The Vergecast - Apple's Intel acquisition, the Galaxy Fold starts its comeback, and a $5 billion fine for Facebook

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

Stories discussed this week: Apple buys Intel’s smartphone modem businessSamsung says it has fixed the Galaxy Fold and will release it in SeptemberT-Mobile won’t sell the Galaxy Fold when it is rereleasedSony’s latest RX100 camera finally gets a mic jackThe first speakers from Ikea and Sonos are inexpensive and sound greatFTC hits Facebook with $5 billion fine and new privacy checksFacebook will have to monitor its own privacy rules — and that’s likely not enoughFTC sues Cambridge Analytica and restricts former CEO’s business activityFacebook confirms new FTC antitrust investigation after posting strong earningsWhy wasn't the FTC harder on Facebook?Facebook design flaw let thousands of kids join chats with unauthorized usersJustice Department announces broad antitrust review of Big TechAmazon ‘destroyed the retail industry across the US’ says Treasury Secretary MnuchinTrump keeps losing tech policy fightsDish reportedly reaches deal with T-Mobile and Sprint to become the new fourth major US carrierOrigin PC’s Big O gaming PC has a built-in PS4 Pro, Xbox One X, and Nintendo SwitchAnker CEO Steven Yang is all in on USB-CApple iPhone 11 rumors: Lightning port, new Taptic Engine, upgraded …This year's iPhone should be the last with LightningYou can subscribe to Land of the Giants: The Rise of Amazon here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Verchcast, we talk about Apple buying Intel's modem business, the Galaxy Fold returns. There's a new RX100, and then we get deep into the weeds of what is going on with the FTC and Facebook with Russell Branden and McKenna Kelly. That's the Verchcast coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools

just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of billion dollar hardware acquisitions. Feeling good about that? I'm your friend, Eli. Dieter Bone is here. Hey, Paul Miller. He's in the dark. It's a very dark arena. Where are you?

Well, it's the summer, and light bulbs create heat, and I'm trying to mitigate heat so that my fan of my laptop doesn't turn on and pollute my recording. It's pretty good. So I want to, there's a lot going on. Also, I'm goff. I look great in eyeliner. I'm just putting it out there. That's just a fact about me that everyone should know. I want to start just real quick.

There's a lot going on. the show, literally breaking news as we speak, I just want to apologize to listener. I know I've sounded like a straight up potato the past two weeks. It's because I've just been on the road, but I'm in New York. This episode's going to sound good. And I'm never... What does your potato sound like? It's just listening to the last two episodes. Like a potato. But I'm in New York and I'm never, never leaving New York again. That's my plan. You just can't drag me out of the... I'm actually, I live in the studio now. Please tell Max I love her. Okay. I would always describe.

your voice is starchy. Is that good or bad? I don't know if I should be extremely complimented or deeply insulted, and I don't want to find out. All right, we're going to have Russell, Brandem, and McKenna Kelly join us around the midway point, talk about a bunch of policy stuff that's happening. There's a bunch of antitrust stuff. The FTC settlement with Facebook came out. We've got to dive into that.

Just a lot going on there. We're going to have them come on. But I want to start with gadgets. We've been like all policy all the time lately. There's a lot of gadgets this week. I love gadgets. I want to make sure the audience remembers that we love gadgets. And straight up, right as we started taping, breaking gadget news, which is that Apple,

which is long remember it, but Apple is agreed to buy Intel's modem business for a billion dollars. Yeah, one Instagram. Although that metric doesn't really count anymore, does it? Because that was so long ago they bought Instagram. If you had a billion dollars, would you rather have Instagram or Intel's modem business? I'm going to go with Instagram. It's a way more fun. They're bringing on 2,200 Intel engineers.

It's a lot of people. They're obviously getting the boatload of IP or whatever. It's going to be under Johnny Shrugi, who's Apple's chip person. He's very excited. There's a press release. This is kind of a big deal. Here's my major question. So if you just think about the chronology here, Apple invented the iPhone.

Let's start at the beginning. First, there were cell phones. So Apple obviously has the iPhone. The iPhone for years had Qualcomm modems in them. Apple and Qualcomm got into a very serious dispute about the licensing terms for those modems. The heart of that dispute was Qualcomm's payment structure for modem chips. So if you want to use Qualcomm's modems, you don't just buy the modems. You have to buy this underlying license for its patents.

Apple said that was double dipping. Lawsuit. Big, nasty lawsuit. In the midst of this, Apple says we're going to start using Intel modems because they want a second supplier. They want to get away from Qualcomm. Those Intel modems, they did it on some models. People pretty much universally said these really aren't as good as the Qualcomm modems. And it didn't actually hurt Apple all that much, but they were like, they were worse.

They went back to it. To the point where in the models were still using Qualcomm modems, they throttled the Qualcomm modems. So they would equal the slower performance of the Intel modems. Everyone was very unhappy about this. Apple and Qualcomm settle the case, largely because Intel did a bad job. Right? I mean, like that thing about the modems being worse is real. Intel also didn't have a great 5G roadmap.

Apple rumors that the next iPhone, not this next iPhone with the iPhone after that, we'll have a 5G chip. Apple needs to get on that train because it's a race. They settle the case. Apple's going to use Qualcomm chips. I mean, Apple basically caved in the settlement, too, because they didn't have any choice because they had no leverage because Intel failed. Because Intel was bad.

Literally the day they settle the case, Intel announces, we're done with the modem business. We can't be manufacturing modems if we're going to compete with Qualcomm. We're out. Okay. So that's where we were until, I don't know,

two hours ago. There's immediate rumors that are going to buy this business. And then today, just literally minutes ago, they announced they did. 2,200 engineers, the boatload of IP,

the business, billion dollars. Yeah. Why? Like, just like very basically, this is a, this is 2,200 people that were not previously able to compete with Qualcomm. Right. And why are they going to be able to do so under Apple? And they, and they lost Apple as a customer and Intel said, well, we don't want you around anymore. And so now Apple's like, we're just going to, you're going to, have you thought about working in a circle? Will that make you better at this? Like, I think that's a big question here. Like, is Apple just that much better at, chip engineering than Intel.

There's a very obvious answer to that question, by the way, which is yes. Yeah. But like these are the same, it's the same folks. Well, and the same IP, and presumably, like, they didn't just buy talent. They bought, like, a bunch of plans to make the modems, which Intel itself was unable to execute on. So what was keeping them from being able to execute on it and were they good plans in the first place? And then on top of all of that, will Apple making its own modems, presumably, you know, for 5G, this isn't going to happen for the next iPhone

or maybe even the iPhone after that. But will Apple making its own modems? One, make the iPhone better and two, actually be cheaper for Apple than paying Qualcomm because presumably they're still going to end up having to pay Qualcomm some kind of royalty or licensing

for the IP that Qualcomm developed, even if it's Franned or whatever. But I don't know that it's a sure bet that Apple's going to make a better, cheaper modem for its phone. because it bought Intel. There's a lot of X-factors there.

And maybe they don't care. Maybe they just want to stick it to Qualcomm, or maybe they just want to feel like if Qualcomm disappears tomorrow, they have a backup plan. But there's nothing about this deal at first blush. It's like, oh, yeah, obviously things are going to get way better for Apple. It's like there's like three or four things that could get better if they execute really, really well.

Apple does have a pretty good track record with making components for its own stuff. Like if it decides to invent, invest in something. Apple was already like, well, something like, there were rumors that Apple was like three years away from having its own modem anyways. So maybe there's just like some spare pieces that they can get from,

from this Intel acquisition that can complement the work that they were already doing. Right. So one thing that is true, by the way, is Johnny Strugi, who runs Apple's processor division, is X Intel. So it might just be true that working in a circle makes you a more effective

chip. engineer. I mean, he was there. They weren't cranking out A-series-level processors for mobile when at any point. I'm pretty sure the circle is full already. Like, they haven't got rid of the old campus. I think that there might not be space for 2,200 Intel engineers in a circle. I'm fairly confident the Intel engineers are going to continue working wherever they are. Okay. Oh, we'll see. I mean, Apple's a big company. They can acquire more of California as necessary. There's another, this is a much more cynical read. I don't think Apple, buys companies to not do anything. I think they expect results when they spend this much money.

But a way more cynical read is that everyone knew Intel's modem business was not great. It was just a fact in like the people we know who float around the industry, you pay attention. They had been saying for a long time, hey, like these trade shows are kind of boring. Like Intel isn't here. They're not showing off their modem capabilities on like giant breadboards or prototypes the way that Qualcommis. like the rest of the industry is like showing us the stuff that is the the leading indicator of where they are, they've all but disappeared. And so they're not competitive. Well, if you bring, because they need to be competitive in those spaces to sell the modems to other customers. They need to be a little bit more public because they're trying to sell it to filmmakers.

Apple doesn't have that problem. Right. So you bring this business in-house and then you can just count on your Death Star-like reputation for chip excellence to scare Qualcomm into the appropriate pricing structure. Oh, right? Like that's a move. Like you can just say like, okay, we're slow now, but ahead of the curve, five, ten years from now, we're definitely going to get better. We have all this IP to build on. We have all these folks.

We're going to get good at this the way that we got good at A series processors, either play ball or we will find a way to move on. And there's not a lot of transparency in how well it's going until Apple has to give up and like just use the Qualcomm chips, which is, What happened just like two months ago. So, yeah, I mean, that's like, I think that's a very cynical read. I think you can also characterize it just like a very smart investment for Apple. Like, they spent a billion dollars. They acquired this business that was failing, but they get to use it as this hedge against Qualcomm, which owns so much in the market. They own a lot of 5G patents.

Just a lot, a lot. There are not a lot of competitors of Qualcomm in the world. A constant theme of the Vergecast, by the way, this competition. I don't know if anyone has noticed that. But anyway, that's like the biggest news. Apple spent a billion dollars in this moment of business. it kind of puts everybody else in a bind. Oh, yeah.

If you're an Android manufacturer that wants to sell outside of China, you're like, it's Qualcomm or bust. I mean, there is some modem technology. There is some Huawei stuff. And, you know, there's a bunch of other chips and Samsung makes Exenos. And, you know, you can just go down the line.

But none of it performs nearly as well as Qualcomm, especially on the bands that are popular in the U.S. Yeah. I mean, for a minute there, well, processors and totems, right? Right. For a minute, there was a pretty big variety of smartphone processors that lasted two years. No, I mean, on the low end, there's still media tech.

It's hanging out. It's doing all right. Yeah, but on the high end, there was once, Nvidia had Tegra. Yeah. Didn't Motorola have its own wacky chip for like two seconds? I might have. I can't remember. But yeah, Tegr was like the one.

Tegra failed. Intel tried to put Intel chips. That was just not a great idea. There used to be a lot of sort of like mid-day. to high-end competition, and now it's all Snapchat down the line. Yep. Yep. And what does the Snapchat work well with? A Qualcomm modem.

Does Qualcomm have some extremely complicated pricing scheme that makes it all but impossible to buy a Snapchat unless you buy their modem? I would bet that they do. Yep. So the sort of differentiation for Android makers is gone because Intel never figured it out. Do you guys have a vibe of

how expensive is this part? Obviously, you can't sell a phone without a modem, so you need one anyways, but... No, this is the heart of the Apple lawsuit. There isn't an expense for the part. There's not a line item expense for the part. So what Apple was particularly mad about was that they would buy the part, and then they had to buy a patent license from Qualcomm for the whole phone,

and that license was calculated on a percentage of the cost of the finished product. So the modem for the 32-gigabyte iPhone costs less than the modem for the 64-gigabyte iPhone. And Apple's like, that makes no sense. like why do you get a piece of our intense storage margin right like that it literally makes no sense well and it's it's interesting if you look at the prices of like you can go to best buy right now and buy a phone for a hundred dollars yeah and it is not a good phone but is is a thousand dollar flagship with all qualcomm internals definitively 10 times better it's not 10 times faster yeah you know it's higher quality, but I don't know.

You know what I mean? Like the cheap stuff is way cheaper. The cheap stuff is way cheaper. And way better than it used to be. And way better. But I, you know, like the, the sort of like channel bonding carrier aggregation stuff is all happening at the high end. So it is faster.

You can't get a 5GE logo, you know, on your $100 phone. Which is probably an argument for buying $100 phone. Anyway, that's the breaking news. There's some other breaking news. in this world. Huh? Ah, I already made that joke. I know.

Oh. Sorry. Dieter. I get it. Yeah. I get it. The Galaxy Fold is back to haunt you once again. Oh, God.

So if you don't know, the Galaxy Fold was announced to huge fanfare. Took over the entire keynote that Samsung did way back. Just a big, big deal. And then everybody's review unit broke for various reasons. Mine broke mysteriously. To be clear, Samsung to this day has not told me what it. things broke my unit. I've been asking, and I still don't know.

Anyway, they canceled the thing, like three days after I reviewed that device, which was just great. Just, thanks, guys. And said, we're going to fix it. And then everyone's like, sure you will, this thing is canceled. And it turns out, nope, it's not. They were, in fact, working on fixing it. And they have, in fact, done some stuff to it to make it ready to sell.

I would say that one of my favorite verge moments lately was looking in some. Slack yesterday in seeing you and Chris Welch zaprooting renders of the Galaxy Fold, like pixel by pixel trying to figure out what they did. And it came down to these are renders and we don't know. But also this part is rounder. Like, yeah. So, like, the back of it looks a little bit rounder. The bezels maybe, yeah, inside the fold, the back looks a little bit rounder. The bezels maybe a little bit thicker.

One thing you can absolutely see is the protective film, which is the thing that I've Everyone, except for me and a few others, like, tried to tear off because they thought it was like one of those, like, in the box screen protectors, is now, like, goes underneath the bezel or underneath, you know, the plastic rim bezel thing around it, so you're less likely to try and tear it off. And then they've added caps on either end of it. Because before, in the hinge, you know, when you opened and closed it, you could actually, like, see the actual bend of the screen and there was a gap there that stuff could got it. And they put, like, a cap over that. They may have done some other stuff. Who knows. But yeah, it's getting released at some date in September.

So I'm like, cool. And we wrote the story up, and that was great. And then we're like, hey, you know, T-Mobile and AT&T said they were going to sell this. Let's ask if they still plan on doing that. And T-Mobile got back to us, and they said, nope. Yeah. And AT&T said, we're talking to Samsung, which is not a yes. You think they're scared of the customer support nightmare?

I would be scared of the customer support nightmare. I would be scared that this phone is getting released in, you know, a little over a month, possibly two, if they push it to the end of the month. And I'm a carrier that needs to, you know, do my own testing on phones, and maybe I haven't had a chance to do that yet. I would be unhappy that whatever my, like, precisely, finely tuned, like, a Swiss watch media plan for September when the iPhone gets launched, thing is, is now getting disrupted by the fold just landing in the middle of it. There are many reasons why AT&T is probably like meh about it. Also, one, these carriers do not provide very good support in my experience. No, we just had the CEO of Ashurion on the Vergecast like two weeks ago. And he's like, I have 19,000 employees in a growing business because we are the tech support

providers for the carriers. That's incredible. One of my most foolish purchasing decisions ever was I got upsold at a carrier store on an Android tablet and I like broke it the day of and nobody nobody in the planet wanted to take responsibility for that thing. No. Once you buy an Android tablet, you are alone. Like that's, you are just no one. You have no friends. You have no family. I can't stop thinking about these close up. Hopefully Vergecast listeners have seen these photos on the verge.com or on Twitter. There's these close up detail shots of the galaxy

fold of what we've changed. Yep. Is there a precedent for this? Like a company announces a product. It fails in reviewers' hands prior to launch. They're like, don't worry, we'll fix it. They go back and they make some very small but detectable changes. And then they show you, here's how it's different.

Has this ever happened before? Without actually explaining how it's different. Yeah, like, here's what's different. It's like this drawing is slightly different. They're not, as far as I can tell, these are not photos of the new galaxy full. They're renders, right? Right. Well, yeah, they appear to be renders. But like Apple took people through its testing facilities for antenna gate. But famously, they changed nothing.

Steve Jobs had us all out there and everyone went like on a walk right through their antenna testing lab. And they held up another, like they showed slides of like old Blackberry phones. They're like, this phone sucks too. And then the only thing they changed during IntennaGate was there like, the bars don't go down. as fast because all of you are dumb. All of you are confused by these bars. Apple also took people on a tour of where the place where they torture tested the iPhone 6 over Bendgate

and also didn't change anything until the 6 plus when they like reinforced it on the inside a little bit. But they like stuck to it. Apple also famously did not fix the butterfly keyboard. Maybe Samsung should be applauded for trying to make relatively clear what they've

done here. Samsung took people on tours of its battery testing facilities after the Note 7. Yeah. But technically they did not change the Note 7. They just stopped selling it. They're like, this is impossible to fix. So I can't be too mad at Samsung for not, like, completely blowing out its like apology tour for the fold. Because the truth is, they, the only people that suffered were like me and Joanna Stern.

Perquez. A very small, select group of people. just like some tech journalists. We suffered. But that's like, that's what we deserve. That's our lot in life. That's what we deserve. That is the most Minnesota Protestant thing you've ever said in your entire life.

One thing they did not change is the price, $1,980. That is correct. And they drop this news that it's back and the drawings are different at 9 p.m. on a Monday. 9 p.m. Eastern on a Monday, which, to be fair, is like, primetime in Korea. Okay. But nevertheless, I will tell you that, like, you know, many more things, many other things were more popular on our website than the Galaxy Fold news over the past 24 hours since

both Samsung's news and T-Mobile's news hit. Just to be, I want to read T-Mobiles. We're not selling this statement, like verbatim, because it is... High-quality. It is the meanest thing you will ever hear from one company saying it, thing about its partner. T-Mobile will not carry the galaxy fold because we already offer customers a wide

range of the latest smartphones. Please reach out to Samsung for any further inquiries. But you know what that range of phones doesn't include? One that folds. Yeah. It's true. It's like we will not carry turkeys this Thanksgiving. We already offer our customers a wide

range of meats. It's great. I like that. Calling it a turkey is also like for a That's pretty good. I think the hype's going to come back in September, though, guys. They're going to run, it's true. They're going to run right into the iPhone. They're going to run into the iPhone, for sure.

And the only question anybody has about this thing now is, will Dieter break it? And, like, from my vantage point, the way that we should do this review is we should just have a live stream of Deeter using the phone for like a day. Like a big brother type house situation, and you're just in the house with the galaxy fold. What do I have to go to the bathroom? I don't know how does Big Brother... I've never actually seen Big Brother. If you're talking... Do they have cameras in the bathroom?

Yes, they always do. That's an important aspect of reality television. All right, well, we'll tweak that slightly. But this is my... Look, if you want us to review the Galaxy Fold by setting up some sort of Big Brother house that Deeter lives in for two or three days, just to see if the Galaxy Fold breaks,

just tweet at me and Deeter. Actually, just tweet at Deeter. Just tweet Big Brother Galaxy Fold House. Can people like pay... to shoot small particulate dust at Dieter throughout the day. There's one room when someone's just like operating a power stander the entire time. Like, oh my God, deer's walking through the woodworking zone again. Just think about it.

We could make this happen. Why do we have these resources? Instead of a dunk tank, it's like a sand dunk tank. And then, you know, if you throw a ball, I fall into the giant pile of tossed away. This is horrible. But we're going to do it. Okay. More gadget news. This one's my favorite. I'm very excited about this. I have been saying for years that the way that, like the Virges thesis is that technology and culture are in a deep and somewhat terrifying relationship. And the Sony RX100 has been like the focal point of that relationship in my brain for the longest time. Because it came out as a still camera, a great still camera. It's the one I use. Sony updates this thing every single year

with the RX100 mark four two years ago, three years ago they added 4K video recording and it became like the go-to YouTuber camera. Yeah, if you, like the portable go-to YouTuber camera, as long as you don't need to record more than like 15 minutes because it like would overheaten like the batteries are the batteries are

the battery's not really small. But like we've had Saradici on the show. I've been on her show she's like one of my faves. She's got like 45 RX-100s. She's like, I don't even know how many I have at this point. And you see them all over the place. One thing it didn't have, a mic jack. Yep.

Sony updates his camera every year, every year the YouTuber's like, where is the mic jack? Every year, our video team is like, where's the mic jack? Not only did it not have a mic jack, there was no way to, like, dongle up a mic jack. Because there were a lot of, like, you know, semi-pro cameras where there was at least, like, a shoe and you could, like, buy a road and, like, attach it to the shoe, right? So it wasn't a full-on mic jack, but there was, like, there was always some way that you could, like, change. together some weird crap and get a microphone attached to it. And the ARX100 is just, nope, absolutely not. Anyway, two weeks ago, Canon announced the G73, Mike Jack.

Sony off cycles like, hey, here's our ARX100 with Mike Jack. It's great. It's like nothing has ever made me happier than this weird arms race between Sony and Canon to capture the hearts of creators. Are you suggesting that competition makes products better? I'm not saying anything, Dieter. I'm saying capitalism is great. That's all I'm saying.

You pulled off the Kindle from the show notes. The new Kindle Oasis is not as good as it should be because there's no competition. Anyway, continue about the RX100. Anyhow, I have this claim. I'm going to make it. I want you guys to agree or disagree with me, your choice. If you have a reasonably new phone and you're thinking, I'm going to get a new flagship phone because I want to take better photos,

I think you should not spend that money and you should spend anywhere between a used RX100 mark four is on eBay for like 500 bucks. anywhere between $500 to $1,200 for the new Mark 7, you should spend that money on an Rx100 because it will take vastly better photos than your phone. And I think that is, if your decision point for a new phone is I want to take better photos, I think you are way better off spending that money on a camera in the class of an RX100.

Getting the photos from an RX100 to a smartphone, it's not quite as good as, like, Nikon's, you know, magic, whatever the heck it is. but if you have an Android phone you just tap the NFC, shoots the photo over, you have an iPhone, it like pops up a QR code and you can like do the QR code and the NFC and an iPhone

kind of works. Really? I mean, it is so deeply in the realm of kind of. So they opened up, Apple opened up NFC and the iPhone kind of. It's like a lot of kindives that all add up to kind

of. You have to open the app first so you open the app first. So you open the app first And then you can, say, pair to my camera. And then you can tap in that right around 50% success rate of the tapping. And then that has, I would say, like a 35% hit rate on doing something. Right. And the thing it's supposed to do is, like, automatically connect you to the phone's little Wi-Fi Direct. Or the thing it's supposed to do is automatically connect you to the camera's Wi-Fi Direct network.

Yeah. But sometimes it doesn't do that. and your phone opens that weird, like, accept this Wi-Fi profile thing? You're like, I did this, like, 500 times. Really selling people on the, don't upgrade your phone by this camera thing. No, I'm just saying, I'm just saying,

this is the definition of a bunch of technology that's supposed to make life simpler, but really you should just open settings and connect the network. Like, you're so much better off not trying it the easy way in doing it the quote-unquote hard way. You know what I wish it had?

The old flip camera, you know, the flip camera is that, You hit a button in like a USB popped out of it. Imagine if a USBC thing could pop out of it. You could just plug it into your phone. That'd be great. And your phone had a USBC port. Yeah, imagine that.

Anyhow, so I have an icon camera that has SnapBridge, which is like a Bluetooth LE. So as you take photos, just populates your phone's camera roll with those photos. Here's a real problem with that. When you're holding a DSLR, you take thousands of photos. Right? I'm like, click, click, click, click. And then all of a sudden, like, my camera roll has 400 photos of this. sunset in it, which I don't need at this time.

Right. So it's great. I just prefer to do the manual. Anyway, my point is the main thing to know is they added this mic jack. It also has much faster burst recording. It's just a better camera, right? It's the yearly increment. But they put it out a little bit earlier because Canon just added a mic jack to its big

competitor. And I love that. Nothing makes me happier than that competition. So Google finally disconnected Google Drive from Google. photos because there's a whole thing there. But something it was doing to try and make sure that no photos got lost has meant that hundreds of ancient weird-ass photos that I thought I had deleted or that I put on drive but explicitly didn't put in Google photos or just appearing in my Google photos.

If you want to see pictures of me from like 2009, I got you right now. It's infuriating. Anyway. Yeah, I don't understand what Google is doing with Drive and Photos. Google Photos is great. I think everybody should use it. It's fine. It's very good at the thing that it is.

It's better than most other things. But this is actually just a folder with all my images. They have not yet. Right. That was what Drive was supposed to make it become. And that was just a miserable failure. I've been experimenting with dropping Dropbox and switching to some other service. and somewhere in my experimentation, I think I turned on Google Drive Sync to my desktop on one of my computers.

And so now every photo I put on my desktop is appearing in Google photos against my will. And I haven't figured out why. It's driving me crazy. That is like the ultimate in accidental self-surveillance. It's like all of a sudden Google knows everything that happens on your desktop because you were trying to sync one photo. Yeah, pretty much. Last little bit of gadget news. New Seno speakers are out today, but they're not new son of speakers.

or IKEA speakers. It's a phonisk. I am very excited about these. The little one is $100. It sounds, I would say, not as good as a son-of-speaker. I wouldn't go so far as to say potato. It's more like a pineapple. If you're in your car, pull over and

and listen to a potato. Imagine what the sound of a potato is. And then once you've got it, just record a voice memo and tweet it at Reckless. No, but then that will sound like a potato. That's what that sounds like. Potato Inception. Yeah. Potato Ception.

Anyway, it sounds fine, right? But it's $99. You compare two of them as surrounds for a big son-of-speaker system. I think this thing is great. I would recommend this thing just based on it's like ease of use over almost any Bluetooth speaker unless the thing you want to do is like pick it up, take it outside with the battery. Right. I'm super into these.

The lamp is a lot sillier. so there's a what's what a buck 79 it's it's a sonos speaker inside of a lamp that looks like a mushroom the lamp looks like a mushroom it just takes a regular light bulb but you can buy like smart light bulbs but you can also pair them as the surrounds so you could have your living room with like your sonos beam and then no one will know that you have surround because it's in the lamps I think that's great I think it's awesome. A little night stands to the left or right of your couch or something. Ideally, you want them slightly behind your couch.

So you want one of those bookcases behind you. I mean, it doesn't matter. I mean, you're putting surrounds and lamps. You're not like overthinking placement. Mount the lamps from the ceiling to get the full atmosphere. You're not doing that. Back off. I love it.

I think it's great. Chris Welch reviewed them. You should read that review. He says the lamps sound more or less like a play one, which sounds pretty good. That's very good. So we've obviously talked to Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos on the show a bunch of times. It's very interesting how Sonos is sort of, they've got their middle of the market. Like the middle of their market spectrum is where they live, right?

So that's everything from the Play 1 and the Sonos one of the speaker to the beam, the Play 5, all the new architectural stuff they're doing, like the in-wall speakers and the amp. Like that's their zone. Like if you want to spend a medium amount of money to, a fairly large amount of money, like Sonos has you. And then they're partnering on the low end and the high end. So in the low end, they partner with IKEA. There's going to be a bunch of Sonos tech there. IKEA can handle it. You can see how they're partnering on the high end. Like, they're in-wall speakers and stuff are made in partnership with other companies. I suspect, I hope, I dream, I've asked Patrick about this a number of times that they will

eventually do a receiver with Sonos stuff built into it. Right? Like pioneer receivers and on-Kia receivers, you can very easily pair a Sonos connect to them and have the Sonos connect turn on your receiver. It's like just to hop, skip, and a jump to not having to have the breakout box there. So I think their product strategy is really, really smart. Like, for most of the mainstream stuff, the middle of the spectrum that most people are going to buy, they're making it, they're engineering, it sounds really good, it works really well for the very low end $99, partnering with IKEA.

And then you can see on the high-end weirdo stuff that I love, must be honest, they're partnering with other companies. I think that is one of the more interesting sort of platform plays I've seen in a long time. It's like if Apple licensed iOS to those $100 phone makers because they didn't want to play in that market, and they knew, like, this isn't going to eat the real iPhone. And then there was something even more high-end than an iPhone. The Galaxy Fold. Right, but like no one's competing in the middle.

I think it's like we've seen a lot of ways for platform makers to license their stuff. This is a pretty unique riff on it. We're going to give away the very high end and the very low end, but we're going to take the mainstream. My take on what Sonos has started doing right in the past few years is slightly different. My take is the thing that the biggest change that Sonos, the biggest improvement, biggest change Sonos has made the past few years is they started making stuff and selling it. I mean, that was his promise.

When Spence took over, that was his promise. He was like, we have to increase the metabolism of the company, bias to action, all that stuff. They still have not shipped a replacement for the Playbar. Well, there's the beam. No, the beam's like way lower. The Playbar, there was a survey like months and months ago. It might have been CES.

The survey came out where they're asking people about surround systems and Atmos. You know how I feel about this stuff. Yeah. I will tell you that I am using Sonos Ones as my surrounds to a play bar right now. and their, hey Google, sorry everybody, detection, is atrocious. It's pronounced potato. I would say, yeah, it's potato. I would say one out of three times I ask it to do something.

It hears me, and then it says, sorry, I can't do that here. It's like, yes, you can. I'll just ask you again and you'll figure it out. It's really bad. Anyway, gadget news. A bunch of stuff. We're all buying Intel modems. We're all buying Sonos speakers.

We're all buying RX100. This has been a very expensive first half hour of the show. I'm super into it. I really don't want to buy that RX100, but I'm really going to. Haven't you accidentally bought like three RX100? Yes. Yes, I have. All right, we're going to take a break.

We're bringing Russell and McKenna. We got to talk about the FTC and Facebook. It was legitimately some of the biggest news that happened this week. So we're going to take a break. Be back with our policy team. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade. no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster.

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That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork. All right, we're back. Russell Branden's here. Hi. McKenna Kelly's here. I'm here.

You two have had a very busy week. McKenna just lives on the verge cast now. Yeah, this is my new job. Happy to be the new co-host. Yeah, that's great because the government keeps doing stuff. All right. So we knew that the FTC and Facebook were going to settle. We knew that it would be for $5 billion.

But it actually happened. Yesterday. Yesterday. At 8.30 in the morning, right as Mueller sat down to testify about Trump and Russia and all of that, it was great. So everyone was focused on Facebook and not only Mueller. I mean, this is kind of because actually for a couple Fridays, we were like, oh, they're going to drop it on this Friday to totally bury. it and then it dropped on like the one day you knew something else was going to be on CNN. The whole time.

It is a little bit. It was also Facebook's earnings day. Right. So they had to. Like they were going to have to say it in the earnings. Yeah. But Facebook also posts like really good earnings. So Facebook drove like drove its own news cycle here, it seems like.

What is the, well, actually, I have the complaint here all 50 pages. I want to read some bits of it. But give me the high level summary. High level summary. Yeah. $5 billion. They're fine. Yay.

Cool. That's over with, right? They pay for it. They don't care. There's also a new board, right? I mean, a new committee on the board that oversees privacy. So Mark Zuckerberg's power is a little diffused. Now on privacy.

There's other people who have to check. But they're made of members of the Facebook board. There is a third party assessor. Oh, I see. That is the language. Okay. And the privacy committee is like independent. They can't be fired in theory.

and they can sort of, there are like various ways they can escalate. It's really, I mean, I think people are broadly skeptical as to whether this committee is going to do anything because generally committees like that don't do anything. Who appoints the committee? Facebook's board of directors.

But like with the FTC's help. Yeah. And there's a third party assessor. Yes, that's the language. I love this. Okay. The settlement language is great. So other things,

Facebook can't lie about privacy stuff. Cool. They also have to do really great. That's never stopped before. I know, right. Well, remember 2012? But so great. So there's a ton of other stuff.

There's some facial recognition stuff that I thought was pretty interesting. Basically, the FTC had found that some folks had their facial recognition stuff on by default. So, you know, photo tagging and all that stuff. So the FTC was like, hey, opt-in consent, you need to know. There needs to be, like, explicit opt-in stuff on that. I thought that was interesting. I wasn't expecting to see that. I mean, there was just, like, a ton of stuff that I think what would, I think Joe Simons called it a belt and suspender system.

Multiple times. Joe Simons, by the way, is the FCC train. Right, yeah. He called it a belt and suspender system, like, several times. And he's like, we have five different areas of privacy that overlap. So if, like, someone fails something, then somebody else picks it up. And it's, like, a confusing system. So if your belt doesn't work, your suspenders holds your pants up.

Right. It was like, okay, cool. This sounds great. We're really happy. A belt and suspenders does not imply, like, oh, this company is afraid of consequences. Mm-hmm. Because a belt and suspenders are not terrifying. I'm just sorry.

Like, anyway. You want, like, vault imagery. Yeah. Not just, like, a dweeby dude who's wearing, like, both a belt and suspenders. I mean, that's the power the FTC has, though, right? Belt and suspenders power. All right. So just to set some context.

You mentioned 2012. The FTC, the complaint here is really based on the fact that in 2012, the FTC did this already. They said Facebook, you've done a bunch of stuff that impacts people's privacy. It's bad. We're going to charge you a fine. We're going to employ a third-party privacy assessor. And you have to tell us that you're in compliance with it all the time. That was 2012.

It is now 2019. Facebook and just all over this complaint, here's the line. This is paragraph 9. Facebook knew or should have known that its conduct violated the 2012 order because it was engaging in the very same conduct that the commission alleged was deceptive in count one of the original complaint that led to the 2012 order. So, FCC is like, you should have known you were doing the wrong thing because you never stopped doing it. Then there's this lengthy section of just dark patterns in the Facebook interface. So you're talking about facial recognition. If you opt into tagging, then you got one dialogue box, but if you didn't, you got a different dialogue box.

And then Facebook changed the interface and all the people who opted into one thing got to say yes again. But everyone else got auto-opted in. There's a whole section about how you're applicable. I mean, literally, it's just screenshots of Facebook. And like, the FTC is like, this is bad. Well, and they used, this is as the security guy, the one that gets to me. They used the number that you gave them for two-factor. in order, like, as an ad-targeting data thing, which is just like, come on, guys.

So they're very unhappy about that. They're very unhappy about application. I mean, this is like the Cambridge Analytica thing was you are a Facebook user. You sign up for an app, Cambridge Analytica. That app doesn't just get your data. It gets all of your friends' data. And, like, several times Facebook said it was going to fix it and didn't. Right?

That's the heart of this. And then the two-factor thing is like the next section and the facial recognition thing is the next section. So you just said third-party assessor, which I just want to come back to it. Well, last week I referred to this guy as the Yikes guy, remember? The Yikes guy. It's the Yikes Committee, right? See, we have to see how this plays out, right? Once the board's appointed, we see who's all on there.

What it is is a Yikes guy who's like, oh, guys, maybe we shouldn't have this certain privacy violation in this new product or new service that we're developing. And then it's determined and they some something happens and something's figured out. Okay. So here's the complaint again. Part 5 of the 2012 order states that Facebook shall obtain initial and bienial assessments and reports from a qualified, objective, independent third party professional who uses procedures and standards generally accepted in a profession. That did that did not work, right? And then there's this whole part where the assessments actually covered up the wrongdoing. So Facebook was supposed to stop giving applications data, but if you were paying Facebook, like more than a quarter million dollars a year for advertising, you got the data anyway.

And they just didn't tell their assessor person. I mean, this is like they just got around it over and over again. What in this? And that's the whole complaint. That's 50 pages. What about this new agreement prevents them from getting around it? Is it just the belt and suspenders? Right.

Okay, so if you listen to the press or yesterday with all the folks at the FTC, including the guy who's the director of enforcement, what they were saying is like, okay, last time we dialed up some harsher limits, right, for Facebook on privacy. This time, we're doing it even more. And so now there's a certification process for Zuckerberg. He has to actually like sign off on products and stuff on privacy now. So there's like a paper trail right. There's documentation that he's seen this. So it makes room for him to be held personally liable later. Right. So, So what's happening is that last time it was bad, this time it's worse, and then next time it's really bad, and maybe Mark Zuckerberg will no longer be the CEO of Facebook or something like that. Is that a potential outcome? Well, I mean, they're trying to hold him more accountable, right? So, I mean, what happens next is what happens next, but they're trying to slowly, I guess, make Mark Zuckerberg or whoever the CEO is in the future more liable for what happens on privacy. Right.

So this is kind of, I mean, I do like, the details are important, but it is kind of weird, right? Just keep coming back to the idea of like, you mess up. People talk about like, man, Facebook's behaving really irresponsibly. Like, there is never going to be more of a consensus on that than there is right now. Like, we've been driving that home for like the last two years. And what are the consequences? Like, how much did it hurt because they did that? And like, it feels like the consequences are not escalating quickly enough, right?

Like, everything was on the side of the government doing something really significantly damaging to this enterprise because they just had nothing going for them. It's also like it's Facebook. It's not like these people are sort of like growing food that people need to eat. It's not vital infrastructure. Like, it's fine. So I don't know. I guess it's just like if they did, if they screwed up this badly and this is what happened, there's just no spin where it doesn't look weak.

And they broke the law. Right. And they were, they had a consent agreement with the government. Yeah, but lots of people break the law. I mean, come on. But it's like weird. But what happens, right? The FTC, if you talk to Joe Simons, the chairman of the FTC, or anybody in the majority over there, they would say, but we're so weak.

Yeah. We can't do much more. What they were forced into and what Joe Simon said repeatedly on CNBC on every chance that he had a second to talk yesterday was like, we're so weak. We need Congress to pass a privacy law. We need new authority to go after these folks. So, I mean, it seems like they're making a really solid case for Congress to do something next, right? It's like. And if I understand correctly, if they had said we want $10 billion and Zuckerberg's head on a stick, there was some bridge too far where Facebook would.

want to go to court. This is a settlement. And if FTC had asked for more, Facebook would have said, okay, well, we'll see you in court, right? That was the decision point. Right. So that's the thing. There were a lot of, so they could have asked for a lot more money. They could have asked for what you said, Mark Zuckerberg's head on a stick. But whatever. So everybody's like trying to come to a settlement, right? I mean, we heard from Brian Fung yesterday at CNN. Facebook walked into negotiations with the FTC saying, we'll pay a zero. So like, there wasn't a lot of wiggle. room for them, right? Five billion according to zero? Maybe a lot. But here's the thing. If the FTC wanted to get rid of Mark Zuckerberg or touch him at all, his power or anything, Facebook would

have wanted to go to court. And Joe Simons would tell you that's a lot of years in litigation. It means that we don't really know what the outcome will be. In this case, we get it after a year following Cambridge Analytica. And we also get $5 billion in consumer protections. That's what Joe Simons would tell you right. So he thinks that he won in this game. That is the most damning part of this whole thing is he thinks he won. Right. What did he

say yesterday? He said at the presser, he said this settlement is awesome. Wow. I don't know that anybody outside of Facebook thinks it's awesome. Like up and down on pundits on both sides, we know a lot of folks. No one thinks this is enough. Well, and

I mean, imagine the credibility of the FTC as an institution. The concern is you go to court and you lose and then no one takes the FTC seriously ever again. But if you're so scared of going to court that you just get stomped on over and over again, then no one's going to take you seriously either. I mean, this is still a high profile failure of enforcement. And I do think, you know, the antitrust sort of the young guns of antitrust who are out there, they're always saying, you know, the institutional culture at the FTC is such that they hate going to court because it's like a pain for them.

It's like this thing that they never do and they sort of want to avoid it because it's a lot of work. And the result is everyone knows that they can push their luck because the FTC doesn't want to go to court. So it will give up whatever we're willing to give up. And this is just like a really high profile example of that. So if you are any other company and you're looking at $5 billion, here's just a series of headlines from CNBC. November 1, 2018, Apple now has $237.1 billion in cash on hand. January 29th, 2019. Apple discloses his cash pile.

The company reports $245 billion in cash on hand. April 30th, 2019. Apple has $225.4 billion in cash on hand. They're just going to peel off the $5 billion. They just set it aside. Oh, yeah. Tim Cook's like, hey, can we? we make a room next to my office labeled FTC and put $5 billion in cash in that room.

Right. And now they're like protected against any, the largest fine in FTC history. These are not poor companies. This is how banks work. Banks just have a slush fund for paying fines for money trafficking and various other laws that they break. Right. I mean, that's not great either.

But Apple's legal fund, like the budget for Apple's legal department is a billion dollars a year. Right. Just straight out. Apple's old general counselors gave a speech and he was like, my budget was a billion dollars a year. And there's a new general counsel. He probably asked for more money, right? Like, it just seemed there was a line, I think Tony, Rom had it in the post. Like, FTC has a total of 1,100 employees.

They have a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And at some point, they were just out-resourced. That to me is the argument, right? They just couldn't out-muscle Facebook. And so you're talking about, should we go to court and lose? the stakes of that might be very high, but your confidence that you can devote all of your attention and money

in every big law firm in the world is going to be looking for the Facebook check. Yeah, that's fine. But that's like year... Yeah, but like what if... I mean, the other point is... Do you employ the best lawyers in the world and you're the FTC? You're like,

well, we have a bunch of government lawyers. Look, hey, we can raise the FTC's budget in the middle of this thing. Right? If you actually want to make the case, then go to war. But I mean, at this point, maybe $100 million is too much budget if this is what they're going to do with it. And that's what Matt Stoller would say right in the post like that. They're like, FTC, dissolve it.

Like, why we're done with this? They have a budget if there's no point in doing any of this. And also, by the way, the idea that like the government's lawyers are outclassed by the private sector's lawyers is true in every sort of area. Like that's true in criminal justice a lot of the time. It's true, I mean, not in most cases, but like OJ or something. It's true, obviously, in like, banking SEC. It's like this classic problem. I mean, that's the plot of the show Billions.

Right. It's a good show. You should watch it. You're saying it's the plot of that show. I have two questions kind of related to this, the money thing. One, who gets the $5 billion? The treasury. It just, it gets dumped into the treasure.

Because the FTC could hire some lawyers. Two, why don't I get $125 like when Equifax gets fined by the FTC? What makes this different? Because this is a consumer protection situation, right? Yeah, but you weren't personally damaged, right? So the Equifax thing was, it's like punitive versus compensatory. Wasn't I damaged if Cambridge Analytica sneaked away my data and convinced me to, to vote for the wrong person, wasn't I harmed?

Yeah, but if you can, so this is like the class action, the sort of classical thing is, okay, you have to define the class. So the class for Experian would be everyone whose data was in this specific breach with Experian. Well, okay, so you could say everyone whose data was breached in the like, this is my digital life kind of thing, but like that's actually not that many people and most of them more kind of active participants in it, like they installed the app. And so it's like, are we just going to do their friends?

What does that have to do with like the facial recognition stuff? And also like how do we quantify how much, how do we quantify the harm that was done to you as a Facebook user as a result of that? It's really more like these ambient privacy things. The model that people are increasingly talk about, I don't know how much like actually this exists in jurisprudence, but they talk about it as sort of privacy harms as pollution. It's just like out there. And so then, you know, if you're winning like a pollution case, you're just like, all right, we're going to spend this money on, on, you know, environmental remediation or something.

The other thing that Facebook got out of this was all their executives got indemnified against all the past bad stuff, right? Right. So if there's, if they find out more stuff that happened in this time period, they can't get punished. Yeah, like not even just the stuff that was in the like case that they were getting sued over. They were like literally anything, which is kind of unheard of. they just identified from FTC stuff or from anybody. Can I not sue Facebook for anything that's happened before 2019 now? Oh, no, you can still sue them. I think it's just the government, yeah, like the FTC can't sue them, which is who would sue them. So then the other piece, right,

at the scale that we're talking about, this is almost certainly government stuff. So then the other piece is they announced her earnings yesterday, and the FTC announced another investigation. An antitrust investigation, right? So of course the FTC didn't announce it. Joe Simons would never announce anything. He would never. So in their earnings, they confirmed that the FTC had contacted them last month and said that they're under antitrust investigation, and that's all we know. So what I want to get at here is we heard earlier that the FTC and the DOJ had like split up big tech. And the DOJ was going to take Amazon. DOJ has Google and Apple. Okay. And the FTC has Facebook, who they are very

familiar with now. Right. And Amazon, right, because after the Whole Foods acquisition, they're very cozy. Cozy isn't the right word, but they have worked with these folks before. But also, like, the DOJ, since that article, we now know the DOJ is kind of looking at everyone, like they're doing a big review of just, like, antitrust issues in tech. Steve Vinichin, the Treasury Secretary, was on CNBC yesterday. He said Amazon has destroyed the retail industry across the U.S., which is, like, pretty

harsh thing for the Treasury Secretary to say. I mean, we've heard a lot of... Monstribly false. Yeah, I mean... This administration hates Amazon, right? We hear it time and time again. It's all over the president's Twitter account.

So what I want to get out here is the FTC bodyed up against Facebook. Facebook was already under an agreement to not do bad things. They'd already paid a fine. They already had this like third party assessor. What the FTC was able to accomplish was a fine.

a different kind of third-party assessor and Mark Zuckerberg signing a piece of paper every quarter saying I didn't screw up. It's like not a lot. Like they didn't get more than they'd gotten before, even though they'd broken virtually the same kind of agreement. I would even say like one of the things dissenting commissioner, Burjee Choper said in his dissent was it's not even that we singled out specific types of data and said you can't collect and share this data because you collected it and

it improperly in the past, which would be like a reasonable thing to put in a settlement. It's just that you need a paper trail of like deciding like, hey, here's why we need the data and then you just do it. Yeah. And Facebook is famously pivoting to privacy anyway, right? They're like bringing their three messaging platforms together. They're saying, we're all very convinced by the pivot to privacy. Sure.

But they're doing it anyway. And this is also true. Facebook is a huge company in digital advertising. What they use the data for is targeting ads. they can just say, like, we don't need to give anyone the data. We're just going to use it all internally. We have this paper trail, and our ad business is going to be fine. So the accomplishment here is quite low, like overall.

So it just seems to me like the antitrust piece of it. You can solve it in two ways. You can do what Joe Simons wants. You can make the government bigger and more powerful. Or you can do this other thing, which is potentially make the company smaller. Right. I wouldn't say that Joe Simons wants the government bigger. Now he's a Republican commissioner, right?

He's asking for more power. Right, yes. A little bit more power to do what everybody is yelling at them to do. But those are like, kind of your two choices. And the cyclone is like, this is a sign these companies are too big to regulate. Yeah, but I mean, these are sort of the same choice, right? Like, the power of the government to say this company is too big, it should in fact be three separate companies is like a lot more. Like, that's a much stronger government intervention than just being like, hey, instead of $5 billion, you made $50 billion last year.

Maybe let's make it 25. And, like, also in the context of this specific settlement, you're not allowed to collect this kind of data anymore. Like, that's actually a much more limited government intervention. But, like, because we no longer trust institutions to, like, respond to events specific. quickly, we're going to have to just be like, oh, no, this, like, when we say a company's too big to regulate, that you want, like, functional regulators, right? Like, maybe a functioning FTC could have regulated a company's Facebook size. We'll never know.

Right? So now it's, like, actually, the bar for when a company is too big to regulate is getting lower because the regulators are getting so ineffective. And so the only option is to break them up. Yeah. I mean, or you have just much bigger regulators. Yeah, I would love that. But that seems way harder. Like, at this point, it seems less starry-eyed to say, let's spend the next 20 years in, like, unending legal war to split up Facebook and, like, write a new telecom act specifically targeted at social platforms and things like that. That seems like more reasonable than let's have an FTC that, that, like, is continually working to keep Facebook in check. And this is right before we started recording, you were laughing at the idea that we would appoint some like data czar with a new agency. Right.

Yeah. Well, so the New York Times had this thing of, you know, Facebook is this new kind of threat or it's this new kind of power. And what we're seeing is that our institutions aren't able, like it's beyond the reach of the FDC, which is functionally true. I mean, that's what we found out. But it's not like we don't know what to do. We've done this sort of thing in the past. It's like passing a law. We used to be able to do that.

The chances of that are so very low. I mean, this is like McKenna was laughing at the end of a privacy law. Everyone wants this thing. Everyone kind of understands what it should look like. I will come on here every week, explain the necessity of a national privacy framework, and I will toss around my fist and scream. But, God, I don't know if it's ever going to happen. I mean, we heard for months.

It was going to happen in March. It was going to happen this summer. And I just keep dreaming of getting that, like, that bill and I get to look at it and write about it and then maybe one day the president will sign it but god dang I don't think I don't know if it's ever gonna happen and I live for this hope in the dark that's all we have young policy reporter on the make throw her a bone it is true that it like hinges on there being actual policy we haven't really thought that far I mean we're getting really close with robocalls are we're getting really close with robo calls are we're getting really Okay, we're just like, sorry. I understand that this is a therapy session for everyone, but we've got to focus. So the idea that we're going to appoint, we're going to create a new agency. Yeah.

And it's going to regulate all these companies and it's going to understand their power. I would just say first, it implies that anyone understands their power, which I don't know. It also implies that we're going to give up. And we're going to say these companies are so big, they're so permanent that we have to, we have to carve out a of the government that like permanently looks at them. I do not know that these companies are permanent. Yeah. I mean, they haven't been around that long.

They haven't been around that long. I think Paul would tell you that big companies tend to just destroy themselves all on their own. Yes, that is my third way in this situation is let Facebook be horrible to its customers so its customers can wise up and leave. Okay. So I think here's the core of it. Here's the core of the failure that I see. That could be true.

That could be an outcome. Nothing about this decision actually affects how they run their advertising. business, which is what their customers are. And so if you look at their results, all this stuff happened. But people are still using Instagram. People are still using Facebook. And if you are some direct-to-consumer brand, the fastest way for you to sell, I don't know, razors or a mattress or whatever it is, is going on Facebook and targeting those

people. Did I miss the ad read? Do we not know what it is this week? It's something. I'm just saying it's a false hope to hope that the government will protect. you from predatory companies who are trying to hoover up your data. Because lots of other companies are trying to do what Facebook did. You know, Facebook was clever and took your phone number when you signed up for 2FA.

And that was horrible and wrong and terrible of them. But a lot of other companies are trying to get your phone number as well. And so you're not ultimately going to be fully safe on the internet, even if it were, the FTC able to perfectly regulate Facebook. You are not now safe on the internet. So the only solution to actually make you safe on the internet will be actually strengthening your capabilities as a person on the internet in the long run. So this is the reason I pointed out, you know, we have the complaint. I'm looking at it. It's full of screenshots of Facebook's interface. It's full of dark patterns. And they're saying these interface tricks actually tricked people. Facebook said you

turn off this setting that lets applications have your data, you push the button, it didn't actually do that. You had to go into this other screen labeled application happiness, and like you push that button, right? You have a screen, it says turn off Facebook platform, it only lists negative consequences. Turn off the Facebook platform and you will never talk to your mother again. You will also have to move to a different country and no, and like Facebook itself won't work. Like, why would you push this button? And the button is labeled like, no, don't turn off the platform or yes, punch me in the face, right?

Like, it's just dark patterns up and down. And I think that is the thing we haven't reckoned with. Like, there are no, there's no one looking at how these interfaces are confusing, how most privacy policies

when you, I'll call one out today. Comcast is an investor in Vox Media. They announced their results today. I went, I opened the Comcast page to read the press release for their results. The whole bottom half of my phone was, hey, this site uses cookies.

And there was a button at the bottom that just said accept. But I could still navigate the site, right? So it seems like I haven't accepted these cookies. But the next sentence is, by continuing to use the site, you accept our use of cookies. So this accept button means literally nothing. Like, that's just a dark pattern all over the internet that I don't think any regular consumer will ever be smart enough to figure out. Right?

Like, there's no way you can't, as a human, a single human, human being being in an arms race with every dark pattern designer at Facebook or whatever website. And that's the privacy law. That's like, as a collective, we need to say some of these patterns are wrong. Right. There is a bill in Congress right now with Senator Mark Warner, who we interviewed on the site. Go read it. He's great.

But there is one that would outlaw dark patterns. And he's running some things in Congress trying. I mean, he's kind of making himself to be the Senate guy. who knows about tech, right? So he's been trying to teach people in Congress about dark patterns, but you're right. Can I go to one of these sessions? I mean, yeah, sure. I think he'd love to. But, so, I mean, people are thinking about it, but you're right. At the average consumer level, people aren't, you know what I mean?

When you see a big green button and a little gray one, you're going to hit the big green button because you're not looking, you just want to use the site or the app or whatever. And I mean, I think on the question of like how does the government, like how does some institution stop this, right? You kind of have two options. You can proactively say, okay, this isn't allowed, or you can set some kind of boundary and say, okay, well, these are deceptive practices. And then we go to, you know, civil courts or some regulatory agency to decide, okay, what's the line for what deceptive practices are, right? And I think that's part of what's so scary about. And really, you need both of those, right? Like, you need some proactive measures that set up the, the, the

sort of post hoc enforcement. Part of what's scary about the FTC thing is if the post hoc enforcement never shows up, especially, like, then the entire system falls apart, especially because up until now, the government approach to tech, I mean, up until like the past few years, has been, all right, this is very innovative, it's very good for the American economy, let's let a thousand flowers bloom and sort of people experiment with things. And then if anyone screws up really badly, we'll come in and punish them. so that'll be an incentive for people to behave.

And that's what was supposed to have just happened. So it's kind of... What's funny is that it had already happened. Like, that's the one that kills me. Well, yeah, but you... They've done it in 2012, and then Facebook... I mean, literally, the quote is, they should have known the behavior was wrong

because they already agreed not to do it. And they just kept doing it. And there is not, I don't think, anyone on either side of the aisle who really is in love with this FTC settlement. I'm kind of shaking your head at me. I can't think of anything. I'm thinking, but I mean, a lot of what I saw. Except for Joe Simons, who's like, fuck, yeah.

This is awesome. This is awesome. No, but I'm trying to think of all the statements I got yesterday, but most people are like, it's time for our privacy law. It is time to set the line on what is deceptive and what is wrong. I mean, again, that's cool. But like, at a certain point what you're asking, like, that's just more buck passing. That's like, all right, like Congress deal with, like, taking the hard step.

Well, this is people in Congress who are like, it's time for me to put my name on a privacy lot. Sure. Because he got to put his name on, quote, the biggest one. Right? Like, that's, that's his obituary. I mean, that's, well, like, it's good that Congress is saying that. I don't know.

I guess I, not to, again, get, like, to, like, bread tube about this, but it does feel like at a certain point that government loses the capability to, like, meaningfully punish corporations that do bad things. If you pass a privacy law? No, no. I'm saying this FTC thing. like it makes you feel as if fundamentally the will to do that is not there because we're ruled by lizard people. I don't know what's happening to Russell right now.

I've been very quiet through this entire discussion because my wife works for Oculus, which is a vision of Facebook, and I always have to disclose it, and I don't want to have to disclose every 20 seconds here. But I just want to jump in to say, I don't think that lizard people are where we want to go with this. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, part of Facebook, which may be run by lizard people. Exactly. I'm honestly a little worried about Russell. Have you noticed, I'm just going to point out, have you noticed that as soon as I brought up lizard people? Yeah, he jumps right in.

There was a lot of tension and people higher in the company were like, oh no, this makes me very nervous. We got to shut this down. Jim McHoff is like, cut it on the lizard people. All right Something's going to happen I promise you Too many people are unhappy with the settlement For there not to be more forward momentum

There's a California privacy bill It feels like a model There's a GDPR out there If Europe continues to exist Open question There are some models for this thing out there And I think The recognition

That dark patterns will regularly overwhelm an individual's capacity to make good decisions on their own behalf is starting to get better. It's easy for interfaces to trick you into making a bad decision. We just reviewed Bose headphones. Both headphones are great. The new ones seem really good. To open the app and adjust the EQ of those headphones, you have to agree to a privacy policy to basically allows Bose to track you. That is bad.

Like, that should not be the case. It just seems wrong. My Sony headphones are the same thing. To install Sony headphones Connect, you have to agree to a privacy policy. And it is like, we will just share your data. In my day, they were just dials. Like, there were physical things. That's what I want.

I want, like, a 12-band graphic EQ on the side of my headphones. I just see, like, that's, no one is going to read that privacy policy. No one is going to choose Bose headphones over Sony headphones because they're slightly more comfortable with Bose's privacy policy. Like, there's no market for that. There should be. I don't, we can, we can do our best. Like, our review mentions that privacy policy now because we're thinking about it. But we, the verge, are not going to affect, like, just alone, like an individual consumer's decision.

And by the way, they're all little Bluetooth computers and all going to track you. Like, that seems like the market isn't going to fix it. And like a privacy law potentially could get you there. And I think more people are seeing that. Drussell is like the lizard people freaking out. All right, I'm changing the subject before it happens again. There's one more thing I wanted to talk to both. you about. It seems like T-Mobile and Sprint's going to happen.

Not today. We're like, kind of waiting with bated breath every night. What's going on with this? Okay, so T-Mobile Sprint. It's been over a year now since they said they were going to merge for $26 billion. Woo-hoo. So we've been waiting and waiting. The FCC finally said, awesome. This looks great. I mean, A G-Pai has never seen market consolidation. He does like. He was like, love this. So now we're just waiting on the Justice Department, right?

So the Justice Department is trying to help them out, I guess, which is the weirdest thing, the weirdest merger thing. It's like, okay, yeah, right now, bad. This is not very competitive. It's going to make the market less competitive. We're going to go from four to three. Four to three, right. So they're like, you know what you could do? You could sell up some of your spectrum and some of your assets to dish.

Yeah. And they could be the next viable competitor. So we're waiting for all of that to just be formally announced. Go ahead, Deeter. Deeter's like back in the game. Like his wife does not work for Ditch Network. He's here. Why are they so eager to help T-Mobile out?

Like, it really seems like they're just trying as hard as they can to find a way to make this thing possible. When they could just say, nah. Their staff. The antitrust DOJ staff was like, hey, not a good idea. That was like a couple months ago. So, I mean, if you want to take, like, the worst, look at this. You could say that the... Lizard people. Right. The Lizard People Trump administration

want T-Mobile to merge with Sprint. I mean, John Ledger's been hanging out at the Trump Hotel, right? That's true. By the way, it looked bad, and then ours technical... A bunch of people have reported T-Mobile is just spending a shitload of money at the Trump Hotel. Right.

And just like hanging out at the FCC, like all the time. Who doesn't hang out at the FCC? Great service. Right. Love it there. I mean... Fastest Wiles service in D.C. is in the lobby of the FCC. I think there's like a similar dynamic going on that we saw in the Facebook case where like the DOJ could challenge it as a violation of antitrust law, but they would have to go to court and they might lose. Like they actually don't have a great track record of winning antitrust cases lately in part. And they just got smacked. Yeah.

So they. 18 time Warner is what I mean, I think part of this is sort of the settlement process where they say, you know, know, okay, we don't want this to be a problem. We think it would be easier if we tweaked it around the edges a little bit. Let's come up with something that works for everyone so we don't have to go to court. But the thing they came up with is, this is theoretically a Republican government. The thing they come up with is like Soviet-level industrial policy. That's coming back, though.

But it's... Trump is tweeting about like our brave patriot farmers. It's true. Okay, fine. But like, to say that he's a real fact. That's a direct quote. And it's in the context of like giving them billions of dollars. And he's like, I'm giving them this money because they're our brave patriot farmers and we must support them. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So Russell is still Russell. Just putting that out there. But I just, just to lay it out for the listener, they're going to combine T-Mobile and Sprint. And then they've like rummaged around the tech industry. They've located Dish Network.

which is already hoarding tons of spectrum and they have not built a cell carrier and they're going to ask very politely for DISH Network to buy some spectrum from the combination T-Mobile and Sprint to take over Boost for $1.5 billion. Boost is already laying off its entire marketing department which doesn't seem great.

So they're going to take over some spectrum. They're going to take over Boost. They're going to get like a license to use T-Mobile's network so they can do something in the meantime while they figure out what to do with all this spectrum and then they're not allowed to sell anything for some period of years. And that last condition,

yes, they're not allowed to sell anything to like big companies like Google or Apple or whomever. And that's like specifically to keep them from like having a partner or selling things to somebody that actually could compete. Right. And so like this is the sticking point is we want to give everything to dish but we're going to require that dish

start a cell carrier and not just package all this up and sell it to Google because T-Mobile and Sprint don't want to compete with a company that knows what they're doing. That is a crazy amount of government right?

Like, why don't you just let Sprint die? That's a good choice you could make. Dish has been sitting on the bench trying to launch a wireless network since 2011. When AT&T was going to buy T-Mobile and then that thing ultimately got denied during that entire attempt at a merger

at a purchase of AT&T buying T-Mobile, Charlie Oregon, CEO, dish was just like sitting in the corner going, you know, guys, this doesn't work out because you don't trust AT&T, we'll buy T-Mobile. We'll do it. I mean, I just, if you are like a free market like, just let it die.

Why are you looking for free? 5G? Are we not talking about 5G? Oh, Kenna. We have to win the race. Dome, Kenna? We need this merger to happen so we can get 5G and world broadband.

Why is it a good result to have the spectrum split among four or more carriers? The good result is a pricing result. Yeah, okay, but imagine if they were all good people. Two carriers? One carrier?

Like, I want these carriers to have more spectrum so that they could theoretically give me a better product. I know it's not a guarantee that they will give me a better product, but I really want these carriers to have more spectrum so that they could, were they to choose to? Does that make sense? You're correct. And this is the argument for DISH has a bunch of spectrum. Why won't you just turn it into a network? Our answer to this problem is we will give you more spectrum and boost network and force you to make a network. That's one way to do it. I want to sell off, I want DISH to be

allowed to sell its spectrum off for parts to the three, the three glorious new phone terms. The Soviet language is really in full effect here. So one answer to this, and this is true, for a while, the Trump administration was batting around the idea of having a single nationalized 5G network. Because if you are like, the best way to use the spectrum most efficiently is to not have any competition, right? Like, that is the single most effective use

of the scarce resource. Well, I don't even think they got as far as thinking, like, who is going to provide service to cellular phones. They were just, like, we're going to build the towers only using U.S. equipment, because it was an anti-Waway thing. And then it was, like,

this became, like, nationalized 5G. I don't know. I guess my reaction to Paul's thing of, like, okay, would AT&T and or, like, would one of the big three having this spectrum meaningfully translate to better service for me? Or is there kind of a point where like more spectrum hits diminishing returns? And the problem is not really the spectrum? Yeah, Paul, I think the disconnect in your question is,

are they motivated by providing great service or motivated by money? And the answer is like they have a lot of spectrum. They're not using it all, and they're spending their money on buying friends for their streaming service. Right? Like, that's where their cash is going. They're not spending it even the money they have on building more towers or racing out 5G, if you believe it's some race. They're spending it on how can we get more money, how can we bundle streaming service and zero-rated on our network. And that's universally what they're doing.

You might remember such notable successes as Go-90 Verizon Streaming Service that's, totally succeeded. So they're spending more money in a place that's less regulated? Yeah, but like that we got rid of all the regulations on them. Remember that was Title II, Jeep pie, big mug, got rid of it, said CapEx would go up because there's no more regulations. It turns out they just, they spent the money in content anyway. So the argument for we should have four carriers is just an economic argument. Four carriers means there's more competition, means prices stay at this place. We consolidate the carriers. We create carriers. We create more of monopoly effect. They are more likely,

Team Mobile is more likely if it achieves, if you combine Team Mobile and Sprint, it becomes the same size as AT&T and Verizon. AT&T and Verizon basically match their prices. They're both national networks. They both provide on-par coverage, sort of on average. Their prices are basically in lockstep. They're a duopoly at that size of the market.

You add a third competitor, maybe T-Mobile is a challenger and it's able to do it. but it is more likely that it will just provide the same class of service. And at some point, you add enough competitors to the market. The challengers are actually challengers. They provide some pricing pressure, which is what T-Mobile was doing. So that's like the argument, which is less about spectrum and more about how many choices do you have. At some point, in the other direction, if you were spreading this spectrum across 20 different carriers, that wouldn't work.

Right. So the argument here is not we need 60 carriers. The argument is we need four, right? and that's where we've been. And so we're just going to Frankenstein Dish Network into a fourth carrier. Dish Network, again, I just would remind everyone, is not a cell carrier. It's a satellite TV company, and they're going to force them to become a cell carrier. I want to be clear.

I'm not promoting the solution. I'm promoting. Just let them merge together and be the Borg that they want to be. Yeah. And then they'll probably screw up and fall apart. I mean, that's the thing that you always say. I buy it. Like, if there's one thing we've firmly proven, it's that many of these companies are not well run.

Sprint, for example, an actual cell carrier runs so poorly that it's going to be chopped into one half given a T-Mobile and the other half-given to Dish network. Apparently, there's not a lot of executives you know how to run a cell carrier out there. I just don't, it's crazy to me that we're doing this level of, like, intricate monkeying with private company deals instead of just saying no. Do you know what my, so this is my bold proposal. And if Andrew Yang is listening, just think about this as telecom policy. Let Sprint Die. Take the spectrum back into the FCC pool. Don't sell it to anyone used to make Wi-Fi better.

Unlicensed white space. I'm into it. I'd say take all the spectrum and make it Wi-Fi. Yeah, but... But... I'm with you, Russell. All right. Absolutely.

I don't, between the lizard people and just like raw anarchy now, we're just all over the place. So I'm calling it to an end. McKenna, you did a great job. Very worried about you. Like that laugh is not normal or healthy. I just want to make it clear. Lizard people wasn't a partisan thing. I'm not like saying Republicans or Lizard people. Okay. Everyone knows what you were saying and I think you should take a vacation. All right. I'm getting a note from bank office says Russell's got to get off the end. All right. Thank you both very much. We're going to take a break. We'll be back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

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aI slash vergecast. That's cloud.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI slash vergecast. We're back. Paul Miller.

Mm-hmm. Every week. That's right. Consistency off the charts. We won a Webby Award for podcast consistency. What's it called? It's called, what do you want? A medal?

Yes. I do. Okay, well, here you go. Origin PC, which just got bought by Coursier, by the way. Origin PC has made a Frankenstein monster called the Big O Gaming PC. It has inside of it, it is a PC, it is an Xbox 1X, and it's a PlayStation 4 Pro, and it's a Switch dock, all in one chassis. And like, it's got colors and lights. And I don't know why, but it really grinds my gears.

And I can't put a finger on it. Yeah, I don't know. See, it feels out of character for me. I feel like I should love this. Oh, look at this marvelous Frankenstein invention that Origin PC put together. And instead, I'm just like, I'm achieved. Is that a word? Wait, why?

I don't know. Is it because Origin PC did it instead of some basement hacker? Yeah, maybe. Who's that guy that used to do all the Ben Heck? Ben Hack. This should have been a Ben Heck project, I guess. But I don't know. It's just, I think part of it is I just want the PC.

Yeah. You know, I feel like I'm carrying dead weight, TBH. Okay. I don't know. I'm bringing it to you guys because I'm confused about my own emotions. I mean, that's what we're here for. I just, it's just funny. Usually your segment is so celebratory.

And now you're like, do you want a metal? It's a PC. It's like, Paul, you love those. Also, as far as I know, this isn't a product, this is like a 10th anniversary. Yeah. It's like, congratulations to us. We're 10 years old and we got bought by Corsair. So we made this Frankenstein monster.

I'm going to just go through it with you. Let's try to go through these emotions very quickly. Are you, you're mad that a hobbyist into it, a big company did it? Maybe a little bit. What if this was like a skunk works project inside the big company and it was a bunch of hobbyists who like got together and did it? Would that make you happy? Like if they did it on the, okay, yes, if they did it on the company dime secretly. And then the company was like, this is great.

Right, it's like a renegade innovation and they got blessed. Absolutely. Okay. I think that's what it is. Because like where else does this come from? Like this didn't happen in like the board meeting. I don't know. The CEO wasn't like, our future is this weird thing. This isn't like a top down direction. If there was any CEO that would be that person, it would be the CEO of this company.

I don't think it's a huge company. Yeah. All right. I think we've worked through it. Okay. Thank you. I think we're going to get you one. It's going to torment you in the dark room at your end. Various lights. All right.

We've gone way over, but we can't not talk about iPhone rumors. Dieter, you wrote a scathing polemic about lightning. That's not true. It was not a scathing thing. I'm trying to sell it for you. But iPhone rumor season is in full effect. Yes. Guillem Rambo over at 9 to 5 Mac has a bunch of information about the next iPhones,

presumably it's the iPhone 11. The regular iPhones are still going to have OLED screen, same resolution. Whatever succeeds the iPhone 10R is going to have a liquid retina screen. The interesting bits about it is there's this thing called leap haptics, which is some kind of advanced taptic engine. And presumably that's going to replace the force touch on the screen, which is good, fine, great. I don't know.

Apple needs to figure out how it feels what force touch. I think how it feels is it wants it to go away. Also, the camera tech, the wide angle thing, is apparently going to have this clever smart frame feature where it's going to use the wide angle lens data to, like, sit around a regular picture so it can better frame photos for you, basically, like sort of like a crop maybe. I don't know. We're going to see. But like, that's the most interesting thing I've seen so far about their, you know, extra camera that they're adding. And then it's going to use lightning to charge. And I don't know what you guys, but my Twitter feed.

was like, oh, God, about the lightning. And, you know, why would Apple switch this year is my feeling? Like, these are iterative updates on the iPhone 10s, which were iterative updates on the iPhone 10, and all of those other ones have the lightning port. So, like, it would be expensive and weird for them to switch to USBC this year. I do think that next year, which is,

people are like, people always say it should be next year, but for real, next year, Apple will hopefully come with a pretty new radical design of the iPhone with less of a notch, and that's the moment, I think, that it should switch to USBC, when it has a new design to peg it to so it can build a narrative around technology. Because it's going to look out of touch

if it sticks with lightning. Yeah, I love this reasoning that you should have a fundamental design shift if you're going to make a major usability shift, like lightning to USBC. But why is it? isn't the fundamental design shifts this year? Like this is, Apple does a 10 and then does a 10S.

This is their iPhone 8 of tens. Yeah, no, I think you're totally right. They did the iPhone 6. That was the design change. Then a 6S, then at 7 and then an 8. Right. Like, there was no 7S in the mix. They did that extra jump.

The 7 was effectively a 6S without a headphone jack. Yeah. Right? Like that was just them priming the pump. to ruin our lives. So because we never got a 7S, we have to get an extra S for the 10? No, I'm just saying that cycle,

the S cycle is just clearly over. Yeah, Apple doesn't give you a radical new radical, a significant new iPhone design every two years anymore. It's a much longer cycle. They stopped doing that a long time ago. Yeah. And I agree with data. I also think besides charging will be moderately easier,

which is important, why do you need a USBC port on iPhone? What do you do and accept charging it with that port? So you can plug your Sony camera into it and get all the pictures off. Everything that you can do with the USBC port on iPad Pro basically works on an iPhone if you use a lightning adapter. So in theory you could plug other stuff into it. For me, the story is actually about charging. Because if you switch to USBC, they could sell a version of the iPhone that doesn't have an AC adapter in the

the box. Yeah. Because you've already got four because your whole, the rest of your life is USBC. So it's a win for the environment. It's a win for Apple because Apple traditionally cheaps out on the AC adapter that it puts inside the iPhone box. It's not a true fast charging thing. And so all of a sudden, like that, like that becomes less of a complaint now because

everyone's already got a fast charger. Apple just, yeah, plug your iPad or Mac charger. It'll be fine. So they don't, right? I mean, if they switch to USBC and they don't put a USBC, and they don't put a USBC, you know, charger and cable in the box. They would have to. I'm saying there could be an option to not get one if you didn't want it.

That's all I'm saying. I've noticed there's a lot of anchor stuff in Apple stores lately. I think they're starting to realize, like, hey, other companies are better at this than we are. And that sort of like five-port USBC brick with a fast-charging PD port. Like, we don't even make this anchor. We'll just sell it in our stores for us. Yeah, Apple always refused to make that. In the early days of USBC when, like, I had my laptop fried and, like, everything was unreliable.

and there's still places where you shouldn't go on Amazon and just buy a random thing. You should do a little bit of research. It's still not as good as it should be, but it's much better now. But in those early days, every time I had a meeting with Apple, I'd be like, why don't you make a better dongle that has multiple ports on it? Like, why do you only make this one that costs $90 and gives me one USBC port? What are you doing? And they'd be like, oh, the ecosystem will fix it.

And I was like, no, they won't. They suck at it. The ecosystem is finally fixing it. It just took them four years. Yeah. You know, I don't know. I have a lot of lightning cables in my house. This doesn't bother me.

They already took away the port I want on the phone. They can't hurt me anymore, all right? I mean, it bothers me because everything else that I plug in, with the exception of my Kindle Oasis is USBC. It's great. That is true. I have literally one power cable that I carry with me in my bag. And whatever thing I've got in my bag, I trust that, oh, if I need to plug it in, I can.

except for my iPhone. I just think that the power delivery stuff is so confusing. If your laptop and your phone and your headphones, I'll take the same power brick, the chances that you will accidentally bring along your phone charger to power your laptop go way up. Sure. I think that's true.

Okay, Panos. That's the reason Microsoft didn't want to switch USBC on the surface. People will get confused. I'm like, I don't know, man, people aren't that dumb. You can look at it and like the big one charges more. Basically. All right. Well, I still haven't seen a great multi-USBC PD brick.

That's the thing I really want, right? Like the brick that has three 30-watt USB-C ports. Oh, that'd be pretty big. To get 3.30 watts, that's a 90-watt brick. Yeah, give me that. Yeah. All right. I mean, you can get, you know, one with like 10 USBA ports that's 90 watts.

Yeah. Okay. The CEO of anger Who was on the show Told me that GAN would let it happen So I'm just I'm wait That's the turn that I need right like I have a 10 USB USB a brick

It's awesome That's the thing that sits in like the main table And we just plug everything to that night And it charges You can't get it for USBC And I'm kind of like I'm gonna wait Haven't upgraded the Sony headphones yet

From the M2s the M2s Because I prefer micro USB charging on the M2s Whoa What Yeah. Why? Absolutely. Because I can't plug in my switch and my headphones and my laptop all into one thing yet. Like that literally that brick, I have like three micro USBs. You know that the new Sony's come with a USBA to USBC cable so you can continue to, you know, use your... I'm waiting for it to be perfect. Okay. You do that. Perfect. You know, the nice thing, though, is that you actually have GAN to look forward to. Like, this is what is, what is. of those cases where we really have a true technological breakthrough that is going to make our lives

better in the near term. Yeah. What a great time to be alive. I mean, if you haven't listened to the interview of the CEO of Anchor, literally 45 minutes of that dude being psyched about GAN, which is one of my favorite conversation. We'll link it in the show notes, but it's in the feed somewhere. Literally one of the most fun conversations I've had because he was just stoked about Gant. Okay. Can I say this, by the way? All the camera stuff they're doing. doing on the back, they're focused on the wrong side of the phone. You think so? The selfie camera is the one that matters?

20 megapixel selfie camera with a wide angle. You want to, you want to, I think we saw some rumors say they're forecasting basically flat sales again. You want to kick up those sales, fix that selfie camera. Because your iPhone's selfie camera right now is just horrible. Give me one of those, like, swiveling cameras. Nine to five says it's going to be upgraded and it will support a slow-mo recording at 120 frames for second.

They're going to go from 8 to 12. I'm saying full on three lenses, 20 megapixels on the front. Right? Like make those Snapchat filters sing. Yeah. They're not going to do it.

But that's, I'm telling you everyone would upgrade their iPhone camera if Apple is like, this is the best self camera in the world that takes DSL quality pictures. I'm not, I don't have any data

to back this up. I just know it's in my heart, but I feel connected to the world. That's my job. All right. That's the merch. I hope your heart is also connected to the world.

Please tell us if you would upgrade for a better selfie camera. You can tweet at FuturePol. You can also tweet at Backlon and Steter. You can tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. You can also listen to other shows. Check out why you push that button.

They put out a new episode yesterday about why people still use Snapchat, speaking of filters. That episode features the one and only Casey Newton. That's pretty fun. Ashley and Caitlin are doing a great job with that show this season. You're going to listen to it. Also, new podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network, of which we are the flagship. That's right.

Going on the weeds, I'm just yelling flagship at Matt Iglesis. One of my top five moments. But new podcast, Land of the Giants. It's from Recode. It's a show about the major tech companies that have reshaped our world. Each season focuses on one of the giants

and explores the ways of change our lives better and worse. First season out now. It's called The Rise of Amazon, hosted by Recode's Jason Del Rey, who's covered Amazon for the better part of a decade. He's a great Amazon reporter. This is a great show.

Episode 1 is out now. Go check that out. And that's it. Also, I'm going to say this last thing at the end. Tuesday interview show, Mark Cuban. Whoa, promo code. It's happening. Rock and roll.

Paul.