The Vergecast - Big screens, bigger screens, suitcase screens

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Dan Seifert discuss the iMac's 25th anniversary, the state of streaming, a TV in a suitcase, and a whole lot more. Further reading: Linus Tech Tips pauses production as controversy swirls They Review Movies on TikTok, but Don’t Call Them Critics YouTube is adding chat, highlights, and Shorts to NFL Sunday Ticket It’s official, people aren’t watching TV as much as they used to iMac at 25: a visual history of Apple's iconic all-in-one computer  How the iMac saved Apple For a generation of students, the iMac was a gateway to the future In a world full of laptops, is there a place for the iMac? Apple moved the end call button again in iOS 17  These iOS 17 Features Won't Be Available at Launch - MacRumors Everything New in iOS 17 Beta 6 - MacRumors   DisplayPort: A Better Video Interface | Hackaday  LG now sells this bizarre TV in a suitcase, and I must have it  Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 family review: easier choices  Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI OpenAI wants GPT-4 to solve the content moderation dilemma  An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban The Biden administration urges the Supreme Court to take up content moderation cases Special counsel obtained ‘some volume’ of DMs from Donald Trump’s Twitter account Microsoft to hold ‘special event’ in New York City on September 21st Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar 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. It's loading. Wait, you're locked out of your air conditioner? I turned it off. I turned it off. Hello, and welcome to our cast. The flagship podcast of gadgets and suitcases.

We're bringing it back. So much of what's happening in our culture now is things that have happened previously in our culture. And gadgets and suitcases is one of them. That's some old 1960s James Bond stuff. And LG is bringing it back. We're going to talk about that a lot. But I'm your friend, Nelai.

David Pierce is here. Hi, I really like the fact that we've talked a lot about how, like, on the internet, it's 2006 again. And with gadgets, it's 1958. Like, I love it. I'm all in. We need a whole suitcase for this camera. Alex Tran's here. I always like the typewriter in a suitcase.

Oh, that really had a nice appeal to me. Again, more things need their own bespoke cases that you bring around. A hundred percent. I mean, this is the exact same energy as. as the resurgence of the flip phones, right? Like, the experience of I want to use the gadget to I'm using the gadget. Right now, it's just like you just like tap your screen. That's not enough.

Make me do more mechanical stuff to use my gadgets. I want to have to like take a cover off of my television. I want to have to plug some things in. I want to like do incantations. Like make me work. One of those big pole switches. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I want to have to turn a key while someone else on the other side of the room also turns a key.

Like, that's how I want to use computers. This is going to be our new published process. It's like multiple key turns and then a blog post goes out. It's how you stay fast. It's how you stay fast. That's really how you know. Like, did I get it right? Like, I'm asking someone else to turn a key.

I better have done this correctly. Okay, so it's been one of those weeks where there's like lots of little news going on. So there's lots to talk about. There is a TV in a suitcase, which I suspect we're going to talk about at length. There's other bits of gadget news. There's a bunch of street. naming news. Trump's DMs have been subpoenaed from Twitter, which is amazing. We should talk about just encryption in general as a concept. Lots of that stuff. Dan Sievert's going to join us for the

second segment. This week was the 25th anniversary of the IMac. We had a big package about that. Lots to talk about there. And then, of course, we are pretty certain that there will be a new iPhone in September. So I'll talk about that with Dan a little bit. What's coming? It seems like the camera bump. Shocker, getting bigger on the iPhone this year. It hasn't gone the other way in quite some time. But let's start. There is one big thing happening in the world of tech and media that several of you have asked us to talk about. I've gotten some tweets. I've gotten some emails, I've gotten some Instagram threads. And it's what's happening at Linus Tech Tips. Big YouTube channel run by Linus Sebastian. We are reporting on it. We have a story on it. Alex wrote that story.

I sure did. People are talking to us. The basics are like fairly simple. And then what has happened is ever more complex. So gamers next is did a video. calling out some inaccuracies in Linus Tech Tips testing policies, a controversy with a GPU cooling block that ended up at an auction and probably shouldn't have. This spiraled into a lot of craziness around that channel. They released a video saying they were going to pause production for a week, that they'd gotten too sloppy, that they were running too hard, and now there are some allegations of sexual harassment in their workplace. That's a lot. From my perspective, is editor-in-chief of the verge. Our contribution to this insofar as we're going to contribute to it is to do reporting, is to make journalism. That's what we do here. So we're not going to overly comment or do analysis on that situation or have opinions about it. At this moment, we're going to do some reporting and figure out some real facts. That's what we're good at here. In particular, we're good at reporting on creators and we're pretty good at understanding the dynamics of tech creators. They sit.

right next to us. We watch them very carefully. We have lots of relationships with them. But we are not that thing. Like we are not in platform dynamics in that way. We are journalists over here. So we're just going to maintain some of that distance so we can put some reporting into the situation. I think that's important. That's where we're going to be for a minute. The one thing I will say is nothing to this situation specifically or that channel or that company specifically is that this pattern in media repeats pretty often. So when we were all, all baby bloggers, we were like, screw the big newspapers. Like, this is the beginning of my career in the mid-2000s. It was a bunch of bloggers being like, the institutional newspapers and magazines

are garbage. We're going to undo them. We don't need all their process and all their dumb ethic. Like, I did it. I was there. And now we have The Verge. And it's like hard fought over a decade later. And we have a huge ethics policy. And like our disclosures on this podcast, we do them so often that they're like a joke and we're like transparent about our reporting standards and we have a background policy and if you look at it you're like oh shit like we just recapitulated all of the things of traditional media because the pressure on us as we got bigger and bigger was that we needed that stuff and yes we got to reinvent it and yes we got yelled at a bunch along the way about not having some of it but it's largely the same as like what happened before we did it our way and

I think we did it better than some of the ways that it had been done before because I think that's important to try to improve. But we had to do it again. And that was like early blogging. I think in general, like the YouTube ecosystem is arriving at that place. So other big YouTubers, they have ethics policies. They have review. They talk about that stuff and they need that stuff because that ultimately protects you when you are at this scale for a lot of reasons. And you need it to build trust with your audience.

I think that will happen to TikTok, again, in a really short order. There's a story we quick posted this week in The Times about movie reviewers on TikTok on movie talk who insist that they are not critics. And they take money from the studios and they don't want to do negative reviews. And all that's, and that's just the beginning of the cycle. Right. They're like, we're not these old fuddy-duddy movie critics. We're something new. And eventually they're going to not be new.

I was like, that's what Harry Knowles said. Right. Like 1999 when he launched his movie site, right? Like we see this over and over and over again. There's a new medium. And everybody goes into like, you have new access. Like, right? There's different gatekeepers.

And so you're like, okay, I'm going to go become a rope. Go do the cool things in this medium and not do it like all the other people who've done it. And then you kind of discover that actually some of that stuff makes sense. And there's a reason they do it. Yep. Your desire for access can corrupt you in like very specific ways. that are repeatable and understandable and predictable, your need to have the audience like you,

especially on an algorithmic platform, very predictable at this point. Like, the pressures are the same, and they lead to the same outcomes. And in particular, the algorithmic platforms, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, they kind of destabilize groups

from working together. They are very individualistic. So, like, there is not, if you look at YouTube, David and I were talking about this. say, if you look at YouTube, big media brands are not successful on YouTube that can band together and say, these are our standards and we will enforce them. Like, generally that is not the case on YouTube. Generally, that is not the case on Instagram. It is all individuals. So individuals run into

these problems, like over and over again at scale. And then disaster strikes. Well, and that confluence you just described, I think, is the thing that is new, right? Like, I think what we were all going through, you know, in the early mid-aughts in the sort of blogging revolution was like it was about sort of teams and websites or whatever. And then the next thing that happened was very much the like individual creator. And there's this thing that happens that happens to people over and over and over on these platforms. You get big enough that you literally just hit the ceiling of what you can do alone. So these folks are building out and they're building big staffs. And what you do is you end up sort of exporting your own self onto other people as you

try to build a business because your audience is connected to you, like as a person. And scaling that is really challenging. And I think we've seen a lot of folks in a lot of different ways run into trouble with like, how do I make this thing bigger than me when in fact it is all about me? And that, that just becomes messy in so, so many ways that I think no one or very few have like really neatly figured out over time. Yeah. And I think it's also just unreasonable to say to an individual creator, like uphold the standards and practices of the AP. Right. While running at the speed of every single platform that exists on the internet, which is required for you to do in order to continue to be successful in your business.

Yeah. It's just not possible. Yeah. And I think that's just very challenging. And that sort of, this thing I said at the very beginning, like what we can contribute here is some journalism. I mean that. And we have the opportunity to do it because we are under no pressure from the algorithm to get views about this today. Like, we just aren't, you know, and that's something that we fought hard for. That's why I care about our website so much, right? We want to be apart from these platforms so we can report on them in a meaningful way. But I just see this bigger story is the thing that has caught my interest here. Yes, these allegations are serious, and yes, I think we need to report on them

and talk to all the principles. And we are among the few sites that have statements from some of the principles in Alex's story. I think that's important. But it's because we spend our time insisting on having statements from named principles in our stories. And we get to do that because we run our own little platform. And that cycle of, okay, if I'm totally dependent on YouTube, I have to do whatever YouTube wants me to do as a platform to get views. Like, you can just see how it just spirals out of control and no one over and over again. Like, YouTubers talk about this all the time.

And very few people have the opportunity to step out of that and say, look, I need to impose my own principles here. or I need to borrow some principles from other kinds of media that have done this before, instead of just it's a raw competition for attention and views on these platforms. So I just see that very clearly, mostly because I lived through it as a baby in a different medium. Like, this has been my experience in media. And we have been lucky to say, we're going to build our thing as a group under the brand of the verge. And if I'm not here, like the verge will persist because it is a brand that stands for something.

And like, we own it. Like, we own our platform. Yes, we are very dependent on other algorithmic traffic. Like, yes, I've talked about that at length. But at the end of the day, like, our website is our website, and we get to choose what goes on it and not really overthink it. And, like, that's the distance that I think is important that enables us to journalism. But that is really hard fought. Like, at no point is that not on my mind.

Like, Alex and David, like, no, like, this is what I think about all day long. That's what we're going to bring to the story. I don't want to overdo this conversation. I just see that pattern repeating, and it's at one stage for YouTube, and it's another stage for TikTok, and it's just going to keep happening as new media emerges. Yep. All right, so on that note, there are some YouTube news this week, which is kind of fascinating. YouTube is a platform in a really interesting space, right? There's YouTube shorts, and they're kind of adding some TikToky features, and then there's YouTube TV.

And I guarantee you this coming football season, YouTube TV is going to be the thing that they talk about. and promote and think about more than anything, which is wild because it's a cable bundle. It is and it isn't, right? So I've been talking to YouTube about this for forever. And the thing that is true about YouTube is it has all of the pieces of everything on its platform. Right? Like every single entertainment thing you can imagine exists somewhere inside of YouTube.

And the thing YouTube has never successfully done is put all those pieces. together, right? Like, you look at YouTube music and it's like, okay, you have a library of music. You also have every live performance ever. You have this incredible library of covers that people do. You have all this fan-made stuff. Like, how are you not figuring out how to give me every imaginable Taylor Swift thing all in one place? I'm serious. Like, no platform has more of that than YouTube. And it has never successfully stitched all of it together. And I think what it's trying to do with football is very much the same thing, right? So they paid what we've heard and reported was $2 billion a year for NFL Sunday ticket.

Huge amount of money. There's, I would say, very little chance that that is going to be like a strictly very profitable thing for YouTube, especially in the early days. But what they're trying to do is figure out, okay, how do we use that to essentially sell you a cable bundle, which like you said, is deeply hilarious. And we should talk more about the fact that everything is just a cable bundle again. But they're also trying to figure out how to make it YouTube, right? Like one of the things YouTube announced this week is that they're adding a bunch of

features to Sunday ticket. They're going to have live chat and polls inside a game, which to me sounds like just like a waking nightmare, like watching football while a million internet strangers like yell about football sounds awful. That's what Twitter used to be for, but I don't know, whatever. And they added a thing where there's now going to be a live set of shorts showing real-time highlights from every game on Sunday, which is like technically really weird and complicated, and I have lots of questions, but is a really interesting idea. And, They're doing all this stuff with creators that they're not really talking about yet. But basically what it seems like is YouTube creators are going to have kind of unlimited access to a huge amount of football content.

Yeah. Which is going to be really interesting and is the kind of thing that creators have not had easy access to before. So there's this thing where YouTube is like, okay, we have football. Like boil it all the way down, right? Like we have football plays that happen on a field. What are like all of the YouTubey things we can do with them? which I just think is like the most interesting question in the universe. And I think YouTube like has barely any idea of all of the answers that there are to that.

But it's going to be super interesting to like see how all of that shakes out. The creator side is the most interesting thing because there's no lack of football plays on YouTube right now. Yeah, but if you if you like steal it, you run the risk of like a copyright strike and it's like things can get kind of awkward. Like one thing I watch a lot of is people talking about soccer. Right. And there's like this weird game you have to play if you are not the rights holder where they'll show like awkward animated stick figure pictures of people moving around to like demonstrate tactics. Or there's one guy who does a great thing where it's like an overhead shot of what looks like the old Microsoft surface where he'll like move little things around on the screen. And people do these sort of clever hacks to get around the fact that they can't actually just use the game. And and what the NFL is now doing is saying all of these people who want to make things about football. all, like, here, have the game. And you've been able to watch highlights before, but you've never been able to, like, use them in the way that, like, you can use music.

And I think that is big. That's a good comparison to music, right? Like, all the social platforms, apart from Twitter, we should, we can talk about that briefly, but all the social platforms, basically have blanket licenses to the music catalogs. And then creators can use them, and there's content ID and blah, blah, blah. And the right tollers get paid when you use music on YouTube. I'm skipping over an awful lot of complexity there, but that's how that's supposed to work. It's fine. It's fine. Whereas sports leagues have not issued these sort of blanket licenses.

So this is like the first time with a major league in a huge setting that this has been enabled. I'm sort of curious how it works. I am too. Like, are they going to do content ID for football play? I just don't know the answer to that question. Yeah, YouTube is not super explained all of that. There's a lot left to do. And I get the sense there's a lot. They haven't figured out yet and I think are probably going to spend this first season figuring out. But like that's very much the road they're heading down. And I think it's really interesting. Why can't you just use the clips and comment on them? Because like with movies and film, like movies and TV shows, you can just be like, here it is. I'm talking about these two people talking. Because Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL will come to your house and beat you to death.

It's basically like, truly like sports leagues are at the bleeding edge of being incredibly litigious about people using their stuff that they're not allowed to use. And the leagues have gotten more permissive over time, I would say, because they've realized that having things on, you know, House of Highlights on Instagram and on the various accounts on different social media platforms is actually a good marketing thing. The NBA has been way out in front of this. They were like, oh, you want to like show cool highlights and make more people watch basketball? Terrific, knock yourself out.

The NFL has been kind of all the way on the other end of that spectrum where the NFL has been super, super, super protective of all of that stuff over the years. And even it has loosened up a little, but like it's the most valuable video that exists in the world in like a very real way. And they've always been super protective of it. And it's, you know, it's funny because they were going to sign this deal with Apple. And Apple was like, we want to do cool broadcast ideas for our VR headset. And they said no, because they don't know how that's going to work. They don't know where the money will come from. and they ended up with YouTube. It's like, we're going to use your clips across YouTube.

And presumably when creators use these clips, the NFL will get money, right? The same way that the labels get money when you use music on YouTube or TikTok. And I think the NFL just like deeply understands that. Right. Like, oh, automated licensing revenue. We understand that. Weird VR headset idea. Give us 35 years.

Like 100% the split that is happening there. Yeah, they're still stuck on, would you like to watch this game on your phone? Like, we're not nearly at VR yet. I guess I was just confused why it's not considered fair use to just do sports videos. So it is, right? Your problem is, fairies is complicated. You need to add some value. That's basically it.

The standard is transformative fairies. You need to make something new out of the clip. So, yes, if you're sitting there doing like deep analysis, Dan Orlovsky and like high, analysis of a play that he does on ESPN, and you're like using like several short seconds to like show a difference and you're like in it, you can do that. And, uh, for example, our sister site, SP Nation, you go to secret base on YouTube. They are doing this all over the place. And it is great. And that is fair use. It's classic fair use, like inside fair use. If you're just a creator being like, look at this cool play, you, you kind of have to fight your way through it. Right.

And like most individual creators, like we've been talking about, the infrastructure to have that fight does not exist for them, especially if you're like a new creator. So YouTube content ID and like the platform, like they don't want to have this fight at scale with the sports leagues who might all become lucrative partners in the future. So they just clamp down on it. And you just kind of like see that that back and forth dynamic happen all over the place. Whereas, you know, a bigger company, an ESPN or a Fox or whatever, like has an infrastructure to like push forward the fair use argument. And so, like, it should be.

It should be. Like, if you, if you are like a wealthy, independently wealthy YouTube sports creator can probably solve this problem. Yeah. But, like, most YouTube creators are afraid to, like, try because they'd rather just make the next video and make money instead of spending money fighting the NFL. Well, and a take down notice is always terrifying. Even if you're like, I'm in the right.

It's like, nope, this is terrifying. I have to burn my entire account and walk away. Not that I have any experience with that. And, you know, the YouTube. notice and takedown is all in the DMCA, so it's all compliant to that. And it basically kicks you out into like go have a lawsuit and come back and tell us how it went. Like it, like YouTube itself is not there to mediate the problem with you. They are there to comply with the DMCA, which is to say there was a notice like of a takedown and you can appeal the

takedown and like we'll do a thing. And like sort of at the end of that rainbow is did you call your lawyer? And once you get there, you're like, I'm just going to make for the next video. Like, screw it. Right? Because if you get, you know, a number of strikes, your channel gets It's a whole thing. And like I said, like big companies can solve this problem. Individual creators stuff like that can't. So it is like kind of great that YouTube realized, like, oh, we don't just want this in our cable bundle. We want this on YouTube.

And they created some financial relationships so that you can use this stuff like you can use music. I'm just very curious to see how the NFL reacts to lots and lots of YouTube creators using NFL clips the way that they use music. Because that is an uncontrolled environment. and we have no idea if the YouTube is going to put guardrails on it. Yeah, it's, yeah. There's a lot we still don't know. And the season starts, I think, like, September 7th. So I think what's available on that first day versus what's available at the end of the season,

I suspect it's going to end up pretty different. Yeah. But I'm very curious to see. So that's one part of YouTube. And then on the other side of YouTube, on the short side, they're adding more samples. So they're adding more music. A big part of the TikTok, like, win has been its relationship to the music and and breaking new records, breaking new sounds, planet of the base.

It's like a thing that is happening because of TikTok. So YouTube music is chasing after that. And then sort of next to all of that, more governments are banning TikTok. So NYC has banned TikTok on city-owned devices. It tracks lots of other cities and states. And then Kranz, you had an incredible reaction to this headline. Nielsen released some data saying, okay, TV viewing is officially down. Like people watching linear TV is now half the people.

fury. And you were like, fuck this headline. What is going on there? Okay. So the headline is, it's like, it's accurate. I'm not even sure I agree with that, to be honest. But there's a big asterisk. There's a huge, huge asterisk in that this is all coming from data that they only started gathering two years ago. So like all time, asterisks, we only started doing this two years ago. Okay. Technically, I feel like Nielsen would PR would come to me and be like, this is technically accurate. And I'd be like it is, but also it's not. It's accurate, but it's meaningless. And honestly, and we've talked about this a bunch, but there was also this like big financial time story the other day that was like, streaming is officially more expensive than cable.

And it's like, well, okay, sure, if you have this gigantic list of streaming services and if you have this made up promotional price for cable that no one actually has, sure, streaming is more expensive than cable. Congratulations. But we're at this point where, like, to me, all of this has proven, and this like goes along with a lot of people in the strike have been talking about with data transparency and stuff. Nobody knows anything. We don't know that Nielsen is the best thing we have and was reasonably good when most people watched all of their television sitting on their couch in front of their television. Even then it was a mess, but it was good enough. Now it's like it gets this one tiny sliver of how people experience entertainment. It doesn't capture mobile very well.

It doesn't capture a huge portion of how people spend their lives. And to me, I don't take anything away from any of this data except that, like, people watch lots of TV, lots of places, and nobody knows anything. This is my underlying theory of the television industry, is that no one knows how to measure anything? I think that's right. All the metrics are fake and agreeing to measure everything in the same way is a nuclear bomb waiting to go off for this industry.

Well, and ironically, now where we are is the streamers know, like Netflix knows, and is increasingly disincentivized to tell anybody. Because, like, if nobody knows anything. No, Netflix is going to do, because of the ads that Netflix is doing, they're going to do something with Nielsen, right? Or Nielsen wants that contract, which is one of the reasons I think that this headline came out. Fair. The headline basically is like, the streamers won, and then they're going to walk into the Netflix offices and be like, hey, we just said you won. like, do you want us to measure? By the way, disclosure, speaking of disclosures and transparency, we made a Netflix show, I'm a Netflix CP, you should go watch that show. Someone wrote us a very

nice email asking if we were allowed to talk about our Netflix show during the strikes. The answer is is that our Netflix show wasn't a union production, and it's also over. So I don't think I'm going to be arrested. But let me know. If you're in one of the unions, I want me to stop talking about the Netflix show we made two years ago, let me know. Anyway, that's one disclosure. Comcast through its NBC Universal Arm is an investor in Vox Media, our parent company. Alex is in the WGA. Our newsroom is organized with the WGA East. I have HBO. I've been watching Hard Knocks like a maniac. It's a crime that Hard Knocks is on at Tuesdays at 10 p.m. instead of Sundays at 9 p.m. like it should be. I feel very strongly about that. That's my personal bias there. I have really weird feelings

about Aaron Rogers right now. Is there anything else, David? I think that's it. I think those are all disclosure. That seems right. Yeah. That's like the solid list. I have a TV back there. That's disclosure. Anyhow, Netflix is under a lot of pressure to release these ratings. To sell ads, you need to tell the advertisers how many people watch your ads. That's going to happen to HBO Max. That's going to happen to Disney Plus. They're all running at these ad tiers. And that is the thing that is going to provide one set of pressures to release standardized metrics. So the ad market can decide where to spend their dollars. And the other thing that's going to happen is in the strikes, one of the demands from all these unions is tell us what shows are successful.

So we can calculate our residuals more accurately and get more money. And I think that's going to place another amount of pressure that might finally break this fever. But I have no idea how it's going to play out. Well, it sounds like that was some of the big news this week was that the producers said, oh, yeah, we're now going to give you more access to data. We don't know all the details yet. But they finally agree to like, yeah, it makes sense that you guys should probably have more data, which everyone knew before this. But it's nice that they agree finally. Not to get into the mechanics of that negotiation, but the streamers were going to have to give up this data to advertisers.

Like, it was going to happen just because of the nature of that market. So I think this is like the concession they were most willing to give because they needed to standardize and synthesize all that data. The question is whether it's Nielsen or paired analytics or whatever, who knows. But the idea that the data needs to be standardized so everyone can understand it, that's coming from the ad market. That's not coming from that negotiation. I think it is a good concession and a useful one to all of us. But it's eventually an advertiser is going to say, how many people saw my ad?

You just have to have a real answer. Okay, we should take a break. There's been a wild ride in the first segment, I have to say. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to dip 25 years into the past and talk about the IMAQ with Dan Sefer. Get your brains ready.

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Dan Sefer is here. Hey, Dan. Hello. Welcome back to the show. You had a big package this week. Our friend Jason Snell contributed. Staff Firstmore on the Verge contributed. This week was the 25th anniversary of the iMac. There's a lot to unpack.

That means a lot of things. Yeah, it means we're old. It is incredible to think that the Mac was a younger platform when the IMAC came out than the iPhone is now. John Gilbert pointed out when he linked to Umar's visual history of the Mac. So the Mac was 14 when the IMAC came out. The iPhone today is 16, which is. just bonkers to think about where these respective products are in their impact on the world. But the IMAC really changed a lot of things. Tell us about this package, Dan.

Yeah. So, you know, 25 years since the I'm first IMAQ went on sales, like August 15th, 1998. The IMAX, as Jason really pointed out really well in his piece, it was the product that really turned around to the company's fortunes. It allowed them. It was successful and popular enough to basically develop the iPod, which then became successful, popular enough to develop the iPhone, and then Apple becomes $3 trillion company. So without the IMac,

like you don't have any of that. And Apple at the time was like very on the brink of not existing anymore. And all of the products that had been developed in the 90s were like these kind of beige boxes, very typical looking, not a whole lot of creativity or design were put into them. But then when Jobs came back

and teamed up with, and they brought out the iMac and just kind of like changed everything in terms of like the perspective of what like a home or a consumer electronic in your home could look like it had this like radical design it was a thing that was like people looked at it and they wanted it whereas if you looked at a PC at the time you looked at it to maybe want to use it and like do things on it but you didn't want the object itself it was just a box whereas the iMac was an object and then that design was so influential It not only permeated throughout Apple's lineup, influencing the design of what the software looked like on Macs and then further on down the line, but it also made translucent plastic products really popular at the turn of the century all the way down to the infamous George Foreman Girl that looks like an IMac. I had never seen that before until this package became a thing, and I'm now obsessed with this translucent George Forman girl.

It is the thing I want most in the world. If anyone listening wants to buy anyone. Do not buy a used George Foreman grill. What if it's in mint condition? And then it's got the bun warm. A product that can never be cleaned. No one has ever perfectly cleaned a George Forman girl. It cannot be done.

I clean ours constantly and it's just fully disgusting. Wait, you have today in 2023 a George Warman Grill? I am reasonably confident that the George Forman grill I have is older than both me and my wife. It was like my wife's grandmas, and it just somehow was in our house. I don't know how it got here. Maybe we should just switch this segment to George Hormon girls. It just, I use it all the time. It's great.

What do you use it for? Are you making like stuffed burgers, like George Foreman? Yeah, constantly. No, it's like, I'm just saying if you have leftover chicken breast and some cold bread and you want to throw it on the Foreman grill for 90 seconds, eat lunch, Bob's your uncle. It's your pinniti press. Yeah.

No, but back to the eye. Listen, David's recipe blog is another story for another day. Oh, yeah, that's going to be successful. Talking about getting the views. Put some cold chicken on a 30-year-old George Forbler. I want to hear the story about how your wife's grandmother grew up building with the George Forming Girl. Will we live or die today at lunchtime with David Pierce? Do you know those things that just end up in your house?

You're like, I didn't buy this. I never asked for this. I just have this now. That's the Foreman grill in my house. Like, George Foreman himself might have brought it to our house for all I know. Like, I sincerely don't know. But the thing about the IMac that most blew my mind, Dan, was like reading Jason's piece, the full, like, yolo energy of this thing from Apple in 1998 where they're just like,

oh, you want a floppy disk? Screw you, USB. You want a thing that looks like a computer? No, here's this weird. Pixar looking piece and nonsense. There's just like, you just get this vibe from Apple that I kind of love where they're like, look, we know if this doesn't work, we're screwed and realistically we're probably screwed anyway. So like here's the weirdest thing we can think of. Do you like it?

It's got a handle. And people did. Yeah, exactly. Well, so I was talking about this on Instagram threads with a few people. You know, people keep saying they want a desktop version of Instagram threads. This is like the thing everyone says. We say it. Mark Zuckerberg is replying to Jay Peters saying it's coming.

soon because we say it a lot. That's a real thing that happened this week. What they mean is a web version, right? The desktop application default that most people think about is a web app, especially for platform like Instagram threads. No one is out here asking for like a native Win 32 Instagram threads application. I mean, I would like a native app. Yeah, but that's like a very small.

It's just like not the thing people are asked. If Instagram's response was you can run the iPhone app on your Mac. using Apple Silicon. Some nerds would be very happy, and most people like, what the hell is this? I just want to run it my browser. And Apple, in particular, with the IMac, that was the moment that that began, right?

Until that computer, desktop applications on computers were one, generally not connected, right? The web was just starting. That was the Wintel monopoly, the height of the Wintel monopoly. Even like AMD in that moment, was not like a serious competitor to Intel. So you had Win 32 and you had Intel and that was the application environment for 99% of everything

And the Mac was this like Rump platform that Microsoft sort of openly talked about supporting So they wouldn't be a monopoly Like they're like as long as we have this competitor We won't get sued by the Justice Department Little did they know This is like this is a lot like in that moment Apple basically said there's this idea of a network computer

And you know the original digital was like a $500 terminal With just a web browser which we finally got into with like Chromeboxes. But that was like sort of the genesis. And it got bigger because it couldn't really build it then. But no floppy drive was so you could send files. Radical idea at the time. There were like entire issues of Macworld that were like, how will we survive?

I think that was like Walt Mossberg's one criticism of it in his review was like, no floppy disk. This is bullshit. And then importantly, the reason that it was a viable product to sell to people was that they were like, you can just plug it into. of the internet and use the web, which is the thing you want. You don't want Microsoft Word running on an Intel processor on Windows. You want a web browser that can bring you all this cool web stuff. And if not for the web and web standards, this computer is a gargantuan flop. Right? It looked cool as hell. It dropped all the bullshit. You only really had to plug in, what, two wires. Like, that was a very famous commercial. Like, you plug it in and there's no

step three, Jeff Goldblum, like that whole thing. It signed you up for internet access through an ISP, and then you can just like run a web browser. And now we're just 25 years later, people are like, I want a desktop version of Instagram threads, and they mean a web app. And there's just a straight line from that idea to this idea that I think we often underestimate. Like, that's the revolution. The phone is very important. It just came at the, it's just the last piece of that puzzle. The first one was, oh, we can sell a computer that basically runs a web browser.

And like, if we do a good job of that, we can become the Apple that we are today. Which is why, like, the Johnny Ive thing became so important, right? Like, they timed giving a new crap about design perfectly. Because, like, I think Jason has this line in his piece that's, like, on the internet, nobody knew you were using a Mac. And I love that because it's true. And it's like, oh, you could just buy the computer that looked cool and was blue and had a handle. And all the stuff you wanted to do on the internet, you could still do.

And it was like Apple being a hardware company worked for it in a sort of unique way in that moment because it had no ecosystem play. It was like all we can do is build a cool thing and hope that people want to use it because we don't have any other moves. Yeah. The PowerPCG3. Have you heard of it? We're going to walk away from this as fast as we can. And all that stuff is really hard for them. I think we underestimate how Apple's very good at processor transitions. Now we take it for, granted. They're like, we're going to run the Macs on Apple Silicon. We're like, oh, you're good at this. In that moment, right, they were stuck

on the G3 architecture. They were stuck with the, IMAQ launch with OS9, which if you, I'm old. That was not a good operating system. It was sweet. What are you talking about? You could customize your text. You could. This is an operating system that famously until the very end,

you could bring the entire OS to a dead halt by holding down the mouse button. And that was like by design. Like it was not a native multitasking, multi-threaded OS. I think until the very, very end of OS9, you could be like, you know what? I just need to everyone stop for a second. You're just like, hold down the mouse button and be like, we're waiting.

We're waiting. Everyone chill the fuck out. Like we're waiting. And they had to do OS 10, like all this stuff. They had to do. But they needed to sell enough IMAX to get there. That kind of brings us to where the IMA is today, right? That's a history.

I will say that you should look at the visual history that we did. And we should all stop and take a moment and recognize the IMAC G4 as the pinnacle of computer design. Are you crazy? Wait, can I tell you a story about the IMAC G4? Yeah. So I bought, let's see, this is probably 2011. I bought an IMac G4 because it was the only Mac I could afford, which you will realize if you do math, that it's a nine-year-old computer that is long since out of date and no one is caring about it.

It was, this is the only Mac I could afford. I bought it from a stranger on Craigslist. We met in, I believe it was Union Square. And he literally like went through an existential crisis giving me this computer that I think I paid like $150 for. Yeah. Because he wanted it so bad and regretted so immediately selling this thing to me. That literally like as he was handing it to me was like, ah, but it's so I just, I don't need it. But like, oh, I love it.

And I was like, yeah, like, that's why I want it too. Like, I want this old-ass computer because it's so cool looking. The G4 was my first ever Mac period. And it was so old and so useless at that point. And I loved it to pieces because it was so cool looking. It was just, I genuinely think it, I agree with you. I think it's the best looking computer ever made. I loved that thing.

It's a shame they only did it for one generation. Like, it lasted for like a year and a half or so. And boom, right on to what ultimately looked like a big iPod. Wait, I have a story to tell about that. But Cranz, I want to hear your bad opinion about the IMAGG. Like, did you guys have to use that G4 iMac? Yeah. David used it.

I mean, he still used it. It's right next to his George Warman Grill. It's a family heirloom. At the time. Because it was not great. Like, I don't know. The G3 was just, there was something much more charming about the G3 iMacs, like the big CRTs and everything. Well, I don't know.

I think the G3 was almost like cartoon-like. And then the G4 was a much more serious, this is the future-looking thing. Hold on. We got to get this time one right. There's the original IMAX-Bonded blue. Then there was the rainbow ones, right? The five colors, those are the ones you might be talking about, Alex.

That's the G3. That's what I had, yeah. That's the IMAX G3. Then there is a bizarre interregnum where Steve Jobs got on a stage, and so we have some exciting new IMAX to offer you today. And everyone thought he was going to do a flat pedal iMac. And he was like, these motherfuckers are called Dalmatian and flower power. Yeah.

What? Literally, people were like, what are you talking about? And that was like the last gasp of that shape. Go look at a blue Dalmatian iMac. It's beautiful. They cannot be found. Oh, my. This is the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

Like Apple went across the world and country, collected them all and was like, you memory hole this. Steve Jobs. famously walked off of stage when he announced those things after sensing the vibe in the room and said it should have been fucking ready. And what he meant was the flat panel IMAX should have been ready. Yeah. This is a real thing. You can go look this up. I just Googled this and I'm looking at these for the first time in my life. And first of all, everyone should do this and look at these because these are incredible. And what these look like to me is if somebody took a normal IMA and

then like you know those really awful like $1.99 skins you can buy on your phone that like from Amazon that you just like apply to the back of your phone and they don't quite stick right. And it's very clear that somebody just like took a picture of a picture of a picture of a wallpaper and then put it on this. That's what this looks like to me. They are nuts. We had them in my computer lab in college and they are nuts. Like they're just nuts.

So I was going to say, I was in college around the same time. And I had to do IT. So I had to like work on everybody's computers. That's what my piece on the IMac is about. Is this why we vibe? Because we were both like college IT people. Yeah, we were both like... I don't think we've ever really talked about this,

but I've known it in my heart for quite some time. Yeah, that's why. It's why. That's why we always judge David. He was in high school being like, oh, boy. Jesus, where did that just come from? Damn, that's just like David took a shot. I was out just like partying and getting late.

Sorry, guys. We had computers to talk about. We were having a great time over there. Dan, suspiciously quiet on what he was doing in this period. I was an IT person in high school. There we go. We were the cool kids. I had a high school job as a PC tech for local hospital.

I think it's very obvious that this group of people was nerds in high school. Alex, continue your story. And David. But no, you could tell, like, basically how much people's parents spent on them for school based on which generation of Iback they had. So somebody comes in with a Bondi blue, you're like, ooh. You got the hand-me-down, huh? They had like the blueberry or something. You're like, okay, okay.

And then they had that Dalmatian one. You were like, wow, you're loaded. This is a straight class system based on IMAC colors that you have been posed on your customers in the College of IT shop. There was like a middle period that we haven't talked about, like the IMAC TV where the shells got clear. It was all cool.

But I'm saying that was the last version. And then this is the thing I wanted to say about the G4. It was a Steve Jobs moment unlike any other where they released the IMAC G4, And he was like, everyone else solves this flat panel computer problem by putting the computer behind the display. And he did the thing. He like put up a bad version of that drawing. And he was like, this isn't the right idea.

We made it a sunflower. And the thing was on the cover of Time magazine. I think it was a Stephen Levy piece on cover of Time magazine. And Jobs and Johnny I've told an entire story in Time magazine about how they were trying to solve this problem of where the computer should go with the flat panel. And they were walking and they saw a sunflower and the bird's see. sang and Johnny looked at Steve and Steve looked at Johnny and they were like, we did it. And then 18 months later, like, we put the computer behind the display. They kissed passionately in front of the sunflower.

But it's like they sold that thing so completely until they were ready to do it the right way. And then they dropped it like a stone. They're like, we actually solved the problem. And here's the thing you've always wanted. And it has been that thing ever since. And just that thing where they so completely bought into the soul. they had at the minute until they were ready to do it the way they wanted and then they never talked about it again they what dead dead to the world like no company can do that now like even

apple basically cannot do that anymore right there are too many installed devices there are too many old things to support like all this stuff to be like for 18 months we talked about sunflowers never remember that again erase the sunflower from your brain, now it's a white piece of a white rectangle, and that's the future of the IMAC. To me, in the history of the IMAC, that moment is more about Apple's

culture than anything else. And it's sort of like unremarked upon because they successfully memory hold the IMAC G4. But it was that shift and I was like, oh, they are ruthless. Like, they are ruthless about getting to the right answer as fast as they can and not talking about

everything they did in the past. To this day, like, you think about a car company. Ford's like, we made another Bronco. It looks like the old Bronco. Like, here's yet another Mustang. Like, most companies are very excited to trade on their past in a way that Apple,

maybe a little bit more recently. But you will note, Apple said nothing about 25 years of the IMac. Yeah. They just came and went. They had two opportunities to say it this year. The announcement in May, and then the in-store in August, which is when we turned our package. But, yeah, not a peep.

Yeah. And I And I think all of that Apple culture is pinpointed in that moment where literally this computer was on the cover of Time magazine. And then 18 months later, they're like, here's the white one you wanted. And like, that was it, like, the end. We have this other piece here. It's really about the future of the Amac, right? Like, where does it go now?

It's in a weird spot. Yeah, yeah. So Monica wrote a really great piece on, you know, nowadays Apple's Mac business is 75% or 80% laptops, and then the rest is like really niche computers, the Mac Studio, the Mac Mini, and then there's the IMac, which was updated in spring 2021 with the M1 chip. It's got the new design, and it's basically just been parked for like two and a half years now. We've got M2 chips and other laptops or other Mac computers. It's not in the IMA for whatever reason. But like the IMA has been this kind of thing that just kind of ebbs and flows for the past decade or so.

like Apple will release an update and then ignore it for like four years. And then we get an IMAQ pro and then it gets ignored for four years. And then we get a new M1 iMac and then it gets ignored for however many years. So Monica's takeaway was ultimately that like Apple isn't ditching the IMA or getting rid of the IMA. That's just kind of the way, the place that the IMAX sits in today's Apple is just much less prominent and less influential than it was to. decades ago, or certainly two and a half decades ago. So it's just like a different product. What's interesting to me is that the original IMAQ that we talked about and all the generations after that were basically, save for the IMA Pro, pitched as consumer products

and consumer computers. And the current IMA is still kind of pitched as that consumer computer, whereas the other Mac desktops are really pitched towards professional, creative, niche use cases. But Apple doesn't really talk about the IMA all that often outside of It's like our initial launch when they showed yellow IMAX and kitchens, which is a very odd place to put an IMac. Especially that it doesn't have a touchscreen. Doesn't have a touchscreen, yeah. You need your touchpad, your trackpad and keyboard in addition to your mic and your kitchen. Can I run a theory by you guys that I think is right but have no actual data for just lots of anecdotal evidence?

I would bet that people keep IMAX longer than any other single Apple. product. Like, I would bet the average use lifespan of an iMac is the longest of any other Mac, because the screen is very good. The thing works relatively well. You're not going to notice when the battery starts to give out, which is often the first thing that goes in a lot of laptops. And the, like, inertia of upgrading is so big because it's just the whole thing.

If I have a desktop, if I, like, want to upgrade the Mac Mini I'm sitting here with, I can keep everything else I have and just slot in a new Mac Mini, upgrading your iMac is like, upgrading your whole office all at once. And also, like you said, Dan, these are consumer things that people are like, this is like the familyest computer that Apple has, right? And I think if you, if you have like a 2011 iMac that's just like sitting in your den, the like leap to upgrade that is huge. And the reasons to upgrade that when it's like a pretty good screen and the only thing that's really wrong with it 12 years later is that it's like pretty slow, my guess would be that like the average lifespan of one of those things is just absolutely off the charts.

And if I'm Apple, I'm looking at that and saying, well, I'm going to sell people a computer. They're going to upgrade once every 11 years. I'd rather sell them a MacBook that they're going to want a new one in three. Yeah, you know what people do with their MacBook errors, they drop them. They spill things on them. The battery part of this is the big, like that's a big part of this is because those batteries go and and you can't replace them on newer laptops and stuff. So it's just like your food barred.

Whereas your iMac can go forever. I think somebody on this call might be recording with like an ancient iMac. I'm looking at it right now. It's a 2015-27-inch i will say that I... And you're you. Name another gadget you own that is eight years old. The cameras are coming up on that, the D7500 coming up on that. But that's like a...

an emotional, like, I should upgrade the camera. Like, I take a lot of shit from this team for sliding that camera. But, you know, it's never done me wrong. Old man still got it. This computer I basically use for this. I run one web app on it. I run Riverside to do this show, and it's this setup, and everything plugs into it. And it's fine.

It is radically over spec. So I, our studio, Vox Media Studios, was upgrading their computers many years ago. And they were just going to recycle this. And I was like, I'm taking it. Because we're just like sitting on the curb. And I was like, can I? Can I? Can I?

I don't know. More? And they're like, don't tell anyone. Now I've told everyone. So it goes. But it has, it has, the key is it has 32 gigs of RAM. And this is like the key to longevity of every computer, in my opinion. It is like, it is just, it has massively more RAM than it needed in its time.

And that means it stays forever. Which is why I tell everybody who buys a Mac now that 8 gigs of RAM is not enough. Like, that to me is more of the evidence of Apple's planned obsolescence than anything else is eight gigs of soldered ram. Like, mm-mm, no, no, no.

No, don't do that. And it's just weird. And I think, David, you're right. The IMac sits in a lot of places. My parents have an ancient one.

They refer to it as the mainframe. Aw. It's very good. And they go to it when they want to do anything serious, like logging into the bank. Yep. Because they want a big screen

and a browser that feels safe. Because you can't use your phone. Why don't parents like bank apps? Because they feel like their phone is not serious enough for logging into the bank. Yeah. Okay. I think that what you're describing, Eli, and what David, you described as, like, it's sitting in a den.

That is, like, the concept, the original concept of the IMac. It was a shared family computer. And it's just that at this point, at this time, that doesn't exist as a product for a lot of people in functional ways in their lives. If you've got kids in school, they're not coming home and sitting at a desktop to do their homework. They're doing it on a Chromebook that links up to their school's network and goes with them to school. Or they have their own personal devices, an iPad or an iPhone or whatever smartphone. The shared concept of a family computer is like not something that really fits into the modern day life.

Whereas the other desktops in Apple's lineup, the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio, etc., are, they have like purposes that fit into people's lives as like devices that they work on all day. But the IMac as the family thing doesn't really exist anymore. That was like, I mean, the IMAC itself was a response to everybody had family computers. Like in the 80s and 90s, if you had a computer, it probably wasn't in your room unless you were like just richy rich, right? Like, you had a lot of money. Alex is like, get that blue doll nation computer out of my face. Yeah, right? Like, you didn't have that.

Like, everybody that, so the IMAC, when the IMA came out, it was like, oh, this is a computer where it's not just the parents using a beige box. Like the kids can interact with this, which is why my brother watched a bug's life on repeat. every day over and over and over again on the damn thing. And nowadays, computers are cheaper. They're more affordable. And laptops have become much, much more affordable than they were at the time. Like, a laptop was still insanely expensive at the time. I think all of my laptops until I got out of college were hand-me-downs because my parents were like, absolutely not. You do not get a brand-new laptop. You're going to drop on its face and break. And then we have to pay for it. Get out. But the prices have come down. So it's like, it's much more affordable. It's much easier to go.

buy a Chromebook for a kid, then be like, okay, everybody's going to use this communal computer in the living room. And also, like, we have to have a space in our living room carved out just for the computer. And then you got one kid on the computer, another kid watching TV, and they're all yelling at each other. And now they can just all have phones and be quiet in another room. Or the school dictates that they have a Chromebook, which, like, takes the decision out of your hands entirely. And then, like, that IMAC that you have sitting there is, like, not used by them because it's not the tool that fits into the rest of their curriculum. Alex just made a striking case to bring back the computer room.

I was just going to say I'm in on this. I want a computer room. That was the best. Like you were always sitting in like a dining room chair that you should not be sitting in hunched over it. Everybody had that horrible office max furniture. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about the desk and the hutch and the whole thing. And you roll a little hush down.

All right. Here's what I want. Vergecast listeners, send me photos of your computer rooms. Yes. Not your modern gamer rooms. I mean your childhood computer rooms. if you have such a photo, I just want to look at them.

And maybe we'll run like a thing about computer rooms. Who knows? If they're good enough. Mine's cursed. I do not want your weird gamer den with your LED lighting and your Wi-Fi's. I want your 486 tower

with a turbo button with Encarta open on a CRT. That's the room I'm looking for. Yeah, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Show me where you came from. I had a gateway with the cow logo. That was those are the days. Yeah. Give me your origin story in a photo of your computer rooms.

All right, we've talked about the IMA quite a bit. There is an Apple event coming up. We're assuming in September for iPhones. That's a pretty solid guess given the decade plus of iPhones coming out in September. iOS 17, betas are out. Dan, any thoughts here? They keep moving the end call button, which seems to be driving people wild. I think, you know, other than that, I think iOS 17 is going to be for a lot

people, and we've kind of said this in our preview coverage already, that it's going to be a pretty small update across a lot of things. And some people are really going to appreciate little things like interactive widgets. I was going to say my one quibble with the characterization of small update is that every app developer that exists on the internet will not shut up about how excited they are about interactive widgets. It's going to get full crazy with the interactive widgets, and I'm very excited about it. Maybe it'll just be more exciting when it launches and those app developers can actually put out their work. Whatever, Dan, you're going to check off a to-do on the home screen of your iPhone and you're going to freak out.

It's going to be great day. It's going to be so great. I can't wait. At the grocery store, checking off the do's online widget like I could have been doing on Android since 2010. Coming. But yeah, I mean, other than that, it's going to be the 17th version of iOS. What are we expecting to change here? I'm excited because the autocorrect situation is bad.

It has, now that people have pointed out, so consistently to us, it has gotten worse in a way that is impossible to measure, but it's definitely worse. And I just, I'm just looking forward to this update. The vibes are off. Give me your LLM powered auto correct. Like, I'll take it. Anything has to be better than this. It's weird, right? If you guys notice, it's gotten worse. Everybody judges me, they always know when I'm on my phone because there's always at least one horrible, confusing typo that like Apple was just like, no, I got you. I'm going to change this word. It totally makes sense. I'm like, no, it doesn't. It's a terrible context.

My theory is that Apple is just trying to push us towards that humane AI pin. They're like, what if you don't use this computer? What if you just talk to you hand instead? Just, hey, guys, what's up? I have thoughts about the show we're watching. By the way, the humane AI pin, this is totally random. They announced this week that they're going to launch or do something in October on the day of an eclipse. That's what I got for you.

They put out of me, you should watch the video. They call out our friend Sam Schaeffer in the video. That always makes me smile. It's like the only time they all light up is when they talk to Sam. Sam's not even in the video. He's behind the camera. And they're like, Sam, and they all smile. And that just made me happy.

But they're like, a momentous day is coming when the sun will be blacked out forever. And then you will talk to your hand. And that's like, okay. So sometime in October, they're going to release this pen. And we can all see what's up. The talk to the hand puns. We just got to get those out of our systems. It's probably just me.

I just got to get that out of my system until that's announced. I did the post about a porn hub, Mind Geek, suing a restaurant in New York City called Donor House. It's a kebab restaurant. And I was like, don't make the joke, please. And everyone in the comments made the drug. You just let other people do it. Like, it's right there. It's like, okay, I'm going to resist.

Do it for me. I was like, I'm just begging you. And everyone's like, here it is. We said it. Fine. Okay. We got to take a break. We're going to come back and do a lightning around with Dan.

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And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling. A-ha moments in quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to be bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have

comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.aI slash vergecast. That's Claude.a.ai slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. We're back. It's lightning around time. There's a lot going on in this lightning round. So much good stuff and some like sad stuff, mainly good stuff. There's also an email where the subject line is HGMI disgusts me, which is just We have found our people.

I was like, they get us, they get us. I keep, I use this line that I ruthlessly stole from Casey Newton all the time, which is anybody can get traffic, but it's impossible to get an audience. And it's like, oh, we have an audience. Like that, those are, you have to trust us to send us that subject. That's a relationship. And I appreciate you, from Sal.

Anyway, his point is that displayport is superior to HTML because of a piece in Hackaday. Hackaday, by the way, I personally have a long history with. There's a long intertwining of Hackaday and gadget back in the day.

We'll link the Hackaday piece about Displayport being better, but HTML disgust me. Sal ends his email by saying, I feel like I've been red-pilled by DisplayPort, which is unbelievable. It's a very very, Very good. Look, displayport is packet-based, and I understand the point. Fine. Okay. Lightning

around. Cranz, you've got the best one. Take us away. Are you ever, like, having a dinner party with your friends outside? And you're like, I really want to watch some TV. So you go, you get your little suitcase out of the closet and you put it out and watch your TV because it's in the suitcase. And then later, you're like, oh, man, I'm going camping with the buddies. I need to watch TV on my camping trip. So you bring your little suitcase with you. LG was like, everybody needs to be able to do that. Not just people who built a suitcase TV. The rest of us need to be able to do it.

So there's the 27-inch, stand-by-me-go. To be clear, not stand-by-me-me-which would make sense. Stand-by-me. And not Migo, the Intel-based mobile platform. I'm just, I'm going to stand-by-me-migo. Like, I refuse to break it out into multiple words. It's beautiful. it can last three hours on a charge

so you can get through one of the Lord of the Rings movies. Wait, I just, like, there's so much room for, it's a suitcase. Wait. But it's a 27-inch street. It's huge.

You guys, I have a revolutionary idea. Make the suitcase bigger. Give me more screen and more battery in a bigger suitcase. My 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip has a bigger battery life than this television.

11 inch smaller screen. You're telling me that it's just the pixels. But it can run an M1 chip. Well, it runs WebOS, which is probably the reason it only gets three hours. My favorite part of LG's promotional images of this is there's two young, very fashionable,

hit people sitting by a pool. And the guy is using the TV to skip a track on the world's largest music widget because it's 27 inches in size to just go to the next track and then they didn't pay for any licensing so the song is song titled by artist's name If you

It's a pop by the way This is what I was going to call out to Perfect call out from Dan If you're in your car pull over now The link is in the show notes Go look at this picture When marketing agents sees come up with briefs for products.

They're like, here's what we want people to feel. Here's how we're going to execute it. I want to know what they wanted you to feel. When they executed this photo, right? They had to do it. They had to get some tables. They had to get a lady with a book. They had to buy white linen clothes for this gentleman.

He has a drink here. They put a lemon in it. They opened the suitcase. They were like, they instructed him to be pointing at the next track button in what looks like a clone of Apple Music but is not Apple Music. All of that happened. Like a series of decisions happened with intent. And I'm just dying to know.

Like, I don't believe this TV is a touchscreen. I think it is actually. It is a touchscreen? In other points about this TV, one, it can rotate 90 degrees so you can watch TikToks on it. Oh, it is a touchscreen. It has table mode. Yes. And then you could play chess on it with the touchscreen.

as they show in other photos. It's got Dolby Vision. It's got Dolby Atmos with four speakers. It's 1080P Dolby Vision. Oh, it's going to be, yeah. Like, you're going to watch your half hour of a show because you probably forgot to charge it, so you've only got 30 minutes of time,

and you're going to watch your 30 minutes of the nanny in Dolby Vision. And it also has to get bright enough so you can actually see it outside. So it's got to run at like 1,200 nits. It has an outdoor picture mode, which acknowledges. is the fact that you are out in the world. Like, Nilai, if we're just going to go down the road of, like, how are we marketing this thing?

The idea that they are giving is you're going to bring this thing. You're going to put it in the trunk of your car. You're going to go camping. You're going to open up the trunk of your car. You're going to open up the suitcase. You're going to swivel up the screen, turn it on, and you're going to put on a video of a, quote, cozy, crackling fireplace while you're out camping. Is that not what you do when you camp?

You don't put the iPad out? Like, oh, we could make a fire and you say, what do you mean? I've already made a fire. And you just pull the screen up. And that's it. I just want to point out, if you watch their video, they are all sitting around an outdoor dining table and she opens the suitcase and opens the screen and showing the fire. And it makes you watch a YouTube video. It's all very good.

You say, I have made fire every time. It's amazing. Every single person on our staff wants to buy this TV. I don't know why. That's the wrong way to think about money. It's only a thousand dollars. Many, like an iPhone is a thousand dollars. Every outdoor dinner party is just transformed with this thousand dollar device.

But if you pre-order it, you get a free X-boom 360 speaker, which is $250. So really, it's like the TV is free. Wait, basically, yeah. Again, if you know what the intent of the man changes track on music player picture is, just like, please let me know. Touch. I'm just dying to know. I'm also dying for the first person to take this as a carry on on a plane and just

bust it out of the tray table. Yeah, just like, the TSA will never let you get on a plane with this thing. They are going to look at this thing and detain you for the longest time ever. Yeah, they're going to be like, what is this music widget? We need to know right now. But then you show them the fire and it's going to be fine.

All right. Dan, what's your lightning round? I'm going to plug myself. I reviewed the three galaxy. Tab S9 tablets today on the site. And I'm just going to say it. Android tablets are interesting this year. Really?

Yeah. They're back, baby. Finally. Android tablets. It's a year of Android tablets. When you say they're back, they never left. Do you mean that they are back in a way that is competitive with the iPad or back in

the sense that someone is releasing them? I would say that they are actually pretty interesting and good. The interesting part of the interesting part of the, part about it is Samsung's been releasing high-end Android tablets that have been pretty decent for a few years now, but it's been only Samsung. And now there's like actual competition within the Android space. You could buy a pixel tablet or you could buy a one plus tablet or you could buy a Lenovo tablet or something like that. Samsung still makes the best ones, but it also makes like the most expensive ones. So there's like actual variety. It's there's

different ideas happening. There's different experimentation. The software's gotten a lot better. there are actual ecosystems that have been built out. If you're a Samsung phone owner, it makes a lot of sense to use a Samsung tablet because it works together in the way that an iPhone works with an iPad. Wait. Dan, aren't you a Samsung phone owner?

I am. Use a Samsung tablet or do you use an iPad? I would say that nobody should buy their purchase decisions based on my own personal device choices. Attracts. Because you will be entering regret. I've seen Dan use Dex.

I used Dex. Like, Dex is fascinating and, like, surprisingly capable at this point. It used to be a hot mess. But I think I wrote this entire piece on Dex. And I spent quite a few days actually working on Dex to, like, test the tablets and stuff. And it's, you know, pretty good. Dex is good now. I spent a decade going to meetings with Samsung being like, you know Dex exists, right?

What if you did anything to it? And they were like, meh. it's Dex. It's like a thing we put in slides, but no one actually uses. And now they've made it into a thing. You can actually have multiple windows in a way that isn't bad on your tablet.

Like, what a concept. It feels like Stage Manager, if you took all the binders off of Stage Manager, and all the restrictions off of Stage Manager, and you did the thing that you want to do with Windows on a screen. That's what Dex is. Okay, I'm just going to, Dan,

I'm just looking at your scores. I'm just evaluating enter a tablet, once are back. So you are a commenter on the website. Yes. I am the people. So you gave the tab S9 and 8, which is fair, although 16 by 10 is... Yeah, that's my main complete with the S9 is 16 by 10 is still a little black. And then the S9 Ultra, which is the one that like, you know, the YouTubers just waved around in TikToks and be like, look at this. And I got it. I was like, yep, look at that. But you gave that one a six because it's gigantic and ridiculous. Yeah. And $1,200.

It's more expensive than the suitcase TV, too. Yeah, that's true. Well, it has a processor. Yeah, it does anything. Outrageously priced. And then the S9 plus you gave a six. And this one just, bleh. I don't even like looking at it.

I feel like there's required to be one tablet in every lineup that just makes no sense and no one should buy it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, in a vacuum, the S9 and plus, great. You know, it's got a great screen, great performance. It's got all the benefits that the others have. It's just, it's too big to, like, comfortably use for tablet stuff. And then it's, like, if you are going to buy it for productivity, just by the Ultra, because that gives you the space to really be productive in a way that the Plus doesn't. For $200 more, you can have the one

that people go, whoa. Right. I mean, that's like, that's this product. Like, you look at an S9 Ultra, you're like, holy shit. That's a thing that exists. You look at the S9 Plus and you're like, well, I'm going to buy an iPad. That's that product. It's like, this is the one that is the most head-on with an iPad. The bezels are

big. I would say that the bezels are not that big. Oh, and this photo, it looks like here. Maybe they look that way in the photo. You know what it is? It's because that photo is a photo of a video in 16 by 9, so it's making it look bigger. But if you look at the side, you can see the bezels on the side. They're not that big.

So if you watch anything, if you watch the vast majority of TV today, it'll look like it has huge bezels. Yeah, because it's great on an iPad. 4-3 movies. That's my favorite. Okay, this is my defense of 4-3. 4-3 is the God's chosen aspect ratio for portable computers. Our Thornton Savior 4-3. I'm saying, 69 and 1610 screens are horrible.

1610 is the worst of all worlds, right? Because you watch a movie, you still get the weird letter boxing, and then you try to do any work. or hold it, God forbid, and portrait. And you're like, well, I'm just a guy with a rectangle. Everyone look at me. And iPad, like, 4-3 is like, you make one compromise on watching video. You make one compromise. And everything else is great.

169, you make one compromise, which is useful for it, which is that it's useless for anything but watching video. Oh, my God. The thing is enormous to have. See, that. Good Lord. That's a thing. It's a platter.

This is the ultra. We have not, we have not spent enough time in the show. We're just, look, the audience has grown. We've added a second episode. We got to do an entire episode that's just like, there's one correct aspect ratio. No, you're wrong. The correct aspect ratio is 3-2 on laptops.

That's it. There's no other good answer. 4-3, you just said the only compromise with 4-3 is watching video, which is the main thing most people do all the time. It's like, remember when Macs were good except the keyboard? sucked. It turns out keyboards are pretty important. To Samsung's credit, these devices are phenomenal

for watching video. Like, the screens are tremendous. The sound is tremendous. These are entertainment machines. It's just personally, if I'm going to spend $1,200 on a device, I'm going to want to do more than just watch a movie once a week or whatever on it. And so, like, I do want to get more out of it.

When do we get, like, a 2.39 aspect ratio on a tablet? Like that Toshiba laptop that had the 21 by 9 I want to feel like I'm watching a movie in the 60s on Cinerama. Like, I just wanted, wow. Christopher Nolan was like, I made a laptop. You're not going to believe how wide it is.

That's all I want it. All right, David, what's your pick? Mine's quick. I've been following all this Google SGE AI search stuff for a while. And Google this week, in the guise of like, relatively, you know, minor feature updates. date rolled out a thing where you can now use SGE as you look at web pages and it will summarize them for you and you can like interact with web pages through Google's AI. And it's like that's not a small thing. That's like an enormous leap in Google making Chrome like the AI hub of the

internet, which is messy and weird and complicated and fascinating. And they're also putting more AI stuff in the sidebar of Chrome. So it's like very quietly AI is coming like front. and center to the entire web browsing experience through Google. And like you talk about kind of AI all the way down. Like we're going to get to the point where Google's AI is summarizing AI generated web pages that you found through Google's AI powered search. And it's just all going to get real, real, real weird. But Google, like Bing has been so loud about like, we are putting Bing everywhere.

Like Google is being very quiet about it, but it's basically doing the same thing. Yeah, especially the sidebar stuff. The interesting thing about SGEE right now is Google featured snippets are still often superior to SGE. Like the AI will like overwrite in a like a precocious seventh grader. And it's like, no, I just needed the answer to the question. I don't need all this preamble. It can't answer a question. Like if a question has a simple answer, it can help you like explore the universe of your question.

But it can't just be like seven. I just can't do that. This thing, though, this SGE features where it's summarizing pages, there's something going on in the background. I don't know what it is. If you work in New York Times, please tell me what it is.

There's something going on with the New York Times and Google and Open AI that I have not been able to piece out. But if you look at New York Times' Robots.t. It allows everything. It allows Google, allows OpenAI.

It literally is star. Whatever all out. There's very few things are blocked, which is fascinating. We got actually a question for a reporter when Open AI rolled out its crawler that once you have a crawler you can block it. So they just rolled it out and someone asked us, hey, why do you block it? And the reason is actually contained in a piece David wrote about Niva, which is the internet has been so fixed for so long that most places only allowed Google and Bing. Because Bing powered all the other search engines for so long.

So you only needed to allow Google and Bing and everything else was just cost, right? like an infinite amount of crawlers coming over your pages is just server cost you don't need to pay because there's Google and there's Bing. So most publishers, most pages only allow that. So Open AI now that they have a new crawler, they got to go get permission from everyone. The Times allows everything. But then there was a report this week that they might sue Open AI because they're really mad at them and they want a deal. And they have a deal with Google that no one knows the terms of. I'm telling you, there's this thing that is happening with AI on the web and all these features that are quietly rolling out,

in the background of it is like a nuclear explosion of lawsuits. It is just coming and it's going to be wild. And we're going to talk about it at the Code Conference, September 26 and 27, in California. I love it. It was good. I got there in the end. Actually, my lightning around ones are

all AI2. Once. You'll notice yet, Nelai said ones because unlike the rest of us, Nelai is incapable of following the rules. Well, it's two that are the same one. It's two that are the same thing. it. So OpenAI rolled out GPT4 to do content moderation, which is terrifying. But everybody treated this like it was a new thing. They were like, oh, they're going to have humans looking at the

production of the algorithm and then they're going to feed it back into the algorithm. What a novel concept. And it's like that's how it has worked forever. Yeah. Like Facebook and YouTube in particular have been like, this is a problem and maybe AI can solve. Like, do you think Google has not been trying to do AI and content moderation on YouTube for ages. They've been doing it. That said, Casey asked a bunch of experts about it and platformer and go read it. The experts seem to really like this idea. They think it is faster.

They think they can build some tools. Importantly, they think a bunch of startup social networks can use tools like this. You don't need the resources of a Microsoft. You don't need the resources of a meta or a Google or whatever. There's something there. Importantly, if you go to Europe and all these other places, they have laws in the books now that say you have to be able to explain your content moderation decisions, and it's not clear if GPT4 can do that. It can't.

Or they got to build it. Yeah, it can't yet. Part of what they said they're doing is part of the process is asking the model to explain itself. And as we've seen, like, the more recursive you get with these LLMs, the weirder and worse they all get. But it's an interesting road to go down. And I think you're right.

Like even if all this does is get everybody to like you can plug in. play C plus content moderation. Like, that's already a huge win for the internet. Are we going to have a point where the content moderation, like, where they ask the chat GPT to explain itself and we're going to have to talk about how it just claimed that it was like a unicorn that longs for death? Like. I don't know.

Like, I think we'll see. I mean, the flip side of this, which, right, we're talking about putting a robot in a position to censor content is in Iowa school district. There are book bans across this country. now. This is a real problem. They decided they weren't going to read the books. They were just going to ask chat GPT to summarize all the books in the library and tell them which ones to ban, which is like a pure abdication of 2D. Like that is the laziest shit I have ever heard in my entire life. If you are going to ban books, don't, right? Like first. Second, like do do the work.

Be like, we, we asked a robot to tell us what books to ban. Like, this is the, the beginning of the use of the tool beyond just the cool demos you see on TikTok, it's, oh, lazy people are going to make stupid decisions with it that impact, like, lots of things. This was, I mean, this was also kind of a protest because they're being required. They have to go do it all themselves. Like, they didn't, they weren't given a list of books. They were basically said, you'll be, like, subject to big fines and stuff if you don't

put together your list of books and have it done by certain time. So that's why, like, they were like, okay, well, we'll just do it fast. have chat GPT do it because you don't care about the kids. So why should we? It was kind of like my read of why they were doing it. A protest chat chat gbt banning. Still not great. Still like books getting banned and kids don't have access to important media. But like, well, I got attention from us. So there's that. But I would say this is the flip side of we we want us to be able to explain itself. When you start making decisions like, we'll let the robot summarize the book so we can ban it from our library, you really need that robot to be able to.

explain itself. And so that's why I said it's two things that are kind of the same thing. Like, we're going to put it in charge of speech on the internet. It should really be able to explain itself because people, once you start saying this is an acceptable thing to do with it, people are going to use it in truly bizarre ways. Last two things, we mentioned this briefly at the top of the show. The special counsel, Jack Smith, has obtained Trump's DMs from Twitter. We won't go into it except to say, this is why we are constantly banging on about encryption. And if this brings our two parties into alignment on the need for end-end encryption on our platforms, I'll take it because that's why you have it. Also, your Twitter DMs have never been deleted.

They just get hidden when you hit delete. Use encrypted platforms, people. Use them. Don't DM people on Twitter. All right. Last one, Kranz, there's a Microsoft event in New York coming up. Yeah, September 21st. We're going to get a Microsoft event.

sounds like we'll probably get some surfaces because they frequently do one in like September, October. There's usually a big surface event, so it sounds like we'll get some of that. Who knows what else? Microsoft's been very busy this year, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see other stuff, but who can say? I believe they're going to talk about AI, would be my guess. Yeah.

If I had to just kind of wildly stab in the dark, I think it's possible that the word co-pilot will be mentioned. When you turn on the new surface, it's like, have you broken up with your wife yet? I'm here for you. Yeah. Speaking of Microsoft, AI, Code Conference, September 26, 27th, Microsoft CTO, Kevin Scott.

Definitely going to talk about AI. September, by the way, is going to be nuts. We assume there's going to be an Apple event, the second week of September. There's going to be an Amazon event on the 20th. This is going to be on the 21st. Code is then MetaConnect, I believe, is at the end of September. Like, it's going to be full crazy coming back. Like, for all the VergeCats listeners who are like, oh, talk about more.

more gadgets. Oh, it's coming, y'all. It is coming. Yeah. These August Vergecasts were just like, here's a grab bag of cool stuff to talk. No, no, no. Dead focus. Yeah. It's coming. It is four-hour episodes. All right. Everyone go get some rest. Pull over in your car, take a nap by the side of the road and get ready for September. Put the fire on your suitcase TV and take a nap. All right. We got to wrap up. David, you've got a new newsletter called installer. Tell people about that. Yeah. It's basically just designed to point people towards all the cool things. things that exist on the internet. We've put out one issue so far. The second one's coming out this weekend. It's been really fun. A lot of people got really mad, which I assume is a sign that it's

fun and interesting and things are going well. We're changing up a bunch of stuff, learning new things all the time, the virtual.com slash installer and also send me all the cool things. The best thing about this newsletter has been that everybody now tags me and funny things on the internet. It is awesome. I love it very much. Go subscribe and install. It is very fun. I will say I will not apologize for not deleting two-factor notifications. The number of people are like, why do you have all these unreads? I'm like, they're like, five-year-old two-factor

notification. I typed in the code already. And they're like, go delete it. I'm like, I'm not using my time that way. You can come over to my house and blow an hour deleting old notifications. Iowa 17 is here to save you, Neelai. It will delete them automatically. It's going to be beautiful. I cannot wait. The number of emails I get where I'm like,

yep, I saw that subject line and I refuse to take. If the phone could just read my mind that it's like, your order is ready is not a thing that I need to take any further action on. You need like Superman's laser eyes and just like blast them. Yeah, just to be able to squint at the phone. That's what Humane's going to do. Don't worry. You just tell your hand. Like I got it.

Delete all the bad emails. All right. That's it. That's a Vergecast. Send us photos of your computer rooms. I'm dying to see. The good ones. Not your modern garbage ones.

They're probably great. In a couple weeks, we'll ask her those two. Yeah, but I'm looking for, you know that tone of wood that was sold in the office mac? That, I want that. All right. We love you. That's the Vergecast, rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week.

We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Box Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.