavier professional workloads. We saw decreases in export time. We saw decreases in X code time. Benchmarks across the board were higher. So it is a more powerful laptop. The battery life is a lot longer, and I think to me that's the most significant part. Is it the same battery as last time, like the same size battery? I think it's an apple's like running right up against the limit.

Yeah. It is the same 100 watt hour battery. So that is like super impressive. Well, the chip is more efficient. There are two more cores on the M2 max than there were. On the M1 max, they're both efficiency cores. It seems like a more efficient chip. I would usually get around 10 hours out of the M1 max.

I'm getting, depending on my workload, I'll get 16 to 20. Wow. That's crazy. It's a very big difference for me. That doesn't mean everyone will see that same difference. You know, people's workloads vary. People's usage habits vary. But I will be very surprised if anyone didn't see a couple more hours at least of battery out of this machine than out of the older one.

Which doesn't mean, I don't think anyone's necessarily trying to upgrade from the M1. That would surprise me. But like, if you're thinking of doing that, you don't need to do that. The M1 Pro and M1 Max are fine. but these are for people who are still upgrading from Intel machines, these are big increases in power and they are more efficient. I mean, that's like six to eight hours extra battery, though. Like, Neely, do you have some FOMO about your M1?

So I'm staring at my M1 Pro, 16-inch Macquick Pro. It's still the best laptop I've ever owned. Uh-huh. And we have an M2 Pro 16-inch MacBook Pro. You've yet to run benchmarks on it. But we've run the benchmarks on the mini with that show. Yeah. And it's like, it's a linear increase in performance and a linear increase in battery life.

It's just like, these numbers are better. Yeah. And sort of exactly the way that you would expect them to be, which is kind of interesting. It's somewhat has the vibes of like an Intel, a pre-AmD being a competitor Intel upgrade. It's like they made the chips better. They didn't feel like they had to make a giant splash with the chips, which is fine because the last ones that came out were a giant splash. So real TikTok kind of situation. Right.

And the rumors are the M3s will be on a three nanometer process. Right. And that's like straight up. Just straight up. And that is the pattern that we saw from Intel before AMD sort of burst on the scene as we often had less exciting generations followed by more exciting generations. It was super fun to write about those too. Because you'd be like this year they're 10% faster.

Anything cool? I said 10% faster. That's all you need. Be excited. The number is 10. What order do you want? Yeah. So,

I don't, this computer RDS, the M1 Pro, 16-inch from Aquick Pro, same battery, 100-coa-hour battery, which is like, it's,

I think it's actually like 99. Something to like sneak under the, yeah, under the plane limit. But like this computer, I just like never plug it. I haven't plugged it in all day today. Yeah.

I mean, do we go to the only, the only way I'm getting that 16-hour figure is I do not let it go to sleep and I have it run something constantly. If I were just using that's my day-to-day life,

I would not need to plug it for every couple days. That's incredible. Now, I didn't get that from the M1 Max when we tested the M1 Max. So if I was like, I'm always on the road rendering, road renderers. Sure. Yeah, who is it? Just driving one hand over here.

Just constantly just mobile rendering. Maybe. Like, honestly, maybe I'd be like, you know what? It's more power and more battery life. And my mobile rendering workflow will be significantly improved. The thing that really struck me reading your review is that it runs the fan and is like a noisier computer. It was much noisier. I was using, I was running

like Puget Bench in the office and people were a couple of us over and they were coming over like, what is going over here? Like that, that's right. I can't remember the last time we had a noisy Mac. Yeah. So that is, and I mean, that was it running on high power mode, which, like, if you don't run on high power mode, you probably will not get that much noise. You probably will get

decreased performance. Is high power mode like a thing you have to activate? Yeah. So if you go into the battery profiles, you can put on silent mode, you can put it on high power mode you can put it on automatic which decides which one do you use based on what you're doing which did you do for your battery test the battery one I love that okay so like high power mode super loud but also like balls to the wall prefer yeah yeah and and there was when I when I ran benchmarks while I was in the battery mode they were there was substantially decreased performance so

you want to have high power mode on if you're doing load mobile rendering yeah well you won't be stealthy yeah you won't be selty everybody's going to hear you come I mean everything is a trade drive. Everybody was hearing you coming away. The area behind the keyboard was like very hot, which like I've never seen from one of these MacBooks. Well, that's interesting though, because that means like, so these are thermally limited. Like that's where the slowdown is.

Well, so actually, I think this is like kind of a weird moment for Apple, right? Because they have been very aggressive, thermally limiting their machines for quite a while. Yeah. Like the Intel MacBook errors were like thermally throttling all over the place. the first generation M1 error in the old case design was throttled. We would hit its limit and throttle down all the time. And the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro would be like, I'm going to run the fan and like last a longer.

And it was like a pretty quiet fan. This one seems like the first time Apple's like, you know what? It's going to get hot and noisy and we're going to keep that performance envelope. And I will just be clear. That was only, that was when it was running Puget Bench, which does just like the wildest things. It's throwing effects. It's doing all this random set with 4K and 8K. If I'm just doing my regular,

if I'm watching Better Call Saul or whatever, it's not like... Those are the two extremes. Monica's like, either it's going to melt down or we're going to watch the superior prequels. Exactly. Those are the only two things that you would ever do in a MacBook. I'm just coming out and saying it. It is a...

We're not back in 13-inch Intel MacBook Pro Land. I open one Chrome tab and it fries itself to death. Like this is still... that that's not going to happen if you're just like doing Chrome or whatever. That was when it was running like the most intense thing that I ran on it. The other thing that really shocked me out the review is you pointed out that apart from battery life where Apple is still just like way ahead of everybody, performance wise, Intel is making some products that can compete. Yeah. So this year, we just went, we just came back from CES.

AMD and Intel both announced these just absolutely wild chips. There's like, Intel has a 24 core chip. AMD has a 16 core chip, and that's not a big little one. That's like a full 16 power cores. I would expect these chips to be competitive with Apple on like Cinevent scores. And so we are in a very different landscape from the landscape we were in when the M1 Max came out where Intel was just not even holding a candle to its performance. Where we do not expect Intel and AMD to compete is battery life. And I don't want to make pronouncements before I've tested the chips, but when I was,

was talking to Jason Banda from AMD at CES. He was telling me basically like, yeah, we're not targeting an audience that cares about battery life with this chip. This is really for people who don't unplug the laptop. Those weren't the exact words, but that was the sentiment I got from, you know, talking to a number of different people who were involved in the making of that stuff. Richard, what were you saying? I said that's one way to describe it.

And another thing that I noticed, the gaming performance is noticeably better. We've got a lot more GPU power here, and it seems like if you want to use your MacBook pro to play games. I don't do that. I don't recommend doing that. But if you want to do it, I just need a caveat of that. But if you want to buy a MacBook Pro and play a ton of games on it, we saw around a 20% increase in graphic performance. And that, you know, that's a noticeably better gaming experience.

It just means, like, game developers have to actually develop for the Mac. And we're seeing more of that. Apple is courting these developers. These developers are starting to seem a little more interested. There's more you can play now than you could a couple of years ago. This is such a low bar. It's the lowest bar. The bar is on the floor.

But it's going to, it's going up. Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like this, and I hate to make this comparison for all kinds of reasons. But if I had to make a comparison, I think it's competitive with the RTX 3070. Okay. Oh, my God. They're coming over the walls with pitchforks. They're coming with pitchforks.

I only say that to sort of put it the way you can think about it or the way you can classify it is like that is the kind of, if you were thinking about like what kind of power do I know. need. If that is the kind of graphic power you are looking for, this is the computer that will give you that. Cool. Which doesn't mean, doesn't mean buy it to play games. And you also can't do creepy staring down the camera lens with your Apple laptop. Well, apparently you can do on FaceTime. Except for on FaceTime. No, you can do that? I don't, can you, hold on. Is that only on the phone? Oh, I'm not running the latest version of macOS. It might only be on the phone. This is going to make for both horrible video and audio. Yeah. Let's just say this The other thing that caught me was basically the only other change here is an HGMI spec change.

2.1. I mean, you mean, what show is this? We need to talk about the HDMI spec change for the next hour. Max don't do HDMI CEC. This is something I hadn't thought about, but I just learned last week. It's such as strange a mission to. Yeah, because they don't do CEC. So you cannot, like, a Mac right now is not a recommended product for your home theater system.

And it used to be 20 years ago When the Mac Mini first came out I'm sorry What kind of piracy situation Do you need a Mac in your home theater for? You know what? Sometimes you just need to acquire things from the internet And you don't want to like

Then transfer them over You just want it fast Can I tell a very tangential story? You know the story Alex actually is part of the story So I'm off Twitter I got to fill the time Yeah

There's hours to reclaim now that the Twitter is not on my phone. Yes, I look at Twitter on the desktop every now and again. Sometimes I might send a tweet and then 500 people tweeted me like, I thought you quit Twitter. It's great. Anyway, not my phone. So I'm trying all these new things. I'm trying not to immediately fill it with more feeds.

Yeah. Right? You're not trying to quit cigarettes and immediately pick up nicotine gun. You're like, I'm trying to rewire the brain. So this last week, Apple News, because I pay for Apple One. Did you know there's a magazine when I was a kid called Stereo Review? It is now turned into a magazine called Time Division. They do not publish the Apple News format.

They publish as just PDFs of a print magazine, which is like super fun to read. Getting back to the source. It's good, man. Like reading a giant PDF magazine on iPad is like, maybe Steve Jobs is on to something. Full page print ad for Samsung HDR 10 in this last. It's beautiful. I mean, it's beautiful. But they had letters to the editor about the kaleid escape, which is like a $5,000, $8,000.

Yeah. Lossless audio, high bit rate. streaming thing. It's the best of the best. The highest quality digital video player. The people who own this also have like home theater systems. You know they custom tag all the movies. Yes.

To trigger home automation points as you're watching them. So when the credits come on, you can trigger the lights to come on in your house. I need to own this. I want this so like Liam's like losing his mind. This is like Liam's stream. So like reading a letter to editor about it. And like the last line is I'm incarcerated and this is how I keep up with news. And it's like, well, first Alex

immediately Googles. So we can't figure out who it is. I'm just telling you, no matter where you go, the AV nerds are like, I need to know. They need to know. Alex's people are everywhere. And now I feel bad that I'm like, who has a Mac Mini in our home theater setup? Because

it's the guy in jail, right? In Studio review. He's like, he's got like the little clear Mac Mini. They've taken all that else so you can see the inside. He's ready. He's got a sick system in there. Anyway, if anybody has a collider Please please let me know. And I desperately want to know how you've coded your home automations to trigger with the custom triggers in the movie files.

I'm just thinking of like panic room and then all of the window shades come down when they go into the room. And you're like, oh, it's so immersive. 3DX. I read the actual review in the middle of it. They're like, fast and furious seven, which great. I'm like, it doesn't matter. It's all the same in the end. All right, HGMI 2.

All I had to do to start this conversation was mention HDMACC. And there we go. I told you what show it is. So the only reason that you really need 2.1 is 8K, which you can support. Great. But then it's really 144 hertz refresh rates, which is only for gaming. Yeah. Which, I mean, you know, if you bump the settings way down on Tumriter, you can maybe get there.

Wait, so you can't, you can't run 4K 144 on this thing? We got at 1920 by 1,200, we got, I think, 103. FPS. What game was it? Tomb Raider. So you didn't run something like the classic Civilization 4? I think that would have gotten 144. I mean, I'm sure there are...

Like a mostly static game? Open up SimCity. I'm sure there are games where... I mean, you can find a game where you'll get that. If you really want to do e-sports on your MacBook Pro 16 with M1 Max and that M2MX and that's your Europe choice. Bullied if you try to do e-sports on a Mac. I mean, I would bully you. Yeah, I would bully you.

Like, why did you spend that much? At minimum, that's just such a waste of your money. All right, so these feel like solid incremental upgrades. Yeah, I mean, and I, you know, incremental upgrade is like a hot button word to use. I don't say that to mean that this is like an inadequate upgrade or a boring upgrade or like objectionable, incremental in the sense that, you know, it's around a 20% CPU uplift and a 10 to 15-ish percent single core. And a lot more battery. I mean, I think we're kind of discounting the battery.

And a lot more battery. Because I'm dying to know what the battery life in the M2 Pro is. I have the whole weekend blocked out. We're going to see if I can run it down. I've canceled plans. It took you the whole weekend. It was agonizing. I've canceled plans.

We're going to sit down. We're going to run. We're going to edit on it until it dies. But yeah, I don't mean to say it's unexciting. It's exciting to see that, you know, these are increasing how quickly people can do their work. they're increasing, you know, the number of things they can cram into a workday. The most exciting upgrade for me is the battery life. And that is what it would make biggest difference in, you know, the workload for someone like me.

But that also goes to show somewhat that I'm not really the target audience for this kind of device. You're not the stealthy mobile rendering ninja. No, I'm not. Maybe for my e-sports. Yeah. No, no, but you're a person who might work an entire day on your laptop. You've been in different places. You've moved from location to location.

You didn't plug it in. You went to sleep. You didn't plug it in. You wake up. You have something you need to do. I can't wait. I can't wait. You can't plug it in again.

It'll be fine. Can we do a challenge for you guys when you go to WWDC where you just take a 16-inch MacPro and don't charge it the entire time you're there? No, because we have to get our work done. And that is the environment where we actually end up killing the batteries. Because you're in a really RF-constrained environment.

So your Wi-Fi radio is like hunting a lot. And that's actually bizarrely the thing that always ends up coming back. Oh, interesting. Yeah, the other thing and I mentioned in this review, I actually am almost as excited to see what kinds of discounts

we see on the M1 Pro and M1 Max, because if those laptops go below $2,000, I'm going to have I can't say this for sure. I would not be surprised if I have a real hard time recommending any 15 or 16 inch laptop that's not

those, because that is just going to be such a, like, wildly good buy for a lower price than this. Yeah. I'm actually, I feel the same way about the Mac Minis. Yeah. Right, like, if this generation of Mac Minis ever sees a discount with the M2 Pro in it, right now it's like sitting at $600, $500, $5.99. If that thing gets dips anywhere below five, it's like, oh.

So $5.50, no. No, it's like $4.99.99. I'm like, uh, 4-50, done. You just didn't even think. Because it's the longevity of that machine given its performance envelope. Yeah. For the things you want to do with a Mac Mini, you're like, I'm going to have this computer for 15 years. But you won't be able to put it in your home theater system.

You won't be able to. That's how you get a kaleidscape. If the kaleidoscape, people are listening, which I'm sure they are. Yes, 100%. The first time we've ever mentioned this product on this podcast. They're like sitting up right now. Send Alex a Kaleiscape. I want to try one out.

Please. It's a client server system. Yeah. So if you just buy the client, you still can't do anything. You have to buy a separate, like, 64 gigabyte servers. Huge servers. And I was trying to price them out, but it's one of those websites where you go, and they're, like, call us for a quote. Yeah.

That's good. It's good. Never mind. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the elephant in the room when you're reviewing something like that's and, you know, sort of the caveat you have to make when you say anything good about it is, like, these are really expensive.

Like they're really great. There are lots of great things about them. The cheapest M2 max unit is like over $3,000. It is really inaccessible laptop for many, many people. But so I'm sort of still, I'm still, you know, I think it's great. I still see it as kind of a niche purchased because it is in that high price point. The M1 Max and the M1 Pro are moving. The more discounted they are, the much closer they are to being like very accessible

mainstream purchases, or certainly more so than, the M2 devices. Again, that M1 Max, I felt like didn't quite have the bad. It had the performance, but most people don't need it. Because it's mostly like extra GPU performance, right? Yeah.

And like, what are you going to do? Play games on this thing? Yes. Alex. Crusader Kings 3. He's going to play 2-4. It's the M1 Pro if it comes down. Then, like, that thing is,

it's in such a sweet spot. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my device is usually. And I think that based on, we haven't gone to fully benchmark and break down the M2 Pro laptop yet. We do have the M2 Pro Mac Mini, so we have a sense of how that's going to perform. We'll have more updates next week about how the laptop specifically compare. But based on what we are seeing so far, I imagine it's going to be a similar situation

where the M2 Pro is more of the everyone chip. Like that's what you can get if you, you know, are doing this stuff occasionally, like this stuff being like video stuff, code, the rendering that Nealai is doing all the time. If you are buying this laptop... In your car. I'm rendering bitcoins on the go left and right. If you are buying this primarily to do a graphically intensive task, then the M2 Max, you'll have a better time. It will save you, you know, if your job requires you to do all this stuff really fast, the M2 Max will save you time. But the increase is not such that it is super,

super necessary for like the average buyer to have it. Yeah. All right. We got to take a break. Monica, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. more after Monica's Marathon M2 Pro battery testing session. We'll see. She's going to come out the other side like a skeleton. I'll be just a zombie, yeah. We'll have more, we'll have updates on that. We've got to take a break.

We'll be right back. We'll be right 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 A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot-com from day one.

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Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Let's time to talk about trouble in Alphabet City. Big trouble in Alphabet City. Which is a real neighborhood here in New York City. Yeah, but this is a different alphabet. To normal people, if you say there's trouble in Alphabet City, they'll be like, what, did a trust fund baby run over a car?

Yes. Did someone not get into the club? That's not what's happening here. No. It's way less fun. Yeah. So lots of Google news this week. They laid off 12,000 people on Friday.

First mass layoffs in Google history, major culture change for Google. They've never done it before. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, back at the company to talk it over with Sundar. Yeah. Obviously, they're the founders. No one knows where they've been for years. Like, Sergey is just like out.

Just like part of the raging. Yeah. Larry's trying to fly a taxi. He landed in. Larry Page has like five flying. car startups. I think it's down to like three or maybe two. Oh, it's just two. All right. But they're back in the building

at Google because they got to refocus. Big New York Times story about Google calling a code red over chat GPT. We can get all to that. They'll have 12,000 people. Seemingly at random. I'm sure that, you know, there are reports that they had hundreds of executives all together to make sure they made

the right decisions. But, you know, very senior people who've been in Google for eight, 10, 12 years, clip to very junior people who actually like, you know, It's 12,000 people, a lot of people. Yeah. So, like, I've seen TikToks from Google employees. So, like, I just walked out of a client meeting.

Whoops. You know. And they're not done yet because they're all over the world. Lots of legal regulations, lots of different countries. So that's just the top line. And Liz actually has a great piece today about the layoffs across tech because Amazon had layoffs, Stripe had layoffs, Microsoft had layoffs, just down the line. And they all have the same reasoning, Spotify had layoffs.

Yeah. Which is, we thought the changes brought about by. the pandemic would stay. Which is, everybody really sat there and was like, we thought everybody's sitting in their houses baking bread and crying about missing the outdoors would just be the present forever. Yeah. Like, we're all going to shop online. We're going to watch all of our videos on YouTube and Netflix.

We're going to listen to everything on Spotify. We did a new clubhouse? Do you remember when the tech industry trying to convince this clubhouse was real? And like, I talk for a living. And I was like, y'all, uh-uh. Everybody's like, we got some. spaces now, though. We got spaces out of it. They thought that we were going to be buying brand new electronics and new laptops every six months for the next.

Logitech was like, webcams are back. I was like, I'm trying to keep Logitech in business, but I can only buy so many. Like, I have to put them somewhere at some point. Stare directly down the camera, the racing wheel. Logite had bad earnings this in this quarter. So this is the context, right? They're all blaming it on, we think. thought the pandemic trends would stay where they were. How could we know? It seems a little short-sighted. Yeah.

Like when Liz was writing this piece, she's like, what do you think? I was like, the first sentence is they didn't think we would go back outside. And so we can talk about why the layoffs are happening, all this stuff. But like, that's the reason that the tech companies are giving. And we talked about it on this show. I've talked about a decoder. Like, what are the first order changes of the pandemic? what are the second order changes?

Like remote work is a lasting second order change. Like a real thing on, I go on CNBC a lot. All cable news is like, screw it, you can be on Zoom now. They used to be like, you have to come in.

Yeah. School has changed. We don't have snow days anymore. I was just talking to my sister about my nephew. They had a snow day, but it was not a snow day. It was just a go-to-school at home. That should be illegal.

I don't know if there's anyone we can call about that. Little kids unionize right now. Exactly. The little kids union. That's great. I mean, so there's that stuff. But the top line of all these layoffs is we thought it was permanent. And that just seems so mistaken.

And I think for Google especially, it just rings really hollow to me. Yes. Especially when you compare it to Apple, who's notably not had layoffs and also didn't grow at nearly the same pace as these other companies. Other companies were doing 60, 70% growth year over year for. like their staff. And Apple is like 10, 20%, and so yeah, now these companies are going, oh, we need all that money back.

Never mind. Give it back. And they're, and they're, apart from META, which Mark Zuckerberg said the same thing. We saw this acceleration in pandemic, and now I've got to wind it back. Okay. But, you know, Google, they left their AI divisions alone, but they shut down their incubator,

which does all their 20% time projects. They're shutting down all these, like, weird other bets they're doing. They're like health science, division of alphabet. Like, they're trying to refocus on the core of Google. I think a lot of people have learned from Elon.

Like, I just get rid of, like, most of the company. And, like, yeah, it'll be a little crappier, but... It's still ghost. And we have yet to see. So that's, like, the big context for Google, right? They just had this, like, very traumatic event. Yeah. And, like, maybe the whole

tech industry is just copycatting each other. Liz has great quotes in her piece. Like, a management professor at Stanford is, like, everyone's an idiot. He's like, it's morons being morons. What are you on with it? It's very good. But that's a broader context.

But then specifically Google. Right? You look at all the other companies. Amazon, it's like, oh, maybe they built too much warehouse capacity to letting people off. Microsoft, they're like shut down HoloLens and a bunch of weird

surface stuff that people weren't going to buy. PC shipments are down because the pandemic is over and everyone already bought their new PC. Still Microsoft. They're going to be fun. Yeah. Google is like, oh, they did all of this. They fired 12,000 people.

The government is, suing them. We should talk about this ad tech lawsuit. The second big antitrust lawsuit against Google, which it's, ad tech is a little biased here, but yeah. We're a little biased here. You know how I feel about the web? That's a big deal. And then they are on the run from chat GPT. We talked about this a little bit last week. You just like add up this week for Google. And you're like, oh, this is the most existential threats a company can face at the same time. Yeah. This is

way different than like the pixel comes out and does not great numbers. This is their core business is under attack from many different avenues. And like, I think the Chat GPT Avenue is not actually the big existential threat that they feel it is. But the stuff going on with the DOJ, that feels really, really big and important to me potentially, much more so than the Chat GPT. But that feels like more of a crisis of like, what are we as a company? Yeah. Richard Royce said? And all of these things are happening at once. It's just something that we really have never seen for Google, like since it came on the scene, that they've had all of this a real competitor that maybe they aren't ready for in a space that they aren't ready for. The pressures of regulators are higher than they've ever been because everyone has a reason to take a hammer to big tech.

It's just a way that you can score points as a politician, as you've pointed out many times, Nelai. And I don't know. I can't remember a time since Google has existed that we've seen them on. on the back foot like this. Yeah, it's tough. And, you know, my theory about Google is people don't take it seriously because it's called Google. Like, it's hard to see the company for what it is.

Yeah. Because it's called Google and it, you know, it very, and for a good reason, it maintains this image of being like a goofball place for smart people to do smart stuff. Well, I worked really hard of that whole do-no evil thing, which they've gotten rid of. Yeah, it's gone. They had a movie about working, they made a movie about getting jobs. There's like, no one will see. Yeah.

Real Hollywood star. and it's an advertising company. Like, and for some reason we don't think of it that way. Well, you know, it's funny, like big advertising companies,

they love to think of themselves as like creative, progressive shops, and then at the end of the day, they're like selling you cigarettes and people. It's like fine. Google is an advertising company, but they're like an ad tech company.

And so this is what this lawsuit really gets at is most of what we as consumers experience of Google are the products, in particularly the two, search and YouTube, Gmail. Great. And they're good products. People like them.

They're the industry. leader. It's very hard to compete with Google search in particular. But the other side of Google, the business of Google, is as ruthlessly competitive as any company. Yeah. And it's run by advertising executives and salespeople and money people. And they are not shy. And so they are not shy about winning whatever competition they're in or foreclosing competition or protecting their monopoly. So you see this lawsuit, it's got 194 pages long. It's fun to read in the sense that any lawsuit that explains what ad tech is and how it works. I read it. I read it. I recommend you go read the complaint. It's just the complaint. It's a bunch

allegations, but, you know, they've obviously done a bunch of discovery. They have a lot of quotes from executives. And what you find is that when you load a webpage, when you load one of our web pages or the Times webpage or any publisher, any website really that has ads on it, there's a whole stack of technology. It's called the AdTech stack. And there's lots of components. and at every layer of the stack, Google owns either the one or two product, and they make it so that all those products work better together and they charge more money that Google then skims off

at another layer of the stack. And they have ruthlessly operated this system to basically be the winner. There's no way to compete with him. And all this other stuff that Google has done in the past, like Google AMP, Google discuss, like these products that Google makes, they use them to force people back,

into their advertising ecosystem. The funnel. It's like a ruthless money machine. Yeah. And so if you, just like to abstract it, the way to think about it is Apple's revenue platform that we've complained about many times is the iPhone and the app store. Right. Right.

And at the end of the day, Tim Cook's goal is that every time you push any button on your phone, he gets money. He gets money. And you can just see that they ruthlessly optimized for that. And people can argue about whether that's good or that's bad. you can have antitrust lawsuits or laws in Congress or the Europeans can get out of you. But like that's the goal and you can see how they get there. Yeah.

You can see that, you know, Amazon's revenue platform is its store and it's AWS business. And their goal is to get you to buy everything from Amazon and for every app to use AWS cloud search writer. You can do this with Microsoft. You can do this all these companies. Google's revenue platform is the web. Yeah. And so it's hard to see where it begins and ends because you're not.

It's so ubiquitous. It's just everywhere. It's everywhere. So you forget that all these ads are being served to you by Google, in particular by a company Google acquired called Double Click. And they run this product called DFP, Double Click for Publishers, what they change to Google Ads Manor. Every still calls DFP. And that thing that they own, the ad server is like hard coded to prefer Google's ad exchanges. It's hard, and that is hard coded to prefer Google's demand side platform.

These are all just like ad tech words. whatever. It's just like everywhere you go, the whole chain is Google. And so the government's case against Google is you bought up all the competitors at every layer of the stack. You used your dominance in one layer of the stack to achieve dominance in another layer of the stack. And now you're charging higher prices, which every other time we talk about antitrust, we're like, we got to change this thing from the consumer welfare theory where there's no higher prices because everything's free. We got to like invent this new. This is just like old school 1980s. Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, antitrust.

It's like, oh, you bought all this shit, and now the prices went up. And so, like, maybe they got, like, you know, usually every time there's a loss of Amazon's like, but people love Amazon Prime. Like, you know, Apple's like the App Store made everyone happier today. Everybody loves Netflix. This is like a bunch of advertisers. Like, you robbed us. Yeah. And like Google's Google can't be like, people love web advertising.

Like, they're in a tough spot with this shit. That's a much harder case to me. Yeah. And so, like, I just see this as it's not a novel legal theory. It's not something like Lena Con invention. Yeah. It's a class, the people who want the lawsuit are the media, advertising companies, other e-commerce companies.

Like, they all see it that, oh, we're losing revenue, we're losing profit margin into Google. There's real money at stake. And this is Google's, like, this is the money. Yeah. Right. If you uncouple the web from Google, I'm not sure. sure what the web looks like. Duck, Duck, Duck, Go.

Like, if people are doing SEO spam for Duck, Gut, Go, like, you found it, like, the nichest of niche interests. You've got three customers. Here's what I do. I cosplay is a specific Victorian lord, and I do SEO for Duck, Duck, Go. What are you doing? I'm telling you, what we're going to do, we're going to rebuild AskG. It's going to be real people.

It's just going to be a guy. It's just going to ask a guy. he's going to tell you something. And similar to AI, it may or may not be true. But you'll get a response. Yeah, you think chat GPT is just a bunch of cosplayers. Obviously. I mean, this to me, so you just add this up.

It's on the one hand, and I don't think this is true at all, but people are out there freaking out the stock market by saying chat GPT is going to replace Google. Yeah. And it's like, mostly what you experience of chat GPT is the good stuff. If you actually sit around trying to use chat, DVD, you're like, this seems like not very good. Yeah.

It's very impressive, but you're seeing it filtered through millions of people only showing you the best stuff. Resource intensive and expensive to use. Yeah, by the way, we got it wrong in the show. In classic TikTok strategy,

we published the thing we said wrong, and that is our most viewed TikTok. Yes. That's all for you guys. Misinformation. We gotcha. You clicked, didn't you? No, we got it wrong.

We were getting wrong. It's on Azure. Microsoft, I would say, has huge investment, Open Eye. They just made a bigger investment. Sam Altman's CEO. So it is not very expensive to run right now. They need to make it cheaper. It is not as cheap as Google searches per query.

It's still like more resource-intensive than Google search. But you see Microsoft is like, oh, we don't have to do Bing. We can just answer the questions directly with chat GPT. All right, maybe that's right. BuzzFeed today announced that it's going to start having chat GPT write the quizzes. Oh, yeah. Mia has done a lot of great reporting on our competitors, CNET. which I have very bittersweet feelings with us.

CNET has been the thing that we have competed against. They're our enemy. Since we are founding, right? They're like, we got to beat CET. They're like, the bastion. And they got bought by this private equity company. And now they're like, publish SEO spam written by robots. Because they are flooding Google to try to win searches and then put ads on those pages.

The ads are served by Google. Basically, they're just chasing Google. When I say I don't know what the shape of the web is without Google, it's you can, CNET's ownership can be like everybody automates their mortgage rate stories. What they have not accounted for is why does CNET publish mortgage rate stories? And the answer is because they want to win the Google searches. So that when you buy a mortgage, you've come through their

affiliate link and they get a huge cut of that. Do you know when you sign it for a credit card and like the points guy is great? When you send it for a credit card, it's all owned by the same company. It's like almost $900 to sign up in an affiliate rank. By the way, we are going to start recommending credit cards, and mortgage.com. And mortgages. Sign up with us.

You just look at that system. Yeah. And you're like, on the one hand, people think whether or not it's true, that it will be disrupted by AI chatbot technology, and Microsoft is making an investment. And Google cannot replace, like regulators around the world will destroy Google if Google stops sending traffic to people, scrapes their data into a language model,

and then starts answering questions directly. Yeah. I just don't think that's going to go well for them. Well, I think everybody would just also probably frantically start delisting and being all in on duck, dot, go. Alex is a new CEO of Doc.com. Please invest. Directly to be.

Vindmo. And then on the flip side, the AI has been used to flood the search results with garbage. Right? So Google is in like a war of attrition against SEO spammers who now have an even cheaper way of filling out their content forms. And then the government's like, also your money is evil. And we want to, oh, that's forgot to say this. The government is asking to break up Google's ad tech division. They want to spin off double click for.

publishers and AdEx, which is their exchange. So like, just imagine being like Sundar Pichai. Right? You're like, on the one hand, I've got to kill the cash cow and replace it with the technology we developed, our own LLMs, Lambda and others. Yeah. Which are superior to chat cheap T, but we haven't released because we have ethical concerns about it.

Whoops. But our competitor, Microsoft has no such qualms. They're just going to do it. Meanwhile, our cash cow search is being turned into a worse product by the same chat GPT wielding SEO spammers. Oh, and the government wants to break us up. And it's all kind of of Google's own making too, right? Like Google became so dominant.

Everybody is chasing to be on Google, seeking the fastest, easiest way to get a tiny piece of the pie that Google has made itself. Yeah. So like, it's kind of its own fault. Yes. Success is like what's brought in here, right? Yeah. I mean, this is a very smart company.

I think Sunura is a great CEO. I think he's ruthless when he needs to be and he's kind of needs to be. He's very thoughtful, he knows how to make money. We've interviewed him many times. Yeah. He is a very thoughtful and considered man.

I just am like, his choice is effectively, all right, it's everyone on the web, it's governments around the world, it's the Department of Justice, who am I going to piss off? Right? Because like, whatever move he makes

is going to piss off like two of those entities. Yeah. And I just think that is such a difficult. gold place to me. So they're, like I said, there's reporting out that Google is called a code red about chat GPD. They do have all this AI technology. They have incepted this meme that Google invented the T in chat GPT. It stands for Transformers. It's true. They've demoed it many times. Go back and watch any Google I.O. Like, there's a weird

middle segment where Sundar is like, now I will talk to a fire hydrant as though it's a kitty. And it's like, I know what's going on, but like they can do it. When they had everybody calling, you could just like ask for it to call and make a reservation for you. that's the transformer model. Okay. That's a different conversationally. They've been demoing the transformer the transformer large language models.

And like I think the last demo was either this past year or the year before, he like asked Pluto if it was a planet. That's right. And Pluto was like kind of sad, you know? I was like, well, I'll get by myself. I don't really know what's going on. But what they were demoing is effectively the same technology as chat GPT. So they have it.

They are not releasing it because they've thought until now. it is unethical to what people talk to a robot that will confidently lie to them. Yes. And it is unethical. Microsoft is like, whatever, man. Like, we lost it mobile. We lost on the web. We lost it search.

We're going to do something. Check out this lying a robot. With Bing. But that's the issue that they're running into now. So they're trying to launch all these AI products. They've got their search issues that you've laid out. But something that you've talked about a lot when we talk about. about these antitrust and these massive tech companies is that every single thing that they launch

isn't big enough to really have any impact on their core product and all the money that it makes. So they can have all these new AI things. Sundar, he can, he can do all of these. They say they're going to launch 20 new AI products. None of them matter. None of them will replace what he has. Yeah. The New York Times described all of these products that they are going to try to make.

They're doing all the AI things that you've heard of that everyone else is doing, maybe something that we haven't heard of. We're going to see them all at I. but none of them are bigger than advertising. And that's the thing that's under direct threat. And it's under the threat, again, in two different, no, it's under direct threat in three different ways, right? Yeah. The demand side of it, we talked to this last week, the demand side of it is people might search TikTok or ask chat GBT or something else instead.

Yeah. Or just search Reddit. People do that all the time. The supply side of it is Futurism, which is also done a great job reporting on the CIA controversy. Yeah, great headline last week that's like the SES spammers are thrilled at Google's non-response to CN's AI issues. Like, and they're like in the dark web forums and the SDS spammers are like, light it up, boys. Because that is a pure volume game for them, right? You flood the internet with garbage content.

You hope that people, you hope it ranks anywhere. You hope you collect some traffic. You show some garbage ads and you take your pennies and you just stack pennies until you've made dollars. and if you can make webpages for nothing with an AI product, you can stack those pennies pretty fast, right? And Google just like needs to have an answer to this. And I don't think that they've arrived at one where they're like,

we will preserve the quality of Google search without irritating everyone or compete with chat GPT without irritating everyone. And in the middle of it, to Richard's point, the government's like, you know the machine that makes money that you're trying to fix? What if we took two-thirds of it away and spun it off in a different company?

And I just like I'm just like looking at this week for Google. I'm like this is one of the most pivotal weeks for one of like we talk about the you know this set of fame companies like every week. We're never like man Netflix is having an existential week. Whenever you know like yeah, whenever like oh Apple could be five companies tomorrow. Like this is like one of the most consequential existential weeks for Google that I can think of for a big tech company in a like a long time. We're potentially five years down the line.

We're looking at this week is like, oh, that was. the beginning of a total re-architecting of the web. Yeah. I do wonder, you know, I've been knocking on the chat GPT plan to, like, compete with it. I wonder how much of that plan, though, is also to figure out how to combat it and the spam it creates on Google. Because, like, if you go and you create a new competitor for it and figure out all the inner workings, you theoretically could, like, figure out how to highlight it and spot it.

I think Casey and Platformer spotlighted some of this where he's like, Google does have AI detection systems. It can, because it knows the training data sets, it knows what it looks like on the other side. And there's this concept of like radioactive data where you seed the models with some stuff where you know what outputs it will generate and you can detect it even better.

We'll see. I think we're in the middle of an armist race for Google. I love it. 12,000, it's the first time the company's ever had layouts of the scale. Never mind. I don't love it. I just think it's going to be weird. All right, we got to take a break. We come back.

We talk about Tesla earnings. We had a little of lightning round. some Microsoft in there. We're right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing

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Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. All right, we're back. I don't know why I thought we could get through Tesla and a lightning around in the last segment here. I believe in us. We're going to go really fast. We're just going to accelerate it. Listen to us at 3X.

So we're going to talk fast and they have to listen to us 3X? Do a line of Coke first. Don't do a line of Coke. This is not an endorsement of cocaine. Sorry. I heard specifically, I was told by an executive at this company that I had a job to do. And what else can I do? was the job doing cocaine?

Which exact? All right. It's fun. Was that not, was that not, was that not, was that not in the contract? Because our start, our startup days are over. There was a time. Yeah. Again, this was the time when we were doing the video Vergecast.

The last time. Like I said, carmic debt, we are just immediately running up the bill again. Just, who, you turn the cameras on. Alex is like, here's what you should do, kids. cocaine. There's a whole line. All right. We do have to get through this.

Please just don't tell your parents about that. Yeah. Don't do that. It's bad. Just don't let him know any of that happened. All right. Lots of Tesla. Tesla earnings.

Elon's on trial for the 420. So he was a 420 tweet. Finally back. He is very upset about being on trial. Yeah. He's attacked the plaintiff's lawyer several times. It's a class action. It's a group of investors who feel that they lost money

because Elon tweeted taking Tesla private at 420 a share, funding secured. Which was a thing that the SEC was also like, no. Yeah, the judge has instructed the jury in this case to proceed knowing the tweet was a lie. So, like, Elon's on his back foot. And so he's in the courtroom. He's taking the stand. We've been covering it.

but he's basically said to the plaintiff's lawyer, like, you don't represent my actual investors. Yeah. You're just like a vulture, which is very funny. The judge got mad at him. He said that he knows that he's popular because he has so many Twitter followers.

Oh, buddy. That's tough. That's a tough one. Just, I would say he's complained of back pain. Yeah. So just a very rough week for you on. He did say the 420 tweet was not about anything in particular as well. Oh, he said it wasn't.

He said it wasn't a weed joke. He said it was a real number that was a 20% premium over the share price. Sure. For which again, he was castigated by the judge because the judge was like, but the treat was a lie. It's a lot. So he's been on the stand. There's a lot of coverage there. Obviously, that trial is mostly mechanical about injury to these shareholders.

But Elon's witness stand, we're not going to not cover it. We're going to watch. So that's happening at the same time Tesla had earnings. Richard earnings did pretty well. They actually made more money in 2020. than they ever did before. So it's amazing the way that we talk about the chaos, the way that his focus on Twitter

may have taken away from Tesla or any number of other things. Tesla is still making money. They are still making more cars than they did before. They are relying less on those credits that they sell to other companies for revenue. They are acting like an actual car company. Amazing.

Building vehicles that people buy. They showed off the semi-finally. The cyber truck will arrive someday. So they pushed. In 2024. They pushed the Cybertruck. Yeah. They said, you know, the factory construction is underway.

This is on the earnings call. No update on the windshield wipers situation. Zero. I swear to God, they are still working on the Cybers. That's what's holding it back. It's three wipers in a circle. I will accept no other answer. Just going to get super hot.

They have not solved this problem. Yeah. I guarantee you they have not solved this problem. It's amazing. But Cybertrucks still vaporware. But they lowered the price. of the three in the Y, sales skyrocketed. They say they have a new platform coming

that they're going to show with their investor day. So they're stuff. Yeah, so Tesla's moving. Obviously, he got some questions about Twitter. He, again, said that he didn't think Twitter was a distraction. That it's a good marketing channel for Tesla. Look at my followers. Yeah, I don't know, man.

At the same time, Twitter has run just face first into what I might be so bold as to call a predictable welcome to hell situation in which the government of India, the Modi administration in India, is very upset about a BBC documentary that looks at riots instead of Gadroth, Hindu versus Muslim riots. They're very, very bad. And basically places a lot of the blame for these riots with the current Prime Minister of Indian Randam Modi. This is like not a surprise to anyone that, like, he was inciting facts.

actor in these riots or that he allowed it to happen. Like, he's a Hindu nationalist. That's what this party is done for. This happened in 2014. This has been the accusation all along. BBC just made a documentary about it. If you weren't interested in social, you should watch a documentary.

Government of India has strict censorship laws. Like super strict censorship laws. They require social media companies to have national offices staffed by locals so that they can threaten to arrest those locals if you do not comply with their censorship laws. Well, I don't want to work. You do not want, yeah, this is like, and this is like one of those things where you can claim to be a free speech warrior, you are going to end up asking yourself if you would like to do business in India, one of the largest countries in the world. And if you do want to do business in India, you have to staff an office full of potential hostages for the Indian government to take if you do not comply with their censorship demands.

Well, real problem. So India sees this documentary, again, produced by the BBC. I have many opinions of the BBC, but they at least attempt to be journalistically rigorous. It says a thing that people have been saying for a long time. They hate it.

Right. This attacks the government of India. This is not respectful of it, whatever. The justification, take it down, YouTube, Twitter, internet archive. Remove your links to this thing. So YouTube caves, which is unsurprising for YouTube.

They have the office there. They do it. This is their stance, right? This is like tight rope balancing act that all the big platforms have done. Where do we comply? Where do we stand up for our users? All right, we're taking this one down. We're not serving in India. You can get it here.

But in India, you don't can see it. By the way, Indian YouTube flooded with Indians talking about the video that was removed. Did this work? Who knows? VPNs exist. Stry as an effect. Does this censorship work on the internet? Who knows? Yeah. That's what YouTube does. And on balance, right?

YouTube is like, they have a lot of lawyers. A lot of Google policy people who are like actively are you going to sad. Twitter just takes it down. And it's like, does Twitter have a policy team anymore? Do they know that the government is removing links to a BBC documentary? Do they know that their owner is like Elon Musk who's like, I believe in free speech. I'm a free speech absolutist.

I don't know. People ask Elon about it. He's like, I can't keep on top of everything all the time. No. I mean, this is it, right? If like you are against government censorship, these are the fights that you are going to have. Like this is a core fight for someone who says they are very, very much against government censorship.

So, Addie Reda Pace, you should read it. Her point is Elon has always said, I don't think companies should censor. If the people want things censored, they should pass a law. So that is just open support of government censorship. Yep. I don't think the people of India have voted on a lot of this documentary. But that's where we're at is this extremely fine, tight rope walk of what it actually means to support free speech

against the actual threat to free speech, which is government censorship. Yeah. And I think Elon, I think he's like back on the Tesla SpaceX trip. He's over the Twitter adventure. And it's just going to get worse. Richard, do you want to say something? Well, I just wanted to know, you know, if you support free speech, if anyone does support free speech, why didn't they spend $44 billion on a social network that no one wanted to buy? That's just what a real free speech supporter would have done.

Like Elon Musk, who does support free speech for people who have $44 billion and don't piss off the governments in countries that they're going to be. wanted to business. Yeah. I mean, again, I think that I should be made a king of Twitter. Elon, if you're listening,

I'll do it. It'll be expensive. Yeah, that's the title that I demand. I like it. King of Twitter. It'll be spending. You know, I ain't cheap.

Oh, no, they're not public. I was going to be like, do you go to earnings calls? But you wouldn't have to because you're the king of Twitter. There's one earnings call you have to go to

and it will be extremely annoying. Audience of one. We'll see. I'm just saying like Tesla's back on track. They need new cars. they're facing an onslaught of competition this year. Most of those cars are still vaporware. Like, can you get an F-150 lightning?

No, you cannot. No, you cannot. Can you get a Rivian? No, you cannot. Can you get a cyber truck? Fair enough. Can you get a Cadillac lyric? No, you cannot.

Like, the competition is coming as a drum that has been beaten, but the cars are not shipping. Yeah. Once they start shipping, once the ad dollars flow through Google's ecosystem, I think Tesla is going to have. to like figure out what to do. But what they know they can do right now is,

there's got a lower prices. People are just going to show up. And I think I'm excited for actual competition in the EV market. I think that'll be good. But the moment Elon has to turn his attention back to governments around the world want to censor Twitter and it's like, that's a powder keg. Because he doesn't want to really turn there. He's already said if you make a law and we're just going to abide by that law.

So if the government comes to us and says take it down, we're going to take it down. But if the United States government does that, he gets real mad. Because the First Amendment. He doesn't care about that. I know. That's what I'm saying. He's like, he's got that. So he doesn't want to take anything down in America, right?

Yeah, I don't know. But he wants to make it the safest place in the world for advertisers. It's like, it's, it's. Yeah. When I say this is a welcome to hell problem, this is like... None of it makes sense. The other social networks, you know that financial time is set up a master of instance. Everyone wants us to set up a massive instance.

By the way, thank you to the one Vergecast listener who just went off and did it. Yes. And like, be. our own teams to study of a mass instance with activity pub, which has quick posts in it. Like, very good. Congratulations. Potentially IP issue.

But for now, I've just, I'm overlooking it. It's great. I love it. Thank you so much. Really excited for you to talk about that in the court case in six months. Yes. If this is opposing counsel's attorney, I didn't mean it. I'm not Naila Patel.

This is a deep fake. You can tell it because I'm looking directly into the camera. I'm not me Right now Deep fake is saying this in Spanish Who knows what's happening The Financial Times set up a mass on server You see this?

Yeah They took it down They're like this is too hard Right no it's too much The escalating legal And server costs are too much We don't want to do this anymore Is this server cost

You have to be like Oh I can all see everyone's DMs Yeah We don't want this in our lives Very good Microsoft Also had earnings What's going on Microsoft?

Not good news. Pretty bad news at Microsoft. That is Intel, too. Yeah, I think there is a theme here, which is that everybody bought their laptops and computers in 2020 and 2021, and they didn't buy any in 2020, especially at the end of the year. So Microsoft's earnings were really down across all hardware. So that means Windows, the OEMs, they're not selling enough to the OEMs because the OEMs aren't selling enough laptops. They're not selling surface. because nobody wants to buy them.

They're not selling Xboxes, which was kind of an interesting one. Their cloud's holding strong. Azure is doing great. That's where they're putting a lot of their investments. And I think we saw also with their layoffs. Their layoffs really particularly hit hard a lot of those hardware divisions,

a lot of those places that are based in you owning the device and using all of it. So if you like that... Yeah, Microsoft's turning away from you. They don't care about you. I mean, they probably still care about you. they still have the business. They're not going to get rid of Windows.

They're going to put edge icons on your desktop to try to get you into Microsoft services. Yeah. But it was not good times for Microsoft. And we saw the same thing with Intel. Intel, again, their stuff's down. Chips are down because nobody is buying the laptops to put the chips in. So none of the laptop bakers are buying the chips. And the GPU business is real down.

To be fair, there's only like one GPU, two. There's not that many GPUs at Intel. So this is not a shock. Intel is also anticipating a 40% drop. year every year, next quarter, not good. So Intel's in trouble. They knew they were in trouble. They've been anticipating this, unlike a lot of the other companies.

They still miss a lot of their forecasts, right? Yeah. They didn't hit any of their marks. But they also were like, it's not going to be good. And it wasn't good. And they're like, it's going to be even worse. And it's going to be even worse. And I think they're really looking towards when they get these fabs up in, what,

2024, I think is when the first one's supposed to come online. In Ohio? Yeah. Yeah. So they're like, them and this in Tesla, they were like, just, just wait. Don't worry about 2020. We're going to back the cyber truck right up to our new fab. It's going to be great.

Roll out some three nanometer chips. We got this. We'll see. I mean, again, the theme of these tech layouts, you really should read Liz's piece. All of them are like, we just thought the pandemic would last forever. Yeah. We just thought people would buy a new laptop every year. And it's like, why did you think that?

It's like the best example I gave is like the whole TV industry thought 3D TV would work and last forever. Yes. And it's like, guys. James Cameron still thinks that, by the way. Some of the lightning around stuff, it was the big Taylor Swift T. Swift, T. Swift was not there. But they all, she was there. She was there in the fact that every senator quoted. She was there in every senator's comments where their interns or whoever had written in Taylor Swift lyrics.

It's good. We've got a big decoder episode about Ticketmaster Monopoly coming. another text stack. We're going to allow you to plug decoder just this once because... I'm just saying it's coming. I'm excited about it.

We were waiting for this hearing because we want to... And I was like, now I got us a bunch of old senators saying what did I get out of this? That's going to be good. Golden Eye remaster coming to Nintendo Switch and Xbox.

The big fight for GoldenEye is going to be who gets to play odd job when we all play together. Should we do a Vergecast Gov and I stream? I'm real bad at it. It's going to be great. Whenever David comes back from his break, he had a baby.

He's on break. He should take care of the baby. No, we're just giving him time. All right. But David can't have all this time to practice. He's got a baby. He's not practicing? He's practicing with, like, one hand.

He's holding that baby. He's got him in the little pompous. It's great. Yeah. Okay. I mean, you know, there's four of us. Yeah. By the way, it has local split screen multiplayer, which is like what I really want.

Perfect. It's going to be great. Very excited about that. TikTok has confirmed now after a point. in Forbes, that it can just make videos go viral whenever it wants. Shock. I'm just shocked by this news. Back in the Facebook video era, we would joke that Mark Zuckerberg just had a knob,

and you just like, turn it up. TikTok's like, oh, yeah, we have that knob, and you can pay us to turn it whenever you want. Just press the button. Just press the button. I feel like the TikTok balloon is going to pop. That story in Forbes. That's why the one video that really pops for us is there like, oh, Virch got it wrong. Yeah.

Crank it. I feel certain that TikTok is not actually an AI feed. It's just, that's the one. That's, it's just some dude. There's like 25 playlist. You could be on one. There's just some dude. Casey Kasem III is back there,

dropping videos into playlist. And that's all it is. And we're going to find out that all this time there was no AI. I'm very excited for that. It's actually really interesting because TikTok is so embedded in the music industry.

There's just a lot of pay to play to break a song on TikTok right now, which is fascinating. And then we got to end here, Alex. It's a downer. Yeah. But, you know, so the Vergecast, we have to end with Peacock. Comcast, head earnings.

Comcast, as you know, NBCU Division, minority investor in box media, the versus parent company, there's your disclosure. That was really good. What's going on with Peacock? So Peacock is not doing great. I truly believe that poker face is going to save it. Yeah. If you watch the show with Natasha Leone.

I almost, it's not out yet. Yeah, it just came out. It's out today. It's out today. some of us got to watch a little bit of it early. I swear I didn't watch six episodes. Some of us are in the Riders Guild, and they're East and Good Screeners, is what I just learned. It was great.

Highly, highly recommend it. But, yeah, Comcast overall, NBC Universal overall did face big losses. Peacock just recently surpassed a really big number for them. Guess how many subscribers? Six. 20 million. Hey, that's pretty good. Yeah.

What is it, a tenth of what Netflix is doing? I would just say it's more subscribers. that I have. Yeah. Like. Subscribe to my substack, everyone. I don't have one of those. I don't have one of those. I don't have a Twitter anymore.

What am I doing? Yeah. So it's taking losses and it's a loss on the Comcast balance sheet. I think we've always said in the go 90 scale where the zero means they're alive and the 90 means they're boot doomed. This is now like a 70 to 80. Wow. You're going to always 70, 80. I think so.

I think Peacock probably has the best chance of being the first big broadcast. streamer that goes, actually, this is not for us. I don't know what they're going to do, though. Are you sure that they'll do that or that they'll try and buy some other streamer that is also... Cool. They're not going to buy Paramount because Paramount has been like in this we're doing it by ourselves thing

before anybody else. And they have the Yellowstone verse. Yeah, they got the 1923. Oh my God, 1923 is so good. You know what every single year of American history, people in Montana have shot each other? With Tommy Guns. That show, we have been watching that show. It's Yellowstone.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, the conceit of, I don't know if, this is crazy we're talking on the Rochast. It's just, if you think about that show is having the lawyer's son, the business daughter, and then the call of duty son, it just like locks into place. We're like, all right, we need to have a call of duty cutscene in the middle of this episode. And it just always happens. It's so like the most compelling thing. Is it good TV?

I don't know. We've been watching it. It's very entertaining. But yeah, there's like, oh, the cut scene is here. Just bam, bam, bam. Yeah, look at it. And they're on horses. They introduce characters just for the Call of Duty son to murder them.

It's like very like, oh, that motherfucker's going to die. But he's sad about it. He's sad about it. He's sad about it. He feels grief. I think actually by season four, he's like, this is what I do. I just kill. Anyway, but that's, that peacock had, that's what Peacock had going for.

Yeah, peacock... The first four seasons. It's got the first four seasons. And now it's Paramount Plus. Paranout Plus has all. all of the adjacent shows. So it's got the fancy one with Harrison Ford. It's got the Sylvester Stallone one where he goes to Oklahoma to start a mob.

It's him and like Martin Star just out there mobbing up. I'll take it. It's great. I want to watch them all. See, that's why Peacock won't buy Paramount Plus. Yeah. They can't afford it. They're all in on the Taylorverse.

Yeah. So Peacock is not doing great. It has not had any hits. It's still hoping poker face. Like it's put a lot of time and energy. into making poker face the thing. This is the new show with Natasha Leone. It comes from Ryan Johnson who did Knives Out

and the Star Wars movies and stuff like that. So they're really... Ryan Johnson, a Verge fan. Yeah? Yeah. In fact, The Verge makes a cameo. I noticed that too. That's true.

It did. I screamed. I was with my mom and I was like, see, I have a job! I looked at my 17-year-old niece and nephew and said, that's cool, right? And they're like, it was cool. My mom did. She was like, it's fine.

Cigrat. So, yeah, Peacog, not doing great. I'll be surprised if it lasts. And I think the big concern, though, if something happens to Peacock, what happens to shows like Poker Face, which is a legitimate, like, great show. It's super, super entertaining.

But 20 million people max are going to be watching it because that's how many people have subscribed. Well, they're trying to get more people. We'll see. Yeah, so we'll see. We'll see. But you're putting him at 70 to 80 on that. I'm at 70 to 80.

Wow. All right. Big call from Alex Cranz. Yeah, sorry, guys. Peacock 70 to 80 on the go 90 scale of gym streaming services. Let us know what you think of Peacock and it's rating. on the Go 90 scale. You can tweet it out.

She's Alex H. Kranz. Wow. Thanks. Tweet it, Richard. He's at RJCC. Monica is at MC squared 96. I'm at Reckless. I do check it like once a day and just like all the tweets.

So if you want to get a like, you can still tweet at me. It'll just be delayed from what's happening. I'm trying to be off of feeds-based media for a little bit. It's nice. I do feel like I'm rewiring my brain. I have read a lot of magazines on PDF. God bless you have a new editor-in-chief of Sounded Vision is an ex-ABS4. is an ex-ABS forum poster.

That's where we are in, like, the media cycle. Perfect. We're like, the hardcore forum posters are now the editors-in-chief of, like, the legendary stereo. How many staff came from the Verge came from the Verge forums? A surprising amount. Yeah. It's a good path. I mean, I came from the Engadgett comments.

I love this. Pretty good. Don't look up those comments. Presumably anyone has deleted them all. You're good. Please don't. It's all going to be fine. Wednesday show.

on the Wednesday show. So on the Wednesday show, I'm talking to Sean Hollister about the steam deck. Do you think Sean wants to talk about? We almost got Liam, we almost bullied him into buying one. It was great. I'm also talking with Catherine Chindicasta about faking your own death online. Surprisingly common. Just recently happened with a romance novelist. Created a whole bunch of conversations. And then I don't know if I can talk about this last one yet. But we're going to have a really special one coming up next week as well. So you got to stay tuned. Until then to hear it, because it's going to be really good and exciting.

but I can't talk about it right now. It's going to be great. All right. You can call the Vergecast hotline, 866, Verge 11. Here's what I'll tell you about listener and our viewer feedback. Last week on the show, I was like, spatial audio sucks. Usually I say anything is bad. A flurry of responses.

Yeah. One. One person tweeted. And I was like, I don't know, it might be good. That's how I know. That's how I know. It sucks. But if you are that one person, 866, Verge 1-1.

I'm asking for the call. Call him. Just call me on. That's his number. All right. That's the Vergecast. Thank you for listening in your car. If you're watching this for the first time in years, we're so sorry.

We're not. Hi. Go home and do your cocaine. That's it. That's the Vergecast 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 Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.