The Vergecast - Apple will make repair manuals and parts available to public / Russia blows up a satellite / Biden signs infrastructure package

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn chat with policy reporter Makena Kelly about Pres. Biden's $1 trillion infrastructure package and what it will do to improve broadband access in the US. Senior science reporter Loren Grush joins the show to talk about Russia destroying one of its own satellites with a ground-based missile. Managing editor Alex Cranz stops by to chat about Apple opening up iPhones and Macs to DIY repairs. Stories referenced: Biden signs $1 trillion infrastructure package into law Biden’s FCC is still deadlocked, and net neutrality hangs in the balance Biden’s pick for FDA chief works at Google Russia blows up a satellite, creating a dangerous debris cloud in space NASA delays ambitious human lunar landing to 2025 NASA’s Moon landing will likely be delayed ‘several years’ beyond 2024, auditors say Blue Origin loses lawsuit against federal government over NASA’s human lunar lander contracts SpaceX’s Starlink reveals new smaller, rectangular user dish to connect to satellites Apple will sell you iPhone parts to fix your own phone at home The shareholder fight that forced Apple’s hand on repair rights Apple reportedly wants to launch a self-driving EV in 2025 with a custom chip The Balmuda Phone is a compact Android phone from a high-end toaster company Meta’s sci-fi haptic glove prototype lets you feel VR objects using air pockets Sonos finally adds DTS audio support to its home theater lineup Hyundai’s restomod Grandeur is the perfect EV for a supervillain Google explains the tradeoffs that led to Pixel 6’s slow charging complaints A look under the hood of the most successful streaming service on the planet Meta goes into lockdown Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, McKenna Kelly joins the show. We talk about the new $1 trillion infrastructure package, what it means for broadband EVs and all kinds of other things. Lauren Grush joins the show. We talk about Russia blown up a satellite in space. It's going on to SpaceX. And Alex Tran's during the show. We talk about Apple's new repair system and lots of other things.

It's coming up on the Vergecast 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. Prom's 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 Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship program of infrastructure. roads, bridges, ports. We've been talking about them for 10 years on this podcast. And today we're going to do it again. I'm your friend, Nelai, Deerbone, is here. I am a week because it's Infrastructure Week. Oh, there you go. Well done. McKenna Kelly's here. Hi, McKenna.

Hey. McKenna is not amused by my infrastructure joke. Sorry, I'm just laughing. No, it's great. It's finally Infrastructure Week. It did. I mean, you're our policy reporter. I feel like you've been living in the moment of its infrastructure week for five years. so I'm happy that you got this win.

There's a lot going on this week. McKenna is going to talk to us about the infrastructure package, what it means for broadband electric vehicle charges. There's another bill coming with tax credits for ebytes. There's FCC drama. A little later in the show, Lauren Grush is going to join us. There's drama in space as well. Satellite explosions, for real.

It's like a real thing. And then Alex Kran's going to join us at the end of the show. Got some Apple stuff and some lighting around. But let's start with the infrastructure package. It is a long time coming. President Trump famously promised an initial. infrastructure package, hijacked for many reasons, never came to pass. Biden obviously came into office promising a huge program called Build Back Better, which was then broken up into two bills.

The first trunk passed. There's a second potentially more controversial bill coming. That's coming to a vote as well. What passed now? It's a trillion dollar package. What's in there for people who are interested in tech? So Monday, Biden actually signed the bill. Congress and the House and the Senate approved it finally a couple weeks ago, and they held this gigantic signing ceremony at the White House. There was like a whole band. It was like kind of cool to actually see an accomplishment like under like some administration where there's actually like a speech in a White House and like all of this kind of stuff in the background of a signing. So that was cool. But essentially it's a

$1 trillion deal that includes a lot of money to fix bridges and roads and the things that we drive and walk over every day. But then also there's a lot of stuff in there that touches on tech and a lot of things that the verge covers, primarily broadband expansion. Of course, a lot of people in the country do not have access to high-speed broadband. This is an issue we have been trying to solve for how many decades now? All of them. Exactly, all of the decades. George Washington was like, here's my platform. He was like, why can't I download apps fast enough? But anyway, so the bill got approved, and that means that there's $65 billion now headed to states to get infrastructure built so people can have those in-home communities.

connections. And what the administration is saying is that this money is going to make sure every household in America is connected to high-speed broadband by the end of the decade, which, you know, we don't know, we can't really predict the future, but that's a really cool goal if they're able to meet that. So I would put that in the context of like, you know, historic programs to electrify every home or to get every house on the phone network. $65 billion does not seem like a lot of money, right? In the context of a trillion dollar package, even in the context of that number, it's not a big number. I guess my two questions are, is it enough? And it's going to the states. Like, how is it going to be administered? Like, how does it work? Do I just get a check? Are you just going to write me a check and I can go find a broadband provider? Like, how's it going to happen? Unfortunately, that's not really the case. That would be kind of sick if it was. But basically, the $65 billion is a smaller number. At first, the Biden administration this year promised $100 billion. But the $65 is kind of what was reconciled between Republicans. and Democrats, many Republicans who were like, broadband is not infrastructure, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, right? And we came to an agreement, well, broadband is infrastructure enough for $65 billion, I guess, was the logic? I don't know. But basically, it comes down to subsidizing, right, and giving the whole problem with, like, broadband expansion is that you look at Verizon, you look at AT&T, you look at all these ISPs, right, and they just don't have the incentive to connect one family living in the middle of nowhere, or Nebraska. I can say that because I'm from Nebraska. But right. So they just don't get the right

return on investment. So these costs need to be subsidized in order for the infrastructure to be built. Now, the interesting thing that we need to talk about here, especially is like this isn't going to be fiber to every home. And that's something that was a little sad for Democrats and more progressives. This is going to be a process that has to do with some fiber, with some other cables, you know, coax. And then also like wireless 5G services. What's our guests is here. So it's going to be a mix of all of these things in order to get people connected. So are the states in charge? Is the FCC in charge?

So notably, the FCC was left out of the infrastructure package pretty broadly, which I think we can kind of get into when we talk about the FCC later. But the FCC has been unable to really do anything this year. They have had like a two-two stalemate with net neutrality being rolled back. There's a lot of questions about the extent to which the FCC has any authority over broadband. So the money is being sent to the Commerce Department, essentially, to offer, you know, kind of like grant programs to states who basically say, hey, we have this really cool plan. We need this much money. Can you give it to us? And that's kind of how it's going to be solved so far. We're talking broadband. You mentioned it could be

5G. It could be coax. Are we still working with the definition of broadband that we've been working with here in the U.S., which is like, what, 25 down three-ups, something insane like that? Yep, it's 253 still. Now, this year, there were some senators who saw, you know, an opportunity in the infrastructure build to be like, hey, we need 100 over 100, or at least, you know, 100 over something that, you know, is still much faster than three megabytes upload. And there were some letters, there were some discussions, right, but that did not end up making it in the final infrastructure package. That and then so I guess this leads into the FCC kind of having to make this decision later. And maybe with a Democratic majority, fingers crossed, I guess, if that's what you. want. They can change that definition later once they're able to do anything. Anything. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get to that. That is a whole swirl of drama, which is kind of interesting, but just on broadband, just to lay it out. So the Commerce Department gets $65 billion, and then the States come to the Commerce Department and say, we've got a cool plan to pay AT&T to wire every house in Wisconsin, which I can say except from Wisconsin. And then the Commerce

Department's like, okay, here's the money. Who makes sure that they don't just waste it, that 18T doesn't blow it. Because the immediate reaction from a lot of people, like, in my mentions, and I was like, I'm excited about this was, I've heard these lies from Verizon before. Right. Right. Because it's true. Like, I think the state of New Jersey has paid Verizon like $10 billion to give one house fires. And they just, like, there's lawsuits and it's deeply corrupt. And I think there's a lot of skepticism here. There's also, I think in, I know this, you get the same replies I do sometimes. There's a lot of people who are like, just give the money to Starlink. Right? Because they'll do it. And, you know, there's like, there's a lot to unpack there. But I think people are rightfully skeptical of the big broadband providers who have not done the work they should have done, even with some subsidies already. And so like, what makes this money, what mechanism makes this money more effective this time, do you think? It's unfortunate because I really, I don't know. We always want to be able to make these promises, right? The FCC Democrats want to be able to say, well, this money is going to do what you wanted to do. But the only effective enforcement that we've had over the past. I don't even know if we can call it effective. But the only, like, working enforcement that we've really had has been, you know, very thorough FCC investigations that take a lot of time, but then also like state attorney general lawsuits. So what I can imagine is there might be something in some contract, a state or a state or a

locality makes with a broadband provider to maybe essentially later if they don't fulfill it to have like the state AG go after them or something. But it is hard. You know, with net neutrality the way it is and with so much skepticism over title to an authority, it's hard to say, you know, what enforcement will look like in the future. I just want to unwind that because you've said it a couple of times. What you mean by net neutrality is not actual net neutrality. It's when net neutrality was rolled back, the FCC actually gave up its authority to regulate broadband at all. They weren't just like, we're not doing that neutrality. They're like, we now have prohibited ourselves from doing anything. Right. So their ability to even like look at this

and enforce this is constrained. Well, it depends on the interpretation, right? Because the FCC is just a house full of lawyers. The funnest building in D.C. It's so fun. Floor 8. We love it. But it's essentially like a, it's just like a house full of lawyers who have like different interpretations of what they can do. So like the FCC could do something and then oh my god, you know, some lawyer somewhere might sue them and say it's illegal. So essentially like they did give up like that sure. I think a lot of people on the left and like Democrats and progressives will say, well, when they did give up title two with the net neutrality rollback, they did get rid of this authority. But it hasn't really been challenged in like too many ways to really

sort that out judiciously. So it is kind of this weird like haunting apparition above the FCC. But, you know, we're going to talk about this, and then the podcast is going to go up, and then you're going to have a ton of telecom lawyers and my mentions being like, well, that's not actually what it is and blah, blah, blah. But that's the world we live in.

Our mentions are like telecom lawyers and Starlink fan boys. It's great when they get together. I wish the audience could have seen my visceral reaction when you mentioned Starlink, because honestly, I just wanted to scream. I could feel it in my throat, all the mentions I get.

And just to be clear for everyone, SpaceX and Starlink have received billions of dollars in subsidies already. Starlink specifically. And pretty controversially, Starlink applied for subsidies to provide service in like the parking lot of Walmart stores and like other heavily populated areas, which is maybe that at the end of the day Starlink is just another ISP and they act like other ISP. Like I appreciate that people love them. I'm just saying if you're a broadband company, my instinct is not to try.

trust you. That's the way that goes. Speaking of Elon, too, specifically, another interesting thing in the infrastructure bill is that there's a couple of billion dollars in it to build out a nationwide EV charging system. That was a great segue. But yeah, so there's a nationwide EV charging plan in there to basically, over the next couple of years, make sure that you can, just like you would, like, go get your big gulp or whatever when you, like, go fill up with, like, gas. You can basically do that with your EV card too, which is kind of cool to see. that coming into play. So I have the same question here.

$7.5 billion is maybe not enough billion dollars, but it's some. It's meaningful. I've talked to a lot of car company CEOs on Decoder. They're like, we're waiting for the government to help us with charging. How does this, are they going to pay electrify America? Are they going to pay the states? How does this money get allocated? That's a really interesting thing.

It's something that I think Andy would be better well suited to talk about. But I have a feeling it's probably the same kind of grant program. There's a problem with like handing out money. to states and like this argument over federalism and very wonky things with Republicans that they end up like trying to do grant programs and things. But that's the goal is, you know, to do it over the next couple of years. And I think what we can actually say for real is like with the government backing this, I think having a plan to do this over so many years will actually incentivize other, you know, car companies or infrastructure companies to

follow suit, right, and invest more money on their own, seeing that this is already starting. Yeah, I think the EV charging thing, every time we bring up another EV on the show when Andy or Sean are on the show, Sean was on last week, the feedback is that car looks great, but it doesn't have a supercharger network. Right, right? And so I should buy Tesla instead of whatever new EVE. If this even goes a little bit of the way to making that market more competitive, I think that's a good thing. I just, I'm kind of at the, a lot of these companies are going to try to get this money and actually holding them accountable to using it for what it's for. I'm very skeptical with broad-dame companies historically, maybe less so with the EV companies because I think at the end of the day, like GM and Ford will know when their customers can't

charge their cars and they can't, that's not an acceptable outcome. Like thousands of dead electric F-150s on the highways of America is not an acceptable outcome for Ford. Like I think they're motivated to solve the problem, but I'm very curious. Before we get to the FCC, what else is in this bill that's worth thinking about? Right. Well, I mean, that's kind of where we are with tech on. that bill mostly. The interesting thing now is, like, we have to wait and see what happens

with the other half of the billback better plan, which is more trillions of dollars for more tech-related things. So it's at this point now where we really don't know when votes will happen in Congress. But what's in the BBB package right now is some really fun stuff that I think, you know, our audience specifically will be interested in. Specifically, there's e-bike tax credits in there. So you get like 30% tax credits through the IRS when you buy like an e-bike worth like $1,500 or something, which incentivizes more people to buy those. It is shocking to me that it is hung on to the bill for this long. I was expecting it would be one of the first things to get cut when they started

slicing things down, but it's still there. Right. Yeah, no, I was surprised too, because I DM somebody in a senator's office and I was like, this was y'all's thing. Like, is it still in there? And they're like, we're really scared, but we'll see. And it was. So everyone was like, oh, my God, this is so cool.

And then also something that I think is really important to talk about is this free laptop program that's in the BBB program as well. The infrastructure bill, like we just talked about, $65 billion to make sure families have in-home access to high-speed broadband. But what does that mean for families who don't have devices at all? Right. So this program essentially gives states and housing authorities, public libraries, all these kinds of organizations, the ability to ask for grant funding from the Commerce Department in order to make, either laptops, desktops, or tablets free for people of lower income. They could also partner with Microsoft maybe or some other company in order to do like a refurbish lower cost device program. So that's really, really cool.

And really it comes down to, you can put all the money out there for broadband access, but if people still don't have the devices to even connect, you're really not helping people all that much. So that'll be cool to see if it gets past. Yeah. And at the beginning of the pandemic, McKenna, you've actually done a bunch of the stories about this pre-pandemic during the pandemic, right? There's like the homework gap for a lot of kids where they don't have access and then all they have is their school's devices, which may or not

be useful. So you connect broadband and you give people devices. That's good. What's the status of that second bill is kind of up in the air, right? It is. So this is an interesting thing that happened before the House left a couple weeks ago. There's this fight between progressives who had long been promise, we're going to get these social services programs in the B, B, in the, in Biden's infrastructure plan. We've been promised this. We want the Medicare. We want things like that.

And then the bill got severed in two. So progressives were like, well, we can vote on BIF, but we, bipartisan infrastructure bill, sorry. I should use, like, weird Twitter jargon. We should, when we vote on the infrastructure bill, we need to vote on the BBB as well, the social spending program. And I think it was close to 20 House Democrats refused to vote. They voted no on the infrastructure package.

And so that infrastructure package was narrowly, very narrowly approved. So that BBB bill needs to be brought up in both the House and the Senate for a new vote in order for it to pass. So the politics in the House, of course, are a little shaky. But the politics in the Senate on that is also a little shaky with Joe Manchin, of course, who held up the infrastructure package for a while. And then Carson Cinema noted Democrat net neutrality hater, the only Democrat who really opposes net neutrality. And so their votes are really, with such a razor-thin majority in the Senate, they need those votes in order to approve the BBB. And they're hoping to do this before Thanksgiving, before December, before something.

The timeline's not entirely sure just yet. I don't think I want to get too deep into the intra-democrat politics of it all. There are many podcasts available for you to listen to if you want to really get deep into the weeds on Democratic Party politics. But fundamentally, how do they decide, okay, broadband goes up? in this bill, but laptops to let kids use that broadband goes in this bill. Was there any rhyme or reason to that? Well, the second half of the bill is being done through a process in the Senate called reconciliation. So that has kind of changed a little bit of the language, especially because they have to do it through reconciliation, because they only need a small majority rather than a super

majority to pass it, which requires those two Democratic senators right in order for it to get approved. With Biff, Biff is called Biff because it's bipartisan, right? They had that supermajority. It was passed with a lot of Republican support. And for a long time, a lot of Republican senators, not just Democrats, have been calling for a universal broadband access, right? So that was easy to secure in there. Maybe it wasn't as much money as Democrats had hoped, but they were able to get it in there and secure a bipartisan win for the Biden administration. Yeah.

And we have long noted that giving people faster Internet access is like across. the aisle, everyone wants it. Sometimes it comes down to how will you deliver it is the disagreement, but I think every member of Congress wants to go back to their district and be like, your internet's faster and I did that. And it's a pretty easy win to deliver to people. Okay. Let's talk about the FCC because it has come up in the context of broadband so many times. The FCC is in a moment of extended drama in like many different dimensions. So let's start with the simplest one. They did have a vote. They might have a new chairperson soon, who we know well, it's Jessica Rosen-Warsall.

I've talked to her, you've talked to her, she's been on this show. But then there's Gigi Sohn, who we've also talked to a lot at The Verge, who seems is much more controversial. Breakdown, what's going on there? Right. So since the beginning of the Biden administration, a Jeep Pie, the former chair, stepped away. And right now we're sitting at a two-two stalemate with two Republicans and two Democrats. So they can't really do anything too controversial.

They can't really do anything that Democrats really want to do, whether that's passing net neutrality or putting more broadband regulations in place because they just don't have the votes to do it. So that's the way it's been for 11 months now, where they've just been kind of doing essentially like administrative work, spectrum work, basically just kind of like cleaning the floors of like things that are easy to do cooperatively, like things that just need to get done. So they've been able to do that. And if for so long, even over the summer we're hearing rumors about who the next FCC chair is going to be, who's the next person who's going to be a person who's going to be a appointed, and eventually it ended up being Jessica Rosenworsel, who is serving his chair now.

Now we have Gigi Sown, who noted progressive, supports net neutrality, supports, like, broader regulations for broadband at the FCC. Used to work for Tom Wheeler as a general counsel during, like, the net neutrality fight. Of course, like Obama's chairperson who pushed that through in the end. Everyone seems a little excited about Jessica Rosenworsel. Her vote will be pretty easy to get through. But with Gigi, there's been this weird fight that's crept up from. Murdoch owned businesses, kind of, but I don't want to, you know, you can't really say anything

specifically, but Lindsay Graham, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News. They're all saying that Gigi will work as a censor against Republican speech on the broad, on airwaves. Sorry, I've been saying Republican speech online for years now, and this is my great enough to the airwaves now. So, which is essentially, Gigi has like had some comments about like fairness over the airwaves for a while, but over the last couple of years, she said there's no way that anything like that could happen again. So there's this weird kind of fight. And I think that's also like explained through the fact that like Newsmax and O-A-N noted pro-Trump news organizations support her nomination. So it's kind of in this weird moment where we basically know that we're still going to have

two-two, but it's, there is no hearing for G-G. We have no idea what's really happening there. And it's questioning whether or not Democrats can get anything done really in Biden's first year or first two years in office. Can you explain why Newsmax and OANN would be supporting Gigi Sown? Because if there's any group that I would assume would say that, you know, censored and Republicans are being censored and we must stop it. It would be those outlets. So I'm confused. Right. So I think it's interesting to note that like Gigi has been doing this for like 30 years.

She is a well-beloved person in the telecom community amongst Republicans and Democrats. Every source I talk to is like, Gigi rules. She will listen to you. And when she talks about free speech, she really means it and all this kind of stuff. And the people who worked at Newsmax and OAN who offered these op-eds last week have worked with Gigi and know what she stands for. So they know that Gigi will support them, maybe not support, right? but give them the opportunity, right, to continue to work the way that they do. It's the interesting thing where it's coming from more, it was a Wall Street Journal op-ed page

that had the first thing about Gigi, and then of course Fox News, and then more conservative Republicans who are raising the question about this censorship thing, which feels kind of like a made-up argument, because it's not something anyone has really raised against Gigi in the past at all. Yeah, this is my favorite, like, mini-drama going on right now. because Fox News versus Newsmax, if you abstract away the fact that they're both conservative cable networks, what you have is a gigantic monopoly position and an upstart competitor. And Gigi is aligned with the competitors. And then the gigantic monopolies really dislike that.

And then the other thing you have, which is like more broadly, you have the cable networks, which have to like run OAN and Newsmax and all those other channels. So they have worked with Gigi on the business side to get actually. to Comcast and Spectrum and whoever else, disclosure, Comcast and Investor, Boxing, the parent company of the Brink. I assure you this is not influencer coverage at all. So ages ago, Gigi organized a coalition of, like, independent cable networks to demand access to cable companies, and Fox opposed that. She organized the conservative outlets to oppose when Tribune was trying to buy Sinclair,

which is the huge conservative broadcast network. She organized the, like, small conservative outlets to oppose that merger. So just like broadly, she's on the side of big things shouldn't get bigger. And so all these small networks have worked with her to oppose big things that ain't bigger. So I agree. I think there's that. And then there's also like AT&T and Comcast and Variety, like they spent a ton of lobbying money for a lot for just across the board. Like pick a senator.

There's money flown in from the telcos. And Gigi wants to regulate them harder. So like across the board, I think there's just a lot of opposition here. But if you look at the breakdown, Fox News versus OAN comes down to OAN's business is threatened by monopolies, both in broadcasting, in cable, and then eventually for access. And any time you try to regulate those monopolies, people say it's censorship. And I think this is just hilarious, right? Like, you live by AT&T's lobbying money.

You kind of like, you die by AT&T's lobbying money. Like OAN runs on direct TV. There's all those stories about how AT&T is like funds OAN. AT&T's lobbying money is preventing the person that OAN wants from getting on the FCC. I think it's just like utterly fascinating to see that split inside of conservative media play out. And the face of it is a progressive FCC commissioner. And I don't know, I just find this, like I could talk about all day. Like it's a very small beltway politics, but it's, I think it's symptomally much bigger.

Mm-hmm. I don't know. Do you think she's going to get through McKenna? Yeah, I do. I think there's always horse trading done. That's kind of what everyone says on the Hill. When it comes to nominations, they get voted on the same time that they do another bill or, you know, senators make some deal to get one nomination in for getting like something else. So I think something will break eventually.

It just depends on when. But there's like a deadline here, right? If they don't get Rosen-Warsall in his chair, they don't get sewn in in time, this two-two deadlock persists for quite a while, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And Rosenwistle would have to pick up her office and leave if they don't vote on to reconfirm her by the end of the year, which would be a one-two with Republicans in the majority of the FCC. So that's what wasting all of this time has brought us to. It's kind of intense over there at the House of Lawyers.

It's like just a bunch of gray suits yelling at you're trying. No, that's always what the FCC has been. I feel like the Trump administration was notable in that, right, maybe they never got infrastructure done. but they confirmed a lot of appointments. They confirmed a lot of judges. They moved really fast on this stuff. Why has a Biden administration been so slow? I mean, it's a good question.

I think it has a lot to do with how the Senate will confirm them, right? When you have more controversial people like this, the fun thing to note is, like, there's like three really progressive people in Biden's cabinet right now. There is Lena Kahn, who we've talked about a lot. And she had bipartisan support because we've seen this like bipartisan outcry over like tech regulation and like enforcement over monopoly power at the FTC. And then the same thing with Jonathan Cantor. Jonathan Cantor was approved earlier this week to lead the antitrust division at the DOJ. And so there's those two progressives, right? But when it comes to telecom and Gigi,

it's funny that that's like the one progressive who is having like that much of an issue. And I think it really does come down to, right, this like huge history of telecom money and things like that. And of course, like at the Senate, Carson Cinema is one of the one of the, of the deciding votes when she gets brought to a house floor, right, to see if she even gets confirmed. So they'd either need, like, more Republicans on board or to ensure that these two Democrats, Mansion and Sinema, will vote to approve her. All right, I'll do it. Put me in, Coach.

I'll run the FCC. That would be, I don't think I'd get voted for. But I'll do it. Joe, if you're listening, you got my number. He doesn't have my number. He could probably get it. Last one, Biden's picked somebody to run the FDA. And they work at Google.

It's very funny for a million reasons, but first tell us who this person is. So, yeah, this is Robert Caleb, I'm assuming, and he's going to run, you know, the FDA that was announced like earlier this week. Right now he's like a senior advisor for verily health sciences, but sciences, sorry, and then like Google Health, which is kind of interesting. But of course, like, it's good to note that like the Obama administration that Joe Biden was a part of had a lot of like tech people and a lot of people who left the Obama administration to go work in tech. There is this big atmosphere of like tech people in the Obama

circle. So we've seen a lot of tech people kind of move into the, you know, the Biden office as well. And so it's kind of interesting to see. There's been a lot of pushback on having like tech people in the cabinet. So it's interesting that this one kind of like cracked through. I just have to say this. Google never made the website. Don't hire the person from Google. They were supposed to make a website that was supposed to test. They just never did it. All right. It was only on here. can make the website check. McKenna, what should we be looking forward next? We're cruising into Thanksgiving and then holidays.

When do you, when should people be on the lookout for this next set of votes around Rosen-Worsel and around Build Back Better? Oh, man. So, Build Back Better, who knows? We've gotten to this point where it could be tomorrow. It could be a month from now. Honestly, it just depends when this gets decided. When it comes to Rosen-Worsel, the Senate never does anything like one at a time.

They always have like one day where they decide to take a vote on like literally everything. So I'm sure like she'll get voted around the same time that they end up like funding the government, which is still a thing that they have not done yet. And the government could shut down next month again, everyone. We are in shambles. I don't know how the system continues to work. But yeah. So I mean, I'm hoping by the end of the year more broadly and then look at it when other big projects like the defense authorization and other big like funding bills get pushed through the end of the year.

All right, Meganna, it's always a pleasure to have you on. We'll have you back when all this stuff gets past to figure out where all this money is going and who's going to spend it. Great to talk to you. Later, guys. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work.

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No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com. Lauren Grouch, welcome with Veritcast. I'm so excited to be back. If you don't know, Lauren was off on book leave. We're excited to read Lawrence.

book when it comes out. Me too. We can't plug it yet because it's not out, so we got to wait. But it's been months since we've talked to Lauren and months since she's been on the show. So welcome back. Thank you. And it's a good day to come back because the space wars have begun. They haven't begun, but they are getting closer and they are having, we're getting some issues, yes. All right. So I'm just reading this headline. Russia blows up a satellite, comma, creating dangerous debris cloud in space. Is this a James Bond movie? I just want to take both parts of that headline in turn. Sure.

Let's start with Russia blows up a satellite. Why did Russia blow up a satellite? Right. So what Russia did is known as an anti-satellite test or an ASAT test. And what these are are basic political shows of strength to say that, hey, I have this capability of blowing up a satellite that's in orbit around Earth. And it's actually a pretty hard thing to do. remember that satellites that are in Earth orbit are moving at roughly 17,500 miles per hour.

And so being able to pinpoint exactly where it's going to be and then send a missile to that satellite is a pretty complicated technical capability. And so Russia was basically showing off saying, hey, look, we took out one of our satellites. We could potentially do that with one of yours if you, you know, down the line. They didn't say that outright, but that is what they are implying by doing this. So they fired a missile from Earth and hit one of their own satellites in space, which is very complicated. And obviously, right, the signal is we could potentially do it to yours. Aren't there, like, rules that say we're not supposed to do that?

So that has been a big point of discussion after this test happened. We do have a treaty. It's called the Outer Space Treaty. It's my favorite treaty. basically loose guidelines of how we're supposed to explore space. And, you know, we want to explore space peacefully. Don't put nukes in orbit. Kind of basic things like that. It's essentially, it's written vague on purpose so that we have options when it comes to exploring space. They didn't want it to be very restrictive and telling countries exactly what they could do in orbit. Also, there hasn't been a

desire to outright ban ASAT test because, you know, the U.S. did an ASAT test itself back in 2008. So I'm sure that discussion will be revived. I mean, it's already being revived right now that the Russians did this. But yeah, it's not outright banned. We do have guidelines for how we're supposed to behave in space. They're all very much open to interpretation. But it's, Yeah, there is no treaty that says do not perform anti-satellite tests in orbit. That seems like an oversight. But there's a reason you'd want to do it, right? I mean, a large chunk of our communications infrastructure runs through space.

Like, if you were to go to a war, you would probably want to do this? I mean, there are plenty of discussions about what a war in space would look like. And not necessarily destroying a satellite with a kinetic missile. because of the impact it has. But, you know, jamming satellites, you know, taking out a satellite either physically or with software is definitely what I think a future space battle would entail. Because I think a lot of people don't realize

just how reliant we are on our satellite infrastructure. You know, we are a space nation in a way. Our phones rely on GPS. You know, we take a lot of Earth imagery with our satellites. a lot of surveillance satellites are very much necessary for our military apparatus. So, yeah, I think taking out satellites in some form would definitely be a way that you would do battle in space. And then the other thing before we get to the debris cloud, which seems like its own

complicated problem, I don't know, just for like a while there, it seemed like the United States and Russia, for all their other problems, were pretty agreeable with space. Yeah. Right? The International Space Station exists. we needed their rockets to go there. That appears to have changed. Is that me just over-reading the fact they blew up a satellite?

It's a very interesting position that we are in, because what seems to be happening is a delineation between the Russian military and Roscosmos, the space agency or space corporation and what it is, is we have a good relationship with Roscosmos. Sometimes it can be a little iffy, but overall, we have a great foundation to work with them. They are our biggest partners on the International Space Station, and so NASA is working with them frequently. The NASA administrator seems to, he indicated that it's possible Roscosmos did not know about this test,

so that the military did it, not knowing that it would potentially jeopardize their cosmonauts on board the internet. PlayStation, which we can get into shortly. We haven't had a lot of details, and the Russian military put out a very spicy statement after it happened that was like, oh, the U.S. knows very well that this was not a danger, that this was not a problem, which is just a wild statement to make. But that is part of the Russia playbook, so it's not necessarily unsurprising. Okay. And I have to ask you this question.

I'm just going to tell the audience, I'm going to ask this question, and then you need to imagine Lauren just rolling her eyes as hard as she can. We have a space force. There's patches. There's uniforms. I'm just saying. They've got uniforms. They've got uniforms. They've got uniforms. They're called guardians. It's a whole situation. Is this what our space force is designed to do? No. Okay. Just checking. I mean, okay, there is, we have something called the U.S. Space Command. And that is responsible for overseeing. the tracking of debris and objects in space. And so it was actually the responsibility of US Space Command

to track the objects that were created from this ASAT test, which they said it was about 1,500 trackable objects, and then thousands of small objects that we cannot track. And that's the scary part, right? Because we have great tracking capability, but we just can't see everything, especially if it's small. So that's what's so scary about it. The Space Force is mostly tasked with operating and deploying those satellites that we talked about.

They oversee our space assets in orbit. There has been discussion about sending people into space for Space Force. But for now... Could you hear the eye roll because I saw the eye roll? What you have to understand is the U.S. military has had a large stake in space and satellites, the satellite infrastructure for a very long time. And what Space Force has done is essentially put all those people that operate those assets into their own branch or, yeah.

And so it's really a bureaucratic and boring change, but it did get a lot of attention because, you know, it was Trump's pet project and it has a very provocative name, if you will. Outer Space Treaty, Space Force, it's a good name. Okay, let's talk about the debris cloud. So they blow up the satellite. You said there's stuff we could track, 1,500 things you can track, stuff we can't track. It seems like, right, the astronauts on the ISS didn't know this was going to happen.

How did this all play out? Let me walk you through my Monday because, well, for us, it was very crazy. So we started the day with reports that there had been this ASAT test from Russia. Wasn't confirmed. The State Department hadn't confirmed it yet. no one from the U.S. was confirming it yet. And then at the same time, we had these other reports that the astronauts on board the International Space Station had to shelter in place that morning because of a cloud of debris that kept passing by the space station every 90 minutes, which is how long it takes the space station to orbit the Earth. And so obviously, we put two and two together.

Okay, it seems like this ASAT test probably created this cloud of debris. that caused the astronauts to go into the safety mode. But we didn't know that for sure. Yeah, my question is like, you don't know that for sure. But like, do you know you just don't want to say it? Or is it like, actually there's like clouds of debris often enough where like this could be just a wacky coinky dink. Yeah.

Well, when it comes to space journalism, I never want to assume. You never want to assume. Lauren's like, I'm an author now, Deeter. Yeah. The standards are higher. She doesn't want to space force the issue. You just don't ever want to assume. And obviously, in our minds, it did make sense.

And then what helped was we have, I have this great source, a satellite tracker named Jonathan McDowell. He's like the go-to guy when it comes to tracking debris or satellites of any kind in orbit. And so he came online and then he did all of these calculations. And he basically showed that the suspected satellite that we thought Russia had blown up tracked with the ISS. It was coming, like it crossed paths with the ISS about the same time, like that mission control kept telling the astronauts of debris cloud was passing.

So at that point, it was like, okay, this is absolutely happening because of the ASAT test. But we still needed, you know, the U.S. to confirm that. We needed NASA to confirm that. And getting those statements was actually pretty difficult throughout the day. And I get it. It's a matter of national security. It has a big. geopolitical ramification. So I understood why it took them a while, but it was kind of

frustrating because we knew that this was a direct correlation, but we couldn't say for sure. So when you say passing by, was it close? Was it dangerously close? Was it NASA being overcautious? As I understand it, the satellite that they shot down was about roughly 100 kilometers, I want to say, above the International Space Station. But what happens when you do these ASAT tests is, like I said, it creates these thousands of pieces of debris, and they don't just stay in one spot, right? It's an explosive event. So they go to higher altitudes,

they go to lower altitudes, they span like miles along the orbital track of where the original satellite was. So the way I described as to somebody, I thought was a pretty good analogy, was imagine if you crashed into a car and created all these car pieces, but those pieces continue,

to drive down the highway. And you couldn't move them. They were just speeding along and you couldn't stop them or maneuver. And you just have to maneuver around them forever because they're going to be, they're going to stay on the highway for years. So they're not going to decay and fall into orbit and burn up. It's going to be a long time. Well, they will.

But it takes years for that to happen for our, our atmosphere and gravity to pull them down. So what you have this situation where they're. going to be kind of raining down crossing paths with the International Space Station for years to come. So it's a significant problem that I'm pretty sure NASA is going to have to be monitoring for a very long time. Now, you mentioned Space Command and that they could track the larger objects, but the smaller objects were the scarier ones. So if we've got smaller objects that can't be tracked around for a long time, I mean, you know,

I think everyone knows like the nightmare scenario is like there's so much space junk in there anything that goes into orbit just could smash to bits by random space junk. Like, is this like the first step towards that path of like, well, I guess we don't get to put stuff in orbit anymore? Like how nerve-wracked are, do people seem about the fact that there's a bunch of, you know, new space junk they can't track? Oh, everyone in the space community is outraged over it. They've all condemned it, you know, and there's some debate over whether or not that exact

scenario you painted will happen. And it may not be this thing where if you launch into orbit, something's going to immediately smack you in your face. You know, it's more of there is so much congestion up there that you don't necessarily have a clear path or you don't necessarily know where all this stuff is. That's another big point of concern is we have all these tracking devices to determine where space junk is. But we have differences of opinion over where those things are.

are, and those differences of opinion can be a few miles in, you know, not knowing where they are. So you could have one satellite and the U.S. military will say, oh, it's here. And then you have Leo Labs, which is a private space company tracker. And they say, actually, we see it, you know, two miles this way. And so when you have that uncertainty factor combined with the fact that it's getting more congested, then you don't necessarily know if you're launching your satellite is. going to be safe if you don't know exactly where everything is and everything's kind of all, you know, crowding that environment just becomes harder to actually put things into orbit.

So it's less of a scenario where you have like gravity where things are just constantly like destroying all of your your infrastructure. It's more of just, is it safe to put my satellite in orbit? That question becomes more and more of a concern. What about Russia? I mean, Russia also operates the International Space Station. they've got cosmonauts there. Like, don't, shouldn't this bother them?

Yeah, that was the whole, that's the whole irony of the situation. I mean, when we found out that they had done this and that they had potentially jeopardized the safety, there's two cosmonauts on the International Space Station right now. So it was definitely very strange. But if you look at the history of the Russian space program, you know, they were never that concerned about putting their cosmonauts in, arms way. So I guess it's not completely surprising, but it does feel a bit counterintuitive. Yeah. But then you have Roscosmos that comes out and they say, you know, safety is our number one

priority. So like I said, it is possible that there was a miscommunication between the space program and the military side of things. But it does seem very strange that they would potentially like posmonauts at risk. All right. Let's talk about some other space stuff. NASA announced a bunch of changes to the lunar program, a delay. Blue Origin is mad as usual. It seems to be their permanent state of being.

What's going on with the moon? Is it still there? Are the tide still being driven by it? I like having you on the show. I just get to toss out these questions. Moon's still there. There's like a blood moon soon, right? Is moon cool?

What's up with the moon? Yeah, there's a lunar eclipse. coming up. Wait, with this, it is there. It might be good. Tomorrow.

Okay, so it'll happen by the time this aired. So hopefully you went out last night and looked at it. Yeah, so what I think Neli is referring to

is the fact that NASA wants to send people back to the moon with its Artemis program. And they recently announced that their ambitious target date, which was 2024,

is not going to happen, as we all suspected. And they've moved. the target date to 2025 instead, which doesn't seem nearly, it doesn't seem any more than the 2024 date. But, you know, what can you do? It's good to have a bold deadline, right? Yeah. You have your aspirational deadline, and then you have your real deadline. And so what do you think the real deadline is? Oh, gosh. We've all placed our bets on this, but I will not reveal my cards on this because I have my internal date. I bet you it's the same year that they put a touchscreen on

the Mac. Oh, no. I hate it. And then Blue Origin is suing the government because they didn't get the contract to build the slander, right? Well, actually, that lawsuit has now come to an end. The judge overseeing the case ruled against them. And so now their litigation has ended. And actually, the judge just released his opinion, which was very spicy and very in the weeds. And we can definitely get into it if you want. Essentially, Jeff Bezos came out and said that they were going to accept the ruling. And so it sounds like they won't be protesting or appealing the results anymore. And so now SpaceX is the sole provider for NASA's human lunar lander.

And they have a long road ahead of them, but I am very eager to see how it goes. And then Elon has just been like wild and on Twitter in all kinds of ways lately. And he got to, but he got to dunk on Bezos, which is like all he cares about in world. Yes. But you could have me on every verge cast and we could always have something on the time. Didn't he just do a live stream where he said some, some strange things? Oh yeah. He gave an update on Starship, which is the next generation vehicle that they're building. It's the same one that they are building for NASA to take humans to the surface of the moon. And he just gave an overview of, you know, its capabilities, what they hope to use it

for. And he made a new prediction that it will fly to orbit for the first time in January, maybe February. He doesn't know if it'll work the first time, which, to be fair, that's a good prediction. Well, look, it's a, it's a very ambitious vehicle and there's always going to be some, you know, explosions when you do something for the first time. And that's, that's SpaceX's strategy. They kind of, they explode, rebuild, and do it again, you know, so it's, it's definitely, it's been working out for them in terms of actually getting to reliable flight hardware. Yeah. Other space X news, right, they, they launched four astronauts to the space station and brought them back, which is now becoming a little bit of,

like, a regular occurrence, which is like a big deal. Yeah, I mean, it was just last year that we were all kind of like, you know, watching an eager anticipation as they launched their first two astronauts. And now since then, they've had five human spaceflight missions, four for NASA, and one that sent four private crew members into orbit for three days. And I think it's, I was actually just thinking this before I came on it. I think it's good when these things become routine. It's, you know, a lot of companies get upset after a while because I'll stop covering their launches. And I'm thinking it's good when I'm not covering your launch. I am covering it. that means that something bad happened, you know?

So it's good when the stuff becomes boring because it means that we're doing it, you know, safely and routinely. That's great. And then lastly, McKenna was just on. We were talking a little bit of Starlink. Starlink has a new dish. Yeah. It's like a little rectangle guy.

I want you to get it. I think it looks cool. So I'm the person with a Starling dish. I pay for the service. I have the old one. It's what, 22 inches. This one's like little. They said it's cheaper to make.

They did not lower the price. No. Which is, like a graded, like when I say Starlink is a broadband company, only broadband companies are like, we made the thing cheaper to make, but we're going to keep charging you the same money. That is a very broadband company attitude to have. The only real difference besides the smaller size cheaper to make, they up the Wi-Fi specs. They still haven't opened the coverage areas. It still seems delayed. Starlink.

SpaceX does not have a PR department. We can't even ask, it's like hard to even ask questions about what's going on. Well, they have a PR department. They just don't respond to me. And I'm curious if anyone has actually received this yet because as I understand it, they're very backlogged when it comes to new orders because of the chip shortage. And then also, I guess we did a story that if you change your address at all in the map tool, it sends you to the back of the line.

So this is the most amazing thing. So they have a tool where you can say what your service area is. And people were going to go play with the map. I think there was like an email that you're supposed to go look at it or something. And so people, the quote is, I moved my location from my barn to my house, which is 13 feet. And now my order has been moved back to late 2022, which is like, don't mess around with maps. You never know what will happen. They've launched a lot more satellites since I did the review.

So I'm going to try it again. like I said, I have the dish I've been paying for it. But the key problem with Starling is even one utility pole in your line of sight. And that whole arc will interrupt your service. And they, it's just, they keep kind of just like quietly not mentioning that to me. I'm curious, I'm sure you got a lot of, you did the review well. To this day. Yeah, I'm sure you get a lot of feedback on it.

Can I ask why you didn't put on the roof? Oh, on my house? Yeah. So put on the roof of my house, I'd have to go 100 feet. air to clear the trees. Okay. So when I, so I did drive down like, you know, the cells are pretty big. The honeycomb cells of service are pretty big. So like just a little ways down the road, there's a big overlook where it's totally clear and I spent about a day with it out there. And the results were the same. The point I was trying to make in the review was like even this much

and even this little bit, the sky is totally clear, but you've got like eight trees in the way. You're basically looking at degraded service. And so to get in my house, to get up over the those trees, I'd have to put up a hundred foot pole. Yeah. I guess it would be good for like somebody in the desert or, you know, out in, out in a very non-wooded area. Honestly, one of the most wholesome places on the entire, and this entire subreddit is mad at me, but that's fine. But one of the most wholesome places in the entire internet is the Starlink subreddit where they're all just talking about how excited they are and like comparing their test results and sharing their absolutely bonkers installs, right?

Like, just bonkers. Like, somebody was like, I didn't want to wait for this poll to come in. So I built a tower out of two by fours. It's 60 feet in the air. Do you guys think this is good? And everyone's like, you did such a good job. And it's like, this is all crazy. Like, there's a lot of people being like, just cut down the trees.

Like, there's like characters in the subreddit, you know? Like, there's the people who are like, just pay the money. Like, it's worth it to spend. $40,000 on a utility pole at your house. And then there's a guys who are like, just get a chainsaw, dude. It's worth it. And it's like all of this. It is legitimately just go to the Starlink subreddit and scroll it for a while.

Like there's hardcore nerds doing satellite tracking. Like every time Starlink launches new satellites, they track when they come online. They measure the speeds and the latency. And then there's like the chainsaw guys. And like, I don't know, it's just like, I read it consistently on Reddit because it is just like the happiest little community of nerds because Starlink doesn't help them. Yeah, that's got to be really rough. So they've just built their own little community of support.

I know they're all mad at me, but I'm just telling, I'm expressing to them. I'm meeting your hatred with nothing but love because I love you. Have you put in your order for the new? It can't. Oh. There's no, there's no option to upgrade your dish. I hear that. Oh, because you already bought your.

Because I already have one. Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, I would have loved to see, like, like the review part two where I cut the new dish if someone wants to come to my house and put up a hundred foot pole uh doors open uh I just also that you know the cable uh the other big improvement on the new dish is that the cable detaches from the dish so the one I have the cable is permanently attached to it I see so even if I did put up the hundred foot pole I'd have to

take that a bunch of cable up with me and then route that route that from the dish to the house instead of the way that you normally do it. So they did make that big improvement. So I'm looking at one of the installs of the new dish, which apparently is called squishy squarepants. Oh, good. Oh, my God. I'm going to spreader, which is amazing. Are you going to Starlink subreddit?

Yeah. It's down to, like, putting calipers on every single part of the cable that you can now unplug, like, to show you exactly, like, down to the millimeter, how wide the different pieces of it are, like, the plug itself. So you can route it through your house. You can route it through your house and you can, like, figure out, you know, know if you need to make any kind of jig or whatever to make sure it, you know, stays where you plug it in or something.

I'm telling you it's the most wholesome place. This is great. It's, I just, I promise you. Like, it is just bros helping bros all day long in every which way that you can think about it. It's great. All right, Lauren. Well, it's good to have you back.

We've missed you. Yeah. There's always an endless flood of space to you, so we'll have you back soon. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, I was going to say every day, something's popping off. So I'm sure I'll be back pretty soon. Support for the show. comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts,

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Claude.aI. slash vergecast. Alex Cran. Hello. You've returned to us. How's it gone? I'm awake. I'm here. I'm ready to record. So, big story this week. It's like the week before Thanksgiving. There's not like a flood of news. Like Black Friday is coming. Like the new stuff is like kind of over. Right. Like it's all holiday like ship the stuff out mode for all the companies. But Apple starts the week with a bang. And they announce it's kind of out of the blue. We're going to start letting people repair their own iPhones. They're going to sell parts. And soon we're going to let you. repair your M1 max. It's interesting that they're only doing the M1 max. It's like a weird line. Alex, tell us what's going on there. What was this announcement? Yeah, so they announced that they're going to sell you little kits that we don't know how much those kits will cost or what will be in the

kits that you can take and then repair your devices. And they're going to make all of the instruction manuals available online. So it's like really good ostensibly, unless your I fix it, in which case it might not be great for your business model. I fixed it. They did a reaction video, which I watched, and yeah, they're gung-ho. Kyle's like, yep, bring it on. I love competition. Yeah, this is like all they've ever won.

They're like, welcome, welcome IBM or whatever. But they actually made a really good point, which is, you said, Alex, you know what it'll cost. I'm sure it'll be a lot. But the fact that there's going to be the parts plus the manuals. Yeah. So instead of trying to reverse engineer all of the procedures, the fact that Apple is publishing repair manuals means that I fix it will be able to get a jump start on like creating proper procedures for their open source version of repair manuals instead of just like intuiting what they think

is the right way to do it and like guessing based on their teardowns they'll actually see what like the official procedure is and then they can base their version of that procedure if they get different parts or whatever off of that and then the third key part is the software like the configuration software so that you don't have to replace like ridiculous tiny microsoddered chips if you want face ID or true tone or whatever to continue to work. Yeah, I think there's like something to be optimistic about, but for me it's hard to be super excited until we know what it is. Like are they going to be sending you the screwdrivers with the very proprietary screw bits or are you going to have to go still buy those somewhere else?

Are they going to sell you a heat gun so you can crack open your iPhone 13, which currently requires heat to like break the waterproof seals? Like there's just a lot of. of stuff we don't know. So it's like, this seems really, really cool. And I think that, I think you're bang on. Like, it's the instruction manuals here that's really the successful part of this. And there's really the exciting part of it. Like the actual kits, I think there's just too many things up in the air for us to be like anything but optimistic about them. Yeah, I'll say this. The steps here are first you have to review the online repair manual. Like, I just love the idea that Apple's going to be like, are you sure? Like, look at how hard it is. You're going to do this. And you click through that. And then

you place an order. Apple says they will offer more than 200 individual parts and tools. So whether or not the Johnny Ive heat gun is coming, you never know. Fingers crossed. But it does seem like a pentelope screwdriver is coming. Yeah. Like the word tools, like it's, you know, they're going to make a hammer and a wrench and a screwdriver. So we'll see what that means. But 200 individual parts and tools. It's for the iPhone 12 and 13 currently, which are not like repairable phones. No. Not really. They are held together with glue and weird screws in lots of ways. So it's interesting that they walk this back.

I would say this was met with like uniform excitement. Yeah. Right? Because even if all you're doing is you click through the thing, you order the parts, and then you go to a service provider who's good at this, massive win. Yeah. Right? Like I think this is like right now if you go to get your iPhone screen repaired,

you have no idea if you're getting an OEM screen, you have no idea if face ID is going to work anymore. Like, there are lots of people who are good at taking the screens off of iPhones. They've not had access to parts or been able to do this in a particularly official way or been able to preserve your warranty. And in fact, this is a better win. Even if you live in a world where like you think, well, go to one of the official independent repair shops that are like blessed by Apple because the forms and the NDAs and the agreements you have to sign to become one of those shops are actually relatively onerous. And so even if all Apple has done here is like change that change that program for repair shops and just like made the website available to the public

getting rid of those agreements and forms so that like you said you know you could like go and buy the part and take it to somebody else is a big win yeah and i don't think apple can india you out of like you when you order the thing they might be able to make you click a box and say you have to do it yourself but like we're not in the panopticon metaverse yet tim cook someone else can use that screwdriver and you will never know i don't know have you read the iTunes terms of service lately is so that's all good and i think universal praise and then kind of the conversation immediately turned to well why would apple do this and the first cut was to satisfy regulators and this will mean nothing which all deference to our friend john grueber is kind of his take you can go read

on daring fireball i would just argue like there is already a massive market for iPhone repair like you're not inventing a market you're just legitimizing an already huge market so i think this is going to get take up because you can already, we don't have to invent a demand. We don't have to invent a consumer who might want this. Right. They already exist. They're already being served. Now they just have better parts. Cool. But then there's like something else going on here, like a shareholder lawsuit that might have actually pushed Apple. Yeah. The shareholder, it was an activist shareholders from the mutual fund Green Century who had. I love a mutual fund. Love a mutual fund. And they had back in in September.

filed with the SEC saying, hey, Apple needs to serious, we're shareholders. And we as shareholders demand that Apple think long and hard about its right to repair stance and change things. And apparently this past Wednesday was supposed to be the deadline for Apple to like do something. And so Apple did this. And those shareholders were like, well, okay, I guess we're withdrawing this because they did something. And they still have to like look at it.

They said it's not like off the table. But but yeah, it seemed they are very much taking credit for this move. So what's interesting is they are taking credit. We have a story, Maddie Stone, our science editor wrote it. So Apple told us on the record, background policy coming through. Apple says the program has been in development for well over a year describing it as the next step in increasing access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and manuals. They would not say whether the announcement is influenced by the shareholder lawsuit. Yeah.

They pointedly would not say that. Would not say. Very clearly. And then the activist shareholders are like, the timing is no coincidence. Yeah. So it's not like a settlement. Right. Right.

Where the shareholders sued and Apple said, we'll do this. And the shareholders agreed to back off. Yeah. Maybe it was. And they're all just like agreed to not talk about it. Right. It's like the end of back to the future where they're trying to, you're trying to connect the two things and like, oh, they're so close and not quite connected.

Yeah. Like, I think what was interesting with this was, initially Apple was, initially Apple was like, no, leave us alone. You're trying to change our business, and that's outside the realm of shareholders. But then the SEC had issued new guidance between the filing and now that said, actually, we're going to carve it out, and shareholders can protest if it's something to do that raise, if it, shareholders can protest if it raises significant social policy issues, which theoretically the right to repair factors into. Yeah. So Apple had asked the SEC, hey, we got a shareholder thing.

We just like, don't do anything about this. We got to, like, study it, and we got to blah, blah, blah. And it seems like the way that usually goes is, like, okay, well, like, go have fun. We'll talk later. Go have fun. But, as Alex was saying, they issued new guidance saying that, like, if it's, like, got, like, societal impact, we're not going to, like, we're not going to just let you go have fun. Like, we're actually are going to look into it when investors come to us.

And so Apple, like, two days before the deadline when, like, This investor group, the mutual phone was going to happen. They're like, just kidding, you can repair stuff now. I will say, and you know, maybe it has been in development for every year. For something that's been in development for over a year, not a lot of information on how it will work. Yeah. None. Like at the end of the day, what we have from Apple is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten paragraphs.

Ooh. And a couple of cartoons. Well, all of their copywriters are busy right now writing. the new policy for in-app payment links or links to things because that deadline is coming very fast and that that appeal is still like up in the air. So like they can't do both at the same time, obviously. To me what this is is like regulatory pressure can work even if there's not a law passed or an action taken.

Yeah. Right. The overall environment of legislatures and like regulatory bodies looking at tech companies we'll spur them to action, sometimes in order to like fend off future action, but it does stuff. This is the program that Apple designed. Right.

Right. That's a win for Apple. This is their program. They have decided that it's the iPhone 12 and 13. They're picking the heat guns and screwdrivers they're going to sell or whatever it is. They're deciding it's only M1 Max. Yeah.

Right. They've chosen. And by the way, the iPhone 12 and 13, the newest iPhones. Mm-hmm. So if you think about, Yep, your battery is slowing down your phone. It's getting old. Your phone's starting to throttle itself. Well, that's not the iPhone 12 and 13 yet. And by the way, Apple, Tim Cook himself on investor calls has said when they rolled out the battery replacement program, their upgrades went down because people realized they could change their batteries over and their phones would perform fast again. And I mean, remember, this was a scandal. Yeah. People believed in Apple denied for years that iPhones automatically started slowing down after Tim. years to force you to upgrade.

Apple maintained. Nope, that's just your battery getting older. And in order to prevent your phone from just shutting off because it can't provide the voltage, we're throttling the processor to make your phone keep running. This is all very innocent. We just didn't tell you about it. They got caught. Oops.

They announced the battery replacement program. Now you can just replace your battery. And they had to admit to their investors. Yep. Our upgrades took a hit. Yeah. Because people could just replace the batteries. Well, iPhone 12 and 13, they're not the phones that either batteries are placed right now.

Yeah. So, like, this is, I would just say, like, you're right. It's the threat of regulation, lawsuits, all the stuff, this cloud that's hanging over to companies right now. But the win for Apple is they're doing it on their terms and then backing off the pressure. Why M1 Max, not Intel Max, which they still sell? Well, the M1s, they don't, the batteries in. So you can actually replace the battery now.

I mean, it may be that they knew that they were doing this. And so they made them slightly easier to repair, question mark? Not the phones. Not the phones. Yeah. Yeah, they designed the iPhone 13 three years ago. Here's my big question. What does an Apple design heat gun look like?

And if they commission Johnny Ive to help make it from Love From, like, do you plug in? Does it charge with the lightning cable? Does a lightning cable plug in like in the center of like where the heat gun actually has the exhaust? So it's like the Apple mouse? Like you can't have it plug in and use it the same time? It's going to be great. Do you say I fix it doesn't use a gun? Yeah, they use.

have what essentially looks like a hot plate. And they place it. Yeah, they have a giant heaty pad. And it's because they can precisely control the temperature that way. I feel like that's expensive. I feel like most people are going to get. So all the old air power mats that didn't get sold that were overheating have been repurposed to the repair program.

Well, so speaking of rigs, though, this is like the last thing, which is Apple might publish these documents and it might be the instructions for taking apart an iPhone 13 requires of $14,000 rig, and we won't tell you how to do it without the rig. Like, that's a real possibility. This is what I mean? If you're telling me that this has been in the works for over a year and you're announcing it today, time to a shareholder lawsuit expiration date, and you're not ready to roll it out until next year, I don't know, man, like maybe even talking about it for a year and like someone just pulled the rip cord. Yeah. That timing. But Apple historically, famously announces things

when they're ready to go. Very rarely preannounces products that are not ready to ship like their 200 parts. So we'll see. But I am looking forward to an apple, a beautiful aluminum heat gun. It's going to be gorgeous. Oh man, that'd be like that. You know that

they're going to do it because aluminum conduct so much heat, they won't realize that humans have to hold it. And then Belkin will make a holder for it. Here's my question. If the if the heat gun has a battery, will you be able to replace the battery? All right, that's enough of this. Other little Apple news, they delayed Zoe Schiffer, now NBC News, broke the story.

They're delaying return to work until February, changing the policies, continues to be a drama for Apple. I will see how that goes. And then Mark German and Bloomberg, I can't get enough Apple Car story. It's my favorite. So Apple now wants to launch a self-driving EV in 2025 with its own chip. Yeah. I have to say in the, and I, all respect to German, he gets a lot. It's great scoops. It's just funny that Apple thinks making a custom chip, which is the thing

it's good at, will be the thing that allows them to ship a car, which is the thing that it's bad at. Yep. I love it. Like, of course they're going to make a custom chip. Like, obviously, that's the only thing they know how to do at this point. In terms of the car. Right. Do they know how to make wheels? Like, unclear. They made it for the back pro. That's true. Little tiny wheels. So the story here is Kevin Lynch who ran the watch. By the way, resuscitated his career after Adobe at Apple, amazing run with the watch and all the stuff, is now in charge of the car project. They were, who knows what they've been doing in the past, they're now going to focus on

self-driving. Right. The point of this car is that it can drive itself. And we'll have no steering wheel. And they're going to launch it in four years. Okay. I want to have that confidence in life. I want to walk through the world with a confidence of the car design team at Apple.

Well, that just means they're going to get fired. Never mind. Never mind. I don't want that confidence. I just say, like the, I talked to an awful lot of car executives on Decoder, right? It kind of every layer of the industry, from the CEOs to the project, man, like, we've just talked to an awful lot of car folks. I've talked to the CEOs of LIDAR companies and self-driving companies.

None of them are saying, we're going to have a product in four years. Not a one, right? Like, your data collection problem is insane. Your sensor problem is insane. your regulatory problem is insane. Like, I just, it's amazing that, you know, this is the target and maybe it's just a bold target. But like, Waymo, which is the industry leader will not commit to 40, like, and they've already

got Chrysler Pacificas wandering the streets of San Francisco in Phoenix without drivers behind the wheel. Like, they're operating a taxi service and they're not like, we're ready to go. Here's a huge problem for, like, Waymo's cars. to Kedra at Maocana was on Decoder. We talked to Code and she was on Decoder. You can go listen to it? I was like, can you put a car in Denver?

And she was like, no. It was just the end of that. Right? Like, they're like, snow's a problem for us. That's like a pretty big problem. And like, she was like very sincere. Like, she's like, that's the next challenge. I just don't see how Apple,

they're operating so far behind that curve. They've never put a person in a car. Well, here's my concern. You know, Apple's not saying anything about the car. They're certainly not saying, they're certainly not given a deadline, but someone inside Apple must have given this deadline to someone. And so the concern with the car is the same as the concern with like that health stuff, right? Is Apple being honest with itself about its capabilities and about what it's going to be able to ship? Like, are they giving themselves like true deadlines and do they actually know what they are capable of and not capable of internally?

or is there like, has there a culture of we, we can do anything in there that is going to end up burning them? I think it's both, right? I mean, either you have a car that can drive itself or you don't.

No, no, no, no, there's a middle ground. It's called full self-driving on a model three. Right, but like even full self-driving, like give Tesla credit. Like they keep putting that software out in the world. They keep selling the, the sensor kits to people when they buy the cars.

They're not like, this is ready. right like Elon's like next week self-driving will be ready and he will set the huge prediction and now every Tesla customer no matter how much you love Elon or not you know in your heart he's going to miss the deadline and Tesla to its credit is not over claiming the name is bad and they should change the name because I think it confuses everyone but including the people driving the cars but like Tesla is not saying it's ready and they have you know as much data about actual human behind the wheel of self-driving cars than anyone. I see this stuff from Apple

and it's like at the end of the day and we talked about this last week with Sean. At the end of the day, they have so much money that they need to attack markets where spending that money is worth it. Where they have a huge advantage because of their pile of cash.

Yeah. And the car industry is like one of those markets. Yeah, what are some of the other markets? Like there's the microfiber cloth industry. There's the cloth industry. Yeah, textiles. Apple's going to be big in the textile. I mean, they could go Samsung with it.

They could start making nuclear reactors, yeah, submarines, boats. But, like, if you just look at like consumer products, making a TV is, like, almost not worth the money and attention for Apple. They could buy an OLED factory tomorrow in China,

and, like, it wouldn't, it wouldn't hit the bank account. Like, a couple of zeros would go down or whatever. Like, it's, there's just a piece of the puzzle where they're like, yep, this is a place where we have a moat, and the moat is cash. The moat might not be technology.

or focus or an idea of what a car should do. And I think that's how you get to, we're going to launch it in four years, ahead of every other player in the industry that has been relentlessly focused and instead of like hiring teams and firing teams. So we'll see. I just want to know what you think the Apple car will look like

because we keep seeing new EVs and they all look nuts, right? Like they either look like robot fish, which is my favorite design trend of all time. Or like, like Toyota lately is deep in the robot fish zone. Like, go look at the new tundra. This is gigantic robot fish. Or they're all doing the light bars across the face.

And they look like that emoji with the line for the face, which I, which Deter, I have to admit, I think it was the Deter emoji. Wait, what? Oh, my God. You know the emoji, the smile of the face, but it's just a line. Yeah, that's me. Yeah. Because you send it to me a lot. Yeah.

Well, it's so it says so much. Like, it's the most expressive emoji, honestly. What if Apple goes like screw it and they just copy Hyundai's grandeur? Have you seen this retro EV concept car of theirs? It's very good. It's very good. Do you ever see the movie in time? People made this reference to this movie.

So there's an old movie. It's a Justin Timberlake movie, I want to say. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like a kid and like instead of currency, the world uses time and you can run out of time. Yeah, yeah. of time. And so all throughout this movie in this weird future, they all drive crazy retro cars. He drives like a challenger, but they're all EVs. And this concept reminds me of that movie. It's so good. It looks like a 1980s Chrysler. Yeah. Hyundai actually did have a car that looked

like this called the Grand Door, which is a copy of a 1980s Chrysler, which is great. But yeah, I'm confident this car has a 0.0 crash rating. Yeah. But I would buy it in one heartbeat if it was for sale. If you put this thing in a wind tunnel, it would just flip over. Yeah, car design right now is just, it's a lot of weird ideas, I would say. Like, the fact that you don't need a grill anymore, I think is just confusing a lot of car designers. So they're like, like, BMW is like, but what if the grills were the whole car? Yeah. And so I just, I'm dying to know, like, is Apple going to make a mid-sized crossover?

Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. Are they going to make a $60,000 mid-sized crossover? Like, isn't that just like a boring product for Apple? It's going to be like $80,000. It's going to be $200,000. The cloth is going to be impeccable on those seats.

The cloth is going to be impeccable. Just incredible. There's just like, there's, yep, there's the in and out of the car market. There's a tech problem. It's an AI problem. There's a reason. Then you think about the actual product they have to deliver to people. Like, are they going to have proprietary tires?

Will there be a right to repair repair manual for it? Can you get it fixed at like, yeah. Can you go to the Midas and have the fluids? change. Yeah, can I get the oil change at Jiffyloob? It will use premium fuel. Oh, no, no, it's EV, isn't it? I don't think they're making a gas car.

That would be the best if Tim Cook was like, and we've uncovered a revolutionary power source. It's been right on our noses the entire time. Yeah. It's called diesel. It's just like, like, whiz the engine. All right, some lightning round things here. This is Belmuda phone. I don't even know.

Dieter, can you explain this toaster phone to me? There's a high-end toaster company in Japan called Bamuda. They make lots of cool stuff. And they have made an Android phone. I just wanted to talk about it to encourage you to go to the website, pull over in your car, pull over your car first. It does look cool. Go to the website.

It's like a half circle, like a wedge. It's like wider and its aspect ratio than most phones. It's relatively small. I'm sure it's terrible. But it looks so good. And it's like, yeah. You know what it reminds me of? even though it's got perfectly flat screen,

I was like, for the hot minute, when we had like concave screens, like the Galaxy Nexus and, you know, whatever that Samsung was, I miss those. It reminds me that a little bit.

Anyway, bring back weird phone shapes. That's the only thing I wanted to say about this thing. It looks sick. I want to buy this toaster. The toaster is $300. It's got to be a good toaster. I might buy the toaster.

Okay. And then here's, this is like such a funny Facebook story. They demoed a haptic glove. They're very proud of it. for the Metaverse. It uses like microfluids and pneumatics to feel pressure so it feels like you're like you can resist your fingers. Cool. And then immediately like the next day

a company called haptex was like, dude you just copied our glove. Like that's our glove. Like it's the same technology. It looks just like ours. So we don't know what's going on there. Here's my only question. Meta. Meta is buying everything in VR. They just bought Supernatural Peter Kafka at Recode Reported. That was a 500 million dollar deal. I have no idea if Supernatural's worth $500 million. I think Zuckerberg just wrote the check. Why didn't they just buy this company?

Like, such an unforced, dumb error. Like, who else are they going to sell the haptic gloves to? It's like, one exec was like, no, we can do this ourselves. Like, he got slighted at a bin-again's or something. It was like, no. I've actually been working up a microfluid glove concept of my own.

Very good. Sonos added DTS support to its home theater stuff. I'm only calling this out because you, the Vergecast listener, this is our community that cares about DTS supports. On a sonus. People are very excited about it. Even the playbar is getting it. Wow.

They're going all the way back. That's nuts. I've got a play bar. I'm very excited. Very excited for my playbys. And listen to some DTS stuff. I almost said BTS. Are you going to listen to some BTS?

Where do you want to go, Deeter? I think the last thing. is so the Pixel 6, Google never said what kind of wattage it could take. They would only give you numbers. It'll charge from 0 to 80% in half an hour or something. They would give you like charge times. They wouldn't tell you how many watts it could take to fast charge. They also told you they will sell you a wireless charger eventually that will charge as fast

as plugging it in. That's like pretty much it. And then alongside the pixel 6, they sold a 30 watt charger. If you want to buy a charger because it doesn't come in the box, you can buy a 30-watt charger. And I was like, cool, guess it charges at 30 watts. Nope. It turns out it charges like somewhere like it averages like way lower. It can do up to 20, 23 or something to that in that zone. But like it bounces around depending on heat and like how, you know, full it is and so on, which is what you want. But it never hits the peak that people assume was 30 watts because that's the charger that

they sell. It peaks at 23 watts. So Android Authority, like, did the testing to verify this, and then Google had to, like, come out and say, yeah, by the way, this is like, these are the wattages. This is how it works. This is why. And they, like, they just kind of, they kind of tried to get away with something there. And they almost did, but good on Android Authority for doing the testing. They also put out a software update for the pixels that they said improved the reliability and perhaps the speed of the fingerprint sensor. A bunch of us have installed it.

And I'm fully in the confirmation bias zone. I'm like, yeah, sure, it's faster. Yeah, sure, it's failing less. Yeah. No. But, like, bottom line is it's still not as good as, like, an S-20. It's still not as good as other optical sensors. What's your read on Pixel 6 at this moment, right?

This is their back in it. This is our real flag ship. A couple weeks later. How do you think it's gone? I mean, I wish I could say, you know, like it doesn't feel like it's picking up any more momentum than any other pixel to me in this moment. I think every single year, we're like, well, let's see how hard the carriers push it. And, like, we're coming into Black Friday. Let's see how hard the carriers are pushing the Pixel 6 instead of the iPhone.

Yeah, and through the holidays, right? If you see that big marketing push, we'll know. I want to call out two stories here. Katie Keck, our new stream reporter, had an amazing inside look at Netflix OpenConnect, which is their CDN where they, like, put their own servers at your ISP. That's why Netflix doesn't go down. I'm torn on this. I wish the internet was better.

It'd be cool if it was. They did it because the internet, like, between ISPs in this country, is not that reliable. So just a deep look at, like, Netflix just solved its problem. They just built their infrastructure. Great piece by Katie. And then Alex Heath, we were talking about meta. After all these leaks, the Facebook papers, the consortium that we were in, all the stuff, meta has gone into lockdown.

And they've started the, culture of that company is changing. You have to ask for access to things in a way that people then have to ask for access before. And I think the changing culture of meta and Facebook, Instagram, it will have ripple effects. Great piece by Alex. Lots of inside info on how that company is working in the face of all this pressure and leaks. Okay. We have gone over. It's real. So we're going to get out here. On Tuesday, Dieter did a whole Vergecast on RCS. I did. which is pretty amazing. Yep.

Very good. This coming Tuesday, we're doing another episode, which will feature Nealai. We're going to air the interview we did with ERO CEO Nick Weaver. Oh, at the event. Yep. The spectaculars continue. Also, go watch Springboard, Deeter's documentary about Hand Spring. It's available on our new app on TV streaming devices on Roku, Amazon, Fire TV, Android TV, and Apple TV.

It's got our videos. It's got our podcasts. You know, put us on the big screen. That's where we belong. It looks great. And you're living here. That looks great. You can tweet at us.

I'm at Reckless Deer's at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Lauren is Lauren Grush. McKenna is Kelly McKenna. It's her name, but backwards. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Get a shot.