The Vergecast - Bring back the iBook, you cowards

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

The DoorDash problem just became Amazon's problem. Perplexity's Comet browser is allegedly stealthily shopping on the internet's largest mall, and the folks in Seattle want it to stop. It's just one example of the fast-moving power dynamics on the internet, as AI companies try to change the way we search, shop, and do everything else. Lots of companies are not going to settle for being dumb databases, and Nilay and David discuss how this fight might play out. After that, the hosts talk about the reports of an impending cheaper Mac with an iPhone chip, and whether that might mark Apple's true return to consumer laptops — or be something else entirely. Finally, in the lightning round, they talk Brendan Carr, late-night shows, party speakers, and sonic logos. Lots and lots of sonic logos. Further reading: Amazon and Perplexity have kicked off the great AI web browser fight  WEB WAR III  Apple is planning to use a custom version of Google Gemini for Apple Intelligence  OpenAI launches its Sora app on Android  Perplexity is going to power AI search in Snapchat.  Easier access to AI Mode, if that’s your thing.  Google Gemini’s Deep Research can look into your emails, drive, and chats  Google Maps taps Gemini AI to transform into an ‘all-knowing copilot’  Amazon is building Alexa Plus into its Music app  The AI industry is running on FOMO  Apple is reportedly working on a cheaper Mac laptop with an iPhone chip  iOS 26.1 lets you tweak Liquid Glass, and it’s out now  YouTube wants a piece of the late-night TV pie.  Apple TV’s new name now comes with a new sound  Brendan Carr votes to eliminate cybersecurity requirements Epic and Google agree to settle their lawsuit and change Android’s fate globally  I’m amused by how Google is complying with the Epic injunction.  xAI used employee biometric data to train Elon Musk’s AI girlfriend  Into the Huluverse: The sonic evolution of Hulu Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm your friend David Pierce. Fun. The Vergecast is fun. We make disallowing user agents fun. That's the slogan of this episode of the Vergecast. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil I Patel is here. Hello. So this is a fun week on the Vergecast because you just get to do a sort of a victory lap on like a thing you've been trying to make happen for a long time.

But before we get to that, two little bits of housekeeping. I have a piece of information for you and a request for everybody right at the top of the show. We have a lot of news we're going to get into, I promise. But real quick, the version history episode this week is the Amazon Firephone, one of the great gadget disasters of like The Verges Lifetime, I would say. Super fun episode, go check that out. And also we are now like deep into production on season two of Virgin History. We have six episodes

are in the middle of right now and you and I are doing two of them together, Eli, and I, to everyone who is watching and listening to this right now, I want questions from you and I want to hear your experiences about two gadgets in particular.

The iPhone 4, which I think you could argue is like the most interesting story of the iPhone since the very first iPhone and TiVo. Those are the two episodes you and I are doing together.

We're recording them in two weeks. So you have two weeks. If you want to call the hotline 866, Verge 1,1, one, tell us your stories, ask us your questions. We want to incorporate more, like, feedback into the show. This whole first season we recorded, like, months ago. So that was very hard to do.

But now we're much closer to real time. So iPhone 4, TiVo. We have a bunch of other stuff coming up. We're doing Google Glass. We're doing the Nintendo Power Glove. We have all kinds of stuff coming up. But for you, iPhone 4, TiVo, send us questions, send us thoughts. I'm wearing it.

I can do it right now. Can I say the one piece of feedback, now that you've revealed that we taped these all months ago, the one comment you and I are both getting on the episodes that were on. People are like, they look so rested after their break. And I'm like, no, this was before. I look so rested before I had another child. Like, yes, that is correct. It's like, no, we, that was pre-restedness. Yeah. By the magic of editing, we recorded all these episodes in May, just so everyone knows. This is, this is a long time ago. It gave us a lot of time to do stuff, but now we're like, we're much more in the groove of like, we're going to do them and then we're

going to ship them, which means we get to like integrate people a lot more. And when David says stuff, what he means is AI replace our faces with younger versions of ourselves, younger, more rested. We had time to Robert DeNiro style de-age our faces in order to get them into version history. All right, let's get into it. So we have a lot of AI news. I think all sort of centered around this subject of like distribution and like how do you get to AI, which is increasingly becoming a key part of the AI story.

We're also going to talk about some Apple stuff. We're going to ask questions about the Trump phone that will not have compelling answers. We have a whole bunch of stuff to do in the lightning ground. But let's start with AI. And let's start with one very particular AI story, which is this fight that started this week between Amazon and perplexity. And my very short summary of this, and then I want to get deep in the weeds on this is basically Amazon sent a cease and desist letter to perplexity saying, you are allowing people in Comet. the AI browser that Perplexity makes to buy things through our agent on Amazon. Stop it.

And Perplexity said, this is Amazon, a big company bullying us, a startup into playing its games because it's trying to do all kinds of shady stuff. These two companies are now at a very legal crossroads fighting about what I think is like a core piece of the future of the web and is a thing you and I have been talking about on this show for a long time and that you have been, you know, I would say trying to make a thing for a very long time. I've been trying to make fetch happen for 18 months. Yeah. So what is the big picture here in your brain? Can I, can I zoom out one step farther even? Sure. Last week we talked a lot about AGI and the panel that would declare the existence of digital

God. We've got some good suggestions on who should be on that panel. We'll set that aside. That's one version of what pays off all this investment, right? Sam Altman declares G. Jesus, right, and then that was worth it. The other version, which is just as loud, if you're paying attention, is we're going to do the app store again, right? We're going to move the economy onto AI, and instead of having app stores on mobile phones, we're going to have apps and agents and services inside of an assistant that can help you out. And it, like a funny piece of that puzzle is like the investor class doing it, is all

of the same people who got rich doing the app store. Yeah. Right. It's all the same VC funds. It's literally all the same characters. They're just like, can we run this playbook again? And hilariously, Microsoft, which famously missed out on a smartphone, is like, all in on AI, can we move the app economy into AI agents and co-pilots and all the services

will be here? Right. Because they're all pretty mad at the app store. Right. Like in general, we've talked about that forever, right? Yeah. The dynamics of Apple and Google's app stores and all the lawsuits and blah, blah, blah. Developers don't love it. If you are Elon Musk, you're loud about how much you hate it. If you're Mark Zuckerberg, you're loud about how much you hate it. To be clear, it's like a jealous mad from all of them, though, right? It is like the biggest, deepest, most valuable moat anyone has created in 15 years and everybody's very jealous of it. Yeah, and Apple's revenue, every year, they're like, our services revenue increased. And it's like, yeah, dude, like, you take 30% of every button push on the iPhone. Like, if there's more iPhones, you're going to make more money.

goes. So that's like the big dynamic. Can we make digital god? Can Sam Altman declare that the Pope and the Dalai Lama have found Jesus in the GPU? That's one version of this pays off. The other one is can we do the app store again? Can we create a new operating system for all the applications? And then we'll be the ones who collect all the rents. And that will make all this worth it. Right. I don't know. Like that's the push. Like we can see it. We don't know how it will be built. That's like a good ongoing story, very vercasty, like, there's a format war about MCP and how Apple might do and all this other stuff happening there.

There's a distribution war. Will Apple just win with Siri? Right. I don't know. But what you've written about this week, and I think what we see from Amazon and perplexity, is a major front in this fight is, can we just do this in the web browser?

Can we just put a web browser out there that clicks around for you? And then we won't really need to do APIs and App Store deals. We'll just do the, clicking for the user and we'll charge the user some money and then it'll be fine. And we've seen like 50 cuts at this already, right? Open AI launched

computer use over a year ago. Google has experiments in Chrome that it was showing off an I.O. You wrote this week about all of the new browsers that are out that have basically the same idea. And what I've been like screaming for the past year and a half is yo, these application providers

are not going to let you do this. And the thing that I've been trying to make happen is calling it the DoorDash problem. because if you run a DoorDash or Airbnb or Zococ or TaskRabbit, being disintermediated by Sam Altman is not your dream in life. No. Right? Like letting the agent come and use your service as a commodity provider of sandwiches

actually destroys your business. If you're Uber and Lyft, letting the agents show up and book cars and literally just like ask both websites and pick the cheapest one and the user never knows what happened actually destroys your business, right? You don't get to upsell into all the things that Uber wants to upsell. You don't get to do dynamic pricing. You don't get to do credit card deals. All the stuff that makes you money on top of the core service kind of goes away.

And so I've spent a year on Decoder asking the CEOs of these companies, what are you going to do about the DoorDash problem? And they all, you know, like down the line, like Brian Chesky, Oliver Kraz, the CEO of Zuck Dock, like the CEOs of Uber and Lyft. They've all been on the show. I've asked them all these questions. I've asked Sundar Patra this question from the other perspective. What are you going to do when these people say no? And basically they're all like, we're going to work it out. Right.

Everyone's a good actor. Everyone knows what's happening. We're going to work it out. The money will move out. And perplexity, the startup just went and did it. Right? They're just like, we're just going to click around in Amazon and buy stuff for you. We're not going to ask for a permission.

We're a startup. And Amazon, I think, is saying, no, we're definitely not going to let you just do this. Like, we are powerful enough to say the Amazon software experience belongs to us. and you are not allowed to just show up on our website with a robot and click her on behalf of the user, unless we agree. And I think there's a lot of ways to look at this. But even if you read the comments and the stories we've written about it,

people are like, well, it's my robot. I can go make it do whatever I want on the web. And then there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, this makes sense. Like Amazon has the right to say no, right? And it's terms of service. Like you can't just scrape Amazon. They can say no to other stuff. And then there's the, should you like pass a fee on?

Should it cost more to let the robot shop on Amazon for you? Can Amazon detect that it's perplexity and charge higher rates to cover the loss it might foresee? Like there's a lot of ways to cut this, but because it's perplexity, they didn't make a deal. They just started doing it. And I think Amazon is coming down as hard as it can to basically cut off the idea that this is acceptable at the past before the deals get made. Yeah, it's fascinating to me that it's Amazon in particular doing this. Like it made me think of, you know, the war that has sort of been going on in your email inbox for years where Gmail is desperate to pull information out of your email to get shipping information and be able to track your packages and all this stuff. And that becomes like, if Gmail can know what I bought on Amazon, that becomes like an incredibly powerful marketing engine for Google, Amazon does not want Google to have that.

So Amazon is like increasingly obfuscating all of the stuff that it sends you. in the receipts and confirmation emails, they're in this like cat and mouse game because Amazon is desperate to hold on to every single tiny data and logistical advantage that it has. Maybe more so than any other company I can think of. It is like desperate to be the whole thing

and not let anyone into any part of it. And here comes perplexity. It's just like, according to Amazon's season distress letter, what perplexity is doing is showing up with its agents and with its bots and pretending to be Google Chrome so as to be completely impossible to detect

from Amazon. And if you go to Amazon's robots.tXT page, as one does from time to time, Amazon does not allow any of the AI bots. Like anyone you can think of, it is blocking.

And all of these bots have a long history of doing sketchy stuff to get around it. They present themselves as other things in order to crawl their websites. But Amazon does not want you to crawl Amazon.com for a whole variety of reasons, right?

And in this case, what Amazon is alleging is that Comet, perplexity's browser, just pretends to be Chrome. And so it just shows up and is like, what's up? I'm a Chrome browser. Nothing weird is happening here. I would like to buy some toilet paper, please. And on the one hand, Amazon's case here is like what you're being is sketchy, right? It's not the crime. It's the cover up.

Like, they're doing a thing in a deeply untransparent way. That seems pretty straightforwardly to me to be like a nice legalese way into stop. doing this with your agents altogether before we have any legal precedent for what to do about AI agents. But it is just, it's, it's the way everybody is doing this is very telling, right? Like, like you said, perplexity kind of has no reason to make a deal with Amazon. It also has no leverage with which to make a deal with Amazon, right? Like, perplexity is this company out here, loudly proclaiming that it wants to buy TikTok and loudly proclaiming that it wants to buy Chrome. And meanwhile, it doesn't have two nickels to rub together to buy either of those companies.

It has nickels. I mean, it doesn't have the nickels to rub together for those. It doesn't have billions upon billions of nickels, but it has a substantial number of nacles. It has enough nickels. It's doing fine. But I think perplexity in this space is by far the least powerful of its competitors. Right. Next to it, you have Google. You have open AI. You have Apple. You have some of like the biggest players in tech. Comparatively, perplexity is very small. So it's actually probably in their interest to be. the ones willing to play fast and loose because they just don't have any other moves.

Like to some extent, I admire the growth hacking of it all. But it is, it's tough when you run into Amazon because nobody will fight harder on this exact front than Amazon. So it's really fascinating to me is thinking about Amazon in the context of being a service rider like Uber and Lyft and DoorDash, which you don't usually do, right? No. You think of it as this monster. And then, but you zoom out. And you're like, oh, they are just sort of a commodity provider of drive. drop-ship Chinese garbage.

Like, at the highest level, right, the highest level of abstraction, you can type any phrase into Amazon and some products will appear and most of them are drop-shipped. Like, that's just the way it goes. And they're all from the same five factories. Yeah. And they're all called like barkful. It's like IKEA, but with more consonants is all of the Amazon brands. And that is a, if you, you know, if you're operating the Amazon retail store, yeah,

there's some stuff you have that no one else has. but what you really have is convenience and what you really have is prime and what you really have is like habit. And it is maybe easier to break that than it is to break. I just use Uber to get a car. Like in a really weird way,

having the agent go shop for you and find you the lowest price and the thing you want is more compelling than open Amazon because you're used to it in a way that I'm going to open both Uber and Lyft and get a car versus I'm already an Uber subscriber and I'm just going to, like, open the app that I'm used to because I'm used to how it works.

Right. Like, that might be fine. And when I talk to Dara Castro, the CEO of Uruh, Ronda Coder, or David Richer, the CEO of Lyft, they're basically like, yeah, we are, those are our customers anyway, right? Like, we're fine. Like, their credit card deals and the stuff are actually a moat. They're like a meaningful moat for us, and we're just going to, you know, change how we do services and make sure we have enough drivers, and we know how to play this game.

We were already commodities. Like, it's fine. I talked to Oliver Kraz of CEO, Zok Dock. And he was basically like, yeah, try. like try to make a Zoc Doc. Like, good luck. Like, this sucked for me. Like, he's my, like, I, but it's basically, like, do you have any competition?

He was like, no. Like, come on, opening. I try to make a list of all the doctors and the insurances they take and comply with him. You don't want to do that. Just pay me the money and I'll do it for you. Like, I'll be your pipes, but at a very high rate. Wait, can I read you the thing that he said specifically? Yeah.

So this is Oliver Carras, the CEO of Zoc Doc, talking to you on Decoder about the Dordash problem. He says, here are the questions you should ask yourself. Question number one. Are these agents simply going to completely displace yourself. Anyone who's running a business that interacts with the real world knows that's not going to be the case because of the learning curve, because of all the edge cases and all these things. Even if the AIs were to start learning about them, we're so much further ahead we can always deliver a better experience. And this is my favorite part. So this is the Coast of England

problem. Our cartographers have been at this for 20 years. There's no way that anyone would catch up to us anytime soon. So they're not going to put us out of business. First of all, first time I've ever heard of the Coast of England problem. Love it very much. Second, this is like a lot of confidence from somebody in Oliver's position. Do you, do you, I have a hard time buying this theory for almost anybody. Like, if, if we are at a place where we're going to boil the world down to a series of databases, no database is impenetrable. So to me, this is the, the heart of what I've been calling the DoorDash problem, right?

If you are just a commodity provider of listings, you're dead. Yeah. Here are all the sandwiches. Right. There's no way to charge more for being the best list of sandwiches. in a world where the AI can look at all the lists. By the way, we should specify the Coast of England problem is that there's always more detail to study in the coast of England, like fractally infinite detail on the coast of England.

And so he's like, we will just always have more information. That is maybe too much confidence. I would say we interact with the United States health insurance system is maybe not too confident. Even the AI can't figure out the United States healthcare industry is like a better argument. But, you know, right after he said that, I asked him, who's your competition? He said no one. And that's what he means. Right.

Right. It's like, we are effectively a monopoly for this service. It's funny to think of Amazon as not having that kind of moat, right, is not having anything that really keeps you shopping on Amazon. If you can get a lower price for the same product somewhere else, that the AI can just go and find you. Yeah. And some of these other service riders, maybe even DoorDash, maybe even the commodity. provider of sandwiches has more of a moat than Amazon. My frustration is when I'm calling the DoorDash problem for a year and a half,

try to make it happen. By the way, if you work at DoorDash, can you get your CEO, Tony, to come on the coder so I can ask what the doordash problem? That would be great. We're working on it. I did make DoorDash problem happen. And then Amazon shows up out of the blue, and they're like, we're the biggest commodity provider of all.

And they get into this fight with perplexity. And now everyone, I think, can see it. And it's going to be the fight. Because if you think the money is making the money. is making the next app store, making the next great interface for computing, right? I want shoes and it just goes and gets you shoes, then this is the fight.

Because you might not have to build all the APIs, all the operating system keys, all of the business deals in the back end. You might just be able to let your web browser go run around the internet and go through the front door and say, hi, I'm Google Chrome. Can I loot your store shells? And Amazon might not be able to do anything about it.

Yeah, in fact, there's very little Amazon, technically speaking, can do about it. It's what all of these companies are getting away with. It's very easy to hide what you're doing until it becomes obvious how much bandwidth you're pulling. And at that point, it's too late, right? Like, once by the time I've downloaded your site, it doesn't matter whether you noticed or not. But I think the thing to me is like, I've actually kind of done a 180 on this because I think a year or so ago, I was a believer that actually there were going to be a lot of companies that would be happy to be dumb database. is that it's like, okay, Uber makes most of its money when you get a ride, right? So Uber, in theory, is incentivized to give you every possible way to get a ride. And it's like, they were playing this game with Alexa a while ago. And like Uber is one of those companies that it's like anything with a screen gets Assassin's Creed and like anything that will let you do transactions, Uber tends to be there. But it does feel like the AI thing in particular is a breaking point on that. Because it's like not only is this going to book me a ride that I then look at in the Uber app to see when it's arriving, right? And I think this is the thing that I missed at first, right?

It's like Uber is very happy to offload the like first part of the transaction because what it does is pop up a notification on my phone that says your Uber's going to be here in five minutes. And that's where Uber makes all of its next money is getting me to open the app and do more things in the app and upgrade. And like it funnels me in that direction. And what agents are doing is just completely subverting every part. part of that process, right? So it's like, it's not getting me into Uber's ecosystem. It is just bypassing it entirely. And so your business becomes exclusively about whatever fees you're taking when I book a ride, which presumably the perplexities in Open AIs of the world are going to want a piece of as they go. Like Open AISO was on stage at a Wallster Journal tech conference this week saying

that like the only way that any of this money works for Open AI is if it participates in the revenue of the companies that it partners with. So it's like, if you, use OpenAI's tech to create new drugs. Open AI should profit from those drugs, which is like an insane economic theory. But it's like if this stuff gets big enough, that's what all of these companies will ask for. And if you're Uber, that's death, right? Like all of a sudden, this thing is not only going to disintermediate me, it's going to ask for some of my margin, is the end of so many of these businesses. That is already imposing pressure on. Right. Because all of your other parts of your business are going away. Yeah, I don't know. Like the,

But none of that makes sense to me unless you think about Apple in the App Store and the fact that the entire economy is mediated by smartphones. And Apple has just been taken 30% of that economy for quite a while. Well, and there's a long list of stuff that hasn't really existed on smartphones as a result, right? Like, I was just talking to Cory Doctor O the other day who, like, has done his own audiobooks himself on the side because there literally is not a business for audiobooks outside of. of like playing Amazon's one single, very specific game because the margins aren't high enough. You just can't, you can't do it. Like, Apple has destroyed businesses because there aren't 30% margins to give to Apple. And now you're just expanding that to the size of the universe because not only can you not do that, you can't make it up by putting me in your app and showing me ads or

upselling me or any of this stuff. It just, it's all just decreasing to zero. Yeah. And I recognize, you know, this is, this is very businessy for the verge cast, but this is the fight about the future of computing. It is, it starts with perplexity is setting its user agent as Google Chrome, and it ends with, is it economically viable to make anything? Because OpenAAA wants a piece of it, if chat GPUT is the interface for all computing. And that is kind of crazy. It's like, I'm always joking. Like, I know what the verge is going to cover for the next 10 years. We're fine. Like, the story is writing itself every single day. But like, what, what is a computer is kind of up for grabs right now? Yep.

And it does start with, well, Robots TXT is just a handshake agreement that everyone made. Like, David, you wrote a piece about this, like, almost a year ago now. Yeah. That, like, this is, this was a very informal, like, how do we, how do we reduce the cost of all the bots showing up in our website? Because it was really expensive back then. And now it, like, the, the world economy hinges on whether or not perplexity respects robots. TXT. And that's, I, that, that can't hold.

No. And it's, we've been, we've been, we've been. running towards this for a while. And we're about to see who has actual power in this space. And the perplexities and the open AIs are all betting that the user interface, like being the thing that people are accessing to go do this stuff, is what is the power in this relationship. Right. That's like the iPhone had all the power because it's the thing you're holding. Right. Do you want to be Apple and Google? Right. And it's like I buy that much more powerfully in a piece of dedicated hardware that does lots of other things,

it's hard to see how powerful that is when you're a text box that is replaceable by a bunch of other text boxes, which is again, the browser thing. Like browsers are super sticky. And once you pick a browser and you put all of your extensions into it and you have all your bookmarks and you have all your history, it's pretty hard to make people switch browsers. Like this is why Chrome has been so successful for 15 years,

despite not being very good. All of these companies now see that. And they're like, okay, if we can get you in, we can get this giant trove of data on you. And we can make sure that we are the text box. And if we can be the text box, the world has to give us what we want. You know, it's interesting. So you wrote that piece this week.

We put the headline Web War III on it. Part of your thesis is this is the third browser war. Yeah. Right? The first one was at the very beginning. The second one was when Chrome decided that it would do web apps and we would have a standards battle over web apps. And this is the third one, agentic browsers.

I went back at, you know, I just looked at all of the magazine covers from the 90s. It's crazy to me that there isn't massive coverage of this in like the business community right now. Maybe it's too won't care. Maybe you can't see it. But if you just go back to like 1998, Microsoft versus Netscape was on the cover of Time magazine. Yeah. In some of the wildest art this has ever been put on the cover of Time magazine. It was on the cover of Byte magazine. It was on the cover of Businessweek. everyone knew that whatever you thought of the dot-com bubble, whoever got the browser was going to win the next turn. And Microsoft obviously sold itself out trying to win that battle to the point where there was a massive antitrust case.

And they were essentially forced to lose. Inside of that, Netscape got all distracted. There was a great cover of Wired magazine called the Firefox Revolt because Netscape got too bloated and Firefox was the winner for a minute. And then out of that came Chrome, right? that's a lot. Somewhere in there, Apple decided to do Safari as well. By the way, the deal that saved Apple in the 90s, that was Microsoft pumping money into Apple.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made that deal. There's another very famous cover of Time magazine that's a photo of Steve Jobs, like, kneeling on a stage at rehearsal for Macworld. And it's just a quote that just says, thank you, Bill. Oh, wow. Crazy. This is crazy stuff. Like, this is mainstream news, right, that Apple and Microsoft are, making a deal where Internet Explorer will be the default browser on the IMac, and that's going to

save Apple. But we knew the stakes of the browser battle back then. Like, they were mainstream business and cultural stakes. You're in the grocery store, and you see a picture of Steve Jobs on stage, black and white, and it says, thank you, Bill. Like, that's the level of cultural consciousness the browser wars had back then. We're doing it again now. I mean, I think your piece, like, it's a lot of people talking about what the browser represents, but it is the, it's the only app platform that you can deploy in the world where you think AI is this important because it doesn't mean you have to run into the iPhone. Right. Because you cannot make this product in the iPhone. You can only make it on desktop because there's not as many restrictions on desktop.

Well, and it means it's a shortcut into every business deal you would otherwise make, right? Like the thing I've heard from a couple of browser makers is like what nobody understands is that once you log into your bank, your browser just has the cookie to your bank, which means you're your browser is just logged into your bank. Like, I have now handed my browser access to my bank, and the browser could go do stuff if it wanted to on my bank. This seems bad. Well, this is the thing.

Like, I think to some extent, this has really opened my eyes to, like, we maybe should have all thought a lot harder about our browsers over the years. But also, like, this is, you get all of my browsing data. You get a representation and confirmation that I am me to every single app that I use, and you put an agent next to that that can theoretically go click around for me. Like there just is no other version of that setup that is that powerful. Well, so there is one version. We should talk about this.

Right. It's your smartphone. Your smartphone has that. It has biometric authentication. It can see your eyes. It can look at your fingerprints. It has not just cookies, but all kinds of other trackers and ways of knowing you or you. And both smartphone makers thus far have like,

seemed reticent to take the next step. Obviously, Google's way ahead because they own Gemini. And, you know, I think the way they're marketing the pixel and other phones now is more AI forward. But it's not it. You can just talk to your phone and it'll just like go off and use your bank for you. Like, they're not anywhere near there. Apple has made those promises with Siri. They got effectively nowhere. And now there's news this week that they're going to use Gemini for Apple Intelligence. That seems like, okay, well, the phone makers will figure this out. Right. If this is the big existential threat to the big smartphone platforms, and one of them owns, you know, depending on the rankings week by week, the best model, like, they're just going to get there.

And then Apple will just buy it from them the same way they bought search. Yeah. And it's an interesting bet from Apple that that won't shift the power dynamic in a huge way, right? Because like that's Apple betting that the smartphone is still more important than the model. And at this moment, I think Apple's pretty clearly right about that, that like going and getting a very good... So the news that we've heard is that Apple is basically

buying a custom version of Gemini, like a 1.2 trillion parameter model. Really big Gemini model, but a sort of spun off one just for Apple. And they're apparently, I think this is all according to Mark German at Bloomberg, going to pay a billion dollars a year

for it, which is to say they're going to take a billion dollars less from Google every year in exchange for this thing. And for Apple, this is just A, kind of an admission of failure that Apple couldn't do it itself. Like, we've watched Apple try to figure out

how to do this, and that is clearly knock on well. I would also point out Apple made a big deal about partnering with OpenAI when it announced Apple Intelligence. It made some whispers about Gemini at that same at that same WWC, but nothing came of it. I never expected Apple to go train a foundation model.

I think I did briefly. And again, that's the bet, right? It's like, where is the locus of power in your relationship with users. And Apple is kind of as a company happy to bet that the answer is hardware. And that as long as you are using our devices, A, you'll play by our rules. And B, we are going to own all of the important parts of your user experience. The bet that all of these other companies are making, the bet of chat GPT and the bet of

Claude is that actually what's going to matter is I'm going to have this relationship with this model, this character, this bot that is going to supersede all of that. And it won't matter what hardware I buy because I'm just going to, want to hang out with chat GPT everywhere all the time. And like the thing I kept coming back to in this story about browsers and Jake Kasternakis, who edited the story kept pushing me to do even more of this, is like, you have to remember that all of this is just essentially at this point propaganda from the AI companies, right? Like there's actually not evidence yet that that is going to become our primary way of doing anything. Lots of people use chat chbtbt all the time for lots of

things. It is not a more like primary device than your smartphone at this point. Chrome is still setting market share records. Like this change might happen. It has not happened yet. And like again, like to go back to the thing about the first web browser wars was like everybody was directionally correct, right? That like the thing that was changing was that a lot of things that we used to not do on the internet, we started doing on the internet. And like there was a big question about like, are people going to be comfortable putting their banking information on the internet. And like, yeah, we were. It took a while, but we got there. And the ones who stuck through it, companies like Amazon benefited in gigantic ways by being at the front of that. And that's what all these companies are betting again.

But just because it was right, the first time doesn't at all guarantee it's going to happen again. I, the, what will people use chat chip tea for? My dad's turning 80. It's a real thing that's happening. Uh, where my cousins are in charge of making the, the photo book. for his birthday party. We were having a big birthday party. And my cousin texted me the other day and said, hey, can you brighten up this photo of your parents on a beach? I asked chat ShpD to do it.

Whoa. Because the magic robot will just do stuff for you. And I swear to God, and I'm not going to show the pictures of my parents, but I swear to God, this is backed up by the photo that it generated. She followed up with, it made your mom Filipino. And it did. It just replaced my parents in the photo with just two different people. And then she said, in this one, I try to get your dad to smile because he wasn't smile.

He's wearing a Packer's shirt in, like, the mid-2000s. He's definitely not smiling. We weren't very good. This was like the Far Rogers transition era in my belief. And it's just a totally different guy. Like a totally different guy wearing not even a green, like a different sweatshirt. Like it didn't even say Green Bay. And it's like the robot will just confidently do stuff.

Yeah. So people's expectations are that it can just do stuff. And they're going to keep asking, it won't say no. So first of all, I want you all to know. I had what can only be described as a full-on existential crisis at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. My sister just literally went and goes, are you okay? You think they'd be used to this by now. side channel, like, are you okay?

And I, all I wrote back was like, please don't do this. And then I edited, I edited the photos. I brightened up the faces, just using lightroom in five seconds. It was fine. But like, that's the expectation, right? Right. It seems like it can do anything. And there's no, like, should we give the computer or our banking information?

That barrier is gone. Right. Like there's, like, the idea that like people care about privacy on Facebook, like, we've been trying to make people care about privacy on Facebook for 20 years. They, they just don't. Yep. And so can, if the magic robot can do more stuff, I think there's just an inexorable pull towards letting it do stuff, even when it obviously cannot, right?

Even when it's like, that is super not my mom. But like, can you do it for me? Because I, I, I asked the robot to do it and I tried nothing else. It's like a real experience that you can have now with, like, friends and family who are addicted to chat, GBT. And I think there's more power there than anyone expects. I think whether or not that power is, like, rightfully situated with Sam Altman is a question a lot of companies are asking themselves. Yes. Right? That's me saying, that's me pointing out that Apple made its Apple intelligence assessments with OpenAI, but it looks like it's going to go with Gemini.

I think Apple thinks Google is a more reliable partner, even though they're competing on what the user interface of the future will be. Even though the pixel is more of a threat in an AI world to the iPhone than it's ever been before, I think Apple thinks Google is a more reliable partner because they have a long history of, like, you know, co-opetition. Open AI, who knows what they're going to do tomorrow. Like, tomorrow, they're like, we took all of your IP and now you can generate any store of video on a Tim Cook. Like, whoops. Yeah.

Like, and I think all of that is yet to be shaken out. but I do think the idea that the AI will just sort of always deliver an answer is way more powerful to regular people than anyone is giving it credit for. Yes, I agree with that. I've been polling a lot of people in this space recently on like a thing that I can't get over. And it's the thing we've talked about before, which is that like these tools are getting, these tools are really fun to use and talk to. And it is like the characters of them are super compelling to people, even though it sucks

at most of the activities that you ask it to do, right? Like, you're, the, the person you're talking about, they tried to brighten up a photo. Like, they probably had a nice time doing that, right? It's like, this is a, this is a failed experiment, but the like process of doing this with chat GPT, people like actually have a good time. And the thing I'm coming to realize is that that is way more of the game than I realize. Like, I keep asking people like, okay, you've made a bot that people like to talk to, but can't do very much. How much runway does being fun to talk to actually get you. And over and over and over, people keep telling me you have, like, way more than you think. Yeah. It's, it's most of the thing. Like, being fun to talk to is actually most of the game.

And these things are fun to talk to. When Sam Altman had the big live stream after announcing the Microsoft deal on this stuff, the sort of like questions from the audience were not about the business deals or about frontier capabilities. They were all like, when are you going to take the guardrails off and like really let me bang the robot? You know? Yeah. And it's like, oh, this is what people want. Like, they want a, they want a buddy and who's, like, very capable of doing all the stuff and then also trying to bang them on the front page of the New York Times. Or it tries to, like, convince you to do crimes against people. All right, we should get off the subject, but before we do, Eric Gomez, our producer, said just a truly wild thing to us right before

we started recording. And Eric, I would like you to defend yourself. What is the thing that you just said offhand out of nowhere? Welcome to the show, Eric, by the way. Hi, hello. Thank you for being here. Yeah, I regret my decision. Um, Comet is my daily driver for web browsing. Like on purpose. On purpose. You, like, you downloaded Comet and, and you use it for all of your browsing. Yes.

I fell down a rabbit hole. Uh, follow me on this. There's a whole logic and there's a reasoning, uh, for my madness. So it starts with, uh, Xfinity, actually. So as as a subscriber to, I mean, this is great because now we have to discredit. This is not a place I thought we were going to go, but now we have to disclose. Disclosure. Comcast is a minority investor. But it's not good. Whatever the story is, I'm guaranteed as not end up with. If you started with Exfinity and ended with, I used an AI browser, like nothing good happened. Go ahead.

So I use Xfinity as my service for provider because it's the only option we have here in Eastern Connecticut. Great. Because it's a monopoly. You see? Yes. Yes. Exactly. Wonderful. And so. So, you know, as a subscriber, you get all these different types of perks and discounts of stuff. And I remember around this time last year, they were giving a special deal where you get a whole year of Perplexity Pro for free. So I was like, hey, why not? So I signed up for it. And, you know, it gives you access to Propelicity Pro, which is like, you know, I get faster response times and access to all the latest AI models and deeper research and all the cool stuff that you get with these premium AI subscriptions. And so I just kept using it.

I like Perplexity as a web browser, I mean, as a search engine because it's like, it gets me most of the, you know, answers that I'm looking for, you know, or if not, it gives me like 80% of the way there. And then, you know, Perplexity announces a web browser. And it was exclusive invite only to Perplexity Pro users. That's how they get you. Uh-huh. And I was like, huh, interesting. I already get the service of free. So let me try this out.

And so I just kind of started using it. I moved off of Arc. Arc was my daily driver previously, but as we all know, the browser company is kind of moving on from that and doing the DIA browser now. And as much as I love Arc, I know it's like slowly dying or dying to slow death. And so I was like, all right, let me try this comment thing.

And, you know, it's fine. That's good. It's good. It's fine. I will grant you it's fine. Yeah. And I try another cut of this question. So just try it again for like why you like Comet versus Chrome. So, all right.

So let's say this. I was never a fan of Chrome. I was actually a Safari user for a long time. But then, you know, using, you know, working for the verge, everything is all like using Google apps. And so, you know, I was kind of forced to use Chrome because it just makes everything easier. That is literally Google's plan.

And so, you know, I know that common is just a chromium browser. So I was like, well, this is mostly the same thing. Let me just move over to this thing. And it works mostly the same. And I don't really see that much of a difference between the two, except for like all the agentic AI stuff. And so I don't really use it for that. It's mostly for like, you know, the response and the quickness and the faster access

to stuff when it comes to using perplexity as a stuff. service. Man, somewhere somebody on Perplexity's biz dev team just got a race. Like, just right then, whoever made that deal with Xfinity. And I just like, I don't know if you guys have seen this, but like when you go to a lot of publisher websites, the one that comes to mind for me is the Washington Post, but I know they've done this with a bunch of others. You hit the paywall, but it offers you, like, if you download Comet, you can read this

article. Perplexity is finding, like, fascinating ways to hack its way into getting you to to use your browser to get access to things. It's very clever. I don't know how well it's working. It clearly worked on you, Eric, but I don't know how well it's working in the grand scheme of things.

But perplexity is like, it is really after how do we hook you into using this thing? Because once you're in, you'll be in and you'll stay in. Maybe. Eric, what would make you switch from perplexity to something else? I just switch the browser company. company would have just built the AI features into ARC. Well, here's the real question.

When your perplexity pro-subscription runs out, are you going to pay for it? So, funny thing, it auto-builded me the other day, so I was like, all right, well, I guess I'm using another year of this thing. That's how they get you, man. Another raise for the biz dev. Someone learned something from Xfinity. I forgot to toggle that button, and now I got another church. Tell the AI agent to auto-cancel before this year. I should.

Let's see if it. Ask it to do that, see if it does come out next week. let us know if Perplexity will auto-cancel itself. That's very good. I'll try it. All right. In the meantime, Eric, thank you. We need to take a break, and then we're going to come back.

We're going to talk about to Mac News that we're both very interested in. We'll be right back. 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. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include. Integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com,

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That way you can hire with confidence without turning it, into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a full. focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward.

Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into, tech to babysit a broken database.

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innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. So two fascinating bits of Apple news. One is David's victory lap of the week, which is that iOS 26.1 is

out and it lets you basically undo liquid glass. I was right. And everyone who said liquid glass is good was wrong. So yay for me. Download it. Do the do the thing that makes it a little more opaque. Your life will get much better. The really interesting piece of news. And part of me can't figure out why I can't stop thinking about this is there was a report this week, the latest in a long line of reports that suggests that Apple is working on a cheaper, I think substantially under a thousand dollar laptop powered by an iPhone chip. This is like a sort of mythical machine in recent Apple history, the like low cost MacBook. Oh, in forever Apple history. The $500 Mac is like, it's the sun around which all other Apple rumors orbit.

But it seems like at least there is a lot of smoke right now without it. It is the kind of thing that pops up every once in a while. We hear about it every once in a while. But it seems to be happening. And my question for you, Neely, is A, do you buy this rumor? And B, why on earth would Apple build a cheap laptop? So I do buy this rumor. Weirdly, Apple makes more products than ever, but not enough products. What? Do you know what I mean? No. Like, if you think back to the Steve Jobs days, like, he was like, we make too many products, I'm getting rid of everything. We're going to do it a grid, a two-by-two grid, a laptop,

a desktop, consumer and professional, and then he started putting products in the grid. So, yeah, the Powerbook, the Power Mac, the IMac, and then the Ibook. And we should talk about what the Ibook was in a minute. Apple, now, that's gone. Like, that simplicity is gone. Yes. Right. They make more skews of everything and all of it feels like a game where they're trying to get $500 for you to double your RAM or storage. Sure.

And you're trying not to do that. And then at some point you're like, I should just buy the next model up. And so like they make, I would say they make more products than ever before, but like not enough products that actually clearly fit the markets they're in. Yeah, I buy that. They're perpetually trying to push you to. the second most expensive thing they sell. Yeah, it's like, I just bought a Mac Studio. And I started with a Mac Mini,

and I just sort of configured my way to like, I'm going to buy a base model Mac Studio. And I feel great about it, to be clear, because I got the fancier computer. But it was just like this exercise in, none of this really makes sense. Like, none of these products are, like, well-defined for the thing they need to be.

And Apple would totally disagree with you. I know they would, because we talk to them about their products all the time. And like, this is for students, and this is for illustrators. And this is for the cool kid. Like, whatever. But, like, actually going to buy an Apple product is more confusing than ever.

So I look at this. I'm like, oh, this solves a problem for Apple, which is that if you show up with $800 in your pocket, you know, like, I want a laptop. All you can do right now is you can get like a discounted last year's laptop, which is not what people want. Well, and to that point, though, they did the deal with Walmart to sell the like now years old M1 MacBook Air. And by all accounts, that's been a massive success. Right. And so when I see a cheaper Mac laptop with an iPhone chip, first of all, the M1 is an iPhone chip.

Sure. Right? They prototyped MacOS on ARM, like on A series chips back in the day. Right? So like the M1, it's different. I know it's different, but like the jump they took started with an iPhone chip. And now we're many, many more generations beyond the M1, which is still performing fine on computers or selling today. So you can see how they'd be like, oh, we could just take a more powerful iPhone chip that will outperform the M1.

and like call it a day. Right? Like we don't need to keep selling and supporting the M1 forever. We can actually just move the architecture to like more modern chips and more modern process. It's Apple.

They love a supply chain tweak. You know, like you can see how they get there. But I think what they're actually trying to do is expand the market in a coherent way that isn't just cut down versions of products they sell.

They're actually going to make a product that targets like students for real. The question is why isn't that thing already the MacBook error? Like, why do you need to do this instead of saying the MacBook Air is our general purpose consumer machine? And it starts now at $700. Why do you need to make another one? I feel like you have a theory about this.

I do and I don't. I mean, I think it's been really interesting that right now as we speak, there is maybe the best deal I've ever seen on the M4 MacBook Air, which is like a fabulous, still relatively brand new laptop. you can get it on Amazon for $749, which is like a preposterously good deal for a MacBook Air. So it's like it's odd that that's happening, but it does seem like Apple as a company is driven by price points in a way that I don't think we've ever seen it be before. And in fact, the company has loudly proclaimed that it is not driven by, like,

they hate it when you point this out. Right. And they have always said and we'll continue to always say out loud that they're like, know, we make the best products and we, you know, they cost what they cost. And people pay for them because they want the best products. Like, increasingly, this is a company that is very happy to have something at every $50. And to me, what I'm trying to figure out about this one is which of two directions it goes. And one direction is Chromebooks, for lack of a better way of putting it, right? That they're, A, the education market, like you said, is huge. And for a long time, Apple was

everywhere in the education market. Like, I grew up. with those like sort of translucent EMAX in my classrooms. Like those are the first computers I really used. That's gone now. All of that got eaten by Chromebooks and ChromeOS. And now if you're a student, you're not getting a Mac or an iPad, which I think Apple hoped you would.

You get a Chromebook because they're cheap and they're easy to administer and schools by tons of them. So either Apple is just going to try and go way down market and, you know, charge whatever, $5.99. So still be the premium one, but like much cheaper. do the thing in schools and for students try to hook people early and sort of play the game it was playing at the turn of the century. Or, and this is the thing I hope but assume is not the case, this is how Apple like reinvents the idea of what the old 12-inch MacBook can be.

Because if the, what you get when you do an iPhone chip is you get things like easy adoption of a cellular modem and you get even better battery efficiency. because you have to run the thing on a smaller device. Like, just take that 12-inch MacBook, take out the horrible keyboard, put in a good keyboard, put in an iPhone chip, and all of the stuff that comes on that system-o chip inside of the iPhone, just lift it out of the iPhone 17 and put it into a 12-inch MacBook. I would buy the hell out of that computer. You, I know, liked a 12-inch MacBook more than was probably appropriate.

That was my go-to airplane computer for years. Is this not like an incredibly exciting device idea to you? This is so exciting to me. Can I just ask you the obvious question here? Okay. Didn't you just describe an iPad? So. The iPad is turning 10 on the Tuesday after people here.

The iPad Pro is turning. The iPad Pro. Sure. What is the distinction here? Right. Who's to say? So I think it could have been. But I think Apple made a bunch of decisions that has essentially precluded that being the

Like you can't do a lot of the things you want to do on an iPad. It's just still true. There's more and more you can do on an iPad. And iPad's a tons of power. The iPad Pro is like an unbelievable computer. And if I could take that shell and run a Mac and run MacOS on it, it would be great. But just for my own. Wait, let me ask you another question in your heart.

What does MacOS represent to you in your heart? Desktop class browser. Like fundamentally what I'm, I will tell you what I'm looking at. Chrome. What I'm looking at on my computer right now is one, two, three, four, five, six browser windows. You want Chrome and you want the ability to run electron apps because most of the native Mac apps that we use for productivity, at least in our workplace, are electronic apps. Yeah. Right, they're web apps and fancy wrappers.

Sure. There's other apps on my computer that are, right, but like Lightroom exists on the iPad. It's Chrome. You're saying desktop class. It's like amazing to me that Apple has just nirfed the iPad so hard. after this whole conversation we had about browsers just a second ago, they don't see it because it's a threat to their app model and their taxes. Well, no, it's not, no, they don't see it gives Apple, like, not enough malicious credit.

Like, Apple sees it very clearly. And a thing that came up a couple of times in reporting this browser story that I read this week was people who make other browsers think it's very funny that people love Safari because Safari is like a deliberately neutered web browser. Because Apple wants you to use native apps. Like if Apple had made Safari as good as it could, and you have to believe that there is enough engineering and design talent at Apple to make it an honest to God Chrome competitor. And it was a powerful, like, WebKit being another browser engine that is on par with Chromium would be a big deal. Like, they just haven't kept up.

And the only reason they haven't kept up is because they have no incentive whatsoever to keep up. I saw a fancy executive who used to work on Chrome a few weeks ago. And his read of it was Apple has actually been pulling resources away from the. the Safari team over time. Yeah. Not at all surprising. Of course that's what you would do. It's the threat.

It is the threat to their entire thing. And like an agentic Siri that can use the apps on your phone is a different kind of threat. But they're way more willing to do that than to do an agentic safari that uses the web because that breaks their model. Yeah. You don't get in app purchases from that. I mean, it's that simple. But so like the other thing for me is like, and this is just purely a matter of personal preference, I would rather have a thing in the shape of a MacBook with a touchscreen

than a thing in the shape of an iPad that runs MacOS. Like if you just made me pick the shell of the thing, I like the MacBook better. And so that's the reason for me that it is like this idea is very powerful for me because I want all of the stuff that like the 13 inch iPad Pro can do with connectivity everywhere and super long battery life. And the touchscreen is great. But I want it to look like a Mac.

book. I just do. And I think most people do. I think there is a real, like, we got laptops right a really long time ago. And they continue to be the right thing for a huge number of purposes. Actually, I think laptops got right with the first Ibook. Okay. So you know more about this. I have no eyebook experience. So tell me. It's just interesting to think about like we got laptops right. Like it's actually Apple that like really pushed laptops in the correct direction when they started doing consumer laptops. So that's just interesting to think about like we got laptops right. So that's just interesting to think about like we got laptops right. So that's just interesting. It's just something. It's just something. It's just That two-by-two grade was really important. Right? We're going to have professional class machines. And those first Powerbooks, like, this is, I'm just dating myself. Like, those first Powerbucks made a lot of design decisions that we still live with today. Like, they pushed the keyboards back towards the display and did a palm rest. That was Apple design in the 90s.

Like, that is a decision Apple made and everyone just followed them. And there's a bunch of other stuff along the way. And yes, there's competition. And yes, Windows laptops innovated on the idea of having functional keyboards, for example, which Apple took five years to fix. Do you remember when I think it was Acer? It was either Acer or Aesu's decided what if we tried to flip the keyboard on the trackpad? Oh yeah. Paul Miller on the show did keyboard in the front club for like three years.

It's fine. Like people tried things, but like Apple made a bunch of decisions about the design of a laptop 30 years ago that were correct. And then when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he made the grid, right? We're going to have consumer and professional products. And he filled in the consumer product with the IMA, basically rescued Apple with the IMac. and he said, we're going to fill in consumer notebook. We're going to get there. And that square on the grid at launch events, he would just leave it open.

He would show the grid and be like, we updated the power book, we updated the power Mac, here's the iMac, just wait for it. Oh, interesting. And then eventually he's like, we're going to do it, where the iBook is coming out. And this is what I mean about having too many products and not enough products. You go back and you watch Steve Jobs introduce a product. He's like, this is the product. here's who it's for, here's how why the other one suck,

and then here's the thing that's going to make everyone, like, sit up and say, oh, Apple innovated. And hilariously, at the time of the first Ibook, the ones that came in blue and orange and kind of look like toilet bowl lids because Johnny Ive's previous job was designing toilets. This is a true story. The colors are sick. The toilet bowl lid thing is real.

The colors are sick. The design didn't hold up. But, like, everything about that machine is now reflected in modern machines. the thing that that iBook had, that no other computer really had yet, like the thing Apple introduced with the first iBook was Wi-Fi, which is crazy to think about. Like, Wi-Fi did not exist.

And Apple made a big bet on a standard that, like, AT&T Bell Labs, which had been spun out in another company called Lucent. They made a bet on 802.11B. This is like Vergecast standards lore, right? And they said, we're going to do Wi-Fi. We've partnered with Lucent. Here's the first airport base station. It was like a silver spaceship.

And then to bring it home, Steve Jobs forced Phil Schiller to stand on a raised platform above the stage, start downloading a file, and then jump off the platform onto a mattress while continuing to download the file to prove there were no wires. So I went and found this because I had never seen this video. And I think there is a case to be made that this, not the like, you know, it's not three devices, it's one device or not the pulling the MacBook air out of the minimal envelope. I think this should be the true legacy of bonkers Steve Jobs' intro. Let me just play this one clip of Phil Schiller jumping onto a mattress. This is definitely one small step for me. He actually jumps from like 15 feet jump. And we high five.

I mean, he lands on his back. Like that, it was not graceful. No. I love Phil. I mean, he's sold out for it in a way that only Phil can sell out for it. And there's another moment in that same intro where he, you know, Steve Jobs, like he has the laptop on a table. Like, you know, like you always do. He's showing off the thing.

And then at one point he just sort of casually picks it up and starts to walk away with it. And you can hear the audience start to go, oh, like, realize what's going on. And the cheering goes out. And then Steve Jobs. takes a hula hoop and just passes it over. Yeah, because you had to prove that there was wireless networking. Right. Like the idea that this has no wires into it and is still working was like unfathomable.

And I think in terms of like how do we describe what is cool about this thing, 10 out of 10 on the eyebook line. Truly. But that is the moment, right? I remember when that came out like all of my friends who were off to college the next year bought iBooks. Right? And we, there was a lot of, NELI is going to fix your broken airport base station on your campus network

that was not designed for 500 new wireless access points because wireless access points did not exist before this day. And the idea that college students would deploy them on the Ethernet network at DePaul University was like not contemplated. It was weird. There was a lot going on there. But like everyone bought that computer for that reason, right? I can just have this anywhere in my dorm or my apartment or whatever.

And then that became. Obviously, Wi-Fi is just a thing now. The next version of the iBook, the white iBook, for years, was like the default laptop. Yes. It was just the one you got. It set the standard. It set the tone. They refined that design forever until they moved on to the more aluminum design of the MacBook Air.

But Apple, like, Apple sells that wedge-shaped MacBook Air sort of like despite itself. It doesn't want to. It tried to kill that product a lot. Yep. Right? Including it with the 12-inch MacBook. Including with the 12-inch MacBook with the cheaper 13-inch MacBook Pro, and consumers are like, no, we want this one.

And they have been made to sell that product, even to the say, right, the M1 MacBook Air is the wedge-shaped MacBook Air, because it scratches some itch that that is what a laptop is with a lot of people. And I think their opportunity with this machine is to get back to just defining the product more coherently, as opposed to a series of price points. That's my hope. I suspect what it will actually be is just a replacement for the $600 M1 MacBook at Walmart. But my hope is they get back to that moment where they're like, oh, we're making a consumer product for consumers.

And we can actually announce it with some theatricality because we're proud of it. So that means colors for sure. You have to go back to doing colors, which I think Apple is doing anyway. So I wouldn't see it as like outlandish, the idea that it would have like that sort of eye. Mac range of colors, the purple and the orange and whatever. What else goes into that for you? Like, what does this device have to have to be that thing for you? You probably go back to the wedge.

Maybe. I mean, you could, right? If you have a smaller chip, you know, the cooling needs. I think you have a big question about performance. Like, how much performance you really need? If you're still selling the M1, you have a pretty good sense of how much performance you actually need. True.

And you can probably outdo it. But the wedge shape has always had cooling problems, which is why they've always wanted to get away from it. I think you basically have to say, like, there's a set of things you can do on a Mac now with this computer that it's better than doing on your phone. And I don't know that Apple has made that case in a long time. But to me, this device almost feels like you have an iPhone, and this laptop is like the accessory. Oh, interesting. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, in my mind, there are still things that I would just never do on a phone that I see other people just do on a phone, like, happily.

Like, I have to buy plane tickets on a web browser on a, on a laptop. Like, I don't know. I just can't. I can't bring myself to do it. I don't know why. I'm with you. I think there's, like, a class of people now that's phone first. Yep.

And I think you have to sell them a laptop to do a bunch of other stuff. And Apple hasn't made that case affirmatively for its Macs in a long time. I know they sell a lot of Macs. I'm not, right? They're doing a good job there. But they haven't made the case for, like, why stuff is better on a Mac than a phone in forever. And this, to me, like, if it's cheap, it feels like, oh, you can make the connection much more tightly. And that should be the opportunity here. Not it's a MacBook Pro and now you're a

pro. You know, like, this is much more, hey, you want to get off your phone, right? Get off your phone is a big pull. Use a Mac. Like, here's a $700 Mac that kicks ass to do a bunch of stuff better with the web and, you know, other tools. That feels correct. There's an end to this meeting that leads to deciding to run iPad OS on this thing? It would be a heartbreaker. And for anyone at Apple who is listening, I just want to, I want to urge you not to make that decision. If it's more like what you're saying,

which is they're getting their asses kicked in education because Chromebooks are cheap, like, you know, every teacher I know is like, yeah, that they get destroyed. Yeah. Like, we're not going to give a bunch of, you know, fancy iPads to kids because they're going to just ruin them. We're going to give them $150 dollars ACE or Chromebooks.

Right. Because they're going to get lit on fire and peed on. So their goal is to get back in education. You have to be cheap. But not having Chrome will actually lock them out of a big ecosystem or not having a browser because not everyone's shipping native apps for these devices. Right. Well, and I think you're right that the converse of the Apple is losing an education case

would be that a vast number of kids, particularly in the United States, are getting iPhones or Apple Watches or both as their first devices. That that is the entry point in a way that the home computer used to be one. And I think you're right that if it's like, okay, how do we teach you what you can do better on a device like this in a way that like properly manages the handoff between devices and lets you mirror your phone and like does some of the things that you can do, but in a sort of phone first way, that could be really cool. Yeah. I mean, we'll see. Or they're just going to replace the popular dollar one. Right? Like, or they just have to stop making that so they're going to make this and set. But the opportunity, the reason I brought up the first Ibook launch, the opportunity is to reset and say there's a reason for this to exist. And we're like happy. We like, we spent all this time pointing at that box, consumer notebook.

And then we filled it with a product that makes sense there, not a cheaper version of the old product. Right. I mean, that was like the Apple Magic back in the day. I'm not saying the products aren't good now. I'm just saying it's a lot of price points and not a lot of too many products and not enough products. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, it's Apple will sell you high-end laptops and higher-end laptops, and there is something else to do there. God, this thing was so pretty.

It really was. The green. That's, was it, was it, was it, is that the, is that the, was it? No, it was blue. Was that the blueberry color? Was that what Apple called it? I think so. It's blueberry and tangerine.

First of all, it's green, Apple, just to be super clear about that. But also, bring back that color, and I will buy any laptop you make. I'm telling you, 12-inch MacBook, cool colors, cellular modem. put it in my house right now. Let's go. All right. We should take one more break and then we're going to come back. We got a bunch of lightning round stuff to do, including a game that I'm going to make Eli play

that he knows nothing about. It's going to be great. We'll be right 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,

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Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo.

And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually.

Let's dig in. This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, Finance Edition. And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged. And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole.

Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you are rich BFF. All right, we're back.

Let's get into the lightning round. There's a lot of news this week, so we're just going to blast through as much of it as quickly as we can. Nelai, you get to go first, and is it time? It's time. It's absolutely time.

I hate it when it's time. It is time, once again, for America's favorite podcast. Within a podcast, Brendan Carr's a dummy. He's such a dummy. That's the subtitle of America's favorite podcast in the podcast. He's such a dummy. I should read you the headline.

And you're like, that sounds dumb. Hit me. Brendan Carr is going to have the FCC vote to scrap the requirements that telecommunications firms do good cybersecurity. That's dumb. It's just dumb. And less I, less than anyone. who didn't listen to the show last week forget. Brandon Carr's a dummy last week

was about Brendan Carr saying that all of these broadband companies don't have to tell you what their things cost because it's too much work for them to do so. Yes. But not enough, not too much work when they actually bill you, of course. Right.

But telling you up front, whew, on our requirements. Yeah. And I'm assuming it just really sounds like we're about to hear a very similar argument about doing good cybersecurity. Absolutely similar argument. Oh, no.

He put out a blog post. It's called Halloween treats. He's very cute, much like his predecessor, G-Py. He thinks he's a lot cuter than he is. And he says, here's what we're going to vote on our next meeting. And he says, finally, we're going to vote on an order that puts us on a stronger cybersecurity footing. Following extensive engagement with the carriers, this item announces the steps they've already taken to strengthen their cyber security defenses. So we're going to reverse a ruling reached by the Biden administration that exceeded our authority and required them to do cybersecurity.

So the previous order required them to do cybersecurity. They did it. And now we're going to say they don't have to anymore because we trust them. Because why wouldn't you trust our nation's telecommunications providers? When I think of trustworthiness, I think of wireless carriers in America. The theory is cybersecurity is finished. We have accomplished cybersecurity. We did it.

It's over. Why keep trying? By the previous order, just to. just to like say it clearly, went into place because there was a huge wave of attacks on our nation's infrastructure. And the Biden administration was like, do better cybersecurity. And so they did. I don't know, man. It was like 15 minutes ago that that was where everybody was worried about China was like, that that's how they're going to. That's how China is going to get into our infrastructure. This was like the grand impassioned case that the government was making that we had to do good

cybersecurity because the infrastructure was where it was all going on. And now Brennick was like, whatever. We did. Yeah. It's fine. by the declaration from the Biden administration, if you want to get into the weeds of how dumb he is, right? Like, Brendan exists in a state of existential legal crisis at all times because he wants to be a MAGA Republican, but he is instead, you know, just an old school conservative Republican who's cosplaying as someone the president likes.

This is true. His argument is that the Biden administration used a 1994 law to say this law requires telecommunications carriers to secure their networks from unlawful access or interception of communications. And he says, this is an overreading of the statute. Right? You've taken too much authority.

This is at the same time that the Trump administration is at the Supreme Court being like, everything is emergency and we have the power to tear up anything we want because the world isn't a permanent emergency. And the Supreme Court itself is like, that's not what that says at all. So you just have this fight in the Trump administration embodied in the person, Brennan Carr, who wants power but is still like a project 2025, like tear the government down guy, where they're in court saying, we read some magic words into a statute.

We have all the power in the world. And then Brendan Carr is saying, well, if the Biden administration did that, then we have no power at all. And there's just no, you cannot actually reconcile these arguments unless you're Brendan and all you're trying to do

is give things away to telecom companies, which has always been the point of his existence. I do appreciate that somebody, it feels like once a week, some like SVP at a company has breakfast with Brendan Carr and is like, God, I'm so busy today. I got like, I got this meeting and this meeting and Brendan just takes notes. And he's like, okay, I'm going to take away all of your job responsibilities. Yeah. You're just going to, you're just going to get to hang out. If you want to come all the way back around to, you have to tell them the prices. Brendan's declaration says the inflexible across the board cybersecurity requirements leaves carriers with a burdensome in inchoate compliance standard.

It does little to secure our networks. Making them secure our networks does little to security. It's very good. It's very good. I think the carriers into the put upon victims of this is a bold strategy. Like I admire, I admire Brendan for constantly being like these poor broadband companies. It's so hard to run a company that has a natural monopoly all over the place. The worst.

Anyhow, there's no federal cybersecurity rule. in Congress, there's no law that says it, there was just this rulemaking by the administration. And maybe you think that's inappropriate. You could. You can say the FCC should not have to do this stuff the way it does, but we have a dysfunctional Congress, so that's why agencies do stuff all the time.

And Brendan, he can't decide whether the FCC has so much power that it can force individual comedians off of broadcast television or so little power that it can't make Verizon do cybersecurity. He's a dummy. That's right. Brendan, as always, you're welcome to show up on this show or Decoder or anywhere you want and fight me. And fight me. But like verbally.

Or physically. I mean, honestly, I'm not picky at this point. The doors are open. You pick. You want to get in Mark Zuckerberg's Octagon and fight Nelai? I'm more than willing to engage you, Brendan. I know your Google results are trash. They have been for years because of me.

It's fine. Let's just do it. Come on the show. Listen, I was reading the news this week about how they're going to do a UFC fight on the White House lawn. I propose one of the openers, Patel versus Carr. But it's just us brandishing FCC regulations at each other. That's fine. Yeah, I'd be there.

I love it. All right. Actually, your point about individual comedians is a good segue to my first one, which is there was this big, interesting deadline piece this week about how YouTube is making a concerted effort to make its talk shows into more of a thing on YouTube. Like, as we talked about last week, YouTube is really sort of stratifying in two directions. Like one is shorts, fast, AI generated. Everything is like as easy and low rent as possible. And then on the upside, it's like it wants to be a fancy TV service, right?

Like YouTube TV exists, but also the YouTube main app on television is changing so that it looks more like there's, you know, shows with seasons and episodes. And it is trying to appear higher end. And they're taking things like Hot Ones and Good Mythical Morning, which is like a lot. longstanding super successful YouTube talk show and trying to like make these feel more sort of like mainstream talk shows in the way that like Jimmy Kimmel is a mainstream talk show and Stephen Colbert like everybody's been assuming Stephen Colbert after he leaves CBS because his show got canceled is going to go like do a Conan O'Brien and make a really successful podcast. I've got to assume somebody at YouTube is like buddy come do your show on YouTube and I think if and when that happens it'll

be fascinating. But like, it just, it's another piece of this puzzle to me that just all of these services are just running at each other as fast as they possibly can. You have Netflix, making a big bet on video podcasts and starting to, like, they did like the John Mullaney live show. They're doing Star Search. Like, Netflix is just sort of rerunning parts of the cable TV playbook while YouTube TV and YouTube are also running parts of the cable playbook. And we're just, we're just going to end up with TV again. Like, it's going to be the 90s again. I think it's crazy that as we're talking to this, YouTube and ABC are still in a fight.

Yeah. Right? Like, you just didn't, you just couldn't get Monday Night Football on YouTube TV this week. Yeah. And they were fine with it. Like, they just like, fine. We don't need that. Like, we spend a lot of money on sports rights, but fine.

Like, you'll cave. Like, that was basically the message they sent ABC in Disney this week. And I see what you're saying with the rest of it. it, right? Like, they're going to professionalize YouTube. Yeah. And like, that's weird for YouTube, right? They, they depend on this army of independent content creators. We've talked a lot about rates being squeezed. If Colbert starts a YouTube show, I think a good question is whether YouTube pays him for it. Right. In a way that they don't pay any other creators to be there. But I don't think he wants to do the YouTube brand deals that everyone else is doing to pay the bills. Like, there's, there's some weirdness there with the way that YouTube pays for YouTube TV and is in disputes with the big broadcasters about YouTube TV and how they want YouTube proper to be monetized that doesn't support some of these ideas. Right. If you can't make the revenue to support Stephen Colbert doing a late night show the way that the broadcast networks could make the revenue to support his show, then you simply won't have late night shows of that caliber. You might have a lot of YouTube shows that look like it, but you won't have that thing, right? And that to me is like just the question is when, when did, when, when did, when, When does this all crash together and someone figures out, like, there's a way to pay for this stuff because people want it and it's good and it's not all just garbage? Or there's not going to be a way to pay for this stuff. And I think that's kind of what, like, Netflix is chasing after.

Like, should we just do video podcasts? Like, we don't have to pay for those. Like, they're just getting made anyway. We'll just run them over here and they're pretty cheap to produce. Or do we need to do a full-on John Mullaney stage set? Like, which one is it? And I don't think anybody actually. knows yet. I don't think so either, but I do think, I mean, you also put all of this next to

this big new push from both streaming services and YouTube towards like live appointment programming because I think, I think that's the only way you solve the ad problem you're describing. Like all of the money from television increasingly has just pointed at sports because it's the only thing people will like reliably tune into at a particular time. And so if you're Netflix, you're like, okay, well, we're going to do the Jake Paul Mike Tyson fight. And that worked gangbusters, right? Because people will show up for that at a time and in a place. And if you can do the same with Star Search or WWE or whatever, like, there are not an infinite number of appointment viewing things you can create.

But if you can create a few of them, you can start to like, you just get to charge like an order of magnitude different prices for the thing. And I think if I'm YouTube, it's like there's not that much more scale. for YouTube to go get. And the platform is more and more competitive all the time. So like this idea that the pie is going to get big enough to fund everybody over time, I think it's just not true. So now it's like, okay, we have to go add zeros to some of these deals that we're signing with people or else we're not going to be able to pay Stephen Colbert what he needs

to come do this. And like in a weird way, Sirius is still happy to like write a check for $100 million in a way that like YouTube just isn't. They're getting less than less happy. That business is in trouble. I mean, true, but the deals are still out there, right? Like, Alex Cooper got this huge deal. And, like, you can still make a lot of money all at once doing a podcast in a way that, like, doing a YouTube doesn't support.

And YouTube is going to have to change that. Yeah, but seriously, a really interesting example. I probably pay more attention to Sirius's business because it is the last example of controlling a distribution network that isn't the Internet that really exists. Do you have serious? I have serious in our cars. You've aged yourself so many times in this show. I'm really enjoying this. Eli outing himself as like a 56 year old man.

Well, it's not, I mean, we bought a new car. It just comes with it, right? And then Becky just loves comedians and a bunch of them have series shows. So now we have serious. But like, they own a satellite distribution network that is bundled with every new and used car sale in America. Yeah. And the carmakers get a cut of that revenue when you sign up for Syria. Like this is this is the money right like you pay for serious in your car the carmaker gets a little piece

serious gets a lot of it the car makers have every incentive to put that radio in that car and up sell you in it the dealers get a piece of like everyone is just making money on satellite radio distribution that has nothing to do with the internet but like that's useless on your phone so then serious had to make an app that runs on the internet and now they're like just they're like devaluing their thing that makes them all the money so they're trying to sign exclusive and it's like you can just see that's it's the last one. It's the last non-internet distribution that is that valuable. And like it's under all this pressure. And they're trying to solve with exclusives, obviously.

But it's just like a weird thing where like broadcast television isn't even that value. Like it's getting squeezed to the point where YouTube TV is like, we're just not going to have Monday night football. We'll be fine. We'll just be fine. That's crazy. That is crazy to me.

Well, and I think it's it's a true and B only, true of YouTube. Yeah. Like a true sign of YouTube's power is that it can play that card and get away with it. And I think it did. It can. It looked worse for Disney than it did for YouTube in that dispute, I think. Our friend Julie Alexander, Nat Puck used to work for us. She's one of the smartest media analysts around. She's like, the future of this is just carriage disputes. There just will be a permanent ongoing carriage dispute forever because the market doesn't know what these rates are. And so pointing at the last deal does nothing for anyone. Every time there's a new one, it's like we're starting from zero.

Because no one knows how much anyone should pay. So my big question, again, is does variable rates come to YouTube? Do some creators get more per view from YouTube than other creators? Because if you don't get there, you won't get all the creators you want. And like I think, you know, Jimmy Kimmel is one of those creators. Stephen Colbert is one of those. Like if you put them in the creator bucket, they should have the ability to negotiate for higher rates from YouTube. YouTube itself. And I don't think YouTube wants to cross that bridge, but it's the, it's the thing they do on YouTube TV, right, with all these carriages streets. They're negotiating rates. At some point that comes to YouTube proper. I think so. Yeah. And I mean, YouTube has been saying both to me and to others pretty loudly that like the next big step for YouTube is for a YouTuber to win an Emmy. And I think that is that is sort of a fascinating next turn that like there's a there's a perception change that comes with that in the same way that like,

Within YouTube, it was a really big deal when they got on the Nielsen chart because A, it showed how big YouTube was. And B, it just puts their name next to a different set of things. It's not YouTube next to Twitter. It's YouTube next to Netflix. And that is like, that changes the way that YouTube goes into advertising negotiation. But you're right that the flip side also happens is that people come in and they're like, oh, well, I just left a meeting with Netflix. What's your deal? What are you going to give me? And thus far, YouTube is when like, you can go. Yeah, exactly. There's infinite more YouTube. But as you start to professionalize, right, and it's not just a bunch of amateur YouTubers or My Day at the Zoo videos, you start to professionalize. Like, oh, this actually becomes risky.

Right. Especially as now Netflix is writing big checks for video podcasts. Like, it's all everybody's running at each other and no one knows where it's going to end up. Like, where is anyone watching this podcast? YouTube paying variable rates. I mean, again, I keep saying the creator economy is going to implode. Like, these pressures are coming very hard for individual creators whom, again, I have nothing but sympathy for. Yeah.

Like, this is elephant's dancing and your business is just getting crushed from all sides. Literally nothing but sympathy. But the point I keep making is YouTube forever has basically had a position. You can go. Go try. Yeah. Ninja, you want to leave Twitch to go start mixer with my, have fun. You're coming right back.

You know, like that's been their attitude. It's been Twitch's attitude. It's been everyone's attitude. This thing where we're going to professionalize, it will change the dynamics. And the first time YouTube pays a variable rate to some creator over another, A, we'll change the nature of the platform forever. And be the, like the upending of the culture of what it means for a YouTuber will just begin.

Yeah. And I will just keep saying this. Go talk to YouTubers. We talk to them all the time. YouTube itself does not pay enough money to be a successful. YouTuber. Right. That, that to me is as like indefensible as it gets. Like they are making billions upon billions of dollars, but the YouTubers themselves have to go make other business arrangements to survive. And some turn has to happen there where being a YouTuber is successful just because

YouTube is sharing a revenue with you. I don't know where that pressure comes from, but if that turn doesn't happen, then YouTube is kind of stuck at the plateau. Yep. All right, what's your next one? My next one's quick because the settlement is not approved and we'll dive into it deeply when the settlement is approved. But it feels like Android is going to change forever in a meaningful way because Epic and Google have agreed to settle their antitrust case. And Google will open Android up like formally and officially to third-party app stores and even distribute those app stores inside the Play Store. So Epic had won its lawsuit against Google, claiming that it was doing antitrust violations with Android and not allowing certain kinds of in-app payments,

not allowing people to go around the play store, all this stuff. That was, and it was the same argument against Apple, but because Google has to deal with third parties, there was like oceans of evidence of contracts and dealings and negotiations. Importantly, this one was also a jury trial, which I continue to think, like, it just, there was a smell test in this case, that didn't exist in the Apple case.

I think it's fascinating. So Epic basically won, and they won a pretty narrow ruling that applied to the United States. I don't know exactly the machinations that led Google to want to settle, but they've settled, and they're not going to take the basics of that ruling and apply it worldwide. And so there will be, you know, according to what the settlement they've announced that needs to be approved. They were going to take way less. They're going to take 9% instead of the rates they were taking. And they will allow third-party apps for us to be distributed.

inside the Play Store itself. This is a huge, like this. Everything we've been talking about on the show so far changes when Google changes the Play Store in this way. The business models we've talked about that don't exist, they might begin to exist. I suspect some of this is because doing it in one market and not the other markets is complicated and weird and causes all kinds of problems. I suspect there are security concerns about other app stores that Google would like to be

in control of instead of losing control of. Like there's a lot of reasons you would say, screw it, we've lost in one market. We're going to settle in all the markets. the judge has to approve the settlement. We're going to try to report some of the stuff out. But it's like secretly the biggest news of the week, I think. Yeah, I think this is like so many of these things. This is one where like the devil will truly be in the details.

And if Apple's own malicious compliance is any evidence, there will be a bunch of shenanigans on the other side of this. But like Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, who is not known for sugarcoding his opinion about how things are going in this case, seems thrilled about what's happening here. And so it sort of makes you wonder if Google just decided to lose. Do you know what I mean?

Like if it was just the worst possible case scenario, which the judge in this case has basically, at every available opportunity pointed at Google and been like, I am going to tear your company to shreds. And so like maybe they looked at this and they were like, okay, maybe the like the D minus bad is a better, sort of devil you know than the possible F

outcome here. And Google, like, the app store revenue doesn't matter to Google in the way that it matters to Apple. Like, it just doesn't. And so maybe Google also sees a way here to change some of the norms. Like, I can Galaxy Brain my way through all of this, but it is certainly true that what it means to be an app developer to most of the phones in the world is going to change in some really interesting ways.

Yeah. And I think if you're Google, and you're like, well, we have Gemini on our phone. own. And now Gemini will have access to more apps and more business models. And that's how it. Like, you can see why they're like, screw it. We came in second this last time in terms of app store revenue. We're not going to come in second the next time. Whereas Apple cannot make this deal.

Right. And if you see gaming as the reason for every bit of app store policy, which is like not a perfect but not a wrong way to look at app stores, Google might have a pretty, like wanting to win at games is a pretty good move for Google here. Like getting epic to play nice, you start to open the door to a lot of interesting reasons

for people to use Android devices that stand to benefit Google in a much bigger way. Right, because Gemini is using all of your other apps for you. Right. So then you're only opening your phone to play games. Google needs you to use Android

way more than it needs you to use the Play Store. And it has, I think maybe it is willing to divorce those two things in order to keep people using Android. Yeah. We'll see. Like I said, the settlement has to be approved. So that's why we didn't spend a lot of time on it today. Yeah. It's going to get approved.

I think we should do some reporting to figure out the contours of this deal, how it will work. I'm confident Tim Sweeney will want to take yet one more victory lap. But when it happens, we're going to rest assured. There'll be a full episode of our chest on it because it is as like earthquake in the mobile space as it gets. For sure. All right. My next one is very short, which is that I have huge news for you about the Trump phone, which is that it doesn't exist. But the thing that has changed in the last seven days is that there has been a slew of new ideas about why the Trump phone doesn't exist.

Like, there was definitely a thing in September where we just kind of all let the date come and go. And then at the end of October, like October 31st, last Friday, there was an awful lot of, well, the Trump phone was. a lie, wasn't it? Kind of coverage. And the heat on, well, this was just a bunch of bullshit vaporware has really increased. And I'm not saying we get credit for that, but I will take credit for that. Yeah. Because we did it on Thursday of last week. We are particularly in the show very good at counting days that things don't happen. Yeah, we are. And we are now a month and a week overdue on the Trump phone with, I mean, not only does it not exist. There's not one bit of information. about it. I have not seen anyone who has used Trump mobile. I have not seen anyone who claims to

have used one of these phones. I've not seen anyone who claims to know that they exist in the world. Like, the proof of life on something like this is so easy that it's like, it clearly there's nothing here. It's funny because it's just an NBNO. Right. Ryan Reynolds found it easier to start a mobile network than the Trump boys. Should we start Verde Mobile and see if we can get it off the ground faster than Trump mobile. That's actually a great idea. I'm just saying like the the smartless podcast started an NV&O faster and easier. You can just do it in the Trump family. If you will remember that you know what it remembers says at the launch of Trump mobile, they paraded out a bunch of sort of like anonymous looking guys and they're like, these are our mobile executives. They have long histories

in the space. And like they couldn't just white label T-Mobile, which everyone else is able to do with like a drop of a hat. Like literally SmartList launched an MV&O in this time. You can, You can use the smartless wireless network. I don't know why, but you can. It's just Jason Bateman calls you once a day. He's like, how you doing? That would actually be pretty good. I would accept that.

I'd be like, do you remember your little-known movie The Switch? I love that movie. Tell me everything about what it's like working with Goldblum. It's a great movie. It's horrifying, plot-wise, excellent in-line delivery terms. I can't recommend it enough. Do you remember when they did the Dish Network thing, right? And T-Mobile sold Dish Network a bunch of Spectrum so they could buy Sprint.

Nobody remembers this for us. We counted the days that this wasn't real forever, and now it's definitely not real because Brandon Card's a dummy. The point I'm making is the first version of that network launched with like a cockamini idea about crypto points for using your wireless network. And that launched. And we spent when we sent Mitchell Clark to go use it in Las Vegas. and we could do it.

And there was like a subreddit about Project Gena 5Sys and it's weird crypto. Like they did all of that. They layered on a crypto scam on top of a wireless network and launched that and we were able to go use it. And we still can't use Trump mobile, which is just an MVNO, I believe, of AT&T and T-Mobile. It's insane. And if there is somewhere a Trump phone like tethered to a desk, I will fly to that desk just to look at it. and use it. It doesn't exist.

This phone is fake. The renders have not gotten better on the website. Like, I, it's just, I am increasingly of the belief that this is never, ever, ever going to launch. And no, nobody will ever say anything about it. Not only is it going to be, like, massively late, I don't think it's ever going to be anything ever. Oh, yeah, no, no chance. And we're going to keep counting the days. Yeah.

If there's one thing this show can do, it's count. That's what we're here for. Incrementally count the days that nothing happened. Poor Don Preston on our team. has signed up to send PR emails into the void once a week asking where Trump Mobile is. And I'm going to get Alison Johnson to try to actually sign up for Trump Mobile, which I think you can do and review the service. We'll see how that goes.

It's going to be fun. If you know anything, Wettis knows. Yeah, indeed. If you have a T1 phone, I will buy it from you for literally any price. Again, not even a sub-Rub. You know it's bad when there's not even a sub-reddit. Like one person didn't start the Trump-Mobile songrides. The proof of life is so simple.

Take a picture of it. Pete Hegseth, like, take a selfie with a Trump phone. Problem solved. He will definitely not be wearing a shirt. No, God, no. I was going to say my last one as a party speaker update. Now I just want to talk about the movie The Switch, which features the most unhinged Jeff Goldblum performance of all time. You understand how high a bar that is, right? It is so out of, like, he shows up and steals that movie at least six times. And at one point, he says, that is ill-advised. And my friends and I have been saying that is ill-advised for, like, 10 years. It's very good.

Oh, this is the like weird. It's Jason, David and Jennifer Anderson. You don't even want to say the plot out loud, man. It's a rom-com, supposedly. It's sort of, it's horrifying. Like, the plot of this movie is horrifying. The Goldblum is choice.

That's all I'm saying. Go watch that movie. That's my... The Wikipedia page is amazing. There's a lot going on with this movie. Anyway, if you're a Goldblum fan, you got, it's on your list tonight. That's all I'm saying.

My last one is actually a party speaker update. Oh, good. as by request from the YouTube comments, which were oddly aggressive about demanding a party speaker update. It has been too long. I agree. We've had a couple sent in.

So on Blue Sky, I don't even know how I pronounce this. Kinnard Malad sent in a party speaker that I believe he found in a Costco in Canada. This is, right, we're coming full circle on the maturity of these devices. This is a party speaker that looks like an old school boombox,

but importantly, around the speakers are the party lights. critically important. It's called the retro globe boombox. It's just a weird ion thing. Like, this is how we know that we're at full maturity. Right? We're now doing retro party speakers.

It's very, very good. Wait, this is great, though, because if I have one note on the party speaker world, it's that we're giving too much of the design work to the party lights. It's just a lot of like black blobs with party lights. Yeah. And I would like to see. try a little harder with our party speaker design.

Well, no, let me give you the next one. Fragile practice on Blue Sky sent me one. It is just a black blob with party lights, but here's where we are in the maturity of the market. This is at Home Depot. I didn't even have a brand. The brand is T-Z-U-M-I. That's not a word. Or is that an end?

It doesn't even know. Whatever that brand is. It's just drop shipping letters. That's what that word is. Alphabet soup. It's called a super-based job spite speaker. It's at Home Depot for 2997. What?

We've hit the singularity, man. We're through the looking glass. So you can get a party speaker for $30. Everyone should have like 10 of these. The super-based jobs site? Job site. Yep. Super-based jobs.

I love the idea that your construction site. My favorite Nirvana album needs just a straight RGB light situation. But yeah, it's a 10-hour battery. There's just a logo on here that just says LED. No reason why. It's great. I'm telling you, this is the most mature consumer electronics market

that we've seen come from nothing to like the most something totally uncovered. Like it's happening right in front of your eyes. Yeah, all the same stuff, right? Sam Altman's on CNBC talking nonsense. And you're like,

no, this whole thing happened. Just like quietly under the radar. There were not party speakers and now there are party speakers from every company at every price point in every store in America, on every street corner,

at every no king's protest, at every subway stop, they're everywhere. They just arrived. And like, no one talks about them except the Vergecast. There's your AGI right there.

But once you see them, you're like, oh, this thing, just like, under the radar became a part of America's cultural fabric. Nay, the world's cultural fabric. That's your point of people.

You're saying we've reached general party speaker. I'm saying that there are children being born today who will never know a world without party speakers. And it would just be like a default assumption that if they need to broadcast both sound and multicolored light to a large audience, that is a capability to have. That was not true when I was a child.

The one that got me recently was our two and a half year old plays like little toddler soccer on Saturday mornings. And they have one there that they didn't even use. She literally like just put the speaker down to balance her bag of. soccer balls against. And I was like, we've, we've gone so far into party speakers that you just, like, instinctively took it out of your car. And we did.

I'm just saying, we didn't run out of demand. No. Right? Like, GoPro reached a problem where there were just not enough X games people. Mm-hmm. Right? Like, do you remember that moment? Oh, yeah.

Like, I would say 16, 18, somewhere in there where they were just like, we've run out of people to sell GoPro's too. We didn't run out of people to sell party speakers to. There's yet more to come. Yeah. I'm just saying. You think AGI is the thing. You think, you know, the Pope has to declare that Sam Altman found Jesus.

Right under your nose, the greatest cultural revolution of our time. What if everybody has spent the last decade looking for the successor to the smartphone and it's just party speakers? You see what I'm saying. It's right. It's right there. Put the AGI in the party speakers and maybe we're on to something. Next to Alexa. Panos is like, all right, it's eight feet tall.

Five million colors. Let's do it. Yeah. What if Alexa Plus was much louder? Did you like it better? Is that something? All right, what's your last? Okay, I have a game we're going to play.

So we made a lot of fun of Apple TV on this show for just being horrible at naming things. And to be clear, there's now the Apple TV box, there's the Apple TV app, and there's the Apple TV service. And by the, by the what I would call AI property of growth, this means that in five years, every single product Apple makes will be called Apple TV. Yes. This is just, if we're, if we're, you know, doing the linear thing, that's the thing. That's where we're headed. This week, the news was that the new name came with some new branding. There's a new look.

And most importantly, there's a new sound that plays when you first start a thing. All of these services have, they're called like Sonic logos. And it's like that few seconds that plays right at the beginning with the logo to tell you what service you're watching. And all of them are too loud. I mean, agreed. I, my immediate reaction to this story was like, who cares? I don't even know what any of them are. Turns out I know what all of them are.

Oh, boy. And I have pulled a large number of them for you. And I'm going to play them for you. And you are going to have to guess which one is which. Okay. Are you ready for this game? Yeah. I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them for you.

We're going to do ten? We're going to do ten. Okay. Because you should be able to get all of them in one second each. The longest one of these is six seconds off. You watch so much more TV than you. Okay. Let's go.

Let's go. Okay. We'll start easy. Just to, you know, I just want to ease you in. I want to make you feel good. Let's just do that. That's HBO. Classic HBO.

Next. Oh, it's like a spinny color thing. I know what it looks like. I just, what is it? That's HBO Max. That's HBO Max. And if you're saying, David, why is that different? I don't have a good answer for you.

But here we are. Yeah. Next up. That's Netflix. They're very proud of that one. Do you think, is that one or is the HBO static the most iconic one right now? Netflix is very more. I think so too.

Okay. They've stopped using the static. It has faded from the... That's true. Like, the zoomers don't know. Okay. Next up. No, I don't know what that is.

What is that? Is that crackle? That is Peacock. The brand of minority investor in Vox Media Comcast. Well, it sucks. That's what I got. I know that as the thing that plays before

every broad NBC comedy that I watched too many episodes of. That's the one I like here in my sleep. That's Peacock. Next up. Oh man, it's like I'm having sense recollections of all these, but I couldn't tell you what they are. Can you play that again? No. Your hint is Max would get that very quickly. Max would get this. Is that Disney Plus? It is Disney Plus. Yeah. This is why I have a sense memory because I'm hearing it all the time.

Yeah, exactly. All right. Next up. It's very relaxing. Is that sauna TV? You're close. It's the new Apple TV sound. That's the new Apple TV sound. Oh, sure. That's unfair. Who knows? What do you think? Do you like it? It's nice. You want to hear it one more time? Yeah. Yeah, it's melancholy.

It's very hard to imagine that sound going right into like a cold open to a severance episode. No, it is. I'm saying there's like a bitter sweetness. There's a melancholy. All the Apple TV stuff has like a bitter sweet. Even Todd Loss's true. Has a bitter sweetness to it. Everybody has regrets in an Apple TV show.

Yeah. Okay, that's fair. All right, we got a couple more. That's some CBS shit. That's Paramount Plus. It is Paramount Plus. Like, whatever. Like, good work.

That sort of like broad Americana, like bum bum, bum, bum. Like that's just fair out. 100% yes. Well, well done. All right, I have two more for you. I think you're going to get them both. Yeah. Here we go.

Oh, that's another one. It starts with bright light and it focuses, but I have no idea what it is. That one's Hulu. Yep. Which for some reason, so we on this show did trivia with the waveform folks at an Apple event like two years ago. And this was one of the questions was what sound is that. And I got it wrong and it just pissed me off ever since. And so now I know what that is.

All right. Last but not least, see if you get this one. No? I want to say that's like a, I'm going to go with Crackle again. It's YouTube. That's YouTube. That is YouTube. That's the one that plays.

That one's a little bit cheating because it plays when you open the app, not when you play a video, but that's YouTube. Do you have the sound that Plex makes when you open it, which is just the sound of money returning to your pocket? It's the sound of the FBI picking up the phone. Yeah. All right, that was, you did, you did pretty, I am shocked you got Paramount Plus. Like that alone, I didn't get that one because I knew it was Paramount Plus.

I got it because it is, it's so CBS. Like, it's so over the top. Like, just play it again. It's that. That last hit is like, that's just old people. I don't even know how to describe. No, it is. If I had said to you, one of these was composed in 1957, you would have picked that one

immediately. It's like without question. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to play the Apple TV one more time. Right? Like this weird little dissonant minor chord thing, right?

Like, that's like the trap influence on audio, like audio trademarks where CBS is like, major chords. Like it's just very different. Yeah, that's about right. Also,

shout to the podcast, 20,000 Hertz, which has done a bunch of episodes on a, bunch of these things. They're very good. I'll link the show in the show notes, digging into how all this stuff works. They did an episode on the Hulu one, I think, that I particularly liked, which again, I should have gotten that right on the trivia, and I will never live it down. All right, that's it. It's time for us to get out of here. Neely has, like, big shot stuff to go do. I'm not super clear on what you're up to you today, but you have to go glad hand and

kiss babies and stuff. So we're going to get out of here. Vote Patel. Patel, 2020, all of them. It's just, I don't even know what you're running for, but we'll vote for you. before we get out of here Sunday another episode of Virgin History about the Fire Phone thank you to everybody who said nice things about the Zune episode by the way definitely one of the most chaotic ones we've done

but we had a very good time making that one of the first we had no idea where we were doing no none but we had a great time that episode it's been fun to hear from everybody who like still has Zunes so thank you to everybody and a reminder we're putting season two together now and if you want to be on the show

send us questions or reminisce about either TiVo or the iPhone 4 we would love to hear from you. Also, a reminder, subscribe to the Verge, just in general, but also you can get ad-free podcasts. This show, Virgin History, and Decoder, you can get all ad-free.

We continue to hear awesome things from people about how much you like the ad-free podcasts. We like them to download everything everywhere. We've gotten questions from people who are like, why do I have two feeds now? The answer is so you can download more podcasts more times, and we will be very grateful. So thank you for that.

If you have questions about anything we're up to, email Vergecast to the verge.com. Call 866 Verge-1-1. for the hotline. Jen 2 is on the show on Tuesday again with me. She's going to help me smart up my smart house. This is, I think, the second to last time I'm going to be in this room and then I'm going to move and it's going to feel very weird.

So Jen is going to help me make sense of my new place. The Vergecast is a Verge production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larcuck. Andrew Marino is here with us this week helping. Thank you, Andrew. Nice to see you as always. We'll see you next week. Nelai, take a sap.

Proctor, normal.