The Vergecast - Apple releases 16-inch Macbook Pro, Motorola announces a new Razr, and Disney+ launches

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul go through the products announced this week including Apple's 16-inch Macbook Pro and Motorola's new Razr foldable phone. Julia Alexander then joins the show to cover the initial launch of Disney+ and the ongoing streaming wars. Stories this week: The everything town in the middle of nowhere Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro is here, and it has a good keyboard A fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $6,099 Apple’s new Mac Pro is shipping next month Google’s rollout of RCS chat for all Android users in the US begins today Motorola resurrects the Razr as a foldable Android smartphone John Carmack stepping down as CTO of Oculus to work on AI Disney+ experiencing ‘unable to connect’ errors on launch day The Mandalorian’s first episode shows that Star Wars can work on the small screen Disney+ doesn’t have to sell anyone on streaming How to get a year of free Disney+ from Verizon The Simpsons’ aspect ratio is messed up on Disney+ Verizon’s new set-top box is possibly the worst option out there for streaming Apple could bundle news, TV, and music into one subscription as soon as 2020 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about Apple's new 16-inch MacBook Pro. The new Mac Pro is coming out in December. We get into the new folding Motorola Razor. Dieter has many emotions about RCS. And then Julia Alexander joins us to talk about the launch of Disney Plus in the streaming wars. It's Vergecast coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets,

Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports.

And mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, flagship podcast of scissors switches. Wow. Yeah? It's a thing. I'm Nila. I'm your friend.

Dieter Bone is here in New York. I like butterflies. Interesting. Butterflies are great. They're just notoriously unreliable. If you were trying to depend on a monarch, you know what I'm saying? Paul Miller is here. Hello.

Cherry MX Browns, please. All right. We're obviously going to talk about the new MacBook Pro with its updated keyboard, it's stubborn insistence on having a touchbar. And the Razor, the Motorola Razor is out. Disney Plus launched a big week of news. Before you that, I just want to call out Verge reporter Josh Jezah, incredible story this week, The Everything Town in the middle of nowhere.

Josh is on this beat of technology companies making small towns in America do wild things. It's like all the Foxxon stories are Josh. He wrote this story about Amazon nomads, the people who just live in vans, buying stuff from like targets in the middle of nowhere and try to sell them on Amazon. And he's got this new story, but a little town in Montana, where all the Amazon prep centers have, like, located? Yeah, so if you don't know, if Amazon, to get a thing in an Amazon warehouse, it has to meet Amazon's like specs for, like, working in the warehouse.

The box has to be the right size, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so there are these prep centers where people will take stuff from Target or wherever it comes from, fix it up so it actually can go in an Amazon warehouse and then ship it off to the Amazon warehouse. And this story is amazing because it's like, there's just one woman in this tiny little town who's like, I could do that. And she just started doing it. And then all of a sudden the whole town, like all the women in the town started opening up prep centers. It's amazing.

It's impossible to do the story justice. Go read it. I just want to call it out. There's all this like gadgety news and Disney Plus news. Julia Alexander is going to join us later to talk about Disney Plus. There's all that stuff going on. But this is one of those stories that's what the verge is for, right? Like technology and shopping and like there's an emergent behavior of just like the person who's like, actually this is pretty inefficient.

Like I just move boxes around. Amazon should be better at this. Go read it. It's really good. Okay. Dieter, you're in town. Yeah. Because of this computer.

I am, yeah. Which I guess in many ways, Deeter is always in town because of the computer. But this is, we both have them sitting in front of us. 16 inch MacBook pros. Oh, the 16 inches is weird because I think the 15 inch was like 15.4. So the actual increase in screen size, it looks impressive because the bezels are smaller, but it's actually not that much bigger. Yeah. They just went up a number.

Yeah. like you do. It looks good. It's a great screen. It's a very nice screen. We've both got review and it's you're working on the review, but just the sort of announcement response to this computer is a story regardless of the value. We'll talk about the review next week. But people are waiting a long time for this computer. Yeah, long time. An entire backstory about this keyboard that we're just going to have to talk about. And I don't know. The theme of Apple, it's, there's so much. There's layers and layers of meaning with this laptop. Yeah.

I was just, here's my sum up of Apple over the past like five years. No, Neil, let me try. Oh, God. You know, in sports movies,

I just watched Miracle on Disney Plus last night. You know, in sports movies, the very important thing is that the penultimate game against the Hawks or the Soviet Union, you know, is a horrible defeat. Okay,

I understand what you're saying. Right? Right. But the arc of, of a sports movie is not that like they suffer the horrible defeat and then the Mighty Ducks get in a room and they're like we should just do the obvious thing

and win right like they have to like try hard they have to like reach into their soul yes it was inside of them all along the power to be the sports movies are inspiring this is just like they don't get Apple doesn't get credit for being inspiring okay they just do not

Paul's version of this which you can believe or not my version of this is that Apple John Gruber called it hubris when he was writing up this review. It's a good word for it. It's a good word that Apple got so far ahead of itself in believing that they could just change behavior. Yeah. That if Apple just deploy something that comes true.

Yeah. And that is sometimes accurate. Apple takes away the floppy drive. There are no more floppy drives. They did it with the headphone, Jack, Eli. I hate you. They did it. I disagree.

They changed. No one's wandering the streets being like, I wish I had a CD-ROM. Every day I see someone, be like, I wish my phone had a headphone jack. But you can't deny that they've changed behavior. I dislike you. Do you think part of Apple thought that, you know, are touch pads that are pretending to click nowadays? They don't even really click. They just pretend are so good.

They're right about that, though. They are. So what if we're on the way to that future? What if that's the future for the keyboard, and we should skate in that direction? Turns out that they're not right about playing hockey. Right. How much does he possibly have you been watching? All right.

I think that's actually step two. I think step one was they fully believe that they can drive this level of change, right? And they have done it over and over again. I think the chains they were actually after was the Mac is obsolete. And the iPad and the iPhone are the future. We're going to like push everybody towards it. and they took their eye off the ball of the Mac, which they've all but admitted.

Yeah. Right? The old Mac Pro, like, obviously just, like, hit a wall. It couldn't go any farther. They literally kept making the previous generation of the MacBook error because they were like, people keep buying them and we don't know why.

Yeah. Like, they're like, why wouldn't we take this money, but we don't know why you want this garbage computer that we insist on to continue to make with no retina display. So they took their eye off the ball of the Mac because they thought they were going to drive everybody to the iPad.

That was like, I would say, a medium grade prediction. Maybe that's true. It definitely didn't happen as fast as they thought they could get it done. Yeah. 25 years now, is that actually true? Like, who knows? But, like, lots of people are heading that direction. Okay.

Then they were like, what if we make the computers so beautiful that they are impossible to use? Our new professional Mac is a cylinder. That's the way it's hot. We love it. A good portion of this is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Johnny Ive theory. Yeah. Wait, wait, that's layers.

I'm just going through the, I'm just going through the bra. And then we can dive in on the layers. Okay. And we want to make them thinner and smaller. So we've invented this new keyboard that's super tiny. We don't believe that ports are important. So here's, here's some useless ports that are like 10 years ahead of the curve. And we hate Intel, so we're not even going to update the chips inside on Intel's

cadence, every 15 years, will, like, throw you a bone of a new Intel chip. That's where they basically were with the Mac. Also, we are in a weird beef with Nvidia that nobody understands, so we only use radion sometimes. So we use AMD chips. We don't want to put a touchscreen on it, but I don't know, Stephanie invented the touchbar. Let's throw her a bone. Like, I don't know how this thing exists. I don't know why it's here. Eli has his first touchbar computer that he's actually using instead of just, like, glancing at, and he's very angry. It is so dumb. All right. They're in a bad place.

What drives the iPhone and iPad? Developers writing apps. What do developers want an escape key? Can we change the behavior of every developer in the world by removing the escape? Like, that's the level of crazy. I heard Vim got a shout out. Vim got a shout out, yes. I mean, they did the thing where they did like vignettes of like, how would you use all this power?

Yeah. Because at this point, you can't just like show people a laptop, right? Like Apple's thing is always like, what can you do? What Grammy award winning song? Are you going to write today with your huge display? And it's like none of them, actually. I'm going to use GaragePan to just make clapping sounds. Like I don't need 500 tracks.

Anyway, so they showed off a lot of like, here's what you do, here's like Xcode, here's simulate. They were like, it's a very powerful laptop. Yeah. So Vim got a shout out because they're like the SKK key. Okay, well, I'm just saying that that level of belief that desktop computing was over, people were moving to the iPad, that they could drive design forward without worrying about the functionality of the tasks on the computer just clearly bit them. The nuance here is there are some places where their desire to push design forward

and push desktop computing in a different direction were rational and in an alternate universe would have actually paid off better. The alternate universe being one, their keyboard was actually reliable. They wanted us to live in the Star Trek future where you're like, you know, that's fast, that's what that keyboard is heading towards. And then the USBC, you know how I feel about USBC, Don't you? Like, so much potential.

The right thing that just no one, like Apple said, this is the right thing to do. And everyone said, yeah, it sure does seem like the right thing to do. And then nobody did it. Yeah. And then a bunch of people did bad things. And my Mac lit on fire at CES. Yes. So all these things have happened.

Dreams are made to be broken. Right. But like some of the decisions that you're like unhappy, like I think specifically like the touch bar. Like that is absolutely like, you're just trying to change behavior for like just because you think you're cooler. and the keyboard is maybe in that zone. But USBC, it's like you're doing that, but also like there's like a good, you are in fact trying to do something

that isn't just about like Apple is better or better at design. I would say the exact opposite. I can see the good faith with the touch bar where it's like, you know, people in a few years were like, how did I ever live without all these convenient shortcuts on my touchbar?

Like this will really improve people's lives. But the keyboard, it's like, who thought that a keyboard with no, tactile movement and keys that break was going to be an improvement for people's life. So let's start with the keyboard. The very first MacDwick came out, the little tiny guy

had the Butterfly keyboard. Yep. People love that computer, actually. One USB port. Yep. I miss that computer so much. And they were very... I bought your old one. If you'd like to visit it sometimes you can come over. But they were very much like, this is our vision of the future. It's small,

it's light, it's got a single USB port that can do everything. They named it MacBook. They're like, this is the MacBook. This is the thing. It's an iPad that folds over, right? It could be people loved it. Then they tried to make their pro computers that computer. So, reuse the butterfly keyboard design.

They went to the port design. And I think not a lot of people bought that little MacBook, right? It was a very targeted computer. So you don't have this, like, big data set. A lot of people bought 13-inch MacBooks. A MacBooks. A lot of people bought 15-inch MacBook Pros. And these keyboards do not hold up.

And Apple is constantly hiding. behind the idea. Like, it's just a small percentage. Yeah. The majority of our customers love this keyboard. Yeah. I can't think of a single person. Well, no, I mean, now, right, it's become a thing that the keyboards are bad. But, like, even if you're just looking at the data. Do you know anybody with this laptop

who doesn't have a problem with the keyboard? No. Like, I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro with this keyboard. It's actually an Apple reviewing it. Yeah. And it's broken. Yeah, my dad owns one, and my friend owns one and they're both broken on the keyboard. Like who are these people who aren't having this problem?

So Apple has this data that says lots and lots of people are fine. Some people actually love it. And a small percentage of people have broken keyboards or bad experiences. The problem is a small percentage of people at Apple's scale of everything is still millions of people. Yeah. Right? So they're always hiding behind this like statistical like game of minimizing an absolute large number inside of a relative small percentage. We need to finish your grand arc of history.

So you can actually talk about the last time? Yeah. Yeah, I'll get there. Okay. Because I disagree with a lot of your history, but we need to finish it so you can have your narrative. Here's what I'm saying. First, there was Europe. Okay.

First the idea of the nation state was born in ancient Greece, and then it went away for a while. A bunch of nobles were mad at the king. And then during the Holy Roman Empire, a bunch of German lords. Yeah. We can do it. What I wanted to get to was they made. made all those decisions. I thought they could change stuff. Maybe on balance, they would have gotten there. People would have complained. And you would have had the usual narrative of what I get

about the headphone jack, which is, why are you whining about this thing? The ship has sailed. Just shut up, right? Like, you're going to, and I promise you'll whine forever, but I'm aware that the ship has long since sailed. The problem is the keyboard was faulty. And they didn't admit it, and they did admit it. And I really, part of the, what gets us to yesterday and them announcing thing was they announced a new scissors switch keyboard in this thing. And they said, we've been listening to customers. We know not everybody loves it. What actually happened is that Casey Johnston at the outline, Casey used to work at

Arstackney. She's a great tech reporter. Now she's advice. But she wrote a piece of the outline that was like, this keyboard blows. And it is specifically bad because a single grain of sand can destroy it. And she showed it and like, she wrote several pieces about it. And then Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal wrote an incredible column where you could turn off the letters or make the letters repeat.

and basically went through the same reporting process of why it's broken and how it's bad. That set of reporting is, Paul, I think, why everybody is fearful of this keyboard. Because it went from this sort of underreported annoyance about the thing to the conventional wisdom about the product. And then Apple had to launch a repair extension for the keyboard.

The last time they launched products with the butterfly keyboard, they launched them with an existing repair program. They announced a redesigned version of the keyboard. they wouldn't say what had been redesigned. Yeah, these new materials. What new materials? Magic new materials.

Like, basically, they got themselves in a point where they had made this big bet on this keyboard. It was faulty. They refused to admit it. They got caught, and then they had to walk it back. Yeah. And I think that moment for them,

inside of everything else that's happening with the Mac, a redesign Mac Pro that's actually, like, properly designed. An IMac Pro 4 Pro. Like, they've, Mac Mini, that's actually great. I think Apple is. like, oh shit, we have to make good computers.

So that's my version. If I didn't care about accuracy, the headline that I would write, if I worked for another publication that doesn't care about accuracy, the headline that I would write that would just get a cajillion clicks is Johnny Ives' replacement is you. And that all of this was,

Johnny Ive, he checked out a few years ago, and then he finally left. And as he was checking out, a bunch of people like, let's just make it a little thicker. Let's just fix the keyboard and see if you know. notices. Let's just like read. Let's make a new Mac Pro that isn't a trash can and see if Johnny knows. You know, like, none of that is true or fair. No. But there is a trend. Like they, they have done a bunch of stuff that we wanted. They made the iPhone a little bit thicker. So it has better battery. They made this Mac a little bit thicker. They fixed the keyboard on this thing. They made the Mac Pro what the Mac Pro should have been. They, you know, turned on the USBC port on the iPad Pro. Right. They like made it work. Like point for point the things that we've been asking for, customers, us, whoever, they just have started doing it. And it's like, it's just been a trend for the past, at least year or two that Apple is, like,

the thing that's like been annoying, Apple just like did the obvious thing that, like, they should have been doing in the first place. Okay. Let's talk about the actual computer. It's great. I think. I'm still reviewing it. Same prices last year.

2399, 2799. Ninth generation processor. And don't get mad that they're not 10th because you can't get 10th generation processors that, you know, U-Series 45 watt. actually power this thing. One of the things that they just did, they, you know, admitted, not admitting that they were wrong before, but they're admitting that they're wrong before, is they significantly changed the thermals so that it can run under load with 12 more watts of power than the previous generation could. So it's a little bit thicker. The fans push more air

through. It's got a much bigger heat sink. And they also redesigned the logic board such that, like, all of the heat would be better dissipated and, you know, moved around inside. And that was a big problem with the last generation. The thing just could not dissipate heat fast enough, and so the processor would get thermally throttled. So that's great. The thing that they did hear that nobody was asking for, but it turns out as amazing, is they made amazing speakers.

Yeah. They're incredibly good. They're really good. Yeah. I mean, I'm very picky about them. And I think they're the best laptop speakers ever heard. They also have this thing where it's a studio quality microphone and like that. It's a very nice microphone.

I just, I don't think you should use it in your studio. No. It just seems like one of those things where if you're like a recording artist, you walk into studio and someone's like, singing to this MacBook, you should leave that recording studio. Yeah. Because it's not going to work out for you. So would you say they've gotten rid of all of their compromises, most of their compromises, a small percentage of their compromises? The touchbar is still there. They did add an escape key, though.

They added a hardware escape key. The camera is still bad. The camera is very bad. What are the real compromises of a Mac? Like, you're asking a question that has, like, a variety. Like, if the compromise before of the Mac was, I really like this operating system, so I will accept that the space bar may not work very well. Yeah.

They have removed that compromise. If the compromise was, I really like this operating system, I'm forced to have this touchbar in my life and, like, use it to press escape. Okay, they've got right of that. Yeah. They have not, I mean, the bezel is a little bit smaller. Are there Windows computers with smaller bezels? They're absolutely are. And they have touchscreens, turns out.

Right. So, like, that is a compromise that they're just not going to give up on. They don't think these computers should have touch screens. The line I put in my hands on is the lack of an SD card slot when there's this much space to work with is downright spiteful. Yeah. It's spiteful. It's just like, come on. A little mean.

They're very convinced that everyone loves their USBC SD card readers. That's what they think. And they were like, and a lot of new cameras have USBC. And it's like, I don't want to. They don't actually. And also like, I don't, those computers shouldn't talk to each other. Just take the media out. I guess like, so like in comparison to the MacBook Pro 15 that you could buy a week ago,

this seems like a, you know, a lot of things have been fixed. But like the computer I've had my eye on is like the think pad extreme. They have like X1 extreme. and then the P1. So that's a completely different computer. No, it's not. It's 15 inch. It's thin and light.

It has some more ports, but it's not dramatically thicker. And it's not, I don't think it's even heavier as far as I know. And that much better price. And I'm guessing, I really want to see the head to heads. But like, you know, it seems like these are the sort, well, one, think pad keyboards are obviously, I would assume still best in class, but also these are laptops that are designed to perform at a high, I don't know, like Apple's case design is cool, but I can't imagine it is optimal for thermals. I can understand that you can improve what you're doing with thermals

within the constraints of their case design, but I can't imagine a case that was slightly thicker and with vents wouldn't be more efficient. Well, there are vents. There's vents on the back, there's vents on the left and the right. Yeah, they're just hidden. Johnny eyes left. It's metal, and so the metal dissipates heat as well. I'm not saying this, like,

there's not a more possibly, potentially more thermally efficient design, but I don't, I don't think that this is like fundamentally broken. And it was before, and they just, like, they fixed it. They made it thicker. They improved the fans.

It's over and over again the story with this thing. I mean, like, Paul, it's great. Yeah, we're going to benchmark a lot of computers. We're going to, like, figure it out. But, like, if you want to run MacOS, like, this is the thing. you can't, right? Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's not the thing you should get. It's the only thing you can get. Fair. Well, you can still buy it like a... So what's interesting in the context of this whole lineup is that there's this computer. Yep. Where they fixed all the problems.

Yep. Made some cool speakers. Then there's, there are other laptops. Yeah. Which continue to have butterfly keyboards made of special materials that continue to have touch bars just. flying at you. This is not the best selling. It's one of the most

popular. Yeah. But their best selling models are obviously the air and the 13 inch macquick pro. The air I think is just fine. Like butterfly keyboard, haven't heard a lot about it. Keyboard extension. We'll see if they change it next year. The 13th trackbook pro is in a real weird spot.

So they gave this presentation to journalists and waves and we were in one of them and they did a briefing and they talked about all the stuff and here's what it does and pros and blah, blah, blah. And then you know, at the end of every sort of Apple keynote, they, like, show their lineup of products. And they're like, here's our lineup of all of our pro products. And they, like, all the little products I came, you know, sliding in.

And Mac Pro slid in, the Pro display slid in, the IMac pro slid in, the 15 inch MacBook Pro slid in. Yep. Yeah. They just, like, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is just not on their slide of Pro products. I think that generation MacBook Pro is going to get fully memory. hold. Yeah. So they already,

they released the 15-inch old butterfly MacBook pro in like May, and it's just gone. This thing just replaced it. I think the 13-inch will get rebed soon and it'll be gone. And Apple will pretend that Butterfly keyboards never happened.

Yeah. They'll listen to our customers. And it's like three years of you saying the keyboards didn't break. Well, the keyboards broke. Yeah. I think they did as good of a job talking about the new keyboard.

As could be done. This could be done. Without just like flat out admitting that they were wrong. Yeah. Unless they're going to recall every single Mac on the planet. They did as good as it could. And so you guys have been typing on this new keyboard.

It's great. You want to hear it? Here we go. Yeah, let's a little bit of ASMR. All right, here we go. Let's listen to this keyboard. It's fine. I'm coming from an old 15-inch MacBook Pro, 2015, which is honestly the computer that they want you to compare it to.

Yep. And it's fine. I like that keyboard a lot. This keyboard is better than that keyboard. It's, it is. It is a... It's better. It's a little gushier.

Yeah, but it's less springy. It's more clunky, less springy. That MacBook keyboard compared to this, like the backlight bleeds out, the sides of the keys. The metaphor is it's the balloon arm-waving guy at the car dealership. They're like just like, blah.

They're just loose and springy and blah. You know what? You know what the balloon guy exists? Because it's effective. People love balloon guy. people see the balloon guy they're like I'm going to buy a card today I'm just saying

I understand your metaphor but balloon guy's beloved So Nila you're saying that This is not blowing you away compared to Or even possibly an improvement compared to What the 2015? I think if they had told me the same computer With this keyboard

I'd like how the keyboard's different and it's fine Yeah The things that are getting me Are the touch bar is just ridiculous It is a ridiculous Like, just think of the interaction modality of a keyboard is that you are pushing buttons, right? So often you can do nothing by just resting your hands in this zone. The touch bar is full of touch buttons.

So if you are wrong by a millimeter, you have pressed the back button in your web browser by accident. And so, like, now I've installed POC, which is an app that I know Dieter's had that, like, hijacks the touchbar with other stuff. And I've just, like, have my Wi-Fi status where my finger goes, because it's, not a button. Why, I don't need to know about my Wi-Fi status at that point in time. I'm not saying you're wrong, but there's a home row, right? Yeah. That's one place where people rest. But let's say you want to stretch out. There's a row above that. And then there's the numbers. So you're going full extension. You have your hands flat on your laptop. You just like rest your hand on the screen. Are you just like just like chilling just resting your arm? Where do you, where do you like on the palm rest?

On the home row. On the home row. No. There's little, there's little braille, not braille. I'm not like always in like a like a pounce position ready to type. F and J. I'm like scrolling around. I got my hand on the, whatever. All I'm saying is it is ridiculous to put a tap modality next to a button push modality, which is what the touch bar is.

And I just don't. I would have loved to save $200 and not have a touch bar and not have a GPU and like have this, have this keyboard. And I don't think I will ever get that thing. I mean, buy a Surface laptop three. That's what you want. I want a Hackintosh. You want a Surface laptop three.

15-inch Surface laptop three. That's what you want. It's got a regular old keyboard. The touchpad isn't like giant like this one, but whatever. But the GPU is underpowered. Battery lasts a long time. It doesn't have anything you don't want. That's what you want.

Okay. I'll buy one of those soon. Okay. Anyway, Dieter's going to review the computer. I just think this moment where Apple is just doing obvious things is a very interesting moment in their history because what they are, decidedly not doing is innovating a lot. Oh. Right? Like they're not pushing forward

like the products. They're just resetting the products to a place where like everyone's happy with them. Would you like to talk about the rumor that they gave a presentation to a thousand employees and revealed their entire AR plan for the next three years? Yeah. To the 1,000 employees. It's wild. Yeah, I was just going to say like if they come out with wild AR stuff in a couple years, we'll be like, yeah, I guess that makes sense, you know. Right? If it's good, if they did a, if they do a good job and they change the whole world with AR, then like, it makes sense to just sit around and tweak their, their phones and

computers, right? Yeah. I mean, I, I am very concerned about the idea that Apple thinks that AR glasses will replace the iPhone in 10 years, which is one of the rumors that came out of that meeting. Like, I would say as a society, we have not dealt well with pervasive cameras everywhere. Right? Just a lot of problems with everybody having a camera or five all the time. Like just a lot.

Like, in a lot of good things, sure, like I love cameras. We review the hell out of cameras when the phones come out. Great. But like, there are surveillance issues. There are just creepy people issues. There are revenge porn. Like, it's just there. There's a lot of stuff that comes with that level of camera technology.

Now we're going to put them on everybody's faces. Like that, it seems like we ought to think. that one through a little bit before Apple just gets to race out and make a product of that scale. And then on top, like, what is they are? It's a layer of information over the world. I would say as a society, we have not done a great job of agreeing on information at this point in time. Like, what is true and what is not? So, like, now you might have people, like, literally living in different perceived realities.

Like, that is already true because of phones. People live in different perceived realities. But it would be really cool. It would be awesome. I'm just saying I don't want to see face camera filter bubble. Can you imagine how many issues of the interface case you will have to write every day when there are face camera filter bubbles? I'm so excited. I can't wait.

It's just that's where my head's at with that stuff. I think it's really cool. I just think deploying it at Apple scale. I hope they're thoughtful about it. All right. Let's take a break. We got to talk about folding phones. We didn't talk about the Mac Pro now.

Should we talk about it for two seconds? The Mac Pro is coming in December. That's what we know. You can get an 8 terabyte SSD set up on it if you want. It does not fold in half. It does not fold. Yeah, it's got, though. You can't rack-mount it, though.

It's got USBA ports. It's got one on the inside for your copyright dongle needs. It's perfect. All 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 AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy. and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist

or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's Framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner,

You know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend

less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply.

All right. Nieder, do you want to talk about the razor right away, or do you want me to get you all riled up about RCS first? Oh my God. We don't have time to talk about RCS. Okay, look. Vergecast. Google is flipping the switch so that all Android users in the U.S. who use Android messages,

which is not most of them, because most people have Samsung phones, but you can go download it. If you use Android messages, you will get RCS chat. Google will provide it to you by the end of the year. They're rolling it out slowly. They're just doing the thing. I feel like there's a game of like cat and mouse between the carriers and Google over RCS at this point. Like Google is like, we're going to launch in the UK and France and we're just going to like,

we're going to take over and not wait for carriers. And then the carrier's like, interesting. We're going to launch a joint venture where we're going to create our own app to handle RCS. And Google's like, huh, we're just going to provide it, provide it right now because we can, because you're going to take another year

to get your shit done. The carriers are like, I see what you've done there at Google. And I don't know what their next move is, but there's going to be another turn here. Presumably, like, Google provided RCS will switch over to carrier provided RCS seamlessly and without a problem

once carrier provided RCS becomes available. But what we don't know yet is whether or not you'll get to continue to use the Android Messages app or if you've got to use the carrier provided app when they want to provide RCS to you. I use Signal, which can handle my SMS and also Signal messaging. So what will happen there is you'll continue to use SMS because Signal cannot the RCS has to be like from an authenticated app and Signal can't authenticate to an RCS server. And that's forever going to be like that?

Well, I mean, we'll see. Maybe someday Signal will like be blessed up to like become an RCS provider if it wants to because it is a federated model. but that's like a five-year project. Because I just pulled up the messages app and it says you can't, messages can only send and receive messages if it's your default. That's correct.

Yep. So nobody's getting RCS. Well, no, most people use the default and the default of the Android messages on, like a whole, but like two years ago, LG and HG and HG and HG and HG and a bunch of other Android makers are like, yep, we're just using Android messages now.

And the only one that wasn't was Samsung. If you have a Samsung phone, you need to go download Android messages and not use Samsung's client. I could go on. We shouldn't have feelings. I know you do. So let me ask you about them. Oh, God.

This is a war. This is a tiny little cold war for messaging. Yeah. To control messaging. What are the chances that the CCMI, the cross-carrier messaging initiative. Yeah. Great name. When I think about consumer marketing, I think about the words cross-carrier messaging initiative.

What are the chances of the CCMI rule, like, fragments RCS? Hopefully small. Everyone is saying the right words about interoperability and interconnect. Interconnect is the thing that still exists with RCS. It's just a little bit simpler than it was with SMS. So you shouldn't need weird third parties like Cineverse to like translate your messages and then hold your Valentine's Day messages. Because the servers do talk to each other pretty directly right now, like email or whatever. but those interconnects involve contracts and that if any time there's a contract, it's a point of leverage.

And so they could choose to break it. The reason RCS didn't take off is the carriers didn't want to take the time to put in the effort to make the contracts and all work together. There's too much work. They feel like they have to now. I think Google's putting a lot of pressure on everybody. But, you know, it could all go wrong. There's no guarantee that it will go right. And is that here, is it just because iMessage exists, great.

Those people are not accessible. Even if they build RCS, there's no guarantee Apple's going to use it. Although Apple's made some noises in the past, right? No. Apple has said zero things about RCS. I think Google has made some noises about Apple. Google has said that they would love it if Apple participated. They'll accept everybody into their happy RCS family.

And then silence emanated from Apple's circular headquarters. Yeah, I would call it gleeful silence. Yeah. But once in a time, Cary's just make a lot of money in SMS. Yep. All that traffic moved to IMessage and what's happened online and we chat. Yep, because they got hubris. They charge too much rent for SMS.

Anyway. The only reason their building is they're making that money again. But they think they're going to make their money on the back end. Because the thing that they want to make money on is charging Virgin Airlines and Walgreens and your hotel and your bank. to chat with you over RCS instead of charging you for the RCS messages. That's the plan. That sounds like a idea that would have worked five years ago and is not going to work this time.

Maybe. The thing that RCS has going for it is it is tied to your phone number, and it is, once everyone does it, a universal fallback. Everyone will have RCS except for iPhone users. So they know that they can always get, like, you don't have to find out. If I want to talk to you, I don't have to ask you what chat app you use. I can just use RCS. Yeah. But to Paul's point, like, Apple already offers IMessage Business Chat.

Yep. Facebook is combining all of its chat services. And the phone number is the thing that we need to kill. Well, yeah, but guess who doesn't want it killed? The people that control whether or not you can, like, get data on your phone. Well, sure. That's what I'm saying. I feel like this is a legacy offering.

Yeah, well, the only way to stop it, Paul, is to launch a pirate mesh network across the entire planet where we control the data. Well, if the FCC would just let me, free the airwaves. I don't. Stop granting monopolies. We need competition.

It was literally about to explode. Yeah. One thing you could do is, like, you could maybe block Team Mobile and Sprint for merging, the Meg Sprint. Yep. Okay. Yep.

Give the spectrum back to the people. Thank you. The spectrum. Paul Miller for president. The spectrum already belongs to the people. It's doled out by the people's government. Anyway, the end. The people's government.

That's where I'm at right now. First, there was Europe. Oh, dear sweet democracy. Let's just put our face computers on. Relax. All right. Speaking of carriers and throwbacks. Oh, God.

The razor's here. The razor's here. is here locked to Verizon using an e-sim. So you can't just unlock it and throw it on whatever carrier you want. A carrier exclusive razor is a truly, like truly a throwback. It's like a proper throwback. All right. Let's not talk about e-sims and carrier locked-downs.

Let's talk about how cool the screen is. It seems great. There does not appear to be a crease that you can feel or see. Motorola is very confident that you don't need to baby this thing. You know, it's not IP 68 or whatever, but like they're like, we're not doing like a big scary, you know, set of warnings. Use it like a phone. It'll last a couple of years for sure because that's how long phones usually last. And yeah, they're like, we made these screens before.

We're fine. Go ahead and use it. Also, it costs $1,500 so that'll limit the number of people who buy it. And those people are like, like, I broke my razor by driving it over with my Mercedes. Yeah. They'll be fine. Yeah, yeah. We had Panas Panas Panay on the Vergecast a while ago.

He was talking about Microsoft's dual-screen devices. And I asked him very directly, like, this seems like a moment where there's a form factor change, which is usually sort of historically when incumbents fail. Right. Right. Like new entrants can come in because there's a form factor change, and you get there first. So obviously, the form factor change to mobile provided a huge opportunity for Apple. Right.

Do you think – and he was like, no, I don't think about it that way. But I'm looking at dual-screen devices from Microsoft. I'm looking at the Galaxy Fold. I'm looking at this razor. And I'm like, the thing people really want is something that looks different. Like, ultimately, that provides a new kind of functionality. And I see the razor. I'm like, everybody is interested in it.

Yeah. It's the first time you see it non-Apple or Samsung phones just, like, hit the mainstream. Yeah. It was on the front page of CNN today. Yeah. But, like, Motorola has been making Nothing Burger mid-range Android phones for four years now. Yeah. And they've just been like holding this one.

Just like, we're just going to keep making, you know, G whatever's. And they'll just go out there. It'll be fine. But really what we're working on is this thing. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know if they nailed it. There's a bunch of potential problems with it. But it seems like they, the thing that I wrote is they chose an easier problem to solve than Samsung did.

Samsung tried to go all the way to like unfolding tablet. And they just had a huge crease that they had to deal with. And they just, they got over their skis. Motorola just like nailed a slightly easier problem, I hope. Yeah. Well, I mean, Samsung had made a Galaxy S-10 that just folded in half. Yeah. You think they would have been easier than the Galaxy Folded?

I do. I think so. Why is that other than, obviously Motorola has a different hinge design, which is going to be hard to talk about on audio. But you should definitely watch Himes video and read the article. And you can see the patent and everything of how Motorola is folding the screen without really creasing it. It's like, it forms a teardrop inside.

the hinge so that it can fold completely flat. Like if you imagine folding a piece of paper without creasing it, just put two ends of a piece of paper together. And now you have. So that's awesome. So is that what you mean by the easier problems? No, I mean that the length

of screen that they have to fold in half is like an inch and a half instead of five inches or four inches or however tall the galaxy fold screen is. There's just less like stuff that they have to worry about. They could just fold it that way. It goes inside the phone, and they can worry a little bit less about all the shifting and weirdness that happens with, like, the larger screen.

And they have a much smaller number of software problems to solve. Yes. Because all it is is an Android phone. Mm-hmm. Right? Instead of an Android phone that unfolds into a tablet. So, like, the Galaxy Fold is, like, a tiny front-facing Android phone, and then, like, a tablet. Mm-hmm.

And then it's an Android tablet. Although Motorola is doing some kind of nice stuff that looks like, I mean, I haven't used it, but the little external screen. Yeah. You can quick reply to messages, dismiss notifications and stuff like that. It's just, it's not just, it does absolutely look cool. And I think that's a really great reason to be interested in it. But it also seems it just, it kind of makes a little more sense as a phone because it has like a check the notifications mode. it's less tall in your pocket,

which is one of the big problems I have with phones being so big is I just don't like, they're just uncomfortable in my pocket. Yeah. It is a little ridiculously tall when it's open, so it might be weird to use,

but I don't know, it's cool. I think people are going to be hype over this thing. I think people are like, this is going to prove out the use case for a folding phone so much more than the Alexi fold. Yep. Right, like make the thing that everyone's, So, like, there are two things.

Everybody thinks the phones are too big, but then everybody wants a big phone. Right. And, like, we are told over and over again there's not a market for a small phone. Yeah. Okay, well, here's a small phone that turns into a big phone. Like, hmm. Yeah. Like, however many of this they make it.

This will fit in a pocket. And it's a little bit thicker probably. And the possible problem is they made it really thin, which means it has a very small battery and a pretty slow processor. And that combination of things could mean that the battery life isn't great or that it feels slow. I'm not super worried about it feeling slow. I am worried about battery life, and I'm definitely worried about the camera being wompwom. Yeah, the camera will be bad. But this is great. It's a throwback. You can do digital well-being in software, or you can just

buy a phone with a shitbox camera and a slow processor. And then carry around your RX-100, and now you've got like $4,000 a gadget. And because it's a Verizon special, you have to use Verizon Messages Plus, which means you don't want to text anybody anyway. This is horrible. Do you want to talk about the ESIM thing for two seconds? I mean, ESIM was designed to force carriers to allow people to switch phones more easily because they could just, like, do it in software instead of having to go buy a little card, right? A little plastic thing. But instead, what appears to be happening is if there's no place at all to put that little card, then it's completely up to the carrier or the manufacturer of whether or not they'll let you do that software. The software piece isn't there yet.

We haven't regulated it into existence. And so I don't know if this is going to be unlocked. They don't want to talk about it. But it is completely possible that if they don't have to release this thing unlocked, they just won't do the work of making the software to let you use it on another carrier. Yeah. That sounds horrible. Yeah. I mean, I will say that part of the Sprint T-Mobile merger condition is that, like, T-Mil has to, like, provision ESM thing so anybody can jump on their network and, like, jump off their network.

Yeah. But at the same time, like, Verizon's like, what if we use this to put you in jail? That is also a great throwback. Because wasn't the original Razor, Verizon exclusive for, like, a while? Yeah. Yeah, the original Razor is super expensive. It was a Verizon exclusive. It was a status symbol.

And then it commoditized inside of like two years to being like the phone that like Bell South would throw at you for free if you just drove past one of their stores. Yeah, yeah. Like random Bell South dudes outside. For free. All right, let's take a break. We'll come back.

Julia Alexander is going to join us and talk about Disney Plus. The streaming wars have been joined. 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. hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that.

They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy.

And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit

whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era.

Say goodbye to bottlenecks. and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Paul Miller.

Uh-huh. Every week you hold this nation together. It's right. For pure consistency of a segment called. I'm taking my talents to artificial general intelligence. Wow. That's like two different references all in one. This is a sports reference to the time. LeBron James changed basketball teams.

But this is John Carmack, who is my favorite programmer, is basically quitting Oculus. He's going to be an advisor. But, you know, the famed creator of Doom and Quake and just very, very good programmer, a very smart person. I just, the LeBron thing was the thing that came to mind, and there's a really great discussion on hacker news about this. But, you know, this idea that John Cromack says he's going,

while he's not too old, he wants to try artificial general intelligence. He wants to give it a shot. And so he and his son are going to hang out at their house and work on this problem. And it's just like, if any... I can't think of, there's probably maybe five programmers in the world who could say that and anybody would care. Okay. But he is one of the five and it's, I care and it's really exciting.

And it's fun, you know, and it's a great debate because like, what does that even mean? Is this a problem that has lacked people like John Carmack or does it have too much hype? You know, there's so much, you know, like is the stuff Google's doing with deep mind along those lines or is it totally different from what real AGI? would be, it's so much fun to think about and just theorize about John Carmack and his son hanging out, solving the hardest problem on the planet. Wait, can I ask, okay. So first of all, it seems like Oculus hit a big inflection point, right? They completed phase one.

The quest is out. And they also killed the thing that John Carmich spent the most of his time on, which was Gear VR. Okay. So a big inflection point. Like, they went from Palmer Lucky and our CES trailer with like, basically a cardboard box with the phone in it. Well, it was like the first thing to Carmack was like, I'll help you. Sold to Facebook.

We're fine iterated the product. Now all the OGs are gone. Facebook is like big company on its cycle, right? And probably, and I believe steering Oculus towards AR. That's the impression I've gotten for the past couple years. Okay. But like, so he's out there. And then he's, he's going to do AGI.

So here's some dumb questions about AGI that I'm just going to ask you. if he invented a computer that was as smart as a gerbil, would he have been successful? I just picked an animal. That's one of the great things about this hacker news discussion. One of the first problems of AGI is defining intelligence. Okay, so we can stop there. First, there was Europe. Right.

But that's like the scope of the problem. It's like it doesn't even have defined problem set or a defined like solution space. And that's something people are talking a lot about. Like when John Carmack was working on 3D rendering stuff, we have a pretty good description of the physics of light. And when you're making a 3D renderer, you are trying to make something that looks like that without actually simulating trillions of trillions and trillions

to the power of trillions of interactions of particles all the time. You're creating a loose approximation of a thing that we understand the physics of. We don't understand brains. We don't understand intelligence. we do know a lot about them. And so the hope is to use the things that we know about and the things that we do know about computers and trying to marry those into intelligence.

And I think probably the foremost example lately is the stuff Deep Minds done with AlphaGo and they just did Alpha StarCraft. Like they're using neural network stuff and deep learning to solve, to play games right now. I think that's the closest, I think, think that anybody has public research-wise. But it's a very broad problem. Just like one out of ten, how likely is it that John Carmack and his son actually make a Terminator? You don't want to really get into this with me because I really don't even

think AGI is possible. I'm a naysayer in that sense. But if it is possible with our given technology or just like some more leaps, I would say John Carmack and his son have one of the better shots. Because I think he's a really smart person. I feel like we should check on him and his son in that house. All right. Speaking of Death Stars. Wow. I did it.

Julia, welcome. Oh my gosh. It's here. It's happened. Disney Plus. Yeah. It launched. Yes.

Very well for them. They hit 10 million subscribers first day. Well, it launched very well eventually. Yeah. So they had a lot of people sign up. Whether or not those people could watch anything. is the question, but they signed up for it. They signed up for it.

Obviously, there's a huge marketing push. My favorite moment of this, like, they are a huge company. Massive. Like, they are the Death Star. And they keep buying a lot of other big companies. They can't stop themselves. They don't know what else to do with all their money. They're like, crap, 5 million more people watch Endgame today.

Like, what do we do with this? But, like, ESPN anchors or, like, Disney Plus will change your life. Right. Like, that is corporate synergy at a level that is just... It's a disturbing level. Yeah. But, like, you know. But also understandable from like a business perspective.

Like, I get it. Yeah, it's just... So they did a lot of hype. A huge corporate synergy launch moment. I don't know if that 10 million number actually means they have 10 million subscribers, right? They gave it away for free to Verizon customers. It's in bundles. It is ridiculously easy to push one button and subscribe for a minute on like an Apple TV.

Right. I mean, the big question is whether or not those 10 million subscribers will stay around after the seven-day free trial, after they finish watching Mandalorian, after they finish watching Iron Man 2. Yeah. Which I plug every time on this podcast. Come on. Yeah, I mean, whether or not those people actually stay around is the question. But, I mean, analysts were expecting Disney Plus to hit between 10 and 18 million by end of year one. So they hit it by end of day one. Yeah. Which is a nice little moment for them. Like, they get to pass. themselves in the back and be like, see, we knew what we were doing. Whether or not that's true will take a few months. Do you know how they tell how many subscribers they have? They have a Bob

Eiger counter. Dieter, it's been a good run for you, but I think you are the first casualty. I'm so sorry to everyone. This is a family show. I'm not sure how that got through. Do you have that queued up? No, it just came to me. Can I get a real quick question answer? Speaking of a Verizon wondering if it's in the war. I didn't even know, but I just like readintheverge.com and it's like Verizon customers get Disney Plus for free.

And I was definitely not planning on giving Disney any of my money to watch old movies that I've seen before. But if I get it for free, I get it for free. And so I signed up and then I watched Miracle last night.

It was great about hockey because I love the sport of hockey. It's a great movie. What does Verizon get out of that? So Verizon's like out of the zone. They don't have a big content play of their own. They're obviously just going to bundle everybody else's. Yeah, because they tried.

They went 90. They whole and how. But like if you're AT&T, just like they're the two big carriers, right? AT&T is going to do HBO Max or something. They're going to let you stream CNN for free. Like if you're an AT&T customer, you will get as much 480P video from their services as you can drink. Like all day long, 480P video just doesn't hit your data cap. you can have it. Verizon doesn't have that to offer anybody.

So they got a partner. And Disney doesn't have a wireless carrier. It's the up to partner. Buckle up because what's merging next. Oh, my God. Anyway, so they launched the thing. Disney, and you talked about this last time ago, Disney famously had bought Bamtech, which was like the best streaming provider. Yeah.

Maybe wasn't because of what happened yesterday. So those two things, right? A lot of people signing up at once, launch day issues. I mean, the issue that Disney Plus saw is the same issue that every single game company sees when they launch a big game. And then they're like, our servers are now. and everyone gets mad and it's like we've been doing this for two years I feel like every time anything launches like World Warcraft Classic launch and people are like I can't get

it and I was like I feel like this is the same Polygon story every month or a verse story it's like they can't get into their thing and this open Disney Plus they there was override we asked Michael Paul who's the head of Disney streaming services if he was worried about day one he said we're prepared in August and they were not and so but it wasn't surprising to me it seems like things are mostly better now like day two people are getting in I think there's also less people trying to access streaming service they've watched the Mandalorian

so there's that happening too but I mean it wasn't super surprising and Bamtech for me I was like also convinced that it wasn't going to hold up because I look at ESPN plus stuff and ESPN plus stuff always has issues and I was like this is the same didn't Bamtech also run HBO now for a minute yeah and then Disney bought it and they were like

move but HBO now Very famously, every time Game of Thrones came out, like had a problem. I had to watch it on... So HBO Go was hot garbage, and then HBO Now launched on Bamtech. It's a different technology, and then HBO now is the good one, and Go is the bad one. So if you had HBO on cable, you had the crappy streaming service. And if you didn't, you had the good one.

Now was also, though, not super great. I had to watch Game of Thrones on, like, Twitch a lot of time. I don't know if I can say that. But I don't watch it on, like, Twitch because it was just, like, it's running better here than it is on HBO now. So, I mean, this is, like, another question. We are now at the point where you could be paying $4.99 a month for Apple. You could be paying whatever price for... It's in so many bundles.

It's hard to know how much people are going to be. $6.99 standalone for... Stand-alone, $699 for Disney Plus. Like, are we... The question marks about you have to buy everything or, like, recreate the cable bundle. Are you seeing any ways of that, or is Disney and Netflix... It's like, Disney Plus and Netflix are the ones everyone's going to have. So there's an interesting conversation that came up yesterday because the number

one trending thing on Disney Plus last night was The Simpsons. And people were like, why is the Simpsons the number one trending thing? And then it was like, want to. And I was like, well, because Disney needed an office and its office that it owns because they don't want to have any license content. So its office is the Simpsons. They brought that in. They were like, what are people going to fall asleep to?

What are people just going to put on when they're done watching Miracle? It's going to be the Simpsons. And so we saw that happen. Like, there was the number one trending thing. People were confused about it. They were like, why is this on Hulu? So the question is like whether everyone's going to have to have a service that they're going to buy all of this for it.

I don't think that's true. I think Netflix will be that for a lot of people still. I think Netflix has the most at this point that, I mean, genuinely has the most. They announce a new thing every single day. And they have more content coming in and you can just put something on. Like, I should be watching more Disney Plus than I am, but I can't stop watching Criminal Minds, which is a bad show. Yeah.

But here I am. Like every night. This is like a big question for Netflix. Like many of their originals are of like B minus quality. Yeah, they're not great. Right. And like everyone kind of knows it. Everyone's kind of saying it.

Hyperdrive is A plus. I just want to put that out there. You talk about Iron Man 2 every time Hyperdrive. The shoot at the Kodak factory upstate. Is that going to put pressure on Netflix in this? Or is it the library content for license content? In the next few years. I mean the next year.

So the licensing stuff. It's funny. If you go on Disney Plus today, you can click. on a title and it's like, oh, this is coming in October 2021. And it's like, oh, I guess I'll stick around. Just wait. But the reason for that is because even though like Disney owns a lot of their owns, they own all this stuff, they actually licensed out all their IP. And so they're trying to slowly get it back. Netflix has a few years before they have to really start

worrying about losing everything. Like they're losing some things. But like the CW deal for them is still like that's why you can watch a zombie, Riverdale for them. But that's going to start changing soon. So Netflix has to start finding its big franchises. This is what Ted Sarandos, who's their head of content said in a recent earnings call. He was like, we know we need franchises. We know they're important. Right now we're playing, we're trying

to do an original movie play, which like, sure, that's what people are coming to Netflix for. Like, it's, I don't understand what they're doing, but they're figuring it out. And I think they're spending more, they are spending more money than anyone else on content every year. They're trying to figure it out. That question comes into play in like 2021,

in 2022. How long? I don't know if we can answer this, but like they're spending more money, but it's not like they're like they have infinite money. No, yeah. And they're like super not, they're not exactly profitable. Really, they have a lot of debt. But I mean, the thing that goes around a lot with Reed Hastings is like, don't

right, Reed Hastings is going to figure this out. He's the guy in the room. Kind of what they say about Jeffrey Katzenberg who's launching Quivie. They're like, he'll figure it out. If anybody can do it. Don't bet against Jeff. Yeah, you hear it all the time. Exactly.

And I feel like Reed, they've seen it kind of. I mean, they know this is coming. What's harder, I think, for a lot of, like, coming at streaming from a tech angle versus entertainment angles, like, the tech angles, like, let's scale as fast as we can. Right? Apple's doing it. Like, let's launch a bunch of stuff, scale, and we'll take it from there. And content, that's just not entertainment works.

It's like, you will, what's good? Yeah. And, like, what can I stick around for, which is what Disney's kind of doing. Disney's, like, we're going to play our franchise up really high. So every few months, there's going to be either a new Marvel movie or a new Marvel movie or a new Marvel show on the streaming service. There's going to be a new avatar movie or a new avatar show, apparently. apparently on the service.

And so they figured it out really well. They know to keep people around, and then they have like the Simpsons, which will keep people at night. Hulu to the same extent. That's why FX is going to Hulu now. It's like, that's just a smart play. That's a smart, like, oh, well, now there's something

you can only get here and people are going to want. So Disney's coming in from an entertainment perspective and going up against a bunch of tech companies, arguably. And that's where they're winning. Versus Apple is like, launched a bunch of shows. None of them are great. Well, Dickinson is great. And then the other ones are terrible.

C is one of the worst things ever committed television. It's terrible. But they're like, we're getting subscribers. And at the end of the day, they want to be in the Disney, HBO field. But they want subscribers. They want to keep people in their services. They want to keep people in their ecosystem. So it's a different strat play.

In five years, I think the biggest thing we see is people just knowing when to cancel and when not to cancel. It's like, I don't need HBO right now. I'm done with it. I'm just going to go to Disney for a minute. Yeah. It's just easier. I would pay $499 a month for a live stream with Tim Cook watching C for the first time. I just have access to that whenever I wanted forever.

Like for the rest of my life, I'd pay $4.99 a month. Like, I just need to, can I, like, I'm in a bad mood. I just want to be, I just want to watch Tim Cook reacting to C. I want C with closed captions, but by Johnny Ive. Like, Johnny Ive reading certain things. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Apple doesn't have a Simpsons, right? Yeah. And they aren't making a license.

content play, which is what Netflix did. So these business models are like, there's an element to the business models that makes me scared for Netflix. Like Apple makes monopoly profits on the iPhone, right? They make monopoly profits on the Mac. Like, we just had a whole conversation about like, well, if you want to use Mac OS, like you don't get a space bar for a while. Like they have these zones where they're just going to extract the profits, save more

money than anybody. There's no way that the morning shows like one of the, the most expensive shows, like ever in television. There's no way that $4.99 a month is paying for the morning show. Like, they're just losing money. Yeah. They've signed all the shows to a second season. If not more, yeah.

And it's just there. They're just subsidizing this content so that you will use their TV app. And then inside of the TV app, you might buy HBO and HBO pay Apple a cut. Right. I mean, so the big thing that Apple is doing, which, like, we confirm the details of is they're in final, final negotiations to sign Richard Puepler, which is like the great. is kind of F you to AT&T. It's kind of like you guys...

People might not know. Oh, yeah, sorry, sorry. Richard Plipler is like the visionary at HBO. He was the visionary at HBO. He's the one who really championed Game of Thrones when no one believed in it. And he's like, I think there's something here. Turns out he was right.

He did a lot of shows before that. He's really responsible for it. And when AT&T came in and basically said, we need you to increase your output by 50%. We're launching HBO Max. We need to have all this content. He was like, I don't think that's how you do.

do TV. It's not how we've done it. So he left. And then everyone else left too. And then everyone else left. And now he's in final talks with Apple for an exclusive production output deal. So exclusive makes it very big. Like it's a huge deal. And that would be Apple being like we want someone who knows who would do good TV. We'll give

you the money you need. We'll just give you money. And then we want to have Emmys. We want to bring people in. Like that feels like the prestige play to me. Where's Amazon gone in all this? Oh, they're in a very good position. Yeah. Yeah. They're ordering shows.

Well, actually, they just made a recent announcement where they're not giving out numbers anymore. So how their movies are doing, we don't know. But their shows are like, they did a bunch of good stuff with the Emmys this year. My mom finally signed up for Amazon because of the Emmys. So, like, they're doing well. But they also have, like, some of the best licensing deals. Like, all the networks want to be on Amazon channels. Like, they want to be in it because they get subscribers through it.

So Amazon's, like, happy being, like, we'll be the home to SpongeBob SquarePants season. and then also you can watch Marvelous Miss Mays. So I think the reason that all the networks want to be there in the channel deals is because the Fire TV is organized around making you buy that stuff. Yeah. So you buy this like cheap stick from Amazon. People actually really like Fire TVs.

And then the whole interface is like, do you want to buy some new stuff? And I don't think we ever talk about that is being the actual innovation that it is. Yeah. Like for so long the dream was like an all-a-car cable bundle. And the Fire TV effectively delivers that to you. Yeah.

Right. You plug it in. There's a bunch of, If you're a prime member, there's a bunch of free stuff, cool. You're like, I'd like to get HBO and push the button to go. That's what Apple wants to do with the TV app. It's just horrible. Yeah.

But the TV app is, like, embarrassingly bad. The only thing good about the TV app is it is the best-looking app that has ever been shipped on the Roku. Like, we had the CEO of Roku on the show, and I was like, why is your interface so bad? He's like, you know, whatever, people don't give a shit. And then Apple ships this app, and it's like, they lied. They lied to me. Like, there's no limitation in this operating system at all. They just don't care.

And like all these apps are bad. Speaking of apps, Vizio didn't make a Disney Plus app. Plus their Chromecast version is like one point release too old to work with Disney Plus. Wow. So Vizio officially recommends airplaying. Yeah, but it only works on new Vizio TVs. So this is like another problem that I think the Disney Plus launch in particular, and to a smaller extent the Apple launch really highlighted,

which is Netflix is very good at making apps that work very well on every platform they're on. They have a huge lead in just like consumer experience. Disney launches The Simpsons is in the wrong aspect ratio. And it's like they should have known. That train was just coming for it. It's been a conversation for years. I feel like, yeah. Disney, the app on like LG TVs doesn't support surround sound.

Like it just doesn't do it. It's ridiculous. The Apple app supports Dolby Vision and Atmos on the Apple TV box and everywhere else it's like SD quality. There's an element to this where they want to go wide. They want to be horizontal. They want to be in every platform. But they are going to offer worse experiences. I think with Apple, it makes perfect sense.

If you have one of the best experience, you have to buy their hardware. Yeah, that makes sense. But they're cutting themselves off because Netflix is going to deliver you a superior experience for so many things. I've been talking about this a lot recently, and I think what it comes down to, at least the way I see it, when talking to people, Disney is an entertainment company. They've always been an entertainment company. Their whole focus is, it's so funny.

We went to a Disney event, and all the tech questions came up, and you could tell that Michael Paul, who's the head of BAMTEC, and who has a, was very excited. And the Disney guys were, like, there to listen. And then I'd be like, I'd be like, let's talk licensing. And they were like, yes. And, like, this is what we do. This is our movies, our TV shows.

and Netflix started by a bunch of tech guys like Silicon Valley came right out of Silicon Valley and you know it's funny everything about the way Disney launched people are like this is a terrible product launch and I was like this is one of their first major products like they're movies like they're like we give it to the theaters and then they play and then we make money yeah and now it's like okay well the aspect ratio is off

why is that I don't know like people are noticing like there's issues that are happening and they're like yeah well we don't know we're testing it we're figuring it out as we go and it's like that would was the least surprising thing to me. Well, Disney's really big, so it's fair to say this is like one of their first products,

but they've got the Imagineers. They've got the theme parks. There's like real, real software and engineering and expertise that goes into all that stuff. They make robots that flip through the air. Just because they're born. I was like talking to Matt Panzerino

from TechCrunch about this. It's like actually Disney has one of the last pure go there and research-inducing stuff because you feel like at places you can go. They're like they're the new Bell Labs. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, sorry. No, I think they're a big company. Like, they should have just talked to those guys. Yeah, I think you're right. I also think like they should have, I don't know how much they talk to the BAM tech teams about how people use streaming services. But the way the Disney app, the Disney Plus app works, it's a lot of like, I don't think you know how people use streaming services. Like, whereas Netflix feels very into, to like how you're going to do things. It's like, we know you're going to want to skip our intro.

We're know you're going to when the credits start rolling, we're going to skip forward. five seconds, even like the new gimmicky things you're doing where like the Seth Myers thing where it's like, oh, we'll just let you skip over the Trump joke because you're just going to fast forward otherwise. Like we get how you, it's so intuitive and that's something that no other streaming service has, at least

at this point, whereas Netflix dominates. So the skip intro button, in the intro to the Great British Baking show, there's a moment where the child touches the bread and it's like, don't let your kid with their dirty hands touch the bread. The skip intro button appears

half a second before that scene. And so every time we watch that show, it is a game to see if you can hit the skip intro before the kid touches the bread. Is this like a riddle? What is happening at your house? It doesn't appear until right before that scene. It sounds like

you're describing how to get to a treasure. It ruins the show. One second before the child touches the bread. Did he just like, how do we make the Great British Bakeoff interactive? That is the most conflict that has ever been described in the Great British Bakeup.

The skip intro. button in the Apple TV app does not actually skip the intro. Yes, it's terrible. It's terrible. It's terrible. Like, I don't, it's very confusing. But that's like an element of this competition I think is underreported. Like, they're now delivering consumer experiences with a lot of pressure on them, with a lot of design competition, with a lot of feature competition.

Do you think they're up for it? Them being Disney? Or just, anyway. Disney, Apple, H. The interface for HBO Max looks bonkers. It's a social media network. It looks like Myspace. It is very confusing.

It has stories. I'm like expecting Tom to add me as a friend. Like like it's just, yeah, it has stories. It has recommendations from Zach Efron. HBO Max in terms of interface is like the thing I'm most excited about. I just want to play with it. Like it just looks weird. It's like, hey, you watch this.

Do you want to download your podcast? And you're like, sure, streaming service. Like that sounds great. HBO Max, just to highlight what you were saying, has a podcast player in it. Great. Because they make all their interconnection. They have story. so that when you're like looking at a thing,

you can watch a Zach F. Fron video blog about his recommendations. Yeah. Can you imagine being the person in HBO, like the 22-year-old intern, who's like texting Zach F. Rons manager being like, did Zach do his blog today? Like, that's where they're, that's what they're trying to build.

The interesting is that HBO wants to do super push human curation, which is funny because it's the thing we talk about the most with Netflix's algorithm, which is like, why didn't people watch this? And it's like, well, they rely on their algorithm for everything. And the way that, like, we talk about YouTube relying on the algorithm for everything. So HBO's whole thing is, we're going to curate it for you.

And they were talking about this on stage at a recent Embedia Day for the HBO Max when they were unveiling it. And I couldn't help a picture, the worst part of my life, when one of my exes had an Xbox and everything was controlled by, hey, Xbox, can you do this? And I would have to be like, Xbox, can you turn on Netflix? Xbox, can you do this? And I hated it because I hated having to interact personally with the Xbox. And the way HBO Max sold it was like, we're going to personally talk to you about everything.

And I don't want that. I want to come home and, like, eat a burrito and just scroll through something until I fall asleep. Yeah, the last thing you want is your TV recognizing your humanity because then you have to pay attention to it. You're like, why am I watching TV? Yes. All right. We really fully off the rails. I'm sorry.

Trulia, let's end it. Well, we ended with, I don't want my television to recognize my humanity, which I feel really synthesizes something deep about the streaming wars. The way to reclaim power over the Xbox in that relationship is that Xbox recognizes snake sputs. as a wake word. So just let you know, in case it comes up again. I don't, I again, would like to apologize to the audience. Don't know how that one got through. All right.

Let's wrap it up, Julia. It's go-90 scale time. Oh, I love it. If you are aware of the go-90 scale of Doom streaming services, it's how we evaluate streaming services. You can go from zero, you can go 90, which is death. So that's the scale, zero to 90 to gone 90. Disney Plus, where are they out in the sky right now?

I think of 10. Yeah. Yeah. They're fine. Disney's got Disney content. Netflix. Is 10? 10 or die?

10 is good. Yeah. Zero is like guaranteed survival. Why doesn't it go to 90? It does go to 90. 90 is death. Got it. The scale is confusing.

Okay. Okay. Netflix. 20. Inching closer to death. Yeah. Until they figure out their original content plan. Apple TV Plus.

Apple TV plus content-wise, like 60-70. Apple TV plus in terms of it being a successful thing because it's part of Apple's ecosystem, like 40. Yeah, that's, that's, That's a monopoly boost on the 90 scale. That's like a chip you can play. You're like, Monopoly boost. Peacog.

Pekarck. Solid 100. It's a lot of train. Peacock is NBC Universal Streaming Service. It is designed to make you by cable, which NBC is owned by Comcast. You understand why it would be designed. A division of Comcast, Comcast Ventures is an investor at our parent company, Vox Media. Also, NBC itself.

NBC itself. Sorry, buddy. They don't love us. It's not. It's fine. everything's going to be fine. If you don't hear from us next week, please tell my family all of them.

All right. We're going to have you on a lot. The streaming wars are in full force. Verizon just stumbling about the battlefield. Thank you so much, Julia. We got to go. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless.

Deeter's Backlon. Julia's Loudmouth, Julia. Paul is future Paul. I want to tell you something. We're doing something special on the Virchcast's Feat Thanksgiving. We're doing a mini series about pirate radio. We've got three incredible stories.

about pirate radio culture. There's DJs in Afghanistan who were provided equipment by the United States during a propaganda effort. And then the United States left and they had to leave. Amazing story. We got among people in the Midwest who use phone conference lines to distribute radio programming, like conference call software, it's amazing. And there's a bill in Congress called the Pirate Act that will crack down on pirate radio

throughout the United States. It's leading to repercussions with like Caribbean broadcasters and Queens. That sounds like a wild story. Arful. We set up our own party line so you can call in and listen to these episodes. We're printing a zine. Whoa. It's super cool to be on the site.

There's going to be features on the site. The first episode is coming Tuesday, the 19th. Stay tuned for that. I also want to tell you to listen to Reset from our friends at Vox in Recode. It's hosted by Ariel DeHem Ross, his ex-Virge reporter, one of our very favorites. It's about a broad definition of tackling in Science, Medicine, Politics. It comes out Tuesday, Thursdays, and Sundays. Subscribe to Deidder's newsletter.

It's at the verge.com slash newsletter. And we'll be back very soon on the Vergecast, rock and roll. Paul. Promocode.