The Vergecast - Apple mysteries and Google trials

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

It's been a week! The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz rejoin the studio to process all the tech news and announcements. Apple had its annual hardware event where the iPhone 15 and new Apple Watch lineup were shown off. Later, senior tech and policy reporter Adi Robertson joins the show to walk us through the US v Google antitrust trial that kicked off earlier in the week. Further reading: iPhone 15 event: all the news on Apple's new phones  Here's why Apple put a Thread radio in the iPhone 15 Pro  Rumors of Lightning’s death are just slightly exaggerated The iPhone Mini is officially gone, long live the iPhone Mini USB-C Backbone One controllers will be ‘upgraded’ to work with the iPhone 15 lineup. The iPhone is getting new ringtones with iOS 17 Apple announces more iOS 17 features coming later this year: Apple Music updates How Google plans to win its antitrust trial What to expect from the Google Search antitrust trial  US v. Google antitrust trial: updates Developers respond to Unity’s new pricing scheme Unity cancels town hall over reported death threats What happens when Google Search doesn't have the answers? Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over A storefront for robots The little search engine that couldn't Who killed Google Reader? 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

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome for a cast. The flagship podcast of the Dynamic Island. Again. Again. It's really the same show as last time. We've just slightly changed it a little bit.

And now everyone has to just as a group agree that it's important. Yeah, the island's so important. It's the most it has ever been. I'm your friend, Neil. I'm here. David Pierce is here. Hi. We're all in the studio.

We're all together. And you're back. The rage that people have felt about how long you've been gone, Neelai, I cannot describe to you. I am not people. David's like, get out of here. Alex Tran's here. I'm okay with Nealai being back. Okay. Yeah. You're sort of whatever about it. I'm happy. Yeah, it's nice. It's nice that we're all in the studio together. It is nice. I agree with that.

We're going to talk about some phones. Yeah. Talk about some stuff that happened this week that aren't, is it phones? Like, it's good times. I'm excited about that. I can spend hours talking about my newfound ability to crimp Ethernet cables, which is what I've been doing in my new home. That's what we're pivoting to. I can just talk about that the whole time. The number of YouTube channels that are extremely hardcore, and they make a lot of videos that get about 40,000 views

that are just about Ethernet. Yes. And it's just a business. It's just an ecosystem over there. They're not, like, huge views, but it's all very passionate. Oh, yeah, they're so earnest. It's like you're the guy who knows everything about Ethernet, and no one has ever asked you one question about it before.

And now there are people who want to know. It's like the greatest thing ever. Every now and again, you're like, oh, the internet's good. Like all these people exist. They've built a little media ecosystem together. And if you happen to need to remind yourself how to crimping Ethernet cable, they are there for you. That's why they're so good. I haven't crimped the Ethernet cable since I was like 19 years old working in the college computer lab.

Yes. And I was like, I remember how to do this now. That's what I've been doing. That's why I have been on the show. We moved house. I don't have a podcast. set up in that house yet where it's all happening, but I now have a cat 5E line running from my office all the way to the Verizon modem. That's very exciting. And that took a long time to figure out.

How are your 5G speeds? Are you doing surgery? Yeah. No, I've done a number of surgeries. Where is the banana? We do have a lot to talk about today that isn't just Ethernet Cables. Addie Robertson's going to join the show in a little bit, talk about the Google antitrust trial that happened this week. And it has happened. happening for the next nine weeks. The government is suing Google for what they claim is the illegal dominance of search and using the dominance of search to support its other businesses in ways that are illegal, paying for default placements, killing other search products left and right. We don't know what the outcome of that will be. We don't know if the government will

win. They're not doing great at winning these cases. But if they do win, you could see a breakup of Google. And this is just happening very quietly in the background. We'll come back to this later, but it's been very strange to be here not at the Apple event this week. And there's this very like Cooperinoy thing that happens at the Apple event where it, Apple is very good at being the only thing in the universe. And not being there, just sitting here being like, okay, new phone that's a lot like the old phone, biggest tech trial in 25 years. And we've just, we've talked a lot about the one and not that much about the other.

So I'm glad we're going to catch up on the phone. It takes 10 weeks, which is two weeks. which is too long. When Microsoft wanted to buy a gaming company, they did it in five days, and we were all very interested, and it was fine. Ten weeks is just like, can I, how long can we talk about search? A lot of what's happened this week is Google's chief economist has been called to account for his emails from two decades ago. And it's like, this is all happening. We're covering it.

Addie's going to join the show in a little bit. Talk about it in detail. And talk about kind of why it's so quiet. It is hard to cover this trial. Yeah, it is. But we'll get to that. We're also going to get to the unity drama, which Alex has promised to explain to me. I swear I'm going to do it okay.

It'll be fine. It's going to be great. I literally was like, and I was at Apple. And this was happening during Apple. During the event. Like Ash was like, can someone help me do math? And we were all like, no math, only iPhones. So all I know about this is that there are death threats involved in the pricing structure of a game engine.

Yep. So we're going to get to that because that seems very important. But let's start. It is sort of the end of iPhone week. There's a lot of what you might think of as pick up news. We've just asked a lot of questions and we've gotten a lot of answers. Let's start with the enduring mystery of the thread radio. David, do you know what's going on with this thread radio?

No. So this is sort of my favorite part of the iPhone launch because there's that like 36 hours where it's just infinite numbers and information and videos to watch and all kinds of stuff. and then everybody kind of takes a deep breath, gets on a plane, and you're like, wait, what just happened? Yeah. And you guys were talking about this on the show on Wednesday, the like enduring mystery of the thread radio. And Gen 2 and our team did a really good job of basically running down all of the possibilities. One is that there's a sneaky smart home play that Apple is going for here where you could use your phone as a thread border router to connect directly to all your devices.

One is that even Apple isn't really sure what it's doing. One is that it got it for free with the chip that it's doing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on. I think all of those are totally plausible. We have no idea. Yeah. I will say the thing that has jumped out to me is I put exactly no credence behind Apple saying, well, you don't know what's – like, of course that Apple's going to say. Like, Apple is going to come out a year from now and pretend that it invented thread

and have some cool feature, right? Like, that's how this works. But the other thing that I keep thinking about is, like, Apple has made very clear to us over the years that it hates Bluetooth in so, so many ways. And I think it can't replace Bluetooth for things like headphones, but it can absolutely figure out how to replace Bluetooth for connecting to your other devices. And it has the ultra-wideband chip. It's doing all this stuff. But if you can use thread as just like a free way to get rid of this awful power-hungry standard that no one really likes, that makes a lot of sense to me as a thing Apple might do. There's a long road to get there.

You have to put it on all the devices. You have to put it on all the phones. But like, if you were going to start somewhere, it makes sense to start with it. the iPhone Pro, it makes sense to sort of slowly trickle it out. And then in two years, they're going to have a big smart home event and tell us all the cool things they've done with thread. Like, I can see how we get from here to there. What would the cool things be? Just like turning off bulbs? Yes. Yes. What are the cool things? I mean, I like to turn, like using thread is nice to turn off bulbs. I enjoy it as much as you can enjoy doing that. But like, no, the, the answer is we made the

smart home work, right? Like, if I'm Apple, I'm looking at Matter being like, well, that's a gigantic disaster. We'll figure that out eventually. Matter is the long-term answer. It's not the short-term answer. But what Apple can do is come out and say, like, we now have a solution in which you go to your iPhone and you hit the button that says, turn my lights on, and it connects to the lights and turns them on no other steps.

Yeah. That's powerful and would mean things to people. You don't have to worry about your hub bridge. You don't have to make sure that your network is working. You don't have to like, you just, you have a device. That device is over there. You hit a button it turns on. And it would work without needing Wi-Fi.

Right. Which is the best part of you. Again, here's my question. And I believe you that it is unlikely that Apple announced it without a plan. But it's weird that they announced it without a plan. Well, they didn't announce it though, right? They did. It's on the, it's during the keynote in the bento box and it's in the press release.

Yeah, but that's like. They could have just not told anybody about it. But also, do you remember when they, they upgraded the home? map and they were like, it's for future architectural improvements. The hell does that mean? Like, Apple, I think, I really genuinely believe Apple thinks the smart home is for nerds and is just like very slowly building up a thing that three years from now, they're going to be like, we've invented the smart home.

And it starts in that little radio. It's going to be like a slow zoom on a light bulb and then it just pops on. Yeah. And we're going to be like, wow. No, no, no, no, no. No, no. They built that entire house that they do their announcements in it, W. Yeah.

Right. They're like Apple's smart house. We're like beautiful people are doing beautiful things all the time and like someone's making a pancake and a home pod minis like opening a garage. Like they they can't retcon not having done that. They absolutely can. They absolutely can. There will be a birthday party.

The lights are going to pop on. Everybody's going to go. Yeah. We've got a number of emails with thread theories. I think the most interesting ones are all about local connectivity. A lot of people think, will this be better for connecting to smartwatches or AirPods? The answer, and you should read Jen's piece. We'll link it.

It's very good. She basically ran everything down, as David said. And she's got a bunch of actual reporting from people at other companies who use threat. Like Google product managers are in this piece talking about what they would put thread in a smartphone for, which is really interesting. So go read that piece. But basically the bandwidth of thread is not going to let you build that tiny personal area network that people are talking about at this moment. And then there's a lot of like, is it for presence detection and all this other stuff you can think of? And the problem with that is that Bluetooth low energy does exist.

It does. It's still there. It is there. It does that job actually quite well. And so you're just in this weird place where you have ultra wideband, you have thread, you've got BLE. And everyone's like, well, maybe we'll use this one to do the thing that that one's designed for. Like, have you seen these new, how do you pronounce this company, Aquara? Oh, yes.

Aquara. They've got the presence sensors now. And so they have basically UWE presence sensors. And they can tell where you are in a room. Like you can set them up. It'll map out the room. You walk into the room. And beyond just, there's motion in the room, turn on the light.

It's like, I'm at the desk. Yeah. Turn on the desk light because I'm at the desk. And when I leave the desk and go to the couch, turn off that light and turn on this thing. Now that's terrifying. I was just thinking how, I was like, I need to go get that sensor. Yeah. There's a, I, you go watch the videos of people using.

It's so cool. Yeah. And like, it is a big unlock. Again, Jenna's written about all this stuff. It is a huge unlock for smart home ideas because knowing you're in a room is actually not that useful. Knowing where you are and what you might be doing in a room is very useful. But then you have to tell computers where you are and what you are doing in a room. And then the computers will know and store that data and...

Or you can use home assistant. And then a lot of that data and stuff is not stored by the companies. Instead, it's just your data. You Plex, home assistant. I'm out there. I'm out there at the edge. No one's got my data. Literally on the edge.

But anyway, so all this stuff is just these kinds of radios. The blurry lines between them are ever more blurry. And Apple in the phone has all three of them. There's a second gen ultra wideband chip in these phones. And then there's just, it's like I know they didn't announce it without a plan. I know there's a plan they're not telling us. Yeah. But the announcement is an announcement without a plan.

They're going to announce it like, dump, dump. If you just got it for free with the chip, you don't put it in the bento. You let like, I fix it, open it up and be like, huh, weird. There's a thread router in there and then never touch it again. And don't talk about it. Don't answer questions. Like, we've seen Apple do this before where you're like, what is this for? And Apple's like, what do you mean?

That's all fine. But yeah, I think it's right that they're like, they want to put thread in people's minds. And exactly why that is, I don't know, but I think you're right that there's, there is some kind of bet there. It's just a question of like how big and how soon we're going to see something out of that. And what's fun for us is that Verge cast listeners, Verge readers, are they as interested in this mystery? Yeah. Like this post, like what is thread in the iPhone for is like right up there with like iPhone announced. Oh yeah.

And it's great. Like, that's why I do the thing that we do. Other stuff that we picked up, lightning is not totally gone. Yep. It's still around. I mean, Apple still sells the 9th gen. I've had all the AirPods, except for the AirPods Pro, still have it. It does seem like we're in for probably, I don't know, what would you say, 12 months of kind of slowly wiping those things out. Like, if we get to this time next year and there is still a single Apple device with a lightning port, I would be very surprised. It will be a budget iPad. And it will be there for like three more years with the pencil that you plug in and then three years for now. They're going to leave the Magic Mouse with the. stupid-ass lightning port on the bottom just to troll everybody. Well, I mean, that stuff is really interesting because those are wholesale redesigns.

Yeah. Apple's view of USBC is basically, we invented this port. It's ours. And it's true. Yeah. With that first baby MacBook, of which, by the way, I got rid of them, very sad about them. When we moved, it was like, it's time. Ah.

Dieter sold me one a long time ago. RIP, terrible, beautiful computers. The ultimate plane computer. I kept them in my house for years. after they were obsolete, thinking, I will have these just for airplane rides. And then every now and again, I'd be like go on a long flight and I would open one up. And I'm like, this is so much slower than the iPhone. This is so much objectively worse than any iPad in this house, including Max's iPad, which is like lockdown kids mode.

Did you put like Chrome OS on it? No, I thought about it. I was like, I can just purchase a Chromebook for no money. And that's been like six hours. Like you walk into like any carrier retail store. And you're like, I might upgrade my plan. Like, Chromebook. Yeah.

Do you want one? Respite it at you. Anyhow, Apple invented the USBC port basically because the USBIF was going down a bad direction. And they wanted it for that MacBook. Yeah. So Apple's view is like. Apple invented is strong, but it's not that far off. Well, it's like.

It participated hardly. Apple probably deserves more credit than any other company for the existence of USBC. But like a lot of people made USBC, which is why USBC is good, right? because everybody sat in a room and agreed this is the standard we're going to live with it. Yeah, but like in that room, Apple had a knife. Sure. It's like Google and Chromium, right? Like, chromium is technically an open source browser and you can do whatever you like with it.

But someone from Google will stand outside of your house. Yeah, exactly. Like Apple's like, we know where all of you live. You have our phones. Right. We've handed your high cloud credentials to the Chinese government. It's just the thing that we've done. Yeah, don't worry about.

But anyway, so Apple in general is like happy about USBC. I think they're not happy about losing their revenue. I think they're not happy about being forced to it because of Europeans. But you can't just switch the 9th-gen iPad to USBC. You have to re-architect that product. So I think that just gets phased out. AirPods max. Apple doesn't even acknowledge that this product exists.

And I see more of them than anything else. Yeah, they're clearly very popular. Always on the planes. Yeah. Like I think that I need to buy them when I get on a plane. I'm like, well, everybody has them. I should have them too. They're everywhere.

Have you ever stopped to ask these people? So tell me about the case it came with. Do you use it? Yeah, never see the little purse. Never see the purse. But lightning on the AirPods Max, the regular AirPods. I mean, this is a lot of products that need to be updated. I don't think it's quite as simple.

That mouse. There are a handful of them that they can just kind of get for free, right? That you just stick a new port in and it'll be fine. Like the magic keyboard is a good example, right? Like changing that to USBC will not be hard work. I actually think the base level iPad, I think you're right, is the most interesting one because A, that thing is probably due for a bit of a redesign anyway. B, it's clearly very popular. Like Apple talks about that thing way more than you would think it would for like a pretty cheap entry level product.

It's clear it's a meaningful thing to Apple. And so I suspect that one is going to be the one that we see like look the most different and also come with USBC. Well, and a lot of that was like they're trying to get rid of old inventory and stuff. too here, right? Like, that's why it still has the dorky pencil and everything like that. No disrespect. Some disrespect. Some disrespect. Yeah. So, so I do think it's going to be a minute. I don't think they're just going to flip a switch because they do still need to get rid of all of that stuff. Yeah. And that's why they're so rich now is because they're really good at like unloading old crap. They're great at. How did you get rich, Tim? Well, I unloaded old crap.

But they, they would like, they jazz it up. Like, they put some makeup on. on like it they contour like it looked nice. Wow. Yeah. The iPhone mini, man. That's gorgeous. It was a gorgeous old phone. Just like the iPhone. It's now so dead.

I just saw it. So, so, so, so dead. Our producer has one and it's the cutest little thing in the world. Andrew Marino, our producer, just bought another one like a psychopath because it's about to be gone forever. Liam, our other producer is holding on, God, the Furchcast, what a disaster of a show. Just all minis. There's just iPhone minis all the way down.

They're the last two. This is like Walt Mossberg at the end of the MacBook air run. He just bought like two of them to have them in case Apple screwed it up in the future. That's smart. I would do that. That's good. Speaking of USBC in general, we've learned a lot about the port and what it will support. And basically the answer is everything.

Like Apple did this the right way. Yeah, it seems to be. Because they had a moral obligation to David. That's what gets Apple to do things. So backbone, one control. are just going to get upgraded and they're going to work with the iPhone. And I actually saw some backbone folks at the event they were excited and they were just handing out the Android backbone controllers.

There were a lot of games reporters there. Yeah. So that's cool. Like it's cool that that just works. Apparently you can plug in just sort of any USBC hub and get like Ethernet on your phone. Oh, wow. Like basically anything that would work on the iPad Pro is going to just happen over here. That's cool.

That's much bigger than I expect. You're at the office and you have the crappy Wi-Fi, and the IT is always like, just plug into the Ethernet. And you're like, I hate you. I'm on my phone. Now you can just be like, you're fine. Yeah. I don't know how any of that's going to work. My experience doing any of this stuff with an iPad is always a little like you just hope the, you know, the magic of the iPad, magic's at you.

It's going to be even weirder with a phone. And, you know, IS17 is another bit of a wild card here. So, but theoretically, we have decks for the phone. It's just going to work. Yeah. I mean, the backbone thing to me is like the perfect example of how this ought to be, and I think it's very exciting, where they're just like, oh, this thing that used to fit on these phones now also fits on these phones. And so it's going to work. Like this is the point of having a universal standard.

This is why the EU mandated this. This is why we were excited about this. It's like it's going to be good for the accessories market. It's going to be good for users. You're going to be able to share stuff with people. You're going to be able to buy things without that like, does this work with my phone question? which is a really complicated question for lots of people. And yeah, the fact that Apple seems to have gone about this about the most open way possible is great and frankly, very surprising.

Yeah, and they didn't nerf any of the charging speeds or transfer speeds. I mean, except the iPhone 15 is at USBC2. Well, yeah. But again, that's like it's good enough for most people. It'll be fine. I don't think there are that many people buying an iPhone 15 desperate for ultra-fast data transfer speeds. I think those people are getting a pro if they care or not. If they know what USB 2 is, they're getting a pro.

I think that's right. By the way, the word pro means, I just want to be clear. My contribution to iPhone reviews this year is going to be just a little weirder because I have the code conference to deal with. That's very distracting. But I'm like, what if my only contribution to this review is 2,000 words on the meaning of the word pro, a word that has lost all meaning in which in this case for Apple this year means good at video games. That's what pros mean.

They don't have another answer for it, which is wild. Okay, I see it exactly the opposite. We should get to Google after this because this is enough Apple talk. But I think to me, the fact that a big part of the way Apple showed off the pro was by showing you how you can rig up a camera in a studio and shoot to external storage, like that's pro. That's how you tell a story that is different about that phone than the other phones. Whether that's like real and how people will do that,

You were on the show on Wednesday making fun of the idea that you would like use your iPhone in a studio to take professional pictures. People do that all the time. Yeah. Like that's like life now. Steven Soderberg's out here just like shooting movies on his iPhone for fun all day. Like it's a real thing. And the idea that they're going to take the pro and like give it genuinely new things to do, especially as a camera, I think like if you want to tell a pro story, that's where you do it. They're like, we are going to turn this thing.

Right. And I'm saying what they're saying is look at how good it is at video games. Yeah. Not that thing. Sort of. I mean, they did a little bit of the other story. They spent way too much time talking about games. This is like Apple does this all the time. This is my favorite thing in the world.

It's, you're going to use it for games occasionally, so we're going to tell you about every single game that exists on the iPhone. So two things, and then we can wrap up. As always, I've asked people to email us with their hardcore Android gamers. So we got one from Evan. He said, I am here to inform you that I've been gaming on Android for as long as the verge has existed. And it's a long list of all the phones you've ever got. LG, Optimus

G. He played Need for Speed on it. LTE launch. She's got Stadia. Anyway, this email ends with, I did just buy an iPhone 11 primarily to play games. There it is. There it is. Well done, Evan. Easily the funniest turn. It's a good, long email.

Easily one of the funniest turns in an email saying you're wrong about Android games. This is a very good email. And then we got an email from Colin, because we were wondering who would buy the lightning to USBC dongle for 20 bucks. And we hypothesized that some people would buy them for their cars. And he emailed us to tell us, yes, his friend is buying one for his car.

He has a custom setup. And it's apparently easier to pay 20 bucks for the dongle than to tear open his car and put in a USBC cable. Custom setup with a built-in lightning cable? That's incredible. I love this. He's probably one of these people with an iPad in the center of the car. Oh, yeah. Well, Colin, we want pictures of your friend's car.

Get in there. But there are some people out there who are buying the dongle because they have basically fixed lightning cables. A lot of like coffee shops are going to buy the don't. I also think a lot of people are going to buy the don't knowle because the idea of buying an entirely new cable feels annoying. And I'm going to spend a lot of time like running around to relatives being like, don't buy the don't buy the don't go buy a new cable. It costs it's the same price. It's going to be fine. Everything's okay.

Like I'm going to end up with just like a giant, you know, bucket full of two meter. long USBC cables. And just every time I go into a room with family members, I'm just going to start hocking them at people. Everybody's going to have a little rat tail on the bottom of their phones. Because they always have to have that dongle. Like people did it with their headphones. And lastly, I'm just going to say this.

I have heard that not everyone at Apple pronounce it's heaf. Whoa. Heff? There's more diversity of pronunciations inside of Apple Inc. Tell me more. I was just like, does this whole company call it Heath? And then some people contacted me and was like, not all of us say Heath. You can't share, like, you don't want to disclose your short sources.

No, this is some of the most sensitive reporting I've ever done. We appreciate it. And I'm just saying, heath might have been pushed out into the world. But it's out there now. If you're the one on camera, you get to decide how it's pronounced. And it's Heath. It's Heath now. All right, we got to take a break.

That is enough iPhone stuff for a week. We'll be back with Eddie Robertson to talk about USV Google, which is a big deal. 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

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That's upw-R-K.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Addie Robertson's here. Hey, Addy. Hey. So there's a big trial going on in secret. I don't know how else to describe it.

the government does not want us to know that the other part of the government is suing Google. I think that's kind of true. I mean, I just think back to like the Sam Bankman-Fried trial starts in a couple weeks, and there's tons of people talking about that. There was the Microsoft Activision Blizzard trial. There was the Elizabeth Holmes trial. Like, we've had a run of these very high-profile cases. Apple v. Samsung. We've had a run of these over the last few years. And this feels by far like the one that is getting the least attention, despite being potentially like the most consequential by a million miles. Yeah.

It's very strange. I think it's because Google's just really good at like flying under the radar. Because even with the Google v. Epic. Oh, that's what I meant. I said Apple v. Samsung. I mean, that one happened too. Yeah. Apple v. Epic.

Like they all happened, right? Like Apple v. Epic was a big deal. Yeah. Google v. Epic. We were like, yep. Now they're doing it. I mean, Google has also been trying to keep like as much of the trial under wraps as possible here.

Yeah. Yeah. So just. unlike their phones. That's very good. So just to lay the stage here, then I want to add to talk about what's actually happening in trial. It is impossible to cover this trial.

There's no audio stream of it. There was an audio stream very briefly. Yeah, of just the opening arguments, but none of the witnesses. There's barely a schedule. If reporters go into the courtroom, they can't have devices, so they have to take all their notes longhand.

It is just ridiculous. Yeah. But the government might get to a place where it breaks up Google. And the process by which that is happening is basically impossible and opaque. Because we cannot just cover it unless we send someone to the courtroom every day for nine weeks to take notes with a pen. And a scroll. We are thinking about doing. And obviously other larger competitors like Bloomberg and the Times are doing.

But you just contrast that with all of the other trials. and for some reason these decisions have been made. I don't know. I find it very frustrating, obviously because I think about Google all day, every day. But this is the trial where, you know, Google putting out memos to its own employee saying, we do not use words like lock-in.

Yeah, or scale. Or scale, right? We don't use the word of leverage when we talk about search. Like, they're instructing their own executives how to email each other. They're in trouble for destroying evidence in this case. Yeah, there's that amazing message where Sundar, Pichai,

the CEO popped into a Google chat group and said something to the effect of like, we should talk about this. Can we turn off history for this chat session? And then that's obviously the last message anyone can see. And yeah, I mean, Adi, my impression, and this is based on very little except just thinking about incentives here, is that Google has everything to gain from burying as much of this trial and process as possible, right? Yes. I mean, with the caveat that it's not going to matter if the. a judge is like we're breaking up Google. Google is still getting broken up, even if it is in secret.

And again, to be clear, that's one of the less likely outcomes. Yes. But yeah, I think that it benefits Google to not have to deal with a lot of the arguments being made here, as it would for really most plaintiffs, like as it would for Apple in Epic versus Apple. And then there's also a lot of other companies implicated here. Like, obviously this is about Google's deals with companies like Apple. And so Apple has appeared and tried to, like, it's tried to get its executives out of testifying. So there's really just a lot of companies here and a lot of very sensitive information going around.

And so on one hand, it's not really surprising that they would try to keep a lot of the secret. But on the other, it also means that you don't hear as much about what the Justice Department is saying Google is doing. Yeah. And the case fundamentally turns on these deals, right? So the case was pretty wide-ranging. It's been, this has been going on for, three years now. Yeah, it was 2020. The first suit was filed, yeah.

And so, like all things as it approaches trial, it's been narrowed down to a handful of issues. The most, I think, important and relevant one is Google's deals to be the default search engine on the iPhone and other platforms. So, of course, the Justice Department wants Tim Cook to testify. And Apple's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not doing it. And that makes sense. They want to do that. But just, again, I'm just coming back to this. This week, while Apple is announcing pretty light refreshes the iPhone, that captured

all the attention. But the trial in which the Department of Justice is saying the deal in which Google pays Apple money to be the default search provider on the iPhone is anti-competitive and illegal is like totally under the radar and impossible to cover. And I just think that's weird. I think there's also, it's also just easy to be sort of so. because we've been seeing these cases try to make a dent in companies for years and years and years. Like there was this entire gigantic, ostensibly bipartisan tech lash starting in really about 2016, building up 2017, 2018.

Nothing happened. Yeah, I just, I think it's really easy to look at this and go. It is very, very hard to win an antitrust case. The Federal Trade Commission, which is not the one bringing the suit, but which is part of the Biden administration's attempt to get antitrust to happen in the U.S. It has had a couple of really high-profile losses. Epic versus Apple really, it means that Apple is going to maybe have to do something that Apple has been fighting tooth and nail to not do, but it's still basically determined, look,

Apple can just charge these fees. I think that it's very easy to look at this and worry that just nothing's going to come of it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, that was what I was going to say. I think cynicism is the right word here. People are cynical.

Like, we've seen this happen so. many times. And not just in tech, you've seen it happen in a lot of places where it's just like, okay, so when is the government going to actually do something? When is this going to happen? We're just going to continue on. And this is like a really good opportunity for the government. And even the government seems like reluctant, right? Like they could probably make this a lot more public. They could make this more of a show. And it might be in their best interest to like get the public support behind it. But even the government is playing it so safe. You're like, If you're playing it that safe, are you really going to do it?

Well, there are many branches of government, three, I'm told. There's three. So, you know, I don't know why the judge in this case, Judge Meta, is logging it down the way he is. Obviously, Google wants that that way, and there's requests and there's private stuff. But, like, not having audio streams of the witnesses seems, I just don't understand that at all. And then there's the DOJ, which is, you know, they're prosecutors. They're not supposed to do it that way. Yeah.

Right. You know, it's like, there's a little bit of a gap there. The thing I would give you is the same week, we did watch the European government successfully pressure Apple into changing the port on the iPhone. And that's a good outcome. And even in our videos, like our hands-on video where we were like Apple changed it. The comments are like the Europeans changed it. Yep. Like people understand the mechanism by which the change was made.

Yes. Well, and that's what we've been talking about in the U.S. for the last couple of years, right? is that like a clear part of the FTC, which again is not involved in this particular trial. But what they're trying to do is sort of lose in such a way that it eventually we have to legislate answers to this. And it's like what the EU did was make laws. Yeah. They like there was no big court case about the lightning port.

They just made a law about common chargers. And it feels like that's if our, if our system works better, it might be different here. So the EU has made a lot of laws about Google search. So many. They have done more. progressive enforcements about Google search than would ever be contemplated in this company. Down to designing the startup flow of an Android phone. And Adi and I have been talking about this for years, none of it has worked. Like Google is dominant in Europe. When you open an Android phone, it asks you if you want to use Chrome. It asks you, it has a browser ballot and a search engine ballot, right? And no, everyone's just like, okay. We're going to pick Chrome and Google because I bought a Android phone.

What else do you think I'm doing here? Duk, dot, go. Add, do you see any similarities between that version of the European enforcement, which has been unsuccessful in what is happening in this case? I mean, that entire thing you've just said is kind of Google's argument is, look, even when we don't get the default placement, even when we don't do this thing that the Justice Department is saying is illegal, we win. So clearly, we're just the best. I just want to say that is my absolute favorite thing that has been happening in this trial so far is Bing is everybody's punching back. Google's argument is essentially Microsoft makes Bing the default on Windows in the same way that we're the default in lots of places, and still overwhelmingly people choose Google because Bing sucks.

And the government's case is, well, Bing sucks and nobody uses it, and that's Google's fault. and it's very funny to me that like it's a shame that there's not a better product to argue about here. Yeah. And I think it just kept coming up over and over and over. And like in a funny way, if Google wins this case, I think Microsoft is going to have been a huge ally for Google in winning this case. Because what Google is saying, and Adi, I don't know if this was your impression, but listening to the opening arguments over an AT&T conference call, which was very funny for an antitrust trial. It's just, m'ma. But the overwhelming thing Google kept saying was like, we are not the company with infinite resources that is able to do whatever we want and outbid everybody to do everything because Microsoft exists.

Microsoft is also a trillion-dollar company with limitless money to do whatever it wants. They keep trying to put Bing in front of people. Windows exists. Microsoft has a long history of doing antitrusty things, and Bing still sucks and nobody uses it. And I actually think, like, of all of the Google arguments I have heard so far, that is by far the most compelling to me. I don't know, Addy. Did you read that differently on the first day? Yeah. And I think that the Justice Department is trying to counter it by basically saying the reason Google is so good and is so untouchable is because we all agree here. Bing, it sucks. They're not that strong, but is that Google gathers, has so much data from searches that it basically got this flywheel effect of just being able to get default placements.

So then people type things into Google and then Google learns how people. search for things and then Google could deliver better results. And then this just keeps going. And even though Microsoft has tried to do things, it's tried to set its own defaults. It has partnered with Yahoo at thing that's come up to do a data sharing deal in order to get more queries, that that just hasn't been enough. Yeah. One of the things that Judge Meta asked, I think, like within the first hour or so of testimony on the first day, was he asked the the DOJ lawyer, how long has Google been a monopoly? Which I thought was a really interesting question.

And I think the answer was it has been illegally protecting that monopoly since 2010, which assumes that it was a monopoly before that, right? But I think one of- I think he was saying it's had really heavy market power since about 2007. Okay. Yeah. And then, yes, it's been illegally maintaining the monopoly since 2010. Right.

And so that's the DOJ's argument. But what I think it's really interesting there is like, obviously Google came out in 1998. and no one is debating the fact that Google, at least for a long time, was vastly better than everything else and won purely on the merits. And then what we're debating now is did it go from winning on the merits to buying merits and essentially making it impossible for anyone else to Google, what Google did to Altavista and everybody else 25 years ago? And that turn and trying to figure out where it happened and what it looks like is, I think, why we've come down to these default deals. because ultimately that's the question, right? It's like Google's out here saying there are a million ways to find information on the internet. And the DOJ is saying like general search, which they keep calling it, is this different thing from what TikTok is and what chat GPT is.

But they have to figure out like, okay, when did Google go from just objectively being the best search engine and so everybody uses it, which is not illegal, to being the best and making sure that no one else can be? Which is a much trickier thing than like what Microsoft did, which is just like boot Netscape off the internet. And I don't know, it just set us off down this kind of odd path where like it's almost not obvious what everyone is arguing at any given time, no matter what side. This general search thing is ridiculous. Like the FTC, they've done a bad job in many of their cases. Like they did the entire Activision trial and forgot to mention cloud gaming. And then they lost. And then they were like in the background, we're going to appeal on cloud gaming.

And it's like, that was. That was the argument the whole time. Here, the DOJ, I think, is getting suckered into this. Like, every antitrust trial comes down to, like, what is the market? Yep. Let's have an increasingly esoteric debate about what market is being dominated. And then obviously Google's like, the market is the use of computers. And we are but one tiny fraction of why one might compute, sir.

Right. Right. And then the DOJ is like, general search, which means fucking nothing. And the answer is like, no, it's searching the web. Yeah. There are a handful of products that search the web. Yep. People use them all day long.

And there's one search engine that matters in the web. To be fair, that is what their definition of general search is, is a thing that searches sources that is not, sources beyond one site on the web. Right. But even that definition is like, it just, it's so not the, like, if you try to explain that to a normal person, you'd be like, all right, so there's, there are sources beyond one site. Right?

I'm not even going to say the word web to you. And I would just say, if you just look at the web today, we've talked about it so many times, it is so obviously influenced by Google's wants and needs that you can't not say this thing is dominant. It is the only incentive structure that exists in the web really is Google's wants and needs because that's how people get traffic to their websites. Okay, like you just start and the DOJ has just been suckered into this conversation about general search and whether the kids are used. using TikTok. Right. And like that's totally different. I mean, if Apple changes the default search on the iPhone to be TikTok.

Horrible experience. Right. And it's like, but that's so just generally nonsensical to think of that. Yeah. The kids love iPhones. The kids love TikTok. Mung them together. All these other searches that we're talking on in the category of general search that

Google wants you to consider, I would just say, come back to the thing at issue, which is the default deals on these platforms and say, can you replace them? replace them to do you replace the default search on the iPhone with a YouTube search? Yeah. And like, no, basically. You need web search. And Google's protection of that web search, yet there's the data argument that they've been making for a long time. Like everyone's making Google has the most data and they can do it.

But next to it, Addy, are these like vertical search engines, like Yelp and these other companies that are like, we're much better in these very specific domains. And we can barely even get to a customer because of Google's. deals. Yeah, which was a bigger part of the case originally and then got trimmed out of it. And so is not coming up in this as much. Do you think it'll come up later in these 10 weeks? So the Department of Justice is making its case first, and that claim was part of the state attorney general suit that's going to come up later. But it also got cut mostly from that suit. So I think we're not actually going to hear nearly as much about it as we could have, even though those search engines come up. Which is a bummer because that feels like the real

issue, right? Like, the fact that they're doing these exclusivity deals is on its face, totally like monopoly behavior. But also in this case, Google is actually really good at search. So of course, like it's like, let's say you ask Siri to find you a plumber. Yeah. Right. In a competitive world, Apple goes and makes a deal with Yelp or Angelist or whatever, right? And they're running that search on a specialized service. Google's deal means like that's all going through Google. Okay. Okay. Then yeah, no, they're a monopoly. Get rid of them. I mean, like, I don't know if that's good or bad. I'm just saying, but that's sort of the shape of it. And Addie's right. It's been trimmed out of the suit. Although, well, no, the part that got trimmed out of the suit was not the thing you're

describing. It was the idea that when you go to Google itself. Yeah, yeah. And you're trying to find a thing on Google. Google makes it hard to find these places like Yelp or TripAdvisor or whatever, through Google specifically. So that got mostly cut out of the suit. And the judge sort of rightfully was like, well, Google is allowed to do whatever wants on Google. But there is that vertical search thing. From what I read of the decision, the judge is basically like, I need to see more evidence. We'll get more evidence at trial.

And I will decide how big of a deal that is. And so we'll see what the states do. But you just look at all of the things Google does. And again, it's instructions to its own people to not talk about doing those things. Ooh, that seems illegal. I don't think that it is necessarily illegal, but it is certainly the kind of thing you can bring up to say it's shady. Yeah.

I mean, that we don't leverage anything is like a very funny thing to say. So, Adi, what's been going on? This week, it's just been Google's chief economist Halvarian. Have we learned anything in particular? So the first day was after opening statements, Halvarian, where they really honed in on the idea that we're going to go to the metaphorical tape and look at all of these emails that Google is. execs have sent about how important scale is and how important data is. And then there are these

internal arguments where Varian wrote this, did this interview with C-Net where he says, look, the argument that data is like the be-all and end-all and that Microsoft has to make this deal with Yahoo to get data, that's bogus. And then there's this internal fight where people were just saying, look, that's ridiculous. No, data, obviously. If they have the data we did, we would be, they would be incredible. Like, they would be much better than they are now. So there's that. And then this was also where we got a lot of the, we at Google, we do not say market share, we say query share. We do not bundle. We do not tie. And then beyond that, we've also, there's been a behavioral economist that they've brought that the Department of Justice has brought up to emphasize the quote sort of power of defaults. That that's been their first expert witness. He spent a bunch of time on the stand. And so that's been a lot of presentations, both about stuff Google has said internally, which echoes sort of the very. in testimony and just experiments and other data that has been collected elsewhere that just says, in general, people choose defaults.

Yeah, and I do think if you wanted to boil this case all the way down to one question, it's the power of defaults. Like, do defaults matter is in a big way, it seems like what a lot of this is going to hinge on, because Google's argument is they matter a little, right? It's why we pay for the defaults. Like Google cannot in any kind of reasonable way, default don't matter at all because it pays tens of billions of dollars a year to be the default. So it's like all that is fine and good.

But the two arguments it makes is that defaults don't matter that much because people choose Google even when it's hard to or even when there is a fairly level playing field. Because Bing sucks. Because Bing sucks. And also that we only pay to be the default because we're the good, we're the best product. Everybody tells us we're the best product. That's the only thing that matters. The end. And then the DOJ is out here saying, no, you are the default.

you pay to be the default, so we can't even reasonably start to answer the rest of these questions. And that's what all the little search engines will tell you. That's what all the failed competitors will tell you is that we don't even know if we could have beaten Google or tried or caught up. There's no runway. There's no way to even get into this space. Right. You just wrote the obituary of Neva. Yeah, and Neva has already come up a bunch in this trial.

And Shredar Raham-Swami, the CEO of Neva, who used to run the whole ad business at Google, is going to take the stand during this trial. that is a key part of the argument is like defaults are so important that because Google pays all this money to be the default, we don't exist. And that's like if the DOJ can prove that, it might win. And it's very hard to prove that. Yeah. It seems to me. There's also the argument that it's that specifically it's not just small search engines. It is Apple.

That one of the things that hasn't come up really in testimony as much, but was part of the opening statements is that Google has been basically paying Apple to not build a search engine. Yeah, I mean, every year at WWC, Apple does something that hints in interest in doing more searches. Yes. Right? And every year, you know, we get the new version of iOS and it's like, pull down and now you can type this and this will come up automatically. Yeah, you can do image search and spotlight now. It's like, it's right there if you wanted to do it. It's right there.

And then every year we get some notes from some Googlers are like Apple's coming for us. And it's like, no, they're not. Right. I'm very curious, you know, if they do put Tim Cook and Eddie Q and the rest on the stand. We're going to get Eddie Q. It's as far as I know, not getting Tim Cook. Full Hawaiian shirt, Eddie Q on a stand. The question I would ask is, look at all this marketing about privacy, look at all this marketing about not tracking you, and look at the billions of dollars you take from the largest ad tracking thing that has ever existed in human history. How do you square that circle beyond just taking the money?

Because I don't think Apple's ever been held to account for this. Certainly people have tried asking, and they're like, people love Google. and that's the end of it. Google's available in the App Store. The App Store has created more economic opportunity for people than ever. And it's like, where did you go? Come on home. One place that has already kind of come up is with Mozilla.

And Mozilla is another company that says a lot of things about privacy in the open web and believing in the Internet and also takes a lot of money from Google every year to be the default search engine in Firefox. And Google's case, and this has actually worked in Google's favor fairly well so far, it seems, is that Mozilla. Zillah at one point stopped using Google as its search engine provider, signed a deal with, Adi, was it Yahoo? It was Yahoo. Okay. And then went back to Google for exactly that reason.

Because that's the face everybody makes when they have to use Yahoo search. And so Google is like they had choices and they picked Google. Hilariously, the Department of Justice's counter to this is that Yahoo could have been viable, but it was so expensive to beat Google that they had to lard down their service with ads that suddenly made Yahoo search awful. And that's why Yahoo Search was right. argument, right? Like, are all other search engines bad because of Google is such a weird question, but is like kind of core to a lot of this case? Yeah. Like, there are no other good

search engines. Is it because Google is great or because Google has so aggressively defeated everyone? It's both. It probably is both, right? Like, I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, which is why it's going to be very hard for Google to lose this case, it seems. Yeah. Even if they do, you just have to look at Europe where for over a decade now, the princes and princesses of Europe have shaken their pitchforks at Google and said, we will undo this dominance. And the people of Europe have said, down with the king. Nay, good sir.

They have Googled for news about that happening. We shall continue Googling. No, absolutely not. French Revolution, the whole thing. This is, it's very complicated over in Europe. They're still kings, I'm told them. I don't know why. Princess and princesses everywhere.

Just everywhere. No one knows why. My people have run away from them twice. I'm Indian American. Anyway, we're going to cover the hell out of this trial. We're going to figure out how to get into that courtroom basically every day with a series of quill pens and parchment. Because that's how the government wants us to cover USB Google. David, could you take the parchment and have it so it like goes out of the room as you write?

Oh, that's fun. Oh, that's good. And then Addie can just be on the other side. Oh, I like that. OCRing the parchment. My thing is I'm going to bring in increasingly less technologically advanced devices every day until it's okay. Until the judge is like fine, bring a Chromebook. If I come in with like an E-ink notebook that I can write on, is that electronics?

Like, what are we doing? Are we good? If I'm not touching the screen, it's not drawing any power. Bring it a remarkable too and just be like what? This is what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay, so fun detail when you go through the battle detector in the courtroom, you have to take out all your cables. This is not a fun place to be if you have as many cables as I do.

I was like, Neil, I can never go there. No, I'm not allowed in there. That's not going to happen. Again, we're covering the Haldus trial. There's going to be a bunch of big witnesses on the stand. We're going to get as much coverage to you as we can. I think it's a big deal just because no one pays attention to Google Search. Like, we have been running this series about Google Search and what it means and Google Turning 25 all year.

We'll link it in the show notes. David's Neva pieces in there, our Google Reader pieces in there. We have a bunch of SEO stories coming about the culture of SEO. I think they're going to be really good. And what has been apparent in doing those stories is that Google hates it. When you talk about search is anything other than like water. They're like, what? Search is just the oxygen of the internet.

It's just around you at all times. It keeps us all. And it's like, no, this is a business. A business that you ruthlessly protect and instruct your people to never discuss in words that sound ruthless. And I, that gap, I think, is what this trial, even if the government loses, the trial will narrow the gap in the perception of. Google search is just a benign thing that happens. Right. And a very, very ruthlessly run business.

And I say ruthless, I don't mean that in a negative way. I think Google does a good job of running its business and making a lot of cash on Google search. And then funding a bunch of shit, it shuts down two months later. Right. Right. Like that's the engine of Google. It's basically its only business. And then a little bit of YouTube and then a little bit of Google Cloud.

But like it's search that funds a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. And Google wants you to think about it as this like inevitable thing. that just sort of has to exist the way that it does in order for the internet to work. Like you're saying, they want you to think it's water, and it is like a series of very specific choices that people made in how this thing works. And if nothing else, we're going to learn a lot about the choices. Yeah, and we'll do it with quill pens and parchment if we have to.

Okay, we got to take a break. Addie, stick around. We're going to take a break when we come back. I need you and Alex to explain what is going on with Unity to me. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, You already know the challenge.

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There's gigantic drama with Unity, though. It has gone completely off the rails. They changed the pricing structure in the middle of the Apple event. Yep. The developers are very mad. It's escalated to like inappropriate levels or they canceled events. What is going on here? Okay.

So Unity is one of the biggest game engines out there. It's really interesting because Unity is used in like most mobile games, a ton of mobile games out there. So Apple's up there saying, we love gaming. Well, they hate Unreal. And meanwhile, this is happening with Unity, which is a big developer for like big game engine for iOS. They are raising their prices specifically. if you reach, like, if you sell enough product, then you're going to have to start paying them for every download.

Every install. Yeah, every install. So Monica and Allison are just going to bankrupt companies every time they review new products. Because they install the games and all these phones that they review. Right. So basically, they've walked some of it back. But if you're making, I think if you're a smaller developer and you're making like over $200,000 a year from your game,

you're going to have to start paying these fees. And if you're a larger developer and I think it's over a million, A year, you're going to have to start paying these fees. And these fees, like, are fairly small. What is the argument for per install fees? Money? But, like, certainly has you even made any argument that's like... No, that's part of the frustration here.

The frustration is less about the money being asked for because a lot of the developers are like, yeah, if this is a cost of doing business, that's a cost of doing business. This was communicated to us in the worst way possible. In the middle of, like, a big Apple event, it gets communicated. There was no prep. usually they'll go to like bigger developers and be like, hey, we're thinking about charging you more money. None of that happened in this case. And Unity is really like digging in on this.

Every single time we'd get another thing, we'd get another report from a game developer saying, oh, we're going to just delete our game rather than have to pay this, which is what the cult of lamb developers said. I think they're still going to keep their game up. And there are a couple of really specific big problems, too. the first being that it's not even necessarily clear how they track installs, that they're basically saying, yeah, we have this model. It's totally data compliant with data regulations, totally not privacy invading, also totally accurate and also it totally won't if somebody decides they hate you and they want to run a giant like install bombing campaign to drive up your costs. It will also totally not include that, but no one has really figured out exactly what that means. And second, that installs are just not a thing that inherently makes developers money. So they're charging for this thing that doesn't actually tie direct. directly to revenue. Right. And that's what's got people pissed is this thing is just feels really, really egregious to them. It feels like it came on really, really quickly. And there's zero communication. Unity's just saying, yeah, we know you pay us every year to use our engine. Now you have to pay us more. Oh, you've had this game you developed on this engine for the last 10 years.

We'll either learn a new engine or cough up the cash. And that just feels like extortion. It's not legally extortion, but it sure feels like it to developers. How real do you think the threat is from all these developers who are saying basically will leave Unity instead of pay these fees? As is looking into that. I think for a lot of them, it's not realistic. If you've got to be a gigantic amount of work. It's in a huge amount of work.

So for most of them, it's probably not realistic. But a lot of them are saying, well, I'm never going to develop in Unity again. And I'll probably pull those games, right? Life is long. Yeah. If you're a big developer, you can afford to pull a game that's made you a little money and you don't want to pay anymore and go off and do something else. So it's kind of wild that Unity did this.

And the theories are, everybody's got a theory on why they did it. The most common one is they like money, which is fair. A lot of people think it might be because of Genshin Impact, which is huge on mobile and makes a lot of money. And Unity would like some of that money. And has been established Allison Johnson downloads 650 times a year. Yeah, very true. So here's a question to have.

So you mentioned the iPhone. Apple's pushing into spatial computing with the Vision Pro. They basically need game engines to make a bunch of Vision Pro stuff. And Unity is core to that. Like Unity is a big deal in that world. It's big of metal. And Apple hates Epic, which makes the big competitor. Right.

Like Unreal is not going to show up on Apple platforms as the alternative to Unity anytime soon. There are different engines. Like Unity is better for monument in Valley and small. games like that. It's graphically intensive, but it's not like that photo realism. You don't see that as often in Unity games as you do in Unreal, which makes sense because that's also less like taxing to the processor, which is one of the reasons Unity is so popular with meta, also because deals were made and stuff like that. But it's still one of the relatively, you have fewer options for developing 3D and spatial games than you do for developing 2D games, and Unity is definitely one of the huge

3D options because there are plenty of games that are 3D but not photorealistic, including a lot of like VR games. Right. Yeah. So I'm just wondering, is in the midst of all of this, just turning the screw one time, you've covered VR more than anybody that I've ever met? This has some huge impact on how Apple's relationship to developers is going to go as they roll out the Vision Pro, right?

Like, if all the developers are mad at the main engine, where else are they going to go? It's a very good question. And it's partly a question Ash is actually doing reporting on right now. Like there are alternatives that you can use. One of them is Godot, which is an open source engine, which is very tiny and is very hard. But yeah, it's a good question whether that's a thing that makes unity feel like it can flex. Right. That's kind of one of wondering, like, where is this leverage coming from?

Like, if you're like, we're going to piss off everyone, usually it's because you can't. Like, you're Reddit. I was just going to say this is what Reddit did. Reddit's like, we need more money. We're going to piss off everyone. But where are you going to go? Yeah. And they just waited.

And some parts of Reddit are still just a mess. But they just waited and it's fine because we're going to go. Who's a competitor? And there's just an echo of that in this unity conversation, especially as it relates to iOS, because the thing that is the natural competitor is at such odds with Apple at the corporate level. Yeah. I'm going to be really curious to see how Apple responds to this over the next few weeks because it happened in the middle of their event. Yeah. I wonder Apple even knew.

As Apple was talking so much about mobile gaming. Yeah, it just feels like I don't think Apple knew or that probably wouldn't have happened that way. It's also not particularly good for Apple. Like, it's not great for Apple if one of the bottlenecks for their platform is suddenly taking a big fee from developers that Apple doesn't see part of. Yeah, only Apple gets to take fees. Apple doesn't like money changing hands if it doesn't take 30% out of that money. All right, well, we're going to keep covering it. It sounds like Ash has a lot of reporting in the works.

We'll put that on the site. it's a big deal like unity canceled events there were death threats over this yeah which again i will point out is inappropriate don't do that so it goes that's that's life on the internet for you there's much of stuff on the site that isn't apple or the google trial bow is just overhauled its entire lineup of headphones the specter fold is out which is a foldable 17 pc which is a very cool monocle weird laptops i love a weird laptop and uh the workers of the big three automakers are on strike this week which and he wrote about and a million new video games And a million new video.

It's Nintendo Direct in the Sony state of play where this week as well. On top of that, it continues to be September. Just relentlessly September. That's the name of my email. Relentlessly September by Eli Patel. It's avant-garde, but I think you'll like it. We've got a bunch of events coming up. The Code Conference is at the end of this month.

Here's the news. Virtual tickets for the Code Conference are now in sale. All the main tickets are sold out. So you can, if you want to watch the CodeConference, go to Voxvenu.com. slash code and you can sign up a virtual ticket and stream the thing

Mike Krieger from Artifact is coming he's ex CETO of Instagram now the co-founder of Artifact, the news app David just wrote about it they rolled out links yeah they want to be like

the place to share cool stuff on the internet because Twitter used to be that and now Twitter's dead and we love that so Casey's going to talk to Mike about that and then

I don't have you even pay attention a little company called Disney uh lots of weirdness in Disney World and lots of Liz Disney World Lots of weirdness Mickey Mouse is coming to code

Disney Bob Iger has been hinting that he might sell ABC get rid of a bunch of stuff partner with ESPN all this stuff Byron Allen who is the owner of the company

that owns the Weather Channel we invited him because they're doing a bunch of AI stuff on the Weather Channel Climate Change AI whole thing turns out he wants to buy ABC for $10 billion. It's like him and Next Star so both of them

are smaller companies they're less known for being Disney. They're not Disney, but it's a big deal. Yeah. So Julia Wilson's going to interview Byron Allen about what we thought was going to be about using AI. Now it's all ABC. People and local communities deal with climate change. But now we're going to talk about whether or not he's going to buy ABC.

There's a bunch of other great speakers. I'm excited about it. Also next week we have Microsoft event and an Amazon event because this just does not stop. And there's a YouTube event. And a YouTube event. Oh, wow. The made by YouTube. There's a calendar.

We'll put it in the show notes. We made it calendar so you can just subscribe to it, and then you can follow all the events with us. It's going to be a crazy month. We're excited about it. Okay, that's it. That's a Vergecast. We've gone far over. You're looking at me expectantly.

No, we're just... We're just... Liam is looking at me expectantly. I see. It's like a tetraprisim of glares. That's it. That's a Ritchcast. Rock and roll.

And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vorge. Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.