The Vergecast - Apple's chip bumps, big and small

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Apple's new gadgets this week were pretty minor updates, so of course we talk about them for a long time. Nilay and David are joined by The Verge's Jake Kastrenakes, and the three hosts discuss the latest iPad, iPad Air, MacBook Air, and Mac Studio. All three have... a lot of thoughts. After that, they run through some more tech news, including the Digg reboot, the end of Skype, VW's cheap new EV, and more. Finally, in the lightning round, they talk about the latest from DOGE and the Trump administration, Brendan Carr's latest assaults on free speech, and a smartphone that is mostly (but not entirely) a camera. Further reading: Apple iPad Air 2025: launch, price, and specs Apple refreshes the iPad but doesn’t add Apple Intelligence Apple announces MacBook Air with M4 chip and a price cut Our first look at Apple’s sky blue MacBook Air Apple launches new Mac Studios with M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips Behold the maxed out Mac Studio. Digg is coming back, with founder Kevin Rose and Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian Discord is reportedly exploring an IPO. Nothing’s Phone 3A and 3A Pro use AI to organize all your stuff The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses Volkswagen’s cheapest EV ever is the first to use Rivian software Microsoft is shutting down Skype in favor of Teams The Verge remembers Skype Big Tech is now slightly less silent on Trump’s tariffs Trump imposes tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China Car prices expected to increase by as much as $12,000 thanks to Trump’s tariffs Best Buy and Target CEOs say prices are about to go up because of tariffs What’s an import? Trump to Cabinet: Musk has no authority to fire workers FAA staff reportedly ordered to find funding for deal with Musk’s Starlink  Trump’s USCIS wants to review all prospective citizens’ social media accounts Senate votes to strip the CFPB of its power to regulate X MWC: FCC chair says U.S. will defend interests of its tech giants FCC’s Carr defends broadcast probes, slams social media ‘threat’ A camera for your cameraphone: Sony Cyber-shot QX10 and QX100 review Xiaomi 15 Ultra is a small update with a big periscope lens  Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938.

This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Birchcast, the flagship podcast with minor updates that do not support Apple Intelligence. If you think we can't make an hour and a half show about the new iPad air, I don't know what show you think you're listening to right now. We're going to do it. We're going to find a way. I'm ready.

It's going to be emotional, some winding road. Some of you will cry. I think some of you will share. It's up to you decide who you are. But you have to choose right now before we start. At the top of the show. You're going to laugh. You're going to cry.

What kind of person could be? I'm your friend, Eli David Pierce, is here. Hello. Jake Castranakis is here. Hey, good to be here. In the actually very, very real control room, as all of our video viewers can tell. Yeah, what? Did you pick this background?

What? I don't want to give away the charade here, but this might be a controllable screen behind it. I love this. This might not be real. Can I tell you something? So one of the first times I ever did a, like, cable TV hit, and you guys about So you know how they work. What happens is they usher you into a teeny tiny room with a screen behind you and a camera and a light in front of you.

And it is either zero or 700 degrees in that room, depending on the day. And then you said there are a new year thing and you go home. To discover that I was not sitting in front of a window with like the beautiful New York City skyline behind me was like genuinely upsetting the first time this ever happened to me. And I have I have had angry feelings about virtual backgrounds ever since. Listen, you guys next week, we're going to Times Square. We're recording this thing live. All of the backgrounds will be real. This is what I'm saying.

Elmo will come in harassing. We're going to do TRL live, like in the 90s. The first time I ever did, you're kind of describing CNN, I'm guessing, because that was... It was a CNN, in fact, yeah. Because the tiny hot room, that's very much CNN. Yes. I was surprised not by the fact that there was a green screen, which, David, I truly... What?

I knew green screens exist, but that one... These are fancy studios. They should have windows. You walk through the fancy studio where all the people are working. Because the anchors, like, you know, their shows look over to the fancy studio, a lot of people working. And you're like, oh, my God, I did. I may.

I'm going to be on cable news, which over time fades in terms of excitement. And then you are led into this, like, hot windowless room where no one else is there and you can't see them. And that was a thing that blew my mind. Jake is sitting in some sort of, you know, wireless network. command center. That's what that looks like to me. Neli, by the way, recorded all of this dialogue hours ago. I'm just responding to it. The first time

I went and visited AT&T's Network Operation Center, the NOC, which is here in New York, they have one in New York. I will never forget this. It's just a room of charts and graphs. I don't know why they need a command center. It was never actually made clear to me why they needed to build

NASA mission control for the wireless network, but they have it. It's cool. I think it's there for like partners to like look at stuff. Like they need a place that's like not a server rack, you know. But I will never forget one of the engineers just pointed to this huge chunk of traffic on the graph and was like, that's porn. And it was like, oh yeah, that's, you're probably, you're probably right of it. That's awesome.

So, Jake, if you could just wheel around and show us where the point is, as you can see, this is somewhere over here, I think. All right, we got a lot to talk about today, not just Jake's Wall of Porn. There's new Apple products. There's a new iPad Air. There's a new MacBook Air. There's a new Mac Studio, which is very compelling. I got to say. I have a lot to say about the new Mac Studio.

Then we got like two lightning rounds. Dig is back. David reported on the 15th return of Dig. And then, of course, we're going to end by just talking shit about Brennan Carr. That's what we do here on the Burtrast. I think it's a good one. I will say it's a real bummer. popular that segment has become. And I've gotten a bunch of people who are like, please never

kill Brendan Carr as a dummy because it's great. And I keep being like, look, I would love to stop doing Brendan Carr as a dummy, but it requires a certain thing that is not going to happen, which is Brendan Carr ceasing to be a dummy. So this segment will be alive and well for a very long time, I suspect. We're at the point where we're getting fine-grained criticism of the name of the segment. We'll come to it. I'll explain. Can I start with the gadget reveal, though? One of the I've ever purchased my entire life. So we were on vacation, which many people conspiratorially believed meant that I was either cloning my body or dead. Too knows.

So we're on vacation. We go to the beach. I have a crap underwater camera that I bought a million years ago that is now quite fun to take because I can just like give it to the six year old and she like have it to the beach and I don't worry about breaking. It takes horrible photos. It's just a real thing. And then you see all the people have like the iPhone cases, you know, and like that's not great either because they get foggy and cloudy and whatever. So I was like, I'm going to buy a new underwater camera. And I went and I looked and the one that everybody buys is the Olympus TG6 or the TG7 now, which is basically the same thing with the USBC port.

It doesn't matter. It's like orange. It looks cool. And then you look at the photos. Like, this is not actually better than my iPhone. I've now come all the way back around to it. I'm going to buy this horrible case for an iPhone. And then I thought to myself, what if I order from Japan Sony's underwater case from RX100?

Oh, wow. Which is just one of the silliest, goddame. things in the entire world. If you buy it in the States, it's like $350. So you buy it on eBay from Japan, it's like $200. I don't understand how that works at all. Wait, you're saying this is your RX100? Yeah, it's the RX, I don't have it.

Isn't it a tiny point in shoot? Yeah, the RX100 is a tiny point in shoot. I'm sorry if you're listening to this. This is basically a giant plastic bubble that goes, I can't even figure out out of it right now. It's basically, you can hear all the slots. The camera fits into this giant plastic bubble. Here's the best part about it.

This looks legit. This looks like it would survive, like, you know, depths. It's for scuba divers. So the RX100, to control it, you turn the ring around the lens. If you're familiar with your RX100, like, that's how you change the aperture. So you got to do that. So it came with a gear, like a rubber gear that you slip around the front of the RX100. And then that rubber gear is geared to a big knob on the side.

Oh, wow. Incredible. Easily the best gadget I bought in 100 years. I've been taking pictures in the house, which is not underwater. And then this big, silly, white thing on the front is the flash diffuser. So you can pop up the Flash on the Alex 100 and make Flash photos underwater. So I've been taking Flash photos. Is Flash useful underwater?

Do you get the same party effect? Once you, like, fall down the rabbit hole of like, I'm going to take photos underwater, you get into, like, it is as gadgety and nerdy and, like, supportive of space as any hobby, you know. I just wanted to have a camera that. can get wet at the pool. So, like, I don't think I'll need the flash, you know. But it is easily one of the funniest gadgets I've ever purchased. I feel like the thing that that reminds me of is like, like really, really knock off James Bond gadgets.

Yeah. Like, if James Bond had no budget because of tariffs, like all of a sudden, he's getting these, like, large plastic cameras, but that thing is secretly like a gun and a voice recorder in addition to being a way to take underwater footage. I'm very into this thing. I mean, it's just the fact that it was, first of all, it showed up, it's from Japan. So all the instructions are in Japanese. Perfect. And like, it's basically just like a series of rubber gaskets and then affordances to turn the knobs and buttons on the RX100. So there's a wheel on the back.

And then there's a mode dial on top. And so you have to like line everything up so that this knob right here can gear itself to turn the mode wheel on top of the camera. and I'm just like looking at these like IKEA pictures and all this Japanese text. And I was like, I'm a pretty smart guy. Like I'm going to horsepower my way through this. And eventually I gave up and I downloaded the manual in English from the internet. So, but it's, I had a lot of fun with it. And it was sitting on the cess when I started recording.

And I was like, you know what? You know what the show needs before we do Brendan Carr? This needs an honest to goodness ridiculous gadget. And there's nothing I love more than a ridiculous semi gadget. True. By the way, there are many third party cases that are. vastly cheaper. There are many third-party cases vastly more expensive. This one was just, I Google it on eBay. And I was like, I kind of want to buy a silly gadget from Japan today. So I did.

Anything that attaches to a button to move that button somewhere else and turn it into a wheel that presses the button, like you are the verge now. Welcome. You've done it. It's so good. This is what we do here. It's funny because we don't have another beach vacation plan. It's like, I don't even know what I'm going to use. You need to find reasons to get underwater. It's just going to be in the bathtub on like a Wednesday night. It's like cold in New York. Like I'm not getting in a pool any time soon. Anyhow, I encourage you to send in your silly gadget purchases because I think we all need that to keep us grounded as a community during these times.

Speaking of silly gadgets, let's talk about all the new Apple stuff. Tim Cook teased, you know, there's going to be an air. And then they started with the iPad air, which I both understand and be, I think, deflated. everything that came after it. David, you wrote the story. Try. So we kind of knew there were going to be iPads. I think my operating assumption was that we were going to get a base iPad refresh because that thing hasn't been updated since I think the fall of 2022. We did. We did. And we'll get to that. But my point is my assumption was, okay, there's like, there was a lot of smoke around there being an Apple announcement this week. And I was like, I said to Jake,

I was like, my betting thesis is it's going to be the base iPad. It feels like it's time. And then Tim Cook does this thing and we're like, okay, maybe it's, maybe it's the MacBook error. Because again, the iPad Air got revved less than 12 months ago. Like this iPad Air that I have right here on my desk is less than a year old. And so I was like, well, why on earth would there be a new iPad Air? And yet, lo and behold, there was a new iPad Air.

So Abel announced, I would say, with interest and excitement on iPad Air, and then tried to absolutely bury out of existence that it was also updating the base iPad. And we should talk about that because I think it's really fascinating. But the story of this iPad Air is precisely one thing. It's that it now has an M3 chip instead of an M2 chip.

That's it. Actually, I think the story is ever so slightly different. I mean, this new era has Apple Intelligence, right? They've added it to that. It's not in the base model. Right. Which is funny because before these were announced, David and I were messaging each other on Slack and we're like,

they've got to just put Apple intelligence on this and call it today. It's the only thing, only thing to do here. And it's the only thing they didn't do. That's also the only thing Apple has been doing with its gadgets for the last 12 months. That's what I mean. And I think they know the base is like a huge volume seller. Like they're just selling base model iPads. And so is the air, I think.

Like I think pretty clearly the air is a hit. I keep telling people not to buy it, but it seems to still be one a lot of people land on. And I just think it's, I think we're at the point with Apple Intellectual in particular where the bloom is just off that rose. Like it just doesn't matter to people. And so like adding Apple intelligence to any Apple gadget right now is really just a conversation about how much RAM it has. And I think they just didn't want to put enough RAM in the base model iPad.

Yeah. I think that's basically right. And there's there's some weirdness happening where like there has been a pretty clean cutoff in terms of chips that can get Apple intelligence. But now Apple is starting to roll some of those features. but not all of them back to like the iPhone 15 line. And so it's like this lion is just getting blurry in a way that I find very confusing. But also I think you're right that the overwhelming fact is no one cares.

Apple cares a great deal about you caring about Apple intelligence and it just isn't working. The top comment on our news story, which was, you know, Apple and else's new iPad, but doesn't have Apple intelligence. Top comment was no Apple intelligence sounds like an upgrade or something to that effect. And it's like, yeah, like, this is not, it's an annoying little button that gets in a way right now. The X-R-R-R-R-M seems great. Yeah. So, you know, we talked about Alexa for ages last week. My feeling is that Apple Intelligence will not be a thing that anyone understands until the new Siri comes out.

Yeah. Express as a bunch of weird text tools and Gen Moji, who cares? I can talk to Siri like it's actually intelligent. That's the thing. And I think that's why they added the color and the animation to the, existing series, but it doesn't do it. I think they should have held off on that, actually. I agree.

I mean, and I think the response to the Alexa stuff from last week has been really interesting, because on the one hand, again, whether Amazon will actually deliver any of the product it claims to have made TBD, all the signs are bad for how that is going for Amazon. But they're saying the right things about what they're trying to do, right? And they've like announced the thing. And all of the people in the Apple universe that I know have spent this week being like, holy God, is Siri far behind? Like further behind than anybody who has. At least it was like, okay, this is actually really hard.

And if you have like a mainstream product and use case, just flipping that to LLM is tricky. And then Google has done it. Amazon has done it. And Siri sucks. And there was some reporting this week from Mark German at Bloomberg saying that it's possible that the better series. is actually like two years away. Like we're, it's not close.

And I think this, this thing Apple is trying to do just gets uglier because of your exact point. Apple is like hanging up billboards being like Apple intelligence and people like, that just means bad summaries of my text messages right now. Yeah. That everyone should turn off. Like,

it's, it's actually a problem. Every single one of their commercials, they're like aggressively saying like, it comes with Apple intelligence. And it's as though this is the thing that people are excited about. And, um,

it's funny that, they're getting excited about buzzwords, which is like not a very Apple-like thing to do traditionally, particularly when they haven't delivered. Yeah. And it's also when Chat Chit, horrible name, that no one can pronounce. Yeah.

If they had just said, like, iPhone now with ChatGBTGPT, which it is, I think people would be like, that would have been way more compelling. Yeah. Yeah. We nuked Siri and now it just goes straight to ChatGBT. Yep. It would have worked for people.

Apple One now includes, you know, two hours of advanced voice mode and Chat, would have been fine. Sure. But it's a bad brand. I know so many people who call it chat GBT. And it's like,

we're just like past the point of correcting your friends. You know, whatever, it's fine. We all know what we're talking about here, right? Like, you didn't buy it on Canal Street. Like, it's fine. It's like, it's like singing a Michael Jackson song.

You just like try to say the syllables kind of right and really fast and you just get through it. That's fine. And then Rihanna samples it years later. That's going to have. I'm not going to talk about. But the Apple intelligence you have now, you light up an iPhone, and it's like, it's not in your face.

No. But Chow Chibi is a bad brand that people are using because it's useful. And, like, advanced voice mode is very compelling no matter what. Like, you don't need to think about what's happening. You're like, oh, I can just talk to this thing. And if they just given that to Siri, I think it would have been fine. I think you would have ended up in weird spots where people tried to jailbreak it

or you had privacy issues or Kevin Bruce fell in love with it. Siri tried to bang me again, Kevin. I don't want to give the New York Times headlines. It's right there for you. That should be a front page story. That's true. But they haven't done any of that stuff. Anyway, I just think it's really fascinating that the base model iPad, which is just the thing that sells, like, forever and ever sells, doesn't have this feature because they don't need it.

Because the thing is like a Disney Plus machine, you know, like for so many people. Or it's deployed in enterprise and the enterprises don't want Apple intelligence or it's in schools and they don't want. Like, whatever that base model iPad represents is not. improved by Apple intelligence, and I think that says something very important. Well, and what it super clearly communicates is that however Apple wants to feel about Apple intelligence, it knows for absolute certain that it is not a thing it can raise the price for, right? Because if you're, if you're Apple, you, it's the, the base iPad now has the A16 chip, which is a two chip bump from before, which is great, but is still below the technical requirement.

to do what you need with Apple intelligence. And they could have added that chip, but then it would have made the thing more expensive. And for A, for Apple, I think having a $349 iPad is actually really important for a bunch of reasons. But also, I think this iPad now has Apple intelligence and is $50 more expensive is not a winning sentence.

And I think Apple knows that very, very clearly. Yeah. I threatened you with 90 minutes on inconsequential iPad bumps. Do you feel it? Do you feel it? Is it coming? Can I speak to some slightly also inconsequential iPad Air things? Yeah.

That went a little under the Rader. So they added the function row keys to the magic keyboard for the iPad Air, not inconsequential. That's the biggest upgrade here by a mile. And they dropped the price on those by 30 bucks each. They're still crazy expensive. It's still like 250 or 300 bucks or something insane. They went from most expensive. keyboard ever to most expensive keyboard ever, minus $30.

You can still, like, buy another iPad for the price of Magic keyboard, which actually would kind of rule. But the function keys are great. Yes. Yes. That's an important improvement. The iPad Air feels like it's getting ever so slightly closer to being the tablet version of the MacBook Air.

Like, you're supposed to spend roughly $1,000 on it. You buy the 13-inch version. You spend $300 or whatever on the Magic keyboard. and the stylus. And, you know, you don't get the fanciest stuff. You don't get the high refresh rate display. But you haven't spent all of your money on this thing. It gets most of the stuff done that you needed to get done.

It's not exciting in that way. I think it's really interesting. I was just looking over David's, like, recent iPad reviews. There is the only iPad that David says not to get. And it's the one everybody buys. It's right in the middle. It's really tough. The Air has at times gotten it right.

And I think they're like the thing it's trying to do is the right thing, right? Because like the iPad Pro is incredible and three times what anybody needs, both in price and in performance, right? Like it's massive, massive overkill. The thing the iPad Air has to do is convince you that you need more than the base iPad. And I think that case from Apple, more for software reasons than for anything else, has gotten weaker over time. And I think what Apple will tell you is that the thing that makes people step up is either the accessories, which it clearly gates to this device because, oh, I want a keyboard so I can send an email.

Now I have to get the air because that's how I get the good keyboard attachment. Or same with the pencil, right? Like those things are gated not for technical reasons, but because Apple is trying to get you to upgrade. Like that's just real. Or because people want the extra performance because they're doing the kinds of creative tasks that Apple always shows you on stage, right? It's like, if you're using Final Cut Pro and logic on your iPad, yes, you should get an error and not a base iPad. I cannot prove this, but I'm willing to bet that that is a teeny, tiny sliver of iPad people. And to me, the thing that I find myself saying a lot, and I wrote this, I recently updated our iPad buying guide and was basically like there are two types of iPad users.

There are people who want to just like send emails and browse the web and do the crossword puzzle and like look at photos, right? That is like they're sort of the basic iPad tasks. You've described grandparents. Sure. Yeah. There are a lot of those out there. And a lot of them have iPads. I can tell you constantly.

And then there are the people who are like, I want a creative machine. Right. And that's where like the pencil is really useful, whether you're drawing or you're editing videos or whatever. But it is like you are doing hardcore creative tasks. And that's when you show up. And I think many, many, many people have convinced themselves that they are the second kind of iPad user when in reality they are actually the first kind of iPad user. You're just describing Apple as a community. People who are like, what I do is 3D graphics.

And you're like, what you do is e-mails. Right. What you do is watch Netflix. And like, that's fine. And the $349 iPad is a kick-ass Netflix machine. And it's going to be an even better one now. I don't mean to say that pejoratively because we're going to talk about the Mac Studio in a minute. and I'm basically convincing myself to buy a Mac Studio,

and my job is 1,000% emails. I'm just describing myself. Oh, same. We can all be that person together. I'm just... Yeah. Every now and again, I look at the Photoshop icon on my computer. Right.

Huh? Does that count? Think about it. And Apple... I need 30 GPUs. And Jake, I think to your point about the MacBook Air, I think one of the things that has worked really well for Apple is upselling on that with your...

laptop or your desktop or whatever because that like by definition needs to be your most powerful machine. So if you're ever going to overkill on something, it should be a Mac. And on the iPad, I think the thing to do is actually just be honest with yourself about like, what is this thing really for in my life? And to me, it's been a while since the air has made a case above and beyond what most people are actually going to do on their iPad. If you could do high frame rate subway surfers, that would be a game changer. But you've got to upgrade to the pro for that. All right. I said, We were going to talk about the iPad air for 90 minutes as a joke, and it is just threatening to become real.

We have to move on to actual products that are worth talking about. Sorry to the iPad team. You know, change the software maybe. You know, allow real multitasking. I'll give you three episodes of the show if you allow real multitasking. Can I just throw a trivia question at both of you before we move on? Let it run macOS. The whole verge for a month will be about the new iPad.

Yes, 100%. How long would you guys think the like average, average lifespan of an iPad is. If I'm shopping for this one, how old is my current iPad? It's got to be over five. That's my heartfelt belief. Jake, what do you think?

Yeah, it's like seven years. Okay. Almost every number I've seen. This is a hard thing to measure, but almost every number I've seen says somewhere between five and seven years. Yeah. Which is interesting, right?

Because then it's like, okay, if you bought something in 2020, you bought the fourth gen iPad error in like a COVID haze, which had an A14 chip and it had touch ID. That thing is still getting software updates. I don't know that there's anything about these new devices that is like so vastly better

that you need to go get it right now, which is both the incredible success of the iPad and also a very weird thing about these devices. To Apple's credit, this has been their business for a long time, right? They are committed to their products. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So they are just like, we're just going to make another one on an arcade.

and they're going to last a long time. And their money now is not in selling the hardware. It's in taking a cut of every button that you push in their operating systems. Right? It's in the app store fees. It's in Apple One service fees. It's sending you to chat GPT and Apple Intelligence and taking a cut of that subscription if you buy it. Like all of that is their money.

It's giving Apple TV Plus away for free if you merely blink at a number of partners. That's all their money. And so I think the hardware. lasting a long time is actually, you can complain a lot about that business model, the services business model, because it feels like using the devices is increasingly monetized. But on the other end of it is the devices last a long time and they give them software updates for a long time. Yeah. Could they be, does that model suggest the devices could be cheaper? It sure does, but Apple's never going to make the device cheap. No, but I do think you're right. And I think the more

I look at these announcements, and I think there's some truth to this with the Macs, too, like, Apple is a software company in a very real way. Apple is more interested in just putting a thing in your hands that you will use software on than it is on like reinventing its hardware all the time. And that's fine. Well, that's been true. We should talk about the air because I actually did lower prices in there. And that was intended once again to be a segue away from these inconsequential.

But Apple's software company has been true since the days of Steve Jobs. He was very fond. I think it's Alan Kay, famous computer scientist from back in the day. that his quote was if people who are really serious about software build their own hardware and that's like a motivating Steve Jobs quote like he talked about from the beginning so I think that's still there in real for Apple it's now expressed all the way into like they design their own modems for the iPhone like they're very serious about building their own hardware in a very different kind of way yes but it's the services component of that where they don't care if you have the device for 10 years as long as you are paying that iCloud storage fee for each and every one of the one of them. those 10 years. And that has a lot of effects. Like, it changes your relationship to the device. It changes what Apple tries to sell you. It changes what applications get built and deployed on those devices. It changes, you know, like free to play games exist because of this model. And Apple has to not, Apple has to studiously avoid pointing out that a huge portion of its revenue comes from like

five Candy Crush whales. Like, yeah, there's all these weird outcomes there, but one of them that's very concrete is, oh, iPads last for 100 years. Like, that's fine. Which in a vacuum is awesome. Yeah. All right. MacBook Air. They did lower the price, which is shocking in the context of tariffs, because we just

assume prices will go up, but Apple actually lowered price in the air. They added the sky blue color, which is very pale. It's very beautiful, but it's very pale. I'm kind of into it. I didn't like it. I have a, I have a blue iPad Mini from last year that I didn't really like, but there's something about the, like, larger size of it and the sort of open screen on a table that I'm actually kind of into it in the blue. Yeah, it looks, it looks good in the videos we've made. And

space gray, it's dead now. Space gray, which was not a color. Space gray was always a concept. It was, uh, 50, it was 15 different colors over the years. Is that, I guess that is true. Yeah. It was never like a pantone color. Like Apple would be like, I don't know, this is like the gray we could make the aluminum today. Space gray it is. It's the dark one. Yeah, right. Um, so it's gone, but hopefully it will come back. Um, or a black will come back. That would be tight. Uh-huh. The 13 inch at 999. The 15 inches of 11.9. so cheaper. And then they were out of the webcam.

So this is very much just a spec bump. But I think it's a pretty good spec bump, especially at a lower price. Well, especially they bumped the base RAM last year mid-cycle. And so now- That's your Apple Intelligence. Hey, you know what? I've totally changed my tune. Apple Intelligence is the greatest thing that's happened to mankind.

Right? But for a grand, you now get, I think, a very serviceable MacBook. That's great. That's like a huge upgrade, actually, even though this is otherwise pretty quiet. What if the legacy of the whole AI craze is just that Chrome runs better on everybody's computers because we all around. I mean, that has been the legacy of virtually every major hardware revision is like, oh, Chrome will now eat these resources as well.

But, yeah, no, it's true. You buy a new MacBook. You turn off Apple Intelligence. You got yourself a 16-gram upgrade for no money. It's like amazing. You turn it on. and maybe that AI model switch to eat some of that RAM

which is, that's the tradeoff, right? Yeah. We think, nobody's actually sure what Apple Intelligence can do. We have to read out. We're told that it is running on the computer,

changing all of the things we write to be smarter. Yeah. They've revved the webcam to match the MacBook Pro's webcam. I'm, I don't know, but I feel like Apple keeps promising us better webcams and they're all still kind of bad. Yeah.

It's a webcam. Like, it's fine. I actually think somewhat to Apple's credit, it has hit a point where its webcams are fine. Yeah. They're fine. They were not fine for a very long time, but they're fine now. So that's the rev of the air, which is interesting. And I think a great computer.

I think for $9.99, it's very hard to compete with a MacBook error, as it is currently configured and presented. But it's also true that we were like at MWC this week. and like we saw a giant like trifold laptops we the framework laptops were out like there's all kinds of there's all kinds of action in the laptop space and it it's all still revolving around a thousand dollar MacBook air that is deeply hard to compete with yeah what do we think is going on there like i see it was that a Lenova one like they demoed a giant calculator like a huge portrait oh my god it's an incredible calculator on it i love this thing like i mean i'm here with a giant underwater can hammer bubble. Like, give me a gadget, right? Lenovo now has two different versions of basically this exact same laptop where they're like, what if the screen was twice as much screen? And one, the screen just like rolls out from inside the laptop. Yeah. That was like a month ago. And now they're like, wait a second, the screen's

always out. It just folds back. So one, it's always outside, one, it's inside. It doesn't matter. Either way, it's still just a giant super tall screen. And it looks just genuinely, utterly insane to, like, have this little thing in front of you that you type on with an enormous screen. But it also looks amazing, and I want it more than anything. So Lenovo, I believe, has been the, like, foremost proponent of tent mode for laptops. Yes. For years down, like a full decade, Lenovo's like, look, the way you want to use a computer is in 10. tent mode. Remember the yogas, the foldable, the two and one tablets they were making, like the service

competitors? If you will recall, like, the thing that they wanted you to do with a Lenovo yoga was tent mode. It was so flippy. I loved it. It was so flippy. And so this new concept that Jake is talking about, you can fold it back and put it in tent mode. So you have what looks like a laptop, but then the screen is folded back over at an angle. So it's a tent. And someone sitting across screen on a table can see what's on that screen. I love it. I love the brain that whoever you are, like, show yourself, I want to hug you, that thought, okay, here's how people should use laptops with other people. Yeah. Here's what I need you to do.

I need you to sit across from you while I look at my laptop, but then I'm going to fold the screen back over in 10 mode. And then you will look at this screen while I look at this screen and we're going to make eye contact. I tell you, their product guy told Antonio on our team, he said that the thing they compromised on. was that they wanted to put an entire smartphone screen to replace the trackpad, but that was too far. Yeah. Oh, that was too. Yeah, that's just outlandish.

They couldn't make that happen. A screen. If you're out there regularly using tent mode, you know, maybe you've got a 10-year-old Lenovo Yoga. Like, well, whoever you are, if you're out there and you are either regularly using tent mode, or you heard me describe this and you were, like, thinking, I got to get a laptop the content.

Let us know. The email address is open. The phone lines are always ringing. This is the funny thing about this space to me. Like, I don't want more innovation in laptops. This is out of my question, right? Maybe an insane thing to say, but I think the thing I've come around to is, like, I think laptops are just a solved problem.

Like, I think we've, because we've been at this for a while, and there have been a lot of ideas. There was this time, I think it was, it was either Acer or Aesus. I think it was Acer flipped the trackpad and the keyboard. Do you remember this? They made a thing where they made a keyboard in the front club. We did, this was a recurring segment on this show. It was a whole thing. Would be like, keyboard in the front club.

Here's another one of these. Yeah. It was like, that was the closest to success this concept has ever gotten. And then everything got really flippy. And then the razor was like, what if they folded out? And Lenovo was like, what if it rises up out of nowhere? And everybody is like, no, actually, what if the battery lasted longer? Like, what if it was just laptop?

but battery. And I think that's fine. Like we're, we're, what, we're 30 years into laptops now. Like, I think,

I think we can look at those and be like, okay, this is, we know what this thing is supposed to be. Let's leave it alone and go to something else. And where I am with tablets is like, I just don't think we're there yet. So I push harder on that because I'm like,

we can't, we have not finished what this thing is supposed to be. But with laptops, I'm like, I think the MacBook error is probably my longest held, like default recommendation. That is like, If you just want a laptop and I don't want to have any more questions for you,

I'm going to tell you to buy a MacBook Air. And that's been true for 10 years. I can't say if you're saying that with affection or disdain. Like, if you want to get the fuck out of my face, buy a MacBook Air. I have a MacBook Air that I love to pieces. Like, it's affection. Like, and it has been, I think it's, it's frankly kind of damning of the rest of the PC industry that nobody else has figured out that what people actually want is a laptop that is like

light and thin and lasts a really long time. No, wait. To be, to be fair, they have. they just have horrible branding problems, right? Like, what is the default Windows laptop that competes for the MacBook Air? It's a rich topic of discussion. Sure.

And the problem is the Dell has... It's the Dell X-P S-13, which they killed. Which is gone, right? They just won't, like, stick to a brand that makes sense. Now they're like, here's what it's called. It's called the Double Dell Pro, and it comes with a side of fries. You know, like, I don't want that. Like, I don't understand what this is.

You know, HP had a line of computers that we thought would be, they changed the logo. And they're like, now that's gone. And Apple, to its credit, radically changes the product over time. But it does just slowly iterate the products in the same names. And you can argue about whether there's too many products or whatever. But like they've just built brand equity in the name. So much so that Johnny and I've tried to kill the MacBook Air and he couldn't.

Right. If you will recall. And again, they tried to make huge changes to how a laptop works and it sucked. They're like, what if your laptop didn't have any ports in the keyboard as bad so that we could make it thinner? And everybody said, no, thank you. Like, we just figured it. it out. We know what this thing is supposed to be. Again, this was kind of my question about all this.

For $1,000, a 13-inch for $1,000, a 13-inch for McQuick error, it seems virtually impossible to compete with unless you need Windows. Unless there's something driving you to use Windows, and then you have a huge menu of options. But there's not, like,

even like, should Apple put a touchscreen on this thing? It's like, yes, I think they should merge iPadOS and MacOS, and they won't. They're just not going to. They're going to sell you a weird an iPad error and they're going to sell you a MacBook Air and that's fine. And there's something about this one in particular where they revved it a little and they

brought the price down and they added some RAM, which I think you should turn off Apple Intelligence and take advantage of that. It just makes this MacBook error like a particularly strong expression of Apple's dominance of this particular price point. I think it's very hard to compete at this price point with this new air. Yeah. Yeah. It's as a $1,000 computer, it's about as compelling as, I think, is.

possible to do at this moment in time. And that's why I think as a $2,200 computer, the new M3Max Studio is the one I'm going to buy for no reason whatsoever. Okay. This thing is a deal. I'm willing to have this conversation with you, but only if you can explain to me what the hell is going on with the chips in the new Mac studios. I don't think they can make an M4 Ultra.

I think that's what's going on with the chips. Right? Like, I think the way these chips work, and I think their names are getting a little confusing, just a little, yeah. Right? Because what's the difference for you to M1 Pro and M1 Max and M1 Ultra, like, or now M4, M3, like what they are really, what they really mean is we have fused two or four chips together. And so there's something there that is too confusing for people to understand because

the way that's expressed is in core counts. So you're like, I will configure an M3 Ultra Mac Studio and your choices are 28 core CPU, 60 core GPU, 32-core neural engine, or 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU, 32-core-neural engine. And you're just like, I don't know what any of that means. That it's just like a meaningless set of numbers. Obviously, one is more than the other. But then you step back and you're like,

the cheaper model is the M4 Max, which has a 14-core CPU and a 32-core GPU and a 16-core neural engine. You're like, oh, is this just half? But it's a totally different chip family. I stopped listening so long. I'm really sorry. None of this makes sense anymore.

They should change these names because what you have is a chip family and you're taking the core chip and then you're literally fusing another one onto it or then you're fusing three more onto it. And I don't think that that tracks. That's not how people think of anything. No. Like what are the core capabilities of a single chip in the new M line versus three of the old one? You're like, that's literally no one outside of Apple's chip team thinks this way. It also, like, we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the sort of internal math of Apple's naming system. And the fact that the fact that Ultra is more than Max, got it, good on that.

But the fact that Ultra is so much more than Max that Ultra on the last gen outweighs Max on this gen so that a M3 Ultra is more than an M4 max, complicated. I don't know. I just tuned you out too. Okay, here's what I'm saying to you. As everyone knows, everyone in America is aware, I am thinking about buying a new computer. As was it now into you, Cores, are you in the market for it? Breaking news across every cable news station. I have often considered buying a new computer.

I think that was on 60 Minutes this weekend, right? Yeah, they did that great John Oliver segment. And then I sat down and was like, I don't know, you guys. It's a 2017. I'm at. the fan runs all the time. What do you guys think? So I've been thinking about it.

I've solved my monitor problem, which is I'm going to buy a cheat monitor while I wait for the new studio display. And in the meantime, I might break one or more IMAX trying to convert it into a monitor. We got a couple of emails from people with non-scary sounding solutions to that,

by the way. We're going to have to, we have some stuff to try. Okay. Well, that's a whole other show. So I'm like, I'm going to buy this new Mac Mini. So you open the configurator,

and what's the first thing you're going to do? you're going to you're going to upgrade to the m4 pro because obviously my Photoshop needs are intense sure right there's a lot of filters i Photoshop and Patel they call you i take screenshots of david and i draw moustaches on his face every night um and i need 20 gp u course to do that sure so then you're like i'm i'll stick with a base m4 pro i'm not going to upgrade for $200 the next step up that's too much but you're like i can't sit here with 20s 24 gigs of RAM. So I'm going to spend $400 on 48 gigs of RAM because 36 is not offered for some

bananas reason. And then you can't, 512 gigs of storage is not acceptable. So you have to go to at least a terabyte. And then I'm not going to sit here with a gigabit Ethernet port. I'm going to get 10 gigs of Ethernet. My home network is 2.5. Right? So at the very least, I need that.

And then one day I'm going to get one of those crazy fiber connections. I got to be ready for future. I'm at $2,100, $2,09. I've configured a Mac Mini to $2,100 instantly. Checking really quick. What was your starting budget? The starting budget of the Mac Mini is $59. So you can blink at the Mac Mini Configurator and get it to be very expensive.

Or you can open the Mac Studio page and the base model Mac Studio is $2,000. You're like, it already has 36 gigs of RAM. I'll upgrade to a terabyte of storage. It already has a 10 gigabit Ethernet card. I don't need to upgrade this processor because I don't know what any of these numbers mean. $2,200. I think this is an obvious choice. And I think America needs to know.

If the, I don't know, look, CBS is in a lot of trouble with Brennan Carl already. So I don't think they're going to allow me to come on and configure a Mac. But I'm open to it. There's like a whole biz ops team at Apple that just got a raise listening to this podcast. Like just that thing that you just said, they're like, well, we did it. We have one. I do tend to keep computers for a long time. Like, I, they sit on the, I mean, this is why I'm thinking about, I mean, I'm going to find a way to justify this Mac Studio.

But I think this is a staggering deal for the Mac Studio. Which version was the staggering deal? The M4 Max. With 10 gig a bit. Yeah, the M4 Max is basically already configured. The only upgrade you really should do is to a terabyte of storage because 512 is, like, it's almost like we're getting to the point where if you do enough stuff on a computer, just, the system and then like swap to the internal drive in a bunch of applications, we'll eat up 512. Yeah.

So you should go to a terabyte. Yeah. By the way, I mostly do emails in Slack. I'm just saying. I'm going to convince myself to buy this computer. It's like truly, I think, like compared to specking up a Mac mini, which a lot of people love to do. Or, I mean, the Mac Pro at this point is just like completely off. I don't, I don't what the point of that thing is right now.

They need to update. Seriously. I'm impressed with the studio. The approval rating on the studio in general seems to be like through the roof. Like I don't know, I've never heard of anyone who bought a studio and is like bummed with the experience that they got from it. Apple appears to have like really gotten this thing right.

I mean, I should just buy one here on the show. I think you can expense it if you buy it live on the Vergecast, right? And that how that works? It is strange. They revved the Mac Studio so deeply and they haven't touched the Mac Pro, which is now just running an M2 Ultra. But I guess it's if you need PCI Slice. That thing is eventually it's going to be a studio with more slots.

Like it kind of already is a studio with more slots. And that's fine. There will be a few people who need that. A cooling system designed for Intel chips that required nuclear power. Yeah, sure. It is very funny. And by the way, in all of this that, you know, we've talked about Apple Intelligent so much. Like the entire AI revolution is running on giant Nvidia cards.

And Apple and Nvidia hate each other. And there's a very obvious thing for the Mac Pro to be able to do. and they will never do it. Like there's just a personality conflict that will prevent the one Mac that can accept PCI cards from plugging in a video card into it. And they will, it will never happen.

Like, they will add touch screens to Mac and put MacOS on an iPad two decades before they allow Nvidia hardware to run their computer. Like, it's just never get, everyone has to be dead. Like, generations of people have to be dead before Apple and Nvidia can mend their fences.

I kind of think you're right. I like, I want to find, some, like, would draft Kings take that bet on which one happens first? Because I would very much enjoy being involved in that wager. But I think you're right. It's not small. There's a long version, short version. The short version is

there were some MacBook pros that had Indydean trips ages ago, and Indyria screwed up the thermals so that they would basically come unglued, unsodered inside the computers. Oh, boy. And I think Nvidia wanted Apple to pay for it. And Apple, obviously, and never. Generations of people have to be dead. That's what I'm saying. Like,

your children's children may see an Apple computer and video trip. Fair enough. I mean, I should just find one right now. By the way, the maxed out Mac Studio is $14,000. That feels low. Like, I'm, that's fine. You're like, let's do it. Yeah, that and the new MacBook Air.

Their deals. They're deals. Nothing but a deal. 512 gigs of unified memory on the Macs studio. Yes. For $14,000. Got to upgrade that. Price per gigabyte.

That's off the charts, man. That's so good. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with a 10,000. tech lightning wrap. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. I think on a tablet, 64Ks is actually basically fine. Like, what are you downloading under your fucking iPad? Movies. No, no, you're wrong. Wait until your kid needs to take a plane with an iPad. Yeah, she doesn't need 4K.

Yeah. And Louie is A-O-K at 480s. Do you know how many episodes of Louie there are? Do you know how many episodes of Paw Patrol they are? Have you ever sat with a six-year-old and argued about which episodes of Paw Patrol to put on their iPad before a 90-minute flight? You're just like, all of them. Just all. Just give me the library. And that's done with this conversation.

All the kids, they're supposed to get the $350 iPod. They end up getting one terabyte of storage. It's real. Preloaded Paw Patrol. We're back, everybody. We're back. We're just rolled right. People wonder what happens between the segments while someone else reads the ads?

That's what happens. All right, we got a tech lighting around. There's actually quite a lot of small tech news. I want to start with this one because, David, I feel like we've run the dig-is-back story 50 times. It's probably right. Yeah. It's been back several times. If you recall, Dig was one of the early sort of news aggregators.

When I worked at Engadgett a million years ago, we would argue about what story should get a dig badge. So if we saw that traffic was like going up on a story, we put the dig badge on it. And the reason we'd argue about it was, I believe the dig badge at the time was a flash object. So it would slow down the entire website. Oh, wow. But we'd be like, we're getting a lot of dig traffic. Like, it's worse. Dig did send a lot of traffic.

Like it was a real, it had a pretty long run there of if you were at the top of the dig homepage, like it crashed websites. And you'd want to game it. So if you saw that you're getting some traction, you'd be like, we should put the dig badge on this story. So people can click, I dig it. There are some of you listening that have no idea what we're talking about. But like it was like Reddit. It was a meaningful competitor to Reddit at one point in time. And then it went away.

And now Alexis O'Hanian, founder of Reddit, is maybe going to bring it. bring it back with founder Kevin Rose. And David, you talk to them. Yeah. So the one difference between the many comebacks of Dig and this comeback of Dig is that this is the first one that Kevin Rose, who created Dig, is actually doing. So there's something meaningful there. And he's doing it with Alexis O'Hanian, who is the co-founder of Reddit. And it's really interesting because talking to them about it, it's basically like, Kevin in particular has been, has had many opportunities to do Dig again.

And I think for a variety of reasons, chose not. to, but they are all all in on AI. And the idea that it can be a tool for helping moderators do stuff and helping sort content and helping summarize stuff and help people build stuff within these communities. Like the next turn for social networking is basically like what if we were nice to our users, which is a surprisingly rare thing in the social world right now. And what if we were able to build the tools that moderators in particular actually need? I think the theory is super interesting, and there are definitely a lot of people out there

who have fond memories of digs, so they're going to get to trade on that for a minute. But they're also, like, the thing they're trying to build is pretty unformed at the moment. It's very new. They're very early in trying to figure out what it is. But, like, I don't know. I'm curious about this in a way I didn't expect to be.

I was a huge dig user back in the day. Loved it. It was a really important website, and I think really early to those sort of, social news aggregation ideas. I think one of the big reasons that it failed was that it wasn't Reddit. It didn't figure out the community element. Yep.

And Reddit did. And I think the problem that they're about to encounter is that what they're basically describing doing now is making it Reddit, but with some AI. And cool, maybe. Like, I love, I have very, very fond memories of Dig. but it definitely sounds a little, like you're saying, unformed right now in terms of exactly how that pans out. But it is true.

Like, Reddit moderators have a lot of challenges, and it is a lot of work to keep those communities together and not breaking rules and happy. And I think if you are able to take some of the friction away from that, maybe there is something they can do that makes it a little bit better and smarter. And obviously Alexis's involvement here, you know, gives a little bit of sheen to it. Do we think Reddit's good? This is the thing I think a lot about.

And I'm sort of serious. I think a real thing Reddit has going for it is that it is the only game in town in a pretty meaningful way. If you want to do things like you can do on Reddit, there's really nowhere else to go. Wait, I disagree. There's still a giant ecosystem of old school forums that exists. And there are like weird companies that run the underlying software. So like every car in the world has a forum. That's fair.

But like if you want to, if you want to do a bunch of. of that in one place, I suppose. Yeah, like, if you want to talk about cars, there are other places to go. But I think part of the appeal of Reddit is that it is both a bunch of individual communities, but it kind of puts them together in a meaningful way. Yeah, though I do wonder, like, I'm not, listen, there was a dig Reddit rivalry back in the day, and I chose my side and my side lost. And so I've still got a grudge there. I do wonder, like, how much Reddit users are using the Reddit homepage, the R-slash-all feed. whereas dig was a homepage.

You visited the homepage. You know, if they lean into that, again, that is a different type of product than Reddit where you were going to specific communities or curating a very specific subset of communities that speak to you. And I do think, you know, they have proven, you know, phenomenally strong at that.

I think Reddit has, like, kind of come and gone time and again over the past, like, decade. And I feel like it's, you know, maybe stronger than ever right now. So I don't know, I would say that Reddit is good, is very good at what it is doing. I think it's kind of hard to beat. Like, you guys, right?

There are these super nerdy forums for specific niches, but a lot of those forums now just take place on Reddit. And I think for a mainstream audience, like, there is nowhere else you can go. All right. So here's the company I'm obsessed with. It's called Vertical Scope. They're in Canada. They seem very sweet. I should get them on a decoder in some way.

They own AVS forum, which is why I think about them all. time because a vs forum is the real thing. Reddit has not even bit into one ounce of what ABS forum represents. If you're like a home theater nerd, you're listening to the show, you know what aBS form is. They also own toyotanation.com, uh, Ben'sworld.org, Guitars 101 and something called iFish.net, uh, which is the internet's largest fish forum. It's like a two truths and a lie kind of situation.

Like one of these is not real. Also something called, uh, dog forums. Um, it's real. they have 101 million monthly active users across this thing. They're not, right? Like, they're big. It's 1,200 sites that they were on their forums. But you're right.

If you go to ABS form, there's not some connectivity to iFish.net. There's not this, like, overarching, I'm on a social platform that has subredits. There's just this big software. And then obviously what they do is they want to answer across all that stuff. I think that's really fascinating. And I think that really interesting thing about dig and Jake, you were a dig user. So I want to like dig was about sending you away, right? It was about curating the internet.

And there's a quote in David's piece where they're like, like, we don't want to be just like an RSS reader with a like button. Reddit is about the content on Reddit. Like, yes, there are links on Reddit. Yes, they embed YouTube videos, all this stuff. But Reddit is really about the stuff that is happening on Reddit. Totally. And a big problem for almost every sort of a curator of links on the internet now,

including us, is that all of the action is on, social platforms. There are not as many cool things on the web to link to as there used to be. Yeah. Which is just a weird thing that is currently happening. And so I wonder is the new dig, Jake, as you think about why you picked dig in the first place, was it because it was aggregating the web and it was like showing all this stuff or is it because there was a community on there? No, it was because it was aggregating the web, right? Like if you were a tech nerd, if you went to dig.com, you would get everything you needed to know. It was the place to be and, you know, it was It was a light touch website, super fun to be on there.

But it was not about community, not at all. And I think, again, like, ultimately, I think that was one of the reasons that they lost, right? Like, like, AMAs could not have evolved on dig in the way that they did on Reddit. And I think Reddit's ability to create those communities and to have homegrown content is what empowered it to, you know, become so valuable and become such a special place. And so this new dig is, you know, we should say, we have not seen it, right? Right now they just have like a landing page that says, coming soon. There's supposed to be invites going out in the next few weeks or something like that. But, you know, we fundamentally don't know exactly where it's going to land on that spectrum between just being a news aggregator and being a more community-centric, you know, Reddit type of thing.

And I think just looking at the Internet that exists today, it seems very unlikely that they would create something that is just, you know, the original version of Dig, where it is just collecting a bunch of links. and sending you out, right? You sort of need that community element. And at that point, it's like, okay, well, where's the daylight between this and Reddit? It's AI tools for moderators, yeah. David, do they tell you anything about Federation or Social Web or anything like that? I asked about that. And the response was basically it's a thing that they're interested in,

but it's so unsettled that it didn't make sense to buy into any particular system right now, which I actually think is a pretty reasonable argument. Like should you at some point want to be part of this federated system if you are dig and want to like build tools for communities? Yes. If you're a tiny team trying to get a product off the ground, should you be making giant bets on activity pub or AT Proto right now? Probably not. Yeah. Do you see that tap bots, which made tweet bot, which was great.

And then I made ivory from Asson. They have a new one for blue sky called Phoenix that they just announced. Oh, yeah. And it's fascinating. and they should. But they're a small team and basically your entire announcement for their Blue Sky app

is like an apology. They're like, we know you want us to keep doing ivory, but they were small, so we're going to try this one and we don't know which one's going to win but we promise we're not abandoning this one. And I was reading,

I felt really bad for them. I was like, you don't have to apologize. Like no one knows what's going to win. There's even a line in their post that's like, we think activity pub is probably going to win like over the long term, but like all the actions on Blue Sky right now, so we should probably make an app for that.

like, it's like, guys, everybody gets it. No one knows how this is going to shake out. Like, it, it seems like it's, it will be the future in some way. But it is true that all the users are using at protocol and all of the engineers like activity pub to win, then that that's just going to take a while for it to play out. Yeah, it's tough. And I think it's the thing I'm hearing from a lot of developers right now is, is that same kind of thing where it's like, okay, I don't want to build myself out of

of the possibility of doing either of these things. But I also don't want to spend a lot of resources supporting them, which I think right now is probably like the prudent way to think about the internet. Sorry, I'm just investigating what's on IFish.com. It was just closing tabs. It's the Ifish forms. Like if Apple made a fish, it would be called the Ifish. This is what we're talking about here?

No, it's, uh, Ifish.net. I'm sorry. Ifish. That's the world's biggest fishing form. Fantastic. I thought it was about keeping fish. as pets. That's a completely different community.

It's not allowed on I-Fish. That's a wildly different. That's my fish. There's on the IFish.net forums, there's a subform called Life in General. It has 1.3 million posts. Just saying. People just want to hang out.

It turns out. People just want to hang out. They didn't need any AI to do that. Yeah. One more piece of news on this before we leave the social stuff behind. there was some news this week that Discord is potentially starting to think about an IPO, which is

kind of fascinating. Discord has been through some weird ups and downs as a company over the years. Almost got a, was like kind of maybe sort of getting acquired by Microsoft at one point. That didn't happen. Has been, has had lots of ups and downs for content reasons.

It's a weird time to go public. Strange, I feel like, end result for Discord, given that like, if you just look at the trajectory of Slack, Slack went public. It was public for like 30 seconds. It didn't really go great. And now they're owned by Salesforce.

And it's fine. So I don't know. Like Discord is fundamentally the same thing. But like for gamers. They just what, right? Neither Discord nor Slack enjoy that comparison. No.

They hate it. And you're like, guys, have you opened your apps? So what Slack will tell you is yes, yes, but we enterprise authentication is, right?

Right. So is, Is the gamer market bigger than the enterprise market? Well, I think there's the consumer market. So, like, Discord here, you know, it's just a big consumer market that might pay them directly. Right. That's true. But yeah, I think we're in the age of all of these social platforms being like, we're companies or there's space here.

Like, everyone is pretty frustrated with the four billionaires who run all communications in America. What if, what have we tried? And it helps if you have a billion. of your own, like Alexis. A couple of them, in fact, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that one of the things that Kevin said about dig, which I thought was really

interesting, is like, I kept pressing on, like, how big do you want this thing to be? And they seem really interested in not trying to, like, deliberately not trying to go out and build another, you know, many billion dollar gigantic company, which is like a thing you can say when you're already fabulously wealthy from other means. Like, this is the kind of thing that they're like, maybe without the pressures of being a public company to go, you know, screw over our users to please our shareholders, we can actually do more interesting stuff. And so I think there is a real, like, boutiquey nature to a lot of these projects that I think are really exciting. And I think if this dig thing goes well, it'll look like

that, too, would be my guess. Once you go IPO, then you have shareholders who want money. Right. And I wonder how Discord will respond to that. Other stuff, nothing has new phones, a phone 3A and 3A Pro. Have you seen the AI button on the side? Oh, of course. Yeah. That's, necessary. That's the big new feature. I think it's called the essential button. That's not confusing at all. I feel like we put the nothing phone on the list, but actually the fun I want to talk about is this weird Korean prototype that Allison saw at the Nobel World Congress. Well, it's right. Like, nothing made another phone. You know, they... It does AI things. No, that's fair. I do think I left it off the list for today because Allison and Don Preston, who were at MWC, are going to come on the show on Tuesday

to talk about all of this stuff. But I do agree the AI phone is maybe these single most interesting gadget of the entire week. Well, I just, I mean, it's nuts. Like, it makes a 3D avatar of you and watches everything you do. And then it fills out forms in the air for you, which is whatever apparently wants, like, people look at forms of the internet and they freak out, apparently. Just every day, panic in the streets. Just throwing their hands in the air. I don't know how to fill out these forms.

We have to collect all of society's information to make an avatar of myself that can do this. But it's wild because the screen on the front is bifurcated and on top of the screen is an avatar of yourself. I don't understand it. I'm looking at this picture now. And the more I look at it, the less it makes sense to me. Actually, does this, yeah, is there a second screen? I'm just going to read you this part of it. What is happening?

The idea is that you go around downloading your personal data history from websites like meta and Google. Also, your medical records and financial data. This is encrypted into a, quote, personal knowledge graph that is broken up and stored across multiple third-party cloud servers that theoretically only the owner of data can access. And then all of the, this is used to make an AI avatar that acts as a virtual assistant. It also looks like it's running Android 6.

I mean, part of the charm of MWC is like, what version of Android is this, really? I'm so excited for this. You should talk to Allison about all this on the show when she's on, but the company claims that in order to do the demo where they have the phone buy car insurance, they actually bought a car. I guess they keep buying the car insurance. Okay, I actually respect the hell out of that. That is like the most insured car in the world now. It all looks very silly. And then, you know, as with everything, there's too good to be true element.

They say this phone will be sold globally on May 1st for $300,75. I mean, I'm dying to hear on Allison. It don't have to say it went out of the show. But it truly may be the most interesting gadget of the week. Yeah, I agree. I guarantee we will never see it again, but I'm glad we saw it once. And that comes for something. The best part of the whole thing is that I guess in Korea, they did a blockchain-based vaccine record system, but crypto is so toxic that they apologized for it in the briefing.

Good Lord. And they are like, it's not a cryptocurrency. It's just a database. It's really slow. Very good. Volkswagen ID. Everyone, which is one of the worst names ever. Volkswagen's new EV, it's super cheap.

And Sean O'Kane, former Virid Transportation reporter, says it's going to be the first Volkswagen to run Rivian software. If remember, Volkswagen invested a ton of money in Rivian. They spun off some weird middle company that makes software for both companies. And here we are. The first, it's 20,000 euros, or $2,100. It's cute. And I think the idea that it's running Rivian software is super fascinating.

You've used it. How is Rivian software? It wasn't enough to get me to buy Rivian. Yeah. You know, like, I'm like a fancy car person. I'm older now. What about Arrivian for a fifth of the price, though? Like, that to me is the whole story of this thing, right?

It's the $20,000 of it all that makes this thing interesting. That's true. Like, a Rivian right now, you buy an R1. It's like $100,000. And it's like, there's no software that will get me to spend that much money in a car. Right. But on a much cheaper car, like the R3X. Like, I basically have convinced myself that I will buy an R3X when it comes out because it's cute and it'll be cheaper.

Yeah. This is very much in the same mode. You know, Rivian's whole thing is the same. same as Tesla's whole thing or whatever, instead of having tons and tons of subsystems in the car, they just have one or, I think they're down to some small single digit number of compute units. So they basically have built a computer in the car. They've re-architected how the cars work, which is the point of all that software. So that's what Volkswagen is really investing in because their attempts to do this were a disaster,

like famous in corporate history level disaster of Volkswagen trying to do its own software. What I can't figure out about the ID. Everyone, which again, like you undersold how stupid an name that is. It's in all caps and one is a number. Yeah, it's awful. What is the thing? By the way, there's another one called the ID.2 all, but all is in lowercase. Something about... So ID is in uppercase dot two number lowercase all.

Something about EVs has made everyone at auto companies lose their minds. They're like, what if all the designs were insane as if they were from thousands of years from now and they were named completely incomprehensible things? So I understand it on the design front. I really do. Because if you are building an EV, you really want a low, coefficient of drag. So you get all these weird Tylenol capsules just floating down the highways. And then you don't have to build an engine.

You don't need an engine bay the way you needed to before. You don't need a transmission tunnel down the center of the car. Like, you just get to, you have a skateboard. And you're like, what crazy stuff can we do? And the designers at Hyundai were like a lot of crazy stuff. Yeah, actually. the names are, I don't, there's no logical reason for the names to be this bad across the board. And they are very bad.

But is there something magical and repeatable about this that it is $20,000? Like, it feels to me like it should be a bigger deal that somebody is actually able to make this thing at this price. I think the real story here, and I'm just taking a shot, is Rivian already built the software and Volkswagen. like they have a big business in China and the Chinese EV market is super mature and I think that has allowed them to build a car or similar costs. And I think there's a reason we're talking about this car coming to Europe and not to the United States right now. So like a lot of the investment has been paid for, which is really what why so many first

generation EVs are so expensive. You're paying off a huge initial investment. But if you're also, you know, you paid a bunch of money for your revenue investment. They're like, here it is. Like here's our CD-ROM, make the car good. and then there's huge investments across the entire Chinese ecosystem. Actually, we should do a story on this. Somehow I will sign this story off this shortcast.

One of the most fascinating things that's happening right now is that car YouTubers are discovering that Chinese EVs are sick. I've been noticing this. There's a run of these videos. He's like one of the best TikTokers around. Like one of my favorite TikTok channels. He just did a bunch on Chinese cars. Like he opens one.

I think it's the L1 and he's like, if this car was in America, Tesla would be cooked. Like, that's the opening to the video. Wow. And then he goes through it and the car is sick and it's $53,000. And like, yes, is there a massive Chinese government subsidy to develop those cars, produce those cars to do the EV? Yes, there is the economic system. The developed car is vastly different than the economic system in the United States.

But the car is done. Like, it exists. And the market is huge. And Chinese automakers are, they're like branching down a different evolutionary path now. Like, here in the United States, we have a lot of high. hybrids. Like, I have a very cranky Jeep hybrid. In China, they're all doing range extenders. So they have gas engines that run at fixed RPMs that just charge the batteries. We need more range, which is that's how a diesel electric locomotive works, right?

Like, they're just like headed off down different roads because the core EV power train is like done. And like, we're not, we're nowhere close. We have Tesla and it's like, well, someone will throw an egg at your car. Like, it's not a choice. But I think it's like one of the most interesting stories is, you know, like for a car and driver to do a big package on Chinese cars, you know, they would just be different. Like a traditional magazine like that just has to, like, attack that problem differently. Car YouTubers just need content. Right. And they're kind of like out. Like here it is. Like, here's another weird Cadillac. It's 50,000 pounds. Like, whatever. They're like, look at these other cars. Look at, look at, these are weird.

And there's an entire universe of cars that are weird, like, have, like, buttons that American cars don't have in them. And they're kind of, like, drawn to them. The Chinese companies have done a good job of making cars that look like the future in a cool way and not, like you said, Thailand all capsules. Like, some lessons to be learned from that. Look, I don't know. The economics of the social platforms are weird. The economics of the creator economy weird. I don't know if the Chinese car companies are paying all the car YouTubers.

Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know what junkets they're taking. I just know that you watch the reaction. to these videos, and it is astounding, right? Like, the, the one I'm describing from Forrest went viral. Like, Keroswisher shared a car video. Like, what are we doing here? Like, my cousin and my uncle sent it to me.

Like, it went viral in a different way, right? Because the car inside of that video is compelling. And his point is, we can't have this car. Like, we don't have access to Chinese cars this way. And everyone, because of tariffs, because all this stuff, they're like, oh, American manufacturers can't compete. That's not what you want to. that's not what you want the comment section to be filled with.

You want the comment section to be filled with, like, fuck you, GM forever or whatever. Like, it was just not present there. And the part where it's like what you normally see in an EV comment section, it's like, I'll never buy an EV. The range extender solved that problem. Tiz are like, oh, you can just fill this thing. You like gas?

Just put gas in this part of the car. It'll be fine. We're far away from the Volkswagen. We started, now I'm just ranting about tariffs. A preview of what's to come, my friend. All right. Last item in this lighting round. And then I promise you, 90 more minutes of iPad air conversation.

Microsoft shut down Skype. I'm sad. Jake, are you surprised by this? No, no. I mean, I would love to know when the last time people use Skype was. I was looking back at some of the retrospectives. There were like five Skype redesigns. I didn't even know what happened.

There was one that was like so experimental. I didn't even have an interface. Like, it was like some weird, like, Neo Snapchat thing. It was great. Nobody even knew this happened because nobody was opening up Skype. And, you know, it's really sad. Skype was, you know, a very foundational pioneer in, you know, voice calling in the VoIP space. I remember, like, using it very early on and you would pay, like, you know, cents and be able to make a phone call.

like crazy from your computer to a real phone and it felt incredible it was like the coolest thing ever people used to call real phones back then this was don't worry about that but like you know Skype Skype was was kind of mind-blowing and it really had this incredible life as um you know a chat app too and a you know a voice calling app uh of its own and uh you know Tom Warren has a piece up on our site right now looking back at sort of what went wrong um who was sold to eBay for while eBay sold it to Microsoft. Microsoft paid $8.5 billion, I think it was in 2011. And that was right around the time things started going wrong. Which is not to say it was Microsoft's fault, so much as mobile was exploding and Skype was a desktop service. And this sort of, ultimately,

and I'm just stealing Tom's remarks here, led to this situation where, okay, the pandemic comes around and everybody needs to do voice calling and video chatting and nobody went to Skype. and everybody went to enterprise software because it just like it never quite made that leap. Okay, so I think all the facts you just said are correct. And I think the story you just told is dead wrong.

I honestly believe, I've spent a lot of time the last few days thinking about this. I think Skype might be one of the most bottled, botched acquisitions in the history of the tech industry. Like, I think you could make a case right now that Skype is still the best loved

brand name in its space. Like people, I think, still have better feelings about Skype right now than they do about just about anything else in the space. Because they stopped using it. Sure. But like, like, looking back. I mean, yeah, like I stopped using my creative Rio MP3 player and now I love it. No, you don't.

I love the memories associated with it. But that's the thing. Skype was a decade ahead of its competition on almost everything and had a bunch of like complicated tech debt and foundational stuff. I'm sorry. It was a diamond Rio. I apologize. Yeah, there you go.

Which is, yeah. You're not not helping my point here. This is great for me. Okay, I think Microsoft bought a thing that, to your point, Jake, had some tech debt, had some problems, was behind. But also, like, the mobile revolution was the VoIP revolution, right? Like, mobile made WhatsApp happen. There's nothing that WhatsApp has that Skype didn't sit on for a long time. Skype had a bunch of, like, technical.

problems. It did peer-to-peer stuff because of the way that it was architected early on, and it would have had to... But Microsoft undid that. Right. This is the thing. It's all just... There's no reason this didn't work except that Microsoft screwed it up. And Skype had a bunch of correct ideas about not only what Zoom and Teams and Meet would eventually do, but what like the whole messaging ecosystem was going to become that it could have been... Skype could have been Zoom and WhatsApp simultaneously. It was just sitting right there for it. And it just absolutely threw it away because of, as far as I can understand, just total corporate disasters. I am also determined to get to the bottom of what actually happened here inside of Microsoft. If you know and want to talk to me about it, David at the verge.com. I have until May 5th to actually figure out the answer to this story before no one will ever care anymore. And I am desperate to figure out what actually happened here. Because like, something stupid. happened inside of Microsoft that made all of this fall apart. And I cannot figure out what it is. And also, just the fact, Satchanadella was like, we own Skype?

Honestly, that might have been part of it, right? There's like a big leadership change and like, we're going to do something else. But even at the beginning of the pandemic, the fact that Microsoft decided to build a thing called Teams and turn that into its product instead of just doubling down on Skype, weird. Like, you know what's a crappy brand for talking to your friends? Teams. I feel the same way about Google Meet. It's like, I get on for like my fantasy football draft and like, oh, should we jump on meat? And I'm like, no, I don't want to go to work. Like, this sucks.

We just ruined this. And like, I don't know. Skype had all the ingredients of being like an actually central thing to the internet for a really long time. And Microsoft just let it die. Yeah. This reminds me that in the middle of the pandemic for Eisen bought blue jeans and they try to make everyone think blue jeans would be a thing. For so much money. I think Skype had some technical problems that made it easier to start with teams or to start again with teams.

And I'll never forget, you know, teams basically killed Slack, right? The introduction of Teams and the bundling of Teams in office is what drove Slack into the arms of Salesforce. And I will never forget someone at Microsoft was like, you have to understand everyone thinks we're making some like work chat product. Teams is a video conferencing product. Like that's what it is. And that's why people are using it. That's why. And you're like, but that's Skype.

You did that already. Yeah. And they were just very convinced that fundamentally they were, they were initiating people to use Microsoft video chatting services with teams because people thought it was Slack. And Slack was all the rage. But they were actually competing with Zoom the entire time. I don't know, man.

I'm sad. We made a lot of podcasts on Skype over the years. I still think, by the way, Skype has the best, to say, the best audio and video quality. all the services. But I haven't touched it in forever. Yeah, because why would you? Yeah.

There's nothing. Whenever I appeared on CNBC for cable news hits, I would always tell them to use Skype because they supported Skype. And their engineers would be like, what? Like, you don't want to be in Zoom? And I think, Zoom looks bad. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then later, they'd all be like, you're right.

We can't get anyone else to use Skype. You're going to go. Yeah. All right, we should take a break. We're going to come back. There's politics in America. You might have heard of a little lightning around to wrap things up. We'll be right back.

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we're back the lighting round unsponsored extra spicy but i'm going to figure out what that means one of these guys uh david are there tariffs i don't know don't ask me impossible questions me like this is not fair can we talk about ipads schrodinger's tariffs i can explain the ipads so much better that i can explain tariffs the i think the answer well the answer is yes and also no it is very much Schrodinger's tariffs. So China tariffs are real. That's that's a thing. But then there were going to be tariffs on Mexico and Canada, but not for automakers, but now not for Mexico. And I think that's where we are. Unless there's been news since we started recording, but I think that's... But all these are on one month delays. Right. So April 2nd is now the date that is apparently

like circled on the tariff calendar. They were already, by the way, delayed for a month. I just want to wipe it out. TikTok is illegal. Oh, yeah. That deadline is coming up in one month. That's also going to be that week. Oh, man, the first week of April is going to suck.

The rubber's hit in the road for the Trump administration, right? Yeah. They have all these ideas. They can't possibly delay these again. Laws are just a concept. Concepts of the law. The tariff lawsuits have to be coming. To terrorists are a big deal.

You know, you might be wondering, why is the first I'm a terrorist time on a terrorist? the CEO of Best Buy is like the prices are going to go up and everything we sell because everything is manufactured abroad or you know the Apple loves to say this with the iPhone like the Corning makes the glass in America and they ship it over here and the chips are made over here and that that all comes to China to for final assembly and it's shipped back to America and by the way we're hiring 500 billion people in Houston to build Apple intelligence servers because everyone loves Apple intelligence and you're like oh they're trying to point out that their supply chain is global and so every price. product we cover has is just deeply and meaningfully implicated by tariffs. It's a point where we've been asking these companies now for over a month. Like, what are you going to do? And they're starting, I think the chaos is starting to, I think for it initially, they didn't want to say anything. Like, Jake, I mean, you've been running the story basically.

Initially, they were just like, no, nothing. Yeah, just nobody would respond to us at all. And we just kept sending emails. And then, yeah, finally, people have been starting to just be like, well, yeah, the price going up. My favorite, and we talked to this a couple weeks ago, but like, I think it was Acer's CEO, was just like, well, yeah, there's like a 10% tariff. The price will go up 10%. Like, there's just, just math. And it's, yeah, it's sort of unavoidable if they actually do, if, if they go into effect, which I think, like, the big question is knowing whether or not they're in effect at any

given time. Right. I think what's been really interesting the last few days even has been that I think this time those folks thought it was real. And so, because like if you rewind to like the campaign, nobody believed Trump about tariffs, right? Like this is the thing all the banks have been saying since is like, oh, we didn't think he'd actually do it. And then he was like, oh, I'm actually going to do it. And everybody was like, well, we'll see what happens. And then it got paused. And it was like, ha, ha, we told you this is never going to happen.

It's going to be fine. And because everybody's like, well, why isn't the stock market tanking tariffs are going to be a disaster? And then it didn't because nobody thought it was going to happen. But then this time it started, it felt real enough to people that A, they started talking to us and B, things started to change. Like the Best Buy CEO, one of the most interesting things I thought he said was not just our prices are going to go up. He said they're going to go up in the next couple of days. Like they were they were ready for it. Like they were going to start making these changes quickly because this stuff happens quickly.

And then you get this pause again based on as far as I can tell nothing. Like it's just the same. We had a perfect phone call and now I'm pausing tariffs for a month thing every time. And it's just now I wonder what all of these companies and people think again is like, okay, is this now just what we're going to do? This threat is going to loom for four years but never actually become real in a meaningful way? Or does it get more real and more scary each time? and they are continuing to like batten down the hatches even more.

Right. And then there's other ancillary components of this like the de minimis rule that allows Sheehan and Timu and a bunch of other companies to ship packages from China under a certain dollar amount with no customs or tariffs. And that already off the books, but delayed again because there was no infrastructure to actually check those packages and make people pay for anything. Like, look, you can argue with the policy of any of this, right? Like, sure. Maybe we shouldn't have a diminished rule. Maybe we shouldn't undercut American retailers by allowing Shee into exile. I don't know. There's a lot you could say about that.

You need an infrastructure. You need to execute, right? Like, plans are great. It's all in the execution. And they are not ready to execute any of this. Over and over again, we see that. And then, you know, the various leaders of Canada and Mexico are like, we made a graph that says criminals down.

Trump is like, pause for a month. And like, I just don't. What are we doing? Yeah. Car prices are supposed to go up by as much as $12,000. I have no idea what's going to happen to the EV market. That thing about the Chinese EVs, that's a tariff story, right? They don't, they don't exist here because, like, we've just made it impossible to trade in those vehicles here.

You start tariffing regular cars at these rates. Like, maybe you actually do end up with a bunch of Chinese carmakers being like, yeah, we can compete now. Yeah. By accident. Cheap Chinese cars plus tariffs end up being cheaper than expensive. I had not realized until I read a story Andy Hawkins wrote about this, that cars are already at record high prices. Like, however this shakes out on this front, it seems like we might be due for some weird upheaval in the car market here. Look, if not for the other baggage, the only car anyone should buy is a two-year-old Model 3.

Like the most appreciated cheapest car in the world that, like, won't break down because there is a sign in my neighbor's yard, two doors down, that just says sell your Tesla. though. Yeah. And I'm starting to see those pop up all over my neighborhood. They're all over the place. And the bumper stickers that say, I bought this before Elon was crazy. Like, it's a real, it's a really fascinating thing happening in the Tesla universe right now. Uh, if you see, there's the great four or four media story this week about the cyber truck owners club forum. Just like breaking down over how many, how much people hate their cyber trucks. Because you don't get to put the, I bought this before he was crazy on a cyber truck. Right. You're like, no, he was.

Right. He was doing a lot of this stuff. Speaking of Trump and Musk, just some weirdness around Doge, the reality of what Doge is and the lawsuits are all kind of colliding. So I think last time we talked about this, they officially named an administrator of Doge. This woman named Amy Gleason, no one has ever heard from. Who was, I think, wasn't the story that she was on vacation in Mexico? when she was named. Yeah, when she was named. Yeah, good stuff.

And then Trump gave the state of the union, and he pointed to Elon who didn't know what to do with his hands. Like, he didn't do a Nazi salute. So that's a win. Yeah. Low bar. We hit it. He just sort of was weird with a water bottle for a while. He was just like, what should I do it?

Weird dude. And he said, Elon is in charge of Doe. Elon is the head of Doge. It's being run by Elon. The amount of seconds between that statement and it appearing in. court filings about Doge being illegal, uh, zero seconds. Like literally in real time, filings were updated and submissions were made being like, the government is lying to the court about who the administrator of Doge is.

It's Elon Musk. Look at President Trump telling Congress that Elon runs Doge. So then today, Trump had a cabinet meeting with Elon present, reported in Politico, where he told the cabinet that they were in charge of their agencies and Elon had no authority to fire anyone and it's like guys the judges aren't stupid yeah like they they are getting the letters i don't know if people really recognize this the letters the emails he's sending out being like what did you do this week they're hitting the judicial branch oh sure federal judges are getting to what did you do this week emails they're not dumb like uh so i don't know if this is going to work but i the

sort of like legal reality. Well, the lawsuits are starting to catch up is basically what I'm saying. And now we're at the point where, you know, Musk had a meeting with like Republican senators where they're like, let us pass some laws to do this for real. And Trump has to like do this charade where he's like, Elon doesn't have a job. And everyone knows these in charge of Doge. I think, I think some of these lawsuits are going to break against Elon and Trump in a big way soon. It sure seems like it.

And I think the bet they've been making. all along is that they can just be two, three, twelve steps ahead and it won't matter, right? That what they've done will be hard to undo and they'll be on to the next thing anyway. And that one kind of seems to still be working. Yeah.

Like, if the, if the judicial system is going to remain four crises behind Doge, Doge is going to keep getting what it wants. And that continues to be the playbook as far as I can tell. Yeah. on that same playbook, you know, there's all this reporting about the FAA being ordered to cancel this Verizon contract for connectivity and work with Starlink instead because SpaceX is going to fix everything. We just did a long decoder with Andy Hawkins about what's going on with the FAA.

So SpaceX denied this day. They posted on X, quote, recent media reports about SpaceX and the FAA are false. SpaceX is working in coordination with L3 Harris Tech. That's the main contractor. That's the one that Elon said was single digit months away from catastrophic. failure and the FAA to test the use of Starlink is one piece of the infrastructure upgrades so badly needed along with fiber, wireless, and other technologies. Starlink is a possible partial fix to an aging system.

There is no effort or intent for Starlink to take over any existing contract. That's just for your uncertainty. They've signed a loan agreement with L3 Harris. They provided Starlink. So basically they've gone all the way from Trump saying, I've asked Elon to fix air traffic control after a plane crash. And Elon may like, I'll do it. They're single digit months away from catastrophic failure.

Here's some Starlings to fix it. Verizon being like, that was our job. Yeah, we're already fixing it. And now SpaceX being like, we didn't do anything. We gave them, we bought some Starlings at Best Buy. Deeply confusing stuff. Again, you need a plan. These are all great ideas.

You need to execute. And they have not laid out how to execute. I also want to clear, is L3 Harris's system actually like months away from failure? Or is that just the thing that Elon is telling us? Andy has been asking Pete Buttigieg to this question, because if they're single-digit months away from failure today, that means they were only a little over a year away from failure when he was the Secretary of Transportation. And he has not answered our questions. But you would think we would know. If the entire United States air traffic control system was a year away from catastrophic failure, you'd think we would know.

It does seem worth saying that the only evidence we have in either direction so far is, what Elon Musk says. And that should be taken with the requisite grants of salt. I honestly wonder why SpaceX put out this statement. I think maybe a lot of people assume that they were going to fix air traffic control

and they don't want that responsibility. Yeah, I don't think that's a super fun job. SpaceX also has quite a bit going on at this particular moment of time. Yeah. There's more here. Trump wants to screen everybody applying for citizens.

He wants to screen all their social media. Sure. I mean, it's more incursion in the speech. Like, that just is just a thing that Trump administration is very fond of doing is like saying some speech is good and some speech is bad and then saying they support free speech. And then the Senate has stripped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau its enforcement powers over what it's general enforcement powers that would have covered X turning into a payment service, which. well, you know, a little light corruption is like, you know, it's the stuff that life is made of, you know. A little light corruption. It's my favorite Broadway musical. That's what keeps exciting out of these United States.

Speaking of speech, I think it's time, David. Is it not time? Oh, my God. America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy. I will say I got some notes last week saying we're minimizing Brandon Carr by calling him a dummy because he's not stupid. evil. And my point was that he's too dumb to make his evil seem fun. I also think being a dummy and being stupid are not the same thing. Yeah. I feel very strongly that Brendan Carr is not stupid, but I do feel very strongly that he's a dummy. Let me make a comparison for you. Ted Cruz, very smart man, some very bad ideas. You listen to Ted Cruz talk. He's like, he makes it sound compelling. Like, no one likes to type, you know what I mean? Like, he's like, let me weave you a

story about Supreme Court precedent. And at the end of it, like, oh, that's right. And then you're like, wait, I thought about it. All that was lies. You know? Brendan can't do it. Like, he's not smart enough to do it. He just says whatever nonsensical censorship idea that he has.

And I'll give you this example. He was on stage last week after we taped. He was on stage with Ben Smith, who's the editor-in-chief of Santa for an event. I know Ben. Ben, Ben's a smart journalist. in the middle of this interview, Ben Smith looked at Brendan Carr and said, I think, I think I'm being trolled here because Brendan talks in such stupid circles. Right.

Like, no matter what the question is, his idea is that he's so smart that he can just, like, weave his way through it. And Ben was like, you're just trolling me because nothing you say makes sense. Like, all of it isn't inherently contradictory and kind of like you're just justifying government censorship. And specifically what he was responding to was Ben was saying, Aren't you just attacking these broadcast stations for speech you don't like by holding back their licenses or threatening these investigations? And Brendan's response to this, this is one of the most value-free, like principles-free, just naked, like, I'm a corrupt piece of shit comments you can make.

So the FCC is built on precedent and, you know, legal principles. And if you look at what the Democrats did, I now have the, you know, they did bad stuff too. so now I have the precedent to do bad stuff. And you're like, no, you should not do bad stuff. Right. If your big worry is that under the Biden administration, the FCC was doing all kinds of weird censorship and you're a free speech warrior,

the answer is not for you to show up and do more censorship because they set a bad precedent. Right? Like, that makes you a bad person. Just straightforwardly, if you're like, they abuse the law. So now I am the punisher. you should not be in charge of speech in America.

And that is Brendan's worldview. I promise you, that is his worldview, is that he has been given a permission slip to censor speech across the board because of the power he perceives to have. And when I say across the board, I also mean across the ocean. Because this week, you know, his big thing this week, he said the United States will defend the interest of our tech giants

against the EU's digital services. We've covered the Digital Services Act a bunch on the show. I've made Jake write about it. Like, the entire Verge team had to, like, write about the DSA. DSA is a big deal. It covers the big platforms. It says some platforms are gatekeepers. There's digital markets act which right next to it.

Then the speech platforms have certain rules, what they can keep up and take down. The EU is like, we're going to have some laws around platforms. You have a different, we don't, they don't have the First Amendment. They have different speech laws in the EU. Famously, Elon Musk, I mean, Mr. Free Speech, Absoluteist lie, but he says it all time, he's like, if you don't like what's on our platform, pass a law, and then we'll comply with the law. Like, that's his vision. The EU passed some laws. They made some laws. With J.D. Vance is like, your laws are incompatible to First Amendment. And the EU is like,

yeah, we don't. We don't have one of those. They have different speech tradition. I think they're very proud of some of their free speech traditions. I get notes from our European listeners all the time. They're like, we have free speech. This is different than yours. And their criticism of our First Amendment is that our First Amendment is so absolute, like, we, we, we, and I believe this, like, I think this is a good thing, but their criticism of it is, it doesn't allow us to do common sense things, right? We should not just allow hate speech the way that we allow it, but our First Amendment jurisprudence allows it.

We should, like, deepfakes. We'll get to it. But, like, the EU can just, like, make some speech loss in a way that I think is inappropriate, but their criticism of our First Amendment is you don't have to be this crazy about it. Like, you can just make some policies and see if they worked. and you can change the policies. Brendan Carr is like, I will defend Facebook against EU regulation.

Dude, you run the FCC. Like, you are powerless against the European Union. There's nothing for you to say that has anything to do with them. You can just wield some enforcement authority corruptly, which you now said that you want to do, and punish European companies that operate here, or issue statements of law that make no sense, and basically just interfere with business

because you're on a power trip. and everything he does and says indicates that he's on a power trip. Even the stuff that I think is intended to be like mysterious and fun is like, oh, you're just on a power trip. For example, this is the last piece of Brennan car. The SEC has these open meetings, right? And the open meetings are supposed to be like, here's all stuff on our agenda. They're usually pretty unanimous. Like they don't argue with the open meetings.

So they've got one coming up and they're going to explore at the March open meeting. They're going to explore alternatives to GPS to provide some redundancy of system. and also improvements to the 911 system. They're going to next-termurition 911. Great. This is like normal FCC stuff. This is what you want the FCC doing. They're like, should 911 work better?

Like, yeah, you don't have to pay attention to this. I didn't know GPS was a problem, but we can come back to that some other time. Well, there's just like in a bipartisan way, you're like, we all depend on this one system that could be disrupted. We should have other. Let's have more systems. Yeah, sure. I buy that. This is some like basic stuff.

Yeah. Final paragraph of this. He says, wait, there's more. Finally, we will consider an adjudicatory item from the Media Bureau. I can't preview the details of an item like this one in advance. I am sure inquiring minds will want to know. Does it fit with public safety or theme? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is no,

but that's just how life and open meetings go sometimes. This vote will be part of our broader efforts to clean house and clear up some backlog. So we'll be closing out with a good government went. What's an adjudicatory item from the Media Bureau? What? Right. That means adjudicatory means he, He's going to issue a judgment, right?

The media bureaus, it covers all the broadcasters. Mm-hmm. He's going to do some goofy shit. And he's, like, hyping himself for it. Could this be, like, the 60-minutes-y kind of stuff that we've been talking about? Like, yet another you were mean to Donald Trump on your news show kind of things? I have no idea. I'm just saying, like, he is drunk with power and sitting in a chair that should not afford him any power whatsoever.

And he is having the time of his. damn life. And we know that because he keeps saying it out loud. Yeah. He keeps, I mean, and I'm just saying we should not have government censors. I know that's controversial here in America in 2025. We should not have government censors. We should have government censors who think they can just make law any way they want, which is what Brendan is doing. We should have government censors who go to events and tell journalists that they're empowered to be corrupt because they think their predecessors are corrupt. That is exactly the opposite of how you clean up a corrupt government. And you should not have government censors who think that

doing censorship is worth like a hype reel in a press release. Like all this is wrong. It's real like bad guy with a gun, good guy with a gun energy. Like the only way to stop the bad stuff is for me to do it. And then it's not bad because I'm doing it. Yeah. It's like it's kind of like there's like a little tiny part of me that admires that way of like thinking about your life, but it also just seems insane to me. When Trump was elected, our European reporters, Thomas Ricker, Tom Warren, and all those folks, they were like, oh, we're in for it, because the EU is all about regulating the tech giants, and there's a reason that all of the tech CEOs were at inauguration. They want Trump to fight a war over the DSA, in particular the DSA, the Digital

Service Act, and you can see that the war is starting. It's not that Brennan Carr loves the tech giants, right? He wants to reopen section 230 because he's just going to write a law to reinterpret a law that exists, not something an agency can do, very specifically not something an agency can do anymore, because it was recent Supreme Court ruling. But it's like you see that there's no logical coherency to this man except the abuse of power. On the one hand, he's going to protect the Czech giants against Europe. On the other hand, he's going to beat them over the head with his interpretation of 230 so that they censor the way he wants them to. And it's like just, anyway, Brendan, as always, I know you listen. I know you get readouts. Honestly, I know you do.

You're welcome to come on Decoder and face some real questions. I'm going to invite you every week. If people want to tweet at Brendan, you can. He's available. He loves to tweet. He doesn't do anything except, you know, tweet at people and think about how to abuse his power. So it's how Brennan is welcome in Dakota. What if, what is the adjudicatory item from the Media Bureau is Brendan Carr is coming on decoder. That would be amazing. Brendan Carr is putting the knife on jail. I think he's a coward.

I don't think you'll ever show up. So there's that. But he's welcome anytime he wants. There you go. All right, we got to wrap up with like a gadget just to clear the air. Jake, what do you got? Did you see the phones that you can just

attach an entire camera lens in the back of? I did and I got a note from Deeter being like, how do you think these pogo pins work? Which is very good. They don't have to work. This is, I'm sure. You should ask Dom more because this was at MWC, so when you talk to them on Tuesday. But it's their concepts.

So I don't like, do they work? Like that's a very big question mark. Do they look insane and ridiculous? And do I like absolutely want this? 100%. It's just like, you know, and you could put a pancake like pancake lenses exist, right? There are small camera lenses. No, no, no.

These are full on telephoto lenses strapped to the back of what is essentially an iPhone. So they just like made a phone with an e-mount. on it and it rules. There's just a full sensor just in the center, like open and exposed on the back of this camera. It rules. It's great. Do you have to put a body cap on your phone when you're not using it? Yeah, it's not a bad idea.

I love that. I unironically love that idea. This is great. It's fabulous. Like, we're doing weird camera bump things all over the place anyway. Like, just go after. it. Exactly. The cameras have sort of peaked. We've just been doing multiple cameras. The ultimate trajectory of smartphones is just to turn them back into DSLRs that can make phone calls.

All I'm hearing is the Lumia's had this right like 12 years ago. The Lumias were correct. Because there's two approaches here. The one is the what if the main sensor was just a full on sensor, right? Sure. And then there's what Jami is doing, I think, which is what if we made a, whole ass camera and just like magsafed it to the back of the phone. Yeah. That's the one where it's like there's bogo pins. They're saying that it communicates with like a laser communication system. Think about how convenient it would be if in order to have the quality of a DSLR on you at all

times, all you had to do is carry an entire additional lens that you could strap to your phone. I want this to be great and this doesn't make any sense. So like it's a whole camera. It's got the sensor, the optics, all in a lens module. And you just kind of like snap it on the back of a phone. Oh, I didn't realize the sensor is in, in Jaomi's lens. Okay, that's pretty good, actually. Right.

So the one, there's two of them. One of them is the exposed sensor. One of them is the exposed sensor. And then the lenses just go on it with a regular amount. And that's like one idea, you know? Like, that's if you just had the idea, that's the idea you would have. And then there's Jaumie being like, ah, it's not. quite ludicrous enough.

What if the sensor was in the lens? And then every time you changed lenses, you were also changing sensors. My worst tech take has always been that there is some very good idea in all of this. Like, do you remember the Samsung Galaxy camera that was literally just a Samsung phone strapped to a camera?

Yeah. That was a good idea. I remain 100% certain that a point in shoot that runs full Android is a thing that should exist. If you could watch Netflix, on that thing, I really think it would find an audience. It's just like the creator economy is huge. Everybody is just out here doing it.

Like, you're telling me the people who like buy a second phone just to make TikToks wouldn't buy a second phone with a kick-ass lens on it. So, David, the funniest part of this story is that deep, deep in the story, there is a link to Sony having this idea in 2013 with something called the Cybershot QX10 and QX100. Yep. That story was written by David Pierce for the verge. dot com.

10 out of 10. And so you have a review of the QX10 and your conclusion was that the QX10 was bad and the QX100 was great. I don't think any of that held up at all. I was right. Can I get a read out on what the review scores were here?

I don't know. Oh yeah, this was the review I wrote about seeing Paul Rudd on the streets of New York City. The layouts are so broken after over a decade, like 12 years later these layouts are broken. One of the pictures is just captioned with the word fire twice. Fun fact. I don't know why. I literally, I have a picture of Paul Rudd in cargo shorts that I took on this camera when I ran into him. Yeah, the specific broken poll quote in this story is the QX 10 is slightly

better than your phone. The QX 100 blows it away. Hell yeah. And I think we all know what a huge hit the Sony cyber shot QX. All I'm hearing is history. Also, by the way, I got to the score. The score is 6.3. Sure. Seven. I don't know. Yeah, I remember debating between the point two and the point three for a really long time. All I'm hearing is history is proving David Wright, and this makes me really happy.

It's very good. It was $500. Anyway, this idea is back by Jaami, and I'm very excited for it. All right, good. We've cleared the air. Gadgets are back, everybody. Here's my waterproof. Jake has to go, like, direct the Super Bowl from his control room now.

Yeah. All right. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Thank you, Jake. Thanks for having me. Back on. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcasts Network. Our show is produced by Will Por, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.