The Vergecast - Apple’s in on RCS — and everybody’s out on Bing

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Apple announcing it will support RCS next year, AI news that came out of Microsoft Ignite, YouTube's new policy on deepfakes, and much more. Further reading: Apple says iPhones will support RCS in 2024 Google turns to regulators to make Apple open up iMessage Meta will fight the EU over regulating Messenger Microsoft Ignite 2023: all the AI news from Microsoft’s IT pro event Microsoft rebrands Bing Chat to Copilot, to better compete with ChatGPT Windows is now an app for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and PCs  Microsoft Copilot Studio lets anyone build custom AI copilots Microsoft is finally making custom chips — and they’re all about AI  YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians Google is embedding inaudible watermarks right into its AI generated music Nothing is bringing iMessage to its Android phone  On 'Chinese knockoffs' and why Leica works with Xiaomi Taylor Swift fans used record amounts of data during the Eras Tour in North America  PlayStation Portal impressions: hands-on with Sony’s remote play handheld for PS5 Opal's second camera is the Tadpole, a tiny webcam for laptops  The first OLED Roku TV is here after a long, long wait Sonos teases a major new product coming next year Sonos fixes its Dolby Atmos loud pop issue after years of complaints  Taylor Swift fans used record amounts of data during the Eras Tour in North America  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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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome for a cast, the flagship podcast of interoperable messaging standards. Yeah. I mean, it really is. Honestly, if you look at the Apple Podcasts catalog,

you look at the whole thing, you're like, which one of these is the flagship podcast of interoperable messaging standards? We have a strong acclaim to that. Yeah? Is anything. It's not the Ezra Klein show.

Also, the podcast world needs this. The, like, ultra-specific, like, Netflix-style genre stuff that exists. Like, I want that for podcasts. Or it's like, I'm going to listen to a podcast exclusively about how the DMA will affect a messaging app that no one in Europe uses and that we had a big fight about in Slack. And it's just like, there it is. This is the future of AI is you pick your celebrities and you pick your topic and you just sort of get it. During the podcast boom, Casey Newton once said to me, the problem with this market is that

you can pick literally any two celebrities and they have interviewed each other on a podcast. Yeah. And you've got to break through that. And I was like, all right, I'm going to ask nerds about decisions. And no one is going to have done that before. But this is what AI is for. You want to get Dax Shepard. Brie Larson. And Brie Larson.

Yes. Just head to head on RCS. I would listen for hours. Copyright be damned. All right. There is quite a lot to talk about it. We are starting in the midst of breaking news. Apple is going to adopt RCS next year.

That is in the context of massive amounts of European regulation. We have to talk about all of that. We got clips to run. I have threatened to complain about USBC in this context, but I won't explain how or why to my co-hosts. They look scared when I said that. The epic versus Google trial is ongoing. Google versus DOJ is ongoing. Microsoft had an AI conference. Then we got a lightning round. Then there's like Taylor Swift fans are using huge amounts of data all over the place. It's a jam-packed show. And then on top of it for the YouTube audience, we're going to look at

some formula for wearable success graphs after the credits. Because I don't think that makes for compelling radio. I went and listened to that conversation from last week and I was like, this is some of the worst radio. Someone doing bad algebra and then trying to describe a graph, again, this is what AI is for. It's like, you could ask an AI for that podcast and the AI, like, Bing will be like, no. We could have had Dex Shepherd AI do that and we didn't. Missed opportunity. Chad, GPD is like, I'm sorry. That's against the rules. I won't let you make a chemical weapon and I won't let you describe graphs. Via Dex Shepherd. Via Dex Shepherd. All right, let's start. Breaking

news before we start the show. Apple put out a statement, a weird statement in a weird way, unsigned statement to 9 to 5 Mac. 9 to 5 Mac is great. Yeah. I'm just saying it's a weird, weird approach to announcing this news. But the Apple put out a statement attributed to no one to 95 Mac. We trust 95 Mac. It's great. We've asked for formal attribution. But Apple is going to adopt RCS next year. Next year. That was very, very explicit in the statement. You've got the statement. I do have the statement. They said, later next year, we will be adding support for RCS, The standard is currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS.

It's fair. True. Yeah, that's true. This will work alongside IMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users. Yeah. Okay. Sure. There is what that statement says, and then there is what a lot of people want that statement to mean.

And we should peel apart the difference between those two things. Yeah. Because it's very important. What that statement says is that Apple's messages app on the iPhone and presumably other devices, because Apple has messages app on other devices, will support RCS messages. Well, RCS universal profile messages. Fair. Yeah. Also an important distinction.

Yes. That's very good. What that doesn't mean is that the blue bubble, green bubble thing is that. over and that Apple is now integrating RCS into IMessage or integrating IMessage into RCS, it in fact means precisely not that. And it's just like I just want to put that out there. Like what this means is that green bubbles will now send messages that presumably include full resolution photos and videos, which they have not before.

Huge victory. Possibly the only thing that it means. It also means they're encrypted. It's a better protocol than SMS in all ways. But no, no, even that, possibly not the only thing. Like, we don't know about the encryption. RCS encryption is a long, winding, complicated road. True.

I'm hung up on the fact that it says very specifically, this will work alongside IMessage. Right. So let's put this whole thing into context and then unpack it. Yes, please. Because Apple has been dragged to this kicking and screaming. They have not wanted to do this. The European Union is essentially forcing them into a position where they have to do it,

I will say the European Union is not making them do it. Yeah. Right? So there's like a lot of unwinding to unpack there. But let's start with Apple doesn't want to do this. And I think the best evidence we have of Apple not wanting to do this is Tim Cook at the Code Conference, not this past Code Conference, but the one before where he answered a question about RCS by telling the person to buy their mom and iPhone.

We have the clip. It's our clip. It's our conference. Can we run the code conference clip? How do you think Steve would feel about adapting RCS, risk communication systems that would normalize and streamline that? Tim, can you bring peace to the phone wars? He always told me not to wonder what he would have thought just to do the right thing. I don't hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy on that at this point.

And so, now I would love. I would love to, continue. I would love to convert you to iPhone. Okay. It's just, it's tough, not to make it personal, but I can't send my mom certain videos or she can't send me certain videos. And so we leave my honor. Buy your mom an iPhone. The glee with which he said, buy your mom an iPhone.

He was so happy. I mean, he had it. He had it in the chamber. He fired that gun. He was ready. So here's what I will offer you. One, we ran that story. Tim Cook says by it on an iPhone.

This is barely over a year ago, by the way. Like, it's useful to say that this is not like eight years ago. Like, we've been talking about RCS for a long time and there have been proponents of RCS for a really long time. This is not like generations ago thinking of RCS. This is 14 months ago that Tim Cook said this. And our own Dieter Bone, before he went off to Google, disclosure, Dieter-Wist or Google, wrote pieces for us that are like the moral case for adopting encrypted messaging. Because SMS, in this country especially, unencrypted, stored on your carrier servers, totally accessible to the police, to bad actors, sold to data brokers. There's a deep and abiding moral case for adopting an encrypted messaging standard across all the carriers and across all the platforms.

Apple just hasn't done it, and they've said use buy your mom an iPhone is what they've said. So that has been their position and nothing has moved them off of that position. Even a person saying to Tim Cook, my mom can't send me videos. His answer has been, go buy an iPhone. There are documents and testimony and emails in the various trials over the past few years around switching costs, particularly Epic versus Apple, where we have seen senior Apple executives argue about opening up iMessage. Ed AQ and Phil Schiller back and forth in some emails, we should open this up. The response is, no, if we open up iMessage, people won't give their old iPhones to their kids. they might buy cheaper Android devices.

This is lock-in, and they know it's lock-in. Whether or not you want to admit that it's lock-in, Apple knows that we have the emails from their executives. They know that switching away from iMessage in the United States is really hard, and it keeps people on the iPhone. Fair enough. So the context for all this is not the nothing phone, which I think nothing would really like it to be, and we can get to that.

The context for this is today, the day we're recording, it's Thursday. This is the deadline big companies have to file appeals to the European Digital Markets Act, which would designate certain services as gatekeepers and require them to be interoperable. So IMessage might be one of those gatekeeper services. WhatsApp might be one of those gatekeeper services. There's some rules. You have to be so big, have so many users, make so much money. Okay.

That's some EU regulation. What it is not is a regulation that says Apple has to adopt RCS, or yet any regulation that says Apple has to adopt RCS. or yet any regulation says Apple has to open up iMessage. So what you can see is happening here is Apple is going to appeal the gatekeeper status of iMessage, which they've already said they're going to do. And as part of that appeal, they're going to say, look, we adopted RCS, this interoperable, potentially encrypted standard that everyone else is using, and we'll just have our own thing on the side. That is my read.

I don't think that Apple is doing this out of the goodness of their heart. I think they are trying to protect iMessage from European regulators, and they're finally taking the out of RCS. I think that's right. Part of what's tricky about this is that what the DMA means by interoperable kind of remains to be seen, right? Like we've heard some rumblings that there's like code in the WhatsApp app that suggests you may be able to see messages from other platforms inside of WhatsApp. Meta has been on this quest, or at least was at one point on a quest to unify all of its

messaging system infrastructure across all the apps. So this question of like, should I be able to access all of my messaging apps from any of my messaging apps is one version of what interoperable looks like. There's another version of interoperable. And I think this is what Apple would like the definition to be that just says we all support a standard. It's like email. What we build around it is up to us. Or next to it.

Yeah. Whatever. But like Gmail has stuff that only works if you use Gmail, but it's still a fully functional email client. Right. Like that's, that is a version of an interoperability story that you can tell. I think there are a lot of correct concerns about what Gmail is doing to the email ecosystem, but we'll leave that to the side.

So this question of like, is the right answer that all of these messaging systems should be required to talk to each other? That's one thing. And I think that's probably fairly unlikely. I think Apple thinks that with this, it can say we are now tapped into what everyone agrees is the universal standard. We've done our job. This is interoperability. Leave us alone. There's just way, it's just lacking in details.

That's the thing I keep getting hung up on is we don't know what the degree of that interoperability is with IMessage, right? Because it's alongside. So that could mean it's a whole other app technically. Yeah. I don't know if it's green bubbles. Someone in our Slack, when we were talking about it, suggested it would be red, which is very good. Like RCS messages show up is blood red bubbles.

And that is just going to get you to stop using it. I think what you are going to get is some of the basics. You're going to get high-resolution photos. You will get group chats that don't break amongst mixed devices and mixed phones. And over time... I don't know if that's true. Yeah. Right.

Like, it depends on how much... This is why I said the RCS Universal Profiles is an important part of this story, especially because they've written, as written by the GSMA today. Right. Like, this is an evolving standard that is not perfect. Yep. Yeah. Are they tapbacks, emoji.

Like, all this stuff that you need to start. support for make the messaging have parity between devices and platforms and not just platforms between phones between messaging apps on the phones. Samsung messages uses different tapbacks and emojis than Google message. Like this is, it's very complicated and there's a reason that the landscape fragments. But it is also very well known that the fragmentation creates lock-in. So I'm just going to mention something that is bananas to bring up in this context, especially because of what happened.

In 2001, when the Bush administration approved the AOL-Hel-Time Warner merger. Oh, God. Which I would say historically not a success. And in fact, it might be such a historic failure that people bring it up all the time. But in 2001, when the Bush administration... People bring it up all the time. Karras Fisher wrote a book about how much of a disaster it is. But the Bush administration, not your lollygagging liberals,

but the Bush administration. The war in Iraq won, approved the AOL Time Warner merger. The biggest condition on this merger was that AOL open up AOL Instant Messenger to interoperability. Because their biggest fear was that by munching together content in pipes that everyone would sign up for this service and then there would be no competition because no one would ever leave AOL instant messenger. Now, this fear turned out to be not the biggest problem with this merger. But when the government evaluated, okay, what are the competitive harms of allowing these two big companies get bigger? The number one thing they looked at was this messaging service is lock-in. This is a million years ago.

And what you have right now is the European Union looking at a bunch of big services with lock-in effects saying, how do we make these markets more competitive in passing rules? So you end up with USPC on the one hand. We want to cut down an e-waste. We want to make all these products were interoperable. You have the Digital Markets Act, which says some of these products are gatekeepers, and they need to open up and be transparent.

Some of these products are core services, and they need to be interoperable. And I was wrong earlier. IMSGE is not a gatekeeper. It would be a core service. Google has argued, has filed letters saying, IMessage should be considered a core service

and be made to be made interoperable. That's how you get to something like RCS. And you see the European government is saying, okay, these markets are not competitive enough. In the same way that, again, the Bush administration, 20 years ago, 22 years ago, thought, okay, messaging apps create lock-in, we should force them to be interoperable. Was there just like a really big ICQ fan in the Bush administration? And they're like, we got to protect it. I was looking for it.

There's a very long memo the FCC wrote about messaging lock-in in 2001 that's like, we're going to do this. And by the way, AOL pushed back on this. This is all just an echo of ancient history in tech. But messaging apps create lock-in is not some new idea. And again, we've seen the evidence, again, from our own history of tech policy, from emails between Apple executives themselves who know it, from the evidence produced in the European Union DMA process, from Google, which is obviously self-interested.

And I think this is the right move, but I think, as we've all been saying, how they execute this, if they just drop in RCS as the thing that SMS is today, I have no idea how it will go. It will be an improvement. Well, I think it's really important that the fact that they're still planning to appeal, right? Although meta is appealing it for Messenger. Right. They're appealing it for Messenger because they're like, well, this thing we force everybody to download

in order to communicate on Facebook definitely has nothing to do with lock-in. Yeah. Sure, guys. In a funny way, like, in the context of the DMA, WhatsApp is a much more interesting case here than iMessage. Like we had this big argument in Slack this week when the nothing chats stuff came out. Which we haven't even talked about.

No, we'll get to that. Nothing is a boring company full of boring technology. We'll come back to it. It's nothing. It's nothing. No, nothing released a thing with a company called Sunbird that basically lets you use iMessage looking tech on your Android phone. It's sort of interesting and sort of sketchy.

We should come back to that. But WhatsApp is just like orders of magnitude bigger and more important in Europe than IMessage or anything else. Like our whole international team was like, who cares? Why is this news everybody uses WhatsApp? Americans are idiots for using IMessage. They're not wrong. It's a fair take.

315 million Americans? Yeah. Red-blooded Americans. Love their blue bubbles. Every morning, I rev my pickup truck engine and I send some blue bubbles out. No, our problem as a country is what we love is SMS, which is actually the interesting thing here. Like if if if if you like boil the goal of RCS all the way down like get out of the sort of intercompany politics of it all, its goal is to replace SMS, which is bad insecure technology

with better, more secure, more media focused technology. Like the people who make the standards are not interested in like the Google Apple fight. They're just saying SMS sucks. We built it as like a rounding error for carriers to send stuff 25 years ago. We need a better system that is better for sending media. It's more secure. It has larger file sizes. We just have to open up the pipes of message sending. So in that sense, RCS is like a universally good idea. It's kind of a messy technology. But like so is SMS, right? Like all of it is weird and wonky and has its issues. But like I think RCS is an obvious upgrade on SMS in just about every way. The question is, and this goes back to what Tim Cook says, is like, are Apple users clamoring for this? And I think

the product case that you can make, which they made in the question to him, is like, well, people are sending me videos and images that look like shit because they come from an Android phone. And so Apple here can do the bare minimum and still tell both a product and a security story that is also a case to regulators about interoperability. So like, to me, the idea that Apple would go out of its way to like integrate this better and make it seem nice is ludicrous. It's going to replace green bubbles with RCS wherever it can because it's going to make the lowest common denominator of messaging better. And then it's never going to talk about it again. Is this going to fix that issue where when someone from an Android phone sends you a video, it's the size of a postage stamp?

It should. That's the idea. Yes. Okay. I mean, that's the only thing I really run into besides the whole, like, potential to be hacked and too far as far off. Also, photos are horribly low resolution. Nobody sends me photos on Android. One funny thing I was thinking about in the context of this is Anna, my wife, is a diehard Android user and absolutely steadfastly will never switch.

And we have resorted to sharing photos and videos via Google photos. Like, that's just where all our stuff lives because if I text her a picture, it comes through like a 1992 phone camera shot it. And so now we have this thing where it's actually, we've bypassed Apple products because Apple has made this experience so painful for both of us to try and. do this. And if I'm Apple, it's like, okay, there's, there's the little tweak we can make that might actually solve some of our problems without creating any new ones for us. No, the more you, the more you are talking about this, the shittier Apple seems. Just to be blunt about it. Yeah. They have bet against people in the United States switching to any other messaging service, knowing that SMS is insecure and a privacy risk just because all that stuff

sitting on your carrier servers unencrypted and available like that stuff can be sold that we ran a quick post last week uh there's a privacy suit against car manufacturers that's caught up in some like litigation strategy stuff and part of it is carmakers when they ingest the text from your phones they can just read all of your text in plain text because that's the mess of shit and so apple is like running around crowing about privacy they have internal documents we've seen from some of these trial saying Android is a tracking machine. It's against. And then they know they are betting against consumers in this country switching to anything that is more secure. They're betting against you being able to send photos and videos your family. And their answer is that you should buy their

hardware to achieve a better software. Yeah. I mean, like that is just callous, right? Like, we should just call that out, especially now it's like we're at the end of the road in some way. Like, it's been callous the entire time. And that is the story. I like, I don't think there is another read of the situation that doesn't end there. Like Apple, Apple is convinced that the solution you will devise to this experience sucks is you will buy more Apple products. And like Apple's not the only company to rely on crappy products to make you buy their products. But it is, that is what they're doing. And Tim Cook, I mean, he said as much, buy your mom an iPhone.

Yeah. It was a bracingly callous thing he said because the guy's like, it's. Yeah, I mean, it was funny, right? Like, it was very funny. I laughed watching it. But at the same time, the guy's like, I can't text my mom photos. And he's like, yeah, we'll buy her an iPhone. And it's like in the context of that room, given what code conference is, that kind of makes sense.

But like... Yeah, all the other billionaires in the room were like, I have an iPhone. Yeah, they're like, oh, yeah, like I spit and I can buy my mom and iPhone. There were three Google executives who were furious. Yeah. And then everyone else. And I don't mean to say it's call. It's maliciously wrong.

I mean to say, like, they picked their business interests over their values, which we have been seeing across these trials, especially the DOJ trial with Google. Yep. When it comes to privacy, Apple says one thing and they take the money from another thing, like over and over and over again when it comes to that default search deal with Google. They will go out in public and they will bash Google over the head and they'll bash Android and they'll say they don't track you. And then the check clears. And they're sending every search you make to Google. Yep.

Yep. And Google's making all that money back by running advertising against the searches you make on the iPhone. And you put that next to this RCS decision, and you're like, okay, until the European Union pushed Apple into a corner, they were more than happy to say the answer to private messaging on our product is not you figuring it out or getting your friends to use WhatsApp or signal or whatever it is. It's by an iPhone. And that's just, it should, out of the box, the iPhone should be able to send encrypted messages to every other phone. Yeah. You should not have to run into Mark Zuckerberg's waiting or something. You can. You just download, like, Signal or something.

But this is the thing. If you look at the Chinese market, you look at the European market. Those markets are more competitive in terms of device switching the United States. Because the app is the lock-in, not the device. Right. And so you just see here, once you have an iPhone, you're sitting on it forever. Whereas in Europe, there is a little bit more device switching because WhatsApp is the messaging layer. In China, it's...

WeChat. WeChat is the messaging layer. And actually, the application layer. in Japan it's what line. You see these other markets where the lock-in layer is an application that runs across everyone's phones, and people switch phones all the time. In India, there's a – we bring this up all the time. It's my favorite phone market. There's like 10 new Android phones released a week in India.

Because it is just such a vibrantly competitive market for phones, and we just see none of it. There's a former Verge editor, Sam Bifert, has a new newsletter by gadgets. He's based in Japan. He has a great piece recently about Chinese phones and, like, Huawei and Lika and using Lika tech. points out that the American phone reviewer has no view into those markets, does not use those phones, and often just sort of buys Apple's line that the camera is better and that the LICA's just fake branding. He's like, actually, we'll link it.

It's just a good read. You can disagree or not disagree with it. To be fair, Lika was fake branding on quite a few phones. Right. But now the phones have like accelerated. It's just like a really interesting piece. Like the view in a more, the view from a more competitive market is always, I think, fascinating and illuminating.

even if you disagree with it in the end, but our market for phones is extremely uncompetitive because of the lock-in that is imposed by various companies. By the way, it's not to say Google doesn't do it too, or it wouldn't if it could, but... It has tried so many times. And I think it's also telling that Apple's market share in the U.S. is so high as a result, right?

Like, one of the reasons this matters so much in the U.S. is because so many people use iPhones here. It is a dominant platform here in a way it's not, just about anywhere else. And a huge part of that is because of iMessage. Like the strategy works. It's not, there's no question about how to enact that strategy. And so to some extent, you'd be crazy to stop doing it, right? It's like those emails between them where they're like, oh, we should do IMessage for Android. Anyone thinking about, you know, returning value to shareholders is going to like shoot you dead with a sniper rifle for having that conversation.

Yeah, I think that's what drives it, right? Like they got to. return that value. It's a huge business decision. And it's the same with a lot of the things they do that feel like kind of crappy. Yeah. The RAM was a big discussion too this week of like the 8 gigabytes of RAM on the MacBook Pro. And that's something they've been doing for decades at this point as like being kind of cheap on the RAM and then upselling you via them and soldering in the RAM and all of this stuff. And just because yeah, it makes them extra money and their company and the job is to make money. Tim Cook does have that sniper's eye. He does. It's a real thing. The last thing I'll say about this, then we should move on. You go back to that code

clip, Tim says, I don't see our customer is asking for this. I can see our traffic. I can see how many people are reading about the iPhone supporting RCS today. It's just, look, we saw earlier this week, the Target CEO said something similar. He was like, yeah, I don't see customers asking us to take all the shampoo out of the lockboxes. They're saying thank you. Yeah. And it's like, what customers are you talking to, Tim or Target CEO? Like, who? Well, but this is the thing. They're not, people aren't asking for RCS. Like, I genuinely believe nobody is emailing Tim Cook except for like Dieter saying, why don't you support RCS. I think he's Tim at Apple.com if you want to send him a note. I don't know if he reads them or not, but he gets them. But what people reasonably can and should ask for is my mom can't send me a picture, right? Like that is the thing. And I think whether by regulatory reasons or because Apple just decided this is not. not the hill to die on, which I don't think is the case. I'm pretty sure it's just regulatory reasons. Like, it's going to get better for those people, even if they don't understand the underlying

technology because they shouldn't have to. And this is the thing that Apple always says it does, right? Is it's like, we are going to make good decisions for you and not require you to think about it. And what it has done in this case, to your earlier point, Nilai, is over and over not give people the better option, even though it existed. So it is good news to see it finally happening even if it's clearly not out of just like the goodness of Apple's heart. And again, the execution, I think it was Nathan on our team brought up the phrase malicious compliance today. Like we have to see.

This is where I was going to complain about USBC. Are you ready for this? And then we'll end it. The number of devices I have now where all the manufacturer has done is take out the micro USB port and put in a USB port without the corresponding. And this is like two resistors they need to put in there. But they haven't done it. So you can only charge with a USBA to USBC cable.

I have like, it's like an increasing number of devices. What are these devices? So it's everything from like our extremely stupid milk frother that we use to stir protein powder into water. That one feels like your fault. But like we just bought it. And I was like USBC, it's great. And then I have one of those Lumen metabolism trackers that V really likes.

Yeah. This is like a gadget, like a Silicon Valley venture funded. gadget company. They just went boop. USBA to USBC. And it's like the whole range. I've got all kinds of people on threads right now just listing the gadgets they have that are broken in this specific way. And the thing that has not been done, I've learned all about this today.

The thing that has not been done is when you call for power from USBC charger, you can either do it the complicated way and send data and do the thing. Or you can just have two little resistors that tell it, just send me five, five volts. Yeah. I mean, that's a whole penny. Just standard thing. Yeah. You can't. You can't just bend in those pennies like that, just willy-nilly. And so the manufacturers are cheaping out and everyone is having to like stock USBA to USBC. It's driving me bananas. That would be like brutal. You get to the hotel room and you just want to froth some milk.

And you got to, you're like, oh, I left my USBC to USBA cable at home. That's brutal. Anyway, I'm just saying you can you can impose the standard. It does not mean people will not be idiot. It's, yeah. This is like the right to repair stuff that's happening right now with like parts pairing becoming a big issue where it's like, okay, sure. Technically you can repair your Apple devices, but the parts that exist are digitally paired to the product itself. So yes, in theory, you can take it apart, but can you actually do anything with all the different pieces? No, you can't.

It's like, did we solve anything here? Here's a list from threads. It's a Chinese walkie-talkies. Somebody pointed out to me that they have, like Amazon. Alphabet Soup brand. Off brand massage guns, like a theragon, but like an off brand. You know what I mean? Headphones. Apparently headphones are the worst of these offenders. Lots of USBC headphones are actually USBA in secret.

I bet all the beats headphones. Apple is just like F you. Yeah, they're no. I'm just like, it's out there. You can see a USBC port and the number of ways things can go wrong for you just keeps steadily increasing. I don't like it. Anyhow, look, I think the European Union should keep doing stuff. Like, our government isn't.

I was like, it would be nice if the government of the country that actually uses iMessage did something. They're on iMessage. Yeah. You know Lena Kahn has an Android phone? Get out of here. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to stop complaining about governments, come back and complain about AI.

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Okay, we're back. Lots of AI news this week. Microsoft had a conference. They rebranded some things which we'll get into. YouTube has a new deep fake policy, which is actually intention. Google's AI tools, which is fascinating. There's kind of a lot going on. Let's start with Microsoft. What happened at this conference? They announced new processors. That's what you want to talk about, right? It's all I want to talk. All you want to talk about?

I did the entire code conference. I asked every single person about Nvidia H100 chips, and they all said, man, that's a real issue. But the entire AI industry runs on one set of chips. Yeah, which is why it is no surprise that when Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, showed up at Microsoft Ignite, after they just announced a bunch of processors to compete with his, was still there saying generative AI is the single most significant platform transition in computer. computing history. I would absolutely expect that from a man who is a billionaire because they're chitterated. Then he tapped his humane AI pin vanished. But yeah, so obviously the actual big news that happened was they're getting rid of Bing

Chat. They're changing the name of it. It is not going to be Microsoft co-pilot. I love how we're like, this is the biggest news. It is the biggest news. And it's very, it's funny news because it was just earlier this year, they're like Bing Chat. It's going to be Bing. It's all about Bing. And they're like, no, we finally figured out an actual good name and it's co-pilot now. Don't worry about that Bing. Is good name what we're going with for co-pilot here? There's like, there's Bing and it's, it's an all right name. Co-pilot, I feel like, is better for a generative AI assistant that, like, you're supposed to be friends sort of with. Well, there's some history here. First of all,

there's like a lot of history with Bing. Yes. Not of all of it good. Not all of it good. Then we were just talking, it's like we're coming up on one year since chat sheep. hit. And so it's been a wild year. In the middle of that year, you will recall, Microsoft held its event where they announced Bing Chat. Yeah. They're going to make Google sweat. Dance. Dance. That's right. This is to me. Nadella said to me, we're going to make, I want Google to dance and I want people to know that we made them dance, which is, to this day, the coldest thing a CEO has ever said to me. That's what Snow White said to the evil stepmom at the end of the I want people to know I made you dance. Just try saying that.

in your day-to-day life. Just walk up to anyone you know and be like, I want them to dance and I want you to know that I made them dance. There are so few moments where that isn't even close to appropriate. I'm going to open the next staff beating that way. I want WIRE to dance and I want people to know that we made them dance. I mean that, by the way. If you're at Wired, start dancing.

We're friends. It's all fine. It just happened. It's because you're not here, David. Yeah. We're just losing our minds over here. great time. So Nadella says this thing, and he follows that up, and he says a lot of people, any scrap of market share that he can take from Google represents billions of dollars.

Yeah. They took zero scraps of market share from Google. That's not true. They probably took, like, a scrap. My $9 coffee this morning. That's what they took. It was a win for Bing in that we talked more about Bing this year than we have cumulatively in the history of the universe. Yeah. But also.

They also pointed out that naming things at Microsoft scale is impossible. Sure. Right? The sort of trademark reviews and legal reviews and does this word mean a dirty word in other language is all very difficult. And like Bing is just sitting here and actually no one ever thinks about it at all. It's like the opposite of a name. Right. We're just going to see what happens.

Whereas it's like what does Copilot mean in France? Like you're screwed. It's a real problem. And the answer is what Bing means to most people is that it definitely tried to bang Kevin Roos on the front page of the New York Times. And it got, I would say, in its feelings with Ben Thompson and its trajectory. I don't think that's true. I think that massively overstates both of those things. That's what it means to me.

But that is the story they got from Bing, was the front page of the Times saying this thing declared its love to me. No. They announced Bing. I just looked at the Google Trends data. More people were talking about Bing after the sad passing of Matthew Perry who played Chandler Bing than when Bing pivoted to Bing chat. That's not, I mean, that's tragic. It's not official numbers, but it's sad. But it's truth that like being as a rebranding big moment was not as perhaps successful.

Yeah. And then I think there's the problem that it lies to you all the time, which is if you're trying to replace search, just a real problem. And we have written so many stories about what is going on with Google Search. And the SEO community has responded with such aggressively SEO optimized responses to us. It's great. They're obviously going to outrank us in the end. But Bing as a product was not better than search. It was not better than Google Search.

I think Google's own search generative experience, which is in beta, is a fascinating product. It is not actually, at this point, better than Search. Yeah, Tom did our post kind of announcing this rebranding, and I thought he was really clear on, like, Bing wasn't succeeding as this search product, but it does actually succeed with helping people figure out spreadsheets. and stuff like that. And that's what Microsoft is good at. And so like, okay, realizing that search isn't actually their way forward with generative AI, but it's actually as a tool to help this like productivity software, like, that's a smart move. And like, I want to make fun, I love to make fun of being in Bing chat and all of that. But what they did here was like, it was smart. It was the right move. What's really funny to me is I think Microsoft got this exactly backwards. Like if you,

if you rewind to like February March, Microsoft was confident that, Bing was going to be the front end for chat GPT, right? That it was going to be, this was going to be how most people interact with this cool new AI technology. Open AI was just going to like keep building the underlying technology. It launched chat GPT as like a science project. Like it's it continues to be important to remember that no one at OpenAI or anywhere else thought chat GPT was going to be as big as it was.

And so Microsoft is like, we can build the front end for this thing. and it turns out it got exactly backwards where chat gpt is the front end for this thing and bing is the real-time web index that you can attach to that like bing is now infrastructure to these other things rather than being like the main consumer product and i think copilot as a way into some of that is fine and they'll keep attaching co-pilot to everything and i think the copilot name is ridiculous because there's copilot but then there's copilots which are the same but different and live in different apps and it's one thing, but it's lots of things. And I don't get it at all. Apple TV and TV Plus. Yeah, that's just, this is worse, actually, I think. Yeah, you're right.

But I think we got to this point where being one, had a minute where it was like, we are going to be the consumer brand. We have never successfully been able to be by being a different front end onto the same sort of basic need and just whiffed it. Because Chad GBT and OpenAI just absolutely completely ate its lunch. Yeah. And then the extent. The sensibility of chat GPT is much more interesting than anything Bing. Totally. I mean, Bing is trying, well, Bing. Microsoft is trying that, too.

One of the other things they announced was co-pilot studios, which basically does the same thing that OpenAI is doing. Pretty natural text ways to, like, program new bots. And in that case, I'm almost like, ooh, Microsoft is probably much better equipped to handle a big store of bots than Open AI, which we talked about last week. Yeah. It's clearly not ready for that. So, like, I'm not going to just immediately throw Microsoft out and say they lost this and they, they screwed it up. I think, like, they've pivoted in probably really smart direction to still stay a part of this conversation. But, like, Bing is done.

As, like, this whole, is it Bing's moment? It's not. Microsoft is a big winner in all of this, I think, in a big way. It's like, I think what it's done with co-pilot, stupid name aside, is really smart, right? It's like, Microsoft has leaned into what are actually its core competencies, which is, like, like putting helpful tools into apps that people use, right? Like, AI to help you turn your spreadsheets into slide decks is just an unbelievably good idea. And I think there is an overwhelming chance that Microsoft is going to be better at that than

anybody for a long time. A lot of this stuff Microsoft is working on is about Azure as much as anything, right? Like, that's the reason they got in bed with OpenAI in the first place was what opening I needed was compute. So Microsoft is going to build this compute. And then there's going to be a ton of competitors to Open AI, all of whom are going to use Azure because Microsoft is ahead. like Microsoft is going to win in a big, big, big way here.

It just isn't going to win in like the cool way, if that makes sense. Yeah. It's not going to be the number one app in the app store winner. It's just going to do what Microsoft always does, which is be like kind of nerdy and quiet and makes so much money. That's the Microsoft way, except for with the Xbox 360. And the Xbox one. I mean, they did promise to reinvent the television. It didn't happen.

Actually, this brings me to the other thing they announced, which I think is super. fascinating. It's Windows app. Yes. Where you can now just download an app that will run Windows on the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and PCs, which is, it makes sense once you think about it for two seconds, but it is also just one of the funniest, right? It's just to virtualize. It's a real like pimp my ride like, yo dog, I hear you like Windows. It's just funny on its face. It's like conceptually makes perfect sense that if you're going to sell virtualized windows, you should be able to run it on a PC.

But it is just kind of like Windows is now an app to run on your Windows is very good. It is. I think this is one of the smartest moves that they've made in a long time because it allows them to continue getting value out of the Windows software ecosystem, even as everyone kind of runs away from it. I mean, to the point of the interoperability conversation we had just in the segment before this, this is like just much more user-friendly. It doesn't say, hey, go buy a whole Windows PC to check out this app. whatever that you need to work on. You don't have to do that. That's nice. So it's not for consumers yet. It's still in testing. There's no Android version yet. It's very much for enterprise. And it streams. It's streaming, basically, it's remote desktop, but it can stream Windows from a remote PC of your own,

Azure virtual desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Devbox, and Microsoft Remote Desktop services. But it's called Windows app, which is, it's just very funny. I feel bad because I really like parallels, which is the virtualization software to run Windows on a Mac. And if I can just do that, I probably would just do that. Well, so Parallels, is it doing great on M-Series chips? That makes sense. I don't know the answer to that question.

Yeah, I don't know either, actually. My wife's business runs on a Windows app that she runs in parallels on an Intel Mac. Oh, boy. And we have not upgraded it because I just, I'm her IT guy. Yeah. And I'm just like, you just keep you. that Intel Mac. You just keep going.

I got a 2015 I Mac up here in case you ever need a bigger screen. And I've been waiting for basically this solution for quite some time. But I think you're just watching sort of Windows stop being tied to a computer in the way that I think obviously the Mac,

like MacOS is very tied to a machine. Windows is now like a very distributed application layer. It turns Windows into a web browser in a really like important and interesting way that it's like instead of having all of your stuff be web apps or whatever. You can functionally have them all still look and feel and work like local apps

with all of the upsides of being available everywhere. Like Microsoft is betting huge on edge, right, as kind of the front end to the next generation of software. But it can keep with Windows, which is actually a really smart like backwards compatibility thing because there are all these people in the world who are like, I am not going to use the Excel web app because gross. and I have a bunch of stuff that doesn't work on the web, but I need it to work on my computer.

And this buys Microsoft such runway to, like, go after whatever is next because you can either have a Windows machine or you can run a Windows machine on any kind of screen. It just makes it so much stickier. I think this is so smart from Microsoft. Also, I have an answer to your parallels question. I googled it. Can I just read you the bleakest sentence that I've read in a while? Yeah.

You didn't Bing it? I cogied it, if you really want to know. But we can come back to that later. Wow. It says, to run Windows. Windows 11 and its applications on a Mac with Apple Silicon, you need to install an arm-based image of Windows 11 that can run the majority of Intel-based Windows 11 applications by using a built-in emulator. Womp-womp-womp.

It's like a hat on a hat on a hat to get parallel. Oh, that's brutal. I'm just sending her the link to Windows app, seeing what happens next. There's like one application that makes the entire one part of the legal system in New York State Go. Is it word perfect? And it's just like one dude made one app and all the lawyers use it. And that's the whole industry. That's such a perfect example because every industry has one of those.

They all run on Windows and they all have not been updated in 15 years. And like, Neely, you and I have both spent time with Windows executives over the years who are like desperate to figure out how to solve that problem because they're like, we can't move forward in the ways that we know we need to move forward and also continue to support the like hundreds of millions of users who use 50. year old software and need it to do their jobs. And like, this, this is one big step in bridging that gap in a really smart way. When I called that company, which is like, again, like four people and I said, hey, I'm installing some parallels on a Mac. They just moved through

a worksheet because so many of their customers are people who want to use Macs. Yeah. And they need this one app. And they were just, like, they were just ready for me. The one I ran into is for the longest time if you wanted to, like, there's this thing called beef check off for cattle and stuff. And it's, it's whole. Not beef check, the Samhchefer story. Totally different. And it's very complicated. I'm not going to get into all of it.

But basically you have to scan these tags in order to, like, register the cattle and make sure that they've been processed and had all their shots and all of that stuff before we slaughter them and eat them in delicious burgers. And the software, there's two competing software, and the more popular software is cheaper and only runs on Windows 98. And so people are like carrying around ancient ass Dell laptops and stuff. And I think they've started, most of them have moved off. There's very few people left on it.

But those very fewer, like, it's just so much cheaper. Yeah. It's just so much easier. And you're like, but you are. This is like IMAX running on poem pilots. Yeah. What are you doing? Stop it.

They're just making America run. Yeah. They're making our burgers. Blue bubbles. Livestock. Pick up trucks. It's all the same thing. All right.

Let's take a break. We'll come back. we'll do a little bit of lightning ride. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with,

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vergecast. That's clod.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash Vergecast. All right, we're back. Before the lightning around, I do want to, there's one thing I want to talk about.

YouTube this week rolled out a new deep fake policy. It's very early. We talked to them about it for a while. On YouTube, there's two, there's going to be two classes of people who get deep faked.

There's musicians who are basically not allowed to get deep faked if they are on a label that is partnered with YouTube. You're a musician in your label isn't partner with YouTube all bets are off

But if you're a musician On a label, partner with YouTube, or the family of a dead musician on a label, partner with YouTube, no deepfakes. Do you mean like deep fake videos Or like the AI covers

We've been seeing all over the place? The AI covers. It's unique rapping or singing voice. The thing where you can sound like Drake is what they're cracking down. Not allowed on YouTube. And I will tell you, and noisly,

this is a very public, universal music, Drake's label, noisily announced with YouTube that they're doing a deal. So, like, a while ago. So it's, like, very obvious, like, fake Drake is no longer allowed in YouTube. All right. No exceptions. There's one tiny exception. If you make a video that is news commentary or analysis, you can have a little bit of, so we're good. We're good.

We're good. We're good. Play laser bomb right now. What if it's just, like, sick? Like, what if it's just, like, really good? And Drake is like, you know what? You can have this one. So there's no automated enforcement of this yet.

You got to fill out the form. So Drake could presumably choose not to fill out the form. That's what I got for you. They make Drake do it himself. Like, Drake, watch this song. Do you like it? Aubrey, sir, can you, we've brought you a pen. We've brought you this Windows 98 application to fill out this YouTube form.

So that's one class of people. Super protected. No AI voices for rapping and singing. If you're on a label as partner with YouTube. everybody else all kinds of exceptions right parody satire all the stuff like whether you're

a famous person or not you get less protections and all of that looks like fair use like that is the fair use analysis only instead of courts doing it YouTube is going to do it and they don't know how they're going to do it yet so like right now there's a controversy about React videos

there's always a controversy about React videos because they're garbage well there's something right and the The controversy, I'm going to try to sum up the controversy without getting us into the controversy ourselves. People make React videos. They're like, you made a video. Someone else is just making faces. Sometimes they reuse the faces. They're not even reacting. It's just clips of faces. And then they, they steal the views, which is a big deal on YouTube because that means you move the money. People get very upset about this. And there's one whole kind of conversation you can have about it. But the conversation that gets had the most frequently is a conversation about copyright law. Why? Because the only thing that can get content removed from the internet reliably is copy your law. It's only functional speech regulation on the internet. And you look at YouTube and how it handles

copyright, it just nopes out of the conversation. You send a copyright, DMCA request to YouTube. They tell the person that you've sent a request to. That person can respond and say, no, that's not right. And then YouTube says, boy, you guys disagree. You should go to court. And that is the end of YouTube's involvement, right? They will pass some emails back and forth between you. and they will do their legal obligation. It's called notice and take down. But they will not substantively decide if something is fair use. They will just say, go to have your lawyers figured out.

With deepfakes, there's no copyright law yet. There's no court cases. There's nothing. There's no law against deep fakes. There's no federal right of publicity or likeness. So YouTube is bringing it in-house. The same way that YouTube will say, we have rules against things like COVID-misinformation. or election denial or whatever.

And you're like, and how well is that going? How you doing, buddy? Like, right, it's just as messy. It's super opaque. No one knows how it works. They're not going to publish any, like, precedent. Yeah. They're not going to have court opinions.

You know, YouTube's worry quite rightly as if they do that, people will try to game it and find the boundaries so they don't want to do it, but then they're going to have to do it because now there's going to be deepfakes. What is a parody? It certainly can't be music because the labels have been negotiated themselves and moral protections. So you just keep winding through this. And one of the rules we're going to have is that you have to label realistic AI generated

content, especially of like news events. You the creator, right? You're like, you're like, if I do a bad AI cover, I'm good. But if I do a good AI cover, I have to tell YouTube that I did a good AI cover. No, you're not allowed to do AI covers at all because the music labels have forbidden it. So what am I, what am I labeling? So you make a video that's like how the Titanic really sunk and it's just AI generated boat sinking, you have to label it to be like, this is fake.

So I can't do Drake at all, but I can do the Titanic. I just have to say, this is fake Titanic. Yeah, you can't do Drake, but you can do Trump. Here's my question. Because Trump didn't negotiate a label deal with YouTube. Here's my question. There's a YouTube channel right now, and all they do is a new movie's announced, like a big movie.

They announced the cast. Everybody's like, oh, cool. This YouTube channel then goes and makes an AI generated trailer. and I just watched one for today for Moana, starring Zendaya and The Rock. Oh my. And it had like a horrifying AI rock where his face is like morphing.

Yeah. And he's also the guy from Moana. And so two things. One, on upload, that creator would have to say, this is AI generated. And then two, through some process, the Rock could submit a form to YouTube and say, I want this taken down.

this is a deep fake of my likeness, and then YouTube will go through some analysis, which will be completely opaque, and make a decision. And it will not say why it made those decisions. Third of all, live action Moana is going to kick ass. Yeah. Fourth of all, Disney is just milking the shit out of these franchises.

So we don't know. Isn't this just a content ID thing, right? Like YouTube is... No, because they don't know. They can't do it. They've said to us, they're investing in the tools to detect AI-generated content. Those tools basically do not exist now.

Yeah, computers can't recognize computers versus humans. I think you can do it in photo and video and audio to some extent. It's really hard in text. Open eye, I tried to have a tool that tried to do it in text, and they pulled it because it was so unreliated. Yeah. I mean, this one was very clearly like, oh, people's faces don't melt like that when they're just supposed to be smiling. There's some stuff and there's some tip-offs and maybe the content authenticity initiative will do watermarking. But there's all this stuff you could do.

Is the thing that YouTube actually launched here basically just like a form you can fill out to be mad at a video if you're a record label? Yeah, it's a form you can fill out on upload saying I made this with AI and then two forms. One that says, I'm a major label artist partnered with YouTube. Take this down. And another one that says, I'm not a major label artist partnered with YouTube. Please take this down. And they have different rules. With the promise of technology to come in the middle.

Somewhere in here, all this will happen. Do you think we're going to get actors in studios doing it? to? No. You got to go make it. The thing is there's no law. Yeah. There's just YouTube and its business partners desperately trying to get ahead of this problem. And you can see the business pressures are leading to unequal treatment. YouTube desperately needs major labels to be happy. They're going to get, here they are. They have gotten special treatment. Okay. Maybe YouTube needs Hollywood to be happy. Yeah. The next turn will be if you are an actor associated with a

movie produced by one of our film studio partners will give you the no exceptions rule. I'm just thinking of which up-and-coming YouTube artist who doesn't, hasn't signed with a major label, I can like whole scale rip off. Yeah, they're coming. I'm going to make so much money. So I asked a follow-up question, which we'll put on the site. It's on the site yet. Maybe by the time you listen to this, it will be.

That means I have to do it. But here is my question that I asked, what if you take a pixel eight photo and you run through Best Take, and now you've got a synthetic, ultra-realistic photo that was partially generated by AI. Will YouTube require that to be labeled? Can YouTube block you in email form? They're like, here's our story. We're taking you down.

Just blocked. But this is the problem, right? You're going to run dead into your own tools. If you are Google and you run YouTube and you need these rules, and then the rest of Google is just running full speed ahead at AI generated content, you are going to be able to. you are going to quickly run into, I can take a series of photos with my pixel phone, and then I can just make things happen that never happened.

I mean, forget that. I can type into a prompt in any number of Google products to make the exact thing that is now not allowed on YouTube. Yeah. Like, I can get Google to spit out the thing through its image generators. But that's like, you're at least doing it, right? You're like, I'm going to go to an AI content tool,

and it's going to... I think Best Take is on the blur. of possible. Sure. That's fair. Right. It's like these photos sort of really happened, but they didn't really happen. And now I can like, if you go, I encourage everyone to go watch the ad that Google is running for Best Take. But Best Take doesn't make your photos look like the Rock is in it. Right. But they are showing in Best Take, in the ads they are running now, they are showing people like go from looking at one another to not looking at one another or from smiling to looking like, right, like just the basics of a photo. Who was the

looking at what, in what direction, when? Is that person smiling or frowning? Well, you can just concoct a moment with best take. Yeah. And it's in the advertising. It's not, I know everyone thinks I'm overreacting. I'm saying, watch the ad. This is what Google is saying is you can do in their own marketing.

So I asked YouTube, here's the response. The goal of this update is helping the viewer to be better informed about content that is realistic but altered, not punishing creators for using AI. There isn't a single standard we can give you that will apply in every case, and as with all decisions like this, context matters. If you're using Best Take to pick an image where everyone's eyes are open, you could have probably done that yourself by taking more photos, and likely not something you need to disclose. But if you're using the tech to make it seem like you were in a place that you actually weren't or altering a photo of a historic event, you'll probably need to disclose your viewers that use technology to alter the setting. That's so many words that literally, like, to just translate from corporate speak to real words is like, I don't know. That's what that says.

Maybe. If the standard is if you just took infinite photos you could have gotten this moment, the rock would probably be in one of them. It's like, I'm just going to stand here shooting photos until the rock shows up. Is that a realistic standard? I think that's a great standard. Anyway, I'm fascinating. I told YouTube, I will tell everyone,

this question is why the verge exists. I'm endlessly fascinated by this question, especially for a company like Google, which is full speed ahead making the tools and running the platform that will be the most impacted by the tools. To the same point, YouTube today announced a tool where singers can let you use AI clones of their voices, just like running 50 different directions at once. I'm going to do that. Anyone can use my voice for singing.

It's very good. I'm telling you, again, this is why the verge exists. Yeah. Like, I don't know. No one knows the answers to these questions. But I do know that if you stand on any street corner or any major city in the world and just start shooting photos, statistically, the rock will be in one of those photos. Eventually, the rock will appear. All right.

We should do a lightning round. Yeah. David, you have not yet talked about this silly nothing thing. Do you want that to be out of the lightning around or do you just want to do it? No, let's do that now. That's good. Okay. Which means I get to have two lightning round things.

I'm going to pull a knee lie is what we call that. The lighting around, by the way, we are so bad at this. The lightning round is supposed to be like we do lots of things really fast. And instead it's like we're going to do three and they're all going to take 20 minutes. It's a kind of lightning. Which is again, I would say we're willing to rebrand for the right sponsor. Like I've gone from sponsor us for the lightning round to sponsor us for anything. You want to call it the triple play?

I'll call whatever you want. All right. The disclosures are about to be out of control. We just go ahead. Talk about nothing. Okay. So the other part of the messaging news this week was that nothing, the phone maker that we've talked a lot about on the show, they released this thing called nothing chats.

And the big thing that it does is make it so that you can send blue bubble eye message messages from your nothing phone. It only works on the nothing phone too. And it works through a company called Sunbird, which has been sort of loudly proclaiming the technology it has developed. for a long time. But it's basically, it's an elaborate hack of iMessage. And essentially what it does is they put a Mac Mini into a server rack somewhere and you create your iCloud account on that Mac Mini on a server somewhere. And then that becomes the relay for you to send and

receive messages. This is janky as hell for a hundred reasons. It's a security disaster because now all of your messages just live on a computer that you have no access to. And your iCloud password lives on someone's computer. Yes, it's not good. Don't do this. But I mean, do it if you want. But like, do it eyes wide open knowing what's going on here. Do it with a burner iCloud account that only says,

ha ha, I know you're the cops. So this is the beauty of this, which is you kind of have to. Because the way that it works, it can't associate with your phone. If you have an Android phone, you can't register it as an iPhone. with iCloud. So you have to set it up with your email and then it does this weird thing where the first thing it sends you is basically a contact merge to try to put your email into your contact card with your phone number so that it all looks like it's coming from you, even though it's just coming from an email address. And it is confusing and messy but still

kind of interesting. And I think like says more about both nothing being interested in like needling Apple, and also the lengths people will go to to be blue bubbles, especially in the United States. Like, this is very clearly a ploy for nothing to sell more phones in the U.S., where it's very hard to sell a phone that isn't a blue bubble. And it's messy. And there are better ways to do it. And there's a bunch of these things out there now.

Like Beeper is doing something very similar with Mac Minis and IMessage. There's this app, text.com, that just got bought by Matt Mullenwegin automatic. They have a different security system where, because... it lives on your device, it's actually connecting locally to your computer, but that means it it doesn't work on mobile, and they're having to do a bunch of work to get it to work on mobile. So it's, everybody's hacking around it, and they're all making the same bet, which is that, like, Apple won't pick this fight because it's bad PR for Apple to pick this fight. And I think that's probably true, but I also think Apple could essentially wipe this all

away in 10 minutes if it felt like it. And without question. Yeah. But I do think the idea that nothing, pressured Apple into making any decisions, which is what nothing would like you to believe. That's lunacy. And you should not sign up for this. I don't know how much more I can say you should not send your messages through an insecure

third party. I mean, I think you should because then one day I'm going to get access to those messages and read them on the verge cast. Here's a very bad piece of Supreme Court precedent that you can just all muddle over it. It's called the third party doctrine, states just very bluntly that if you hand your, any of your information to a third party, you have no expectation of privacy in that information anymore. And this blows people's minds left or right.

You put something on a cloud server. Your expectation of privacy is gone. And it's like, is that true? Are we like, there's like the people who think that, which is a bunch of judges and prosecutors. And then there's everyone else. And it feels like those people should talk to me. Wait, how does that work for things like lawyers writing anything?

Google Docs or Microsoft to office. It's a real problem. Oof. It's a real problem. This is why I'm not a lawyer. It's too much work. This is a problem in tech policy for 10 million years. But yeah, if you have something on cloud server, they can go subpoena the cloud server provider, and there's no recourse because of the third party doctrine.

So yeah, everybody go go use. Go use sunburn. I really want to read all of your texts. Again, the only message you should ever send through this service is, ha-ha, cops, you can't get me. And you should just do that 100 times a day. All right, Alice, what's your lightning route? Mine is Antonio got to play with the

PlayStation Portal, not to be confused with a PlayStation Portable, otherwise known as the PSP, which also had a little appearance this week. And was a much better device. Yeah, it was a great device, and it was in the trailer for Madam Webb, which is a new Marvel film, and

you don't need to care about it. But the trailer's really dumb. So the PlayStation Portal is the new device that plays all the PlayStation games from your PS5 on this little device in your house. Yeah. That's about it. Yeah.

It's got things like an airplane mode, but you don't need airplane mode because... Does it only work on Wi-Fi? Yeah. What is it? Antonio was very upset about the airplane mode. He's like, why is it here? He's got a bigger review coming up. Airplane's somewhat famous for having Wi-Fi now.

Yeah. Okay. Some of them. Delta very inconsistent. Delta is switching from Go-Go to Viya. I sat and it's not going well. It is not. Yeah. But yeah, he likes that it's very easy.

He likes that it just works. He likes that it's $200. We both agree that if it's like $150, it'd probably be in that like, I want to play PlayStation in my bed. This seems cool. And he says it's, we both use Chiaki,

which is another kind of way to stream this stuff usually to the steam deck. We both tried that. We liked it, but it's really buggy. And this is way less buggy than that. But it is also $200 and does exactly one thing, which is play your PlayStation five games in your house over Wi-Fi on this thing.

This is like a slight overstatement because I can't think of a lesser way of putting this, but this is like a very polished turd of a device. Yeah. No, I think that's fair. Antonio and I were having a conversation about why this exists, because that's the big question is why. And we think it's probably like started as probably a much more ambitious project that slowly got paired down into this.

You would think this would just be good for cloud gaming. That airplane mode is like real evidence that someone thought cloud gaming would be a thing. Yeah. I suspect this is probably... Someone got drunk at a 5G cloud conference. And they're like, we should do a PlayStation portal. And then they're like, ah, this doesn't work. Yeah.

And then they realized, oh, we need a stronger processor if we're going to basically put a web browser on this little screen so we can play all the games and not PlayStation games. I'm not approving this until they do banana surgery. And they're not going to do it on this guy. But, you know, if all you want to do is play PlayStation, not on your PlayStation, but in your house, it's really cool, but you probably don't need to buy it until it's a lot cheaper. Yeah. And it probably will go on fire sale at some point. I'm super buying one of these when it goes on sale.

I just bought a backbone controller. They have the new one that just came out with USBC, so it works on, like, most devices now. I just bought one. It is so much better an idea than this for how. the price. Like, not only will it play my games remotely because those things exist as apps, it does all the other things too. Like, I think you're absolutely right that when PlayStation started building this, it was

going to be much more ambitious than it is now. And what's weird to me is that Sony, which loves an expensive gadget, didn't just build the good thing and charge a lot of money for it. I don't think they could have because then it would have been like, okay, you can play all your cloud games. And PlayStation makes most of its money not from the PlayStation, but from the games. Also, it just doesn't work that well. Like, that cloud gaming is not a mobile product in a way that works well.

I think like 10, 15 hours of The Last of Us, too, via Chiaki, mainly because I was scared of zombies. But you were probably at your house. Yeah, I was still at my house. I'm saying when you leave the world with a mobile device, when you leave the world. When you're in space. Yeah. I'm saying when you leave your house with a mobile device and you're trying to. stream the last of us to on a 5G connection from an underpowered handheld.

It's not going to happen. It's a lot rougher experience. You can still do it. And the backbone is a great example. Like, you can still do this stuff. But I've tried using the backbone and other ones for cloud gaming, like, remote. And I'm like, this is going to be great. Nightmarish experience.

And the minute someone texts me, I'm like, okay, I got to go look at the text. And then it takes me a 45 minutes just to reconnect to the cloud gaming. And I, it's no good. Yeah, it's no fun. It's going to happen one day. day. Sony, I think Sean Hollister has reported this. Sony has like hires for a cloud gaming service. Yeah. Microsoft obviously thinks cloud gaming is the future. Well, Sony has cloud gaming and it's had, it was, it was a first player.

Yeah. Because it bought a big cloud gaming. Guy Kai Kai. Right. Years ago. And so it's had all of this tech just sitting there and it's like, nah. Sony just doesn't want you to know that it has cloud gaming. It's like, it's like when all the cable companies were trying to like pretend that streaming didn't exist. They're like, don't worry about it. It's fine. No one, no one, no one, no one cares about that. It's not a big deal. Speaking of the 5G revolution. Oh, God. Which has obviously impacted every corner of our lives.

Yeah. I was doing banana surgery and a self-driving car just today on 18T 5G. Was it like in a video game? While gaming. Oh, wow. So I've been saying for months and months and months, I can't think of 5G experiences meaningful to people outside of the Arestro. tour. And this is where the story about whether or not they did remote surgery and a

banana came from, because everyone sent me a video of robot surgery on a banana. Fake. Was not done over 5G. They did do the surgery on the banana. But the caption saying it was over 5G, all, none of that was real. Great. So I reached out to AT&T and I said, can you give me some data on the Aeros tour? Just to give me a sense of scale. I've been saying this thing, right? Ares tour, they're playing huge NFL stadiums. anywhere between 15,000, 100,000 people in these stadiums across the world that she's playing in.

Around 70, like, Cowboys Stadium is like AT&T Stadium, 80,000 people. So AT&T was like very kind to me, which historically given our coverage, they do not have to be, they were very kind to me. And they sent me a chart of data usage during the Aeros tour. So this is just AT&T. I asked Timo and Verizon less interested. AT&T is very excited to this. And we went back and forth in a week because I kept asking for more and more numbers.

Alex watched this all go down. I did. next to me in the office. Okay, these numbers are bonkers. So AT&T Stadium, which is where the Cowboys play, the highest night of the Ares Tour, 28.9 terabytes of data are flowing through AT&T's wireless network. And they gave me the 5G plus numbers, which in this case means a millimeter wave. AT&T is also branded mid-band 5G plus.

It's very confusing. But this is the big stadium, 80,000 people, maybe a little bit less, because, you know, Not all seats are full at the tour. But somewhere between 70,000 people, 29 terabytes of data. AT&T, their rough estimation is that every terabyte of data is either 200,000 photos or 400 hours of HD video. So 29 terabytes of data are just like moving through this stadium during the highest night of the airport. Is it all just parents? That is just AT&T.

That is not Verizon or T-Mobile. This is a record. This is most data AT&T is seen in any stadium at all this year. They confirmed it's a record. That's the absolute record. So that means I just did some very quick Googling here. And that means that if every single person at that concert that night was using AT&T to do this, every single person on average uploaded about 72 photos from that concert.

That's crazy, right? And I totally believe it. Every one of the 80,000 people there uploaded 72 photos while they were at the concert. That's insane. That's crazy. So that's AT&T. And AT&T Stadium is like a city. This is a full day total.

But, you know, you can be there for hours and hours before and after. There's like lots of, so it's a big stadium. It's a complex. But the Cowboys play there. So just by comparison, the average Cowboys game is 21 terabytes. So she's just blow it. away a Cowboys game. She's a 29. They're focused on the sport. They're focused on the sport, not the singing. So then you just go down the list. Nissan Stadium, 23 terabytes, NRG Stadium in

Houston, Taylor lost to the rodeo. Yaw. So the rodeo moved 24 terabytes of data. Swifties only moved 20.2. Look, bull riding is an impressive sport, and sometimes you want to upload a hundred million photos of it. AT&T Stadium also out did the Super Bowl in 2022 at SoFi Stadium. which was 13 terabytes. The 23 Super Bowl at State Farm Stadium in Arizona was 21 terabytes. So Taylor is just like way above all the next highest numbers, basically. And my favorite one all the way down here is U.S. Bank Stadium in Anthopolis where the Vikings play. It was 6.6 terabytes of data, but AT&T point out to me that's 6.6 terabytes of data.

70% more data than has ever used during a Vikings game. Like every other event is at least 70% less than the Taylor Swift concert. I couldn't resist that one. I think they knew I'm the Packers fan. Like these fans aren't even trying. I don't know, man. Lambeau Field didn't even make the list here. She didn't play a Lambeau Field.

Anyway, these are crazy numbers. We got the whole chart on the site. It was cool to ask the question. It was cool to get all the data back. I do not know why 5G Plus is both millimeter wave in midband. We should fix that. Someone should fix that. but these numbers are stagr, like just an absurd amount of data.

And it is because of 5G. Like, I talk a lot of crap about 5G in AT&D and Verizon and T-Mobile. Like, everyone knows why I feel about these things. But the fact that they have actually built out the stadiums to support this amount of video and photo sharing in real time. Like, I watched night one in Argentina. I just watched it on TikTok from like five different. angles. Did you see when she hugged Travis Kelsey? It was incredible. I did not. Why didn't watch that? I was just like, I was like, you know, I was like scrolling. I was like, oh, I'm just watching the Erez tour. Huh. That's just happening. And it's because we have actually built out the network capacity to do these things, which is remarkable, regardless of whatever, all the stuff around it. The thing that always gets me, this is a complete aside, but the thing that always gets me about those videos now is how good phone microphones have gotten. Like, do you remember not that long ago that you would, you would watch one of these streams and it would just sound like, gar. They sound great now.

No, so here's the thing that is happening. The Swifties have learned that you need to turn noise canceling off on your iPhone mics. So they all were trying to wonder, they're all trying to figure it out why. Wasn't it, weren't they all using Galaxy phones for a minute because they sounded better or something? There's an incredible arms race in like camera technology among Swifties to the point where people are taking, you're not allowed to bring an SLR, so they've just sort of maxed out the sort of fixed lens mirrorless camera. mirrorless camera you can bring there.

And they are shooting videos for bringing fixed lens mirrorless cameras that can shoot 24 full, like, full frame pictures a second. Are there like 21 year olds? And just run in the shutters. 20 year olds just like decked out in Swifty Ares Tour swag. Laptop on knees. You can't bring a laptop. How do they ask you? If you could bring a laptop at the Airstore, I would have brought a laptop to the Airstro.

Who am I? Last week I'm out here with decks. Trying to record it. flipping around so you get that face cam. That's horrible. I brought a studio display. It's got an M1 chip in it. Do you think next year, like the Pixel 9 will have a thing where it just like automatically

makes whatever video you take of Taylor Swift like look like the best performance Taylor Swift ever did? Yes. It's just like the moon photos you just pointed at Taylor Swift and it just makes Taylor Swift look amazing. The Rock will also be in it. The Rock is just sort of over there. And YouTube is like, I don't know who has a record deal here. I'm out. We can't.

She's going to re-repe. I just want to note some other little stories before I break. Alex went out the first OLED Roku TV is here, but it's made by Sharp. Yep, that's all you need to say there. Probably an LG panel, though. Don't buy a Roku TV. They suck. That's what I was telling my dad yesterday.

He called me three times to ask about it. Yeah. We have a review of the Fitbit Charge 6, which people really miss fitness bands. We got one of those, the interesting. Sonos having a weird quarter. They have a weird time lately. they're teasing big new products. It seems very likely that those are headphones.

This is my other lightning round thing. It's got to be headphones, right? It's got to be headphones or they're going to make a TV. I think that's the only, that's a next logical place for them to go. TV, because I don't want Sonos headphones. Everyone should make a TV. Apple should make a TV. Sonos should make a TV.

The Verge is going to make a TV. I would make a kick-ass TV. It would be so good. It would be 40,000. And then I need, our volume would not be high. All the stuff we put in it. We'd be like, this is the best TV. No motion smoothing available whatsoever.

And then, David, I need you to talk about the Opel tadpole because merely mentioning the Opel C1 to people makes them so, so angry. It caused so many feelings. I bought one for our CEO and it's the biggest mistake I've ever made in my entire career. You still have a job, though. It was dicey. I debated including that in the story and ultimately didn't. Yeah, so Opel 2021 launched a webcam called the C1 that they were like, this is the first. DSLR quality webcam.

It looked good, but you would never know because there was like a 75% chance it wouldn't work with your computer and at a given time. I think we've all tried to use them at various times. We all gave up. Mine's just over there in a cabinet somewhere. Looks great, never works. And this time they came out with a thing called the Tadpole,

which is this cute little one inch by one inch square. I have it here for anyone watching on YouTube. It's adorable. It's an iPod shuffle. Like if you are listening to this in your car, it's an iPod shuffle with a cable coming out of it. And they basically tried to solve everything about the last one. It works better.

You don't need dumb software. You just plug it in and it like works. It's very funny to me that this was like a big idea that they had was like, what if we just plugged it in and it was good? But they got a lot of things right. It's still pretty expensive. It's like I think it's $175. But the rage that this brought up in the comments on our site from a lot of people

who bought the C1 or were excited about it or were on the weight, list or whatever and feel like they've just been left behind as Opel has gone on to this other product was really interesting. And I spent some time with the founders. They know they have a hole to dig out of and that they didn't do everything right the first time and made some mistakes and move too fast and all this stuff. But their reputation is in worse shape than I expected, which I thought was really interesting. Like this is a good webcam. I've been using it a bunch. I have enjoyed it so far. But every time I say that to somebody, they're like, it's impossible. The C1 was a piece of junk. The Obelcy one is so bad that our producer was like, you have to stop using

it and sent me a new webcam. Yeah, he bought us new webcamps so that we'd stop using it. Thank you, Liam. It constantly overheats and would just shut down or sometimes it would just be like, not today, Alex. You don't need, no one needs to see your face. And like, I should make that decision, not my webcam. Yeah. Hello. No, it's true. Sometimes like, the AI is like, uh, not today, kid. Alex, no, you stayed up too late last night. Sh. All right, we got to end the thing. It's like very, very dangerous. Every time we're talking about the Opel, I fear for my job in like five different ways.

Here's what's going to happen. We're going to end the show here. If you're listening in the car, or the end of the show, you can come to YouTube and after the credits, we're going to look at some of the graphs of the formula for wearable success that have been sent to me, which are all wonderful. They're all horrible, but we're going to look at them. So that's the end of the show here on the auto side. Come join us on YouTube if you want to look at graphs because we're not going to do radio by graphs. That's it. That's our chest. Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you.

Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.