The Vergecast - China has some big ideas about smartphones

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

In this episode, what's old is new again, and what's new is... AI again. The Verge's Allison Johnson and Dominic Preston join David to discuss their experience at Mobile World Congress 2025, where they saw the latest devices from Xiaomi, Samsung, Realme, and others — and found themselves confronted with some big, surprising new ideas about how our smartphones should look and work. After that, Kevin Rose and Justin Mezzell talk about the process of bringing Digg back, and how AI can improve the way social networks operate. Digg got a lot of things right two decades ago, and plans to do it all over again now. Finally, we answer a question about printers from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]!), with some help from Framework CEO Nirav Patel. Further reading: MWC 2025 was all about the odds and ends What if your phone’s camera was much, much bigger? You spin me right round, baby, right round. Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: ugly phone, beautiful camera Digg Reboot How Digg helped invent the social internet Digg is coming back, with founder Kevin Rose and Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of camera bump functionality. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here trying to decide which iPad is the best. So I have the new mini, which came out last fall. I have the new Air, which is coming out this week. I have the M4 Pro, which came out roughly this time last year. And then I have the M2 Air, which is now last year's model, which also came out about a year ago. So basically, I have in my hands every iPad you can buy. except for the new base iPad.

I've not tried that one yet. I have lots of questions, but I generally think that the base iPad is the right iPad for most people. So I both have to review the new ones, and I have to go back and update our iPad buying guide on the site. So it requires a lot of existential thinking about tablets that I found myself not ready for.

So if you have thoughts on how you use an iPad and how to basically pick between them for people, I would love to hear them, but until then, I'm just going to be playing games on all of these iPads. And that's just what I do now. This is my life. Anyway, we are mostly not going to talk about iPads on this episode. We're going to come back and do some more iPad stuff once I've had a chance to try the base iPad, which will hopefully be soon. Today on the show, we're going to do two things.

First, we're going to catch up with Allison Johnson and Dom Preston on our team. They were both at MWC, Mobile World Congress last week, seeing all the weirdest and newest ideas in mobile. Going to catch up with them, see what they learned. And then I'm going to talk to Kevin Rose and Justin Metzl, who are two of the people responsible for bringing back Dig. Dig, an OG social network coming back for real in 2025. Right now it's just a landing page and a wait list, but it is coming. It's a real thing.

And we had a really interesting conversation about community and how to build the social internet with AI and how we can do this better than we did the first time. And so I figured you guys should hear it. It was really interesting stuff. We also have a hotline about printers that I'm very excited to get into. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I think I have between one and 16 software updates to do on these iPads. Developer beta's deeply terrifying thing when you're a product reviewer.

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All right, we're back. I'm putting the iPads to the side for now. It's too many tablets. I can't keep them straight. They all look the same. We'll worry about that later. Let's get into MWC. So MWC, Mobile World Congress, for many years, has been kind of the biggest show in mobile.

In the way that CES is like TVs and Cars, MWC is phones. And for a few years, MWC got kind of boring, frankly. The phone market kind of died because no one else could get into it. It was just Samsung and Apple and then a bunch of stuff in China and kind of nothing else. But the mobile industry is actually really interesting right now. And there are a lot of companies with new ideas about smartphones, particularly as we get AI and particularly as cameras become important in an AI world again, there's just a lot of new ideas about phones.

And so two folks on our team, Alison Johnson and Dominic Preston, went to MWC. They saw all the stuff. And I have lots of questions about all the stuff that they saw. So let's just get into it. Here we go. Allison Johnson, hello. Hello. And Don Preston.

Welcome to the Vergecast. Hello, thank you. Happy to be here. Allison, I'm really sorry for not being as enthusiastic about you. Oh, it's all right. I'm like, I'm also happy that you're here. I get it. Yeah.

It's Dom's first time. I want Dom to feel welcome on the Verge cast. It's exciting. Yeah. I'm the shiny new thing. So you got you two were just at MWC. It seems like kind of an interesting year. Like, tell me first just sort of the vibes in Barcelona at MWC this year.

What was it like? It was kind of two things. There's like the phones and they were sort of boring. And then there was everything else. which was like laptops that fold a whole bunch, stuff you put on your phone, stuff you used to charge your phone. It's a cool kind of like reprieve from the moment we're in of like, yeah, phones are boring. They're good now, you know, like there's Xiaomi 15 Ultra, which Dom tested is incredible by all accounts. So it was nice. It's nice to go see like weird cool stuff. stuff. Dom, what was your experience? Similar. I think even the biggest phone launch is the

Xiaomi 15 Ultra, and it's a great phone. It's a very cool phone. I was really impressed by it. But it's a super iterative update on last year's Xiaomi 14 Ultra. So, like, the most exciting phone launch of the show wasn't all that exciting, right? But as Alison said, we just had all these weird little odysies going around, accessories,

concept devices, concept everything this time, fold all things, weird cameras, all sorts of stuff. And then the, they're like smaller brands playing around with just odd versions of phones, like Nubia releasing a few strange kind of $100 phones that no one in the States can even buy that have rotating camera rings and giant speakers on the back and weird stuff like that. What's y'all sense? I want to talk mostly about some of these specific gadgets, but looking through the stuff that you guys covered, I found myself wondering how real

these companies think these products are. I had this experience a bunch of years ago. I was in in a Lenovo briefing at one of these trade shows. And they had this very cool looking orange laptop. And the product person I was talking to was like, oh, we're not going to sell any of those. They're just there so people will come look at it and then they'll buy the black laptop. And that is like, I have thought about that nonstop ever since. And what I wonder about so many of these gadgets is like, yes, we're in a very sort of iterative moment with smartphones. And so if I'm Samsung or Xiaomi or Huawei or Leno or any of these companies that you're seeing make this stuff, are they actually seriously making these things as in like this,

this might be the next phone that you want? Or are these like wild science projects that somebody built in the lab that they're showing you so that we will cover them on the verge.com, even though they know absolutely no one ever will buy them? I think it's like a range of stuff. And Lenovo is a good example because they, the briefing we got, they literally had two rooms. They're like, here are the real laptops. You have to go to the other. room and that's where the weird laptops are that like fold and charge with solar panels and there's like a weird little guy you put on your your computer um so and i think even in that room there's degrees of like this might be a real thing they had that weird like see it's like extra screens for your

laptop that you kind of like magnet to the back of your computer and then you have like the the wildest desk set up at a coffee shop ever. I don't know. I don't see that. It'll be a strange thing if I can go into Best Buy and pick that up someday. But other stuff, I think, is plausible. The question is, yeah, like, in the U.S., especially at something like Mobile World Congress, are we going to get these things? Or are we going to get even just the, like, $200 phone that that company sells that like kind of has some features. Yeah, it's kind of all over the place, I think. Yeah, Dom, playing with these phones, you're like standing there attaching an enormous

camera lens to a smartphone. Like, are you looking at these things being like, this is a real thing that maybe people will have in the real world on their phone someday? Or are you just like, neat thing that you made that I'll never see again? Trying to do a little bit of both, I guess. You always know, especially with ones like that, those concept devices. where someone, they're explicitly saying this is not yet a product or at least, and maybe never will be. You're partly trying to assess, how cool is it? Is it cool? Is it fun? Does this, like, solve some

hypothetical version of a problem, even if it's not practical in any way? But then there is a bit of you looking, you know, sometimes versions of these concept devices do come out, you know, the big DSLR lens on the back of a camera is maybe a less practical version. But then, you know, that Xiaomi had this concept where they had a much smaller lens that attached to the back of a phone via a MagSafe style connection. And that's still a concept. That's absolutely not a product. It will not be a product anytime in the next two to three years.

But I could imagine a world where it was, and you're kind of playing around with that one, and you start going, oh, this kind of does work. This is kind of practical. Like, I could imagine a world where this is a product that comes out, and this is maybe one I would actually want. Okay. I'm hopeful that you guys are right. I think you might have just both been very nice about a bunch of things that are

definitely nonsense. But I'm hopeful that you're right in that there is at least Oh yeah There's nonsense The 200 mil telephoto DSLR is not Yeah Let's start there Tom because I want to run through a bunch of

I think the wildest things you saw And just hear about your experiences with them And I feel like Dom your beat was just weird ideas About cameras at MWC Accidentally, yeah So take me through some of the strangest cameras you saw Okay so I mean the two were the big concepts So you kind of taught around them a little

already. Real Me showed off something we've basically kind of seen before already from other brands, including Xiaomi a couple years ago. But they showed a concept phone where you could put a DSLR M mount adapter on the back of the camera and then strap your big, real DSLR lens to the phone. It actually had a one-inch type sensor in the camera module, but with no lens on top of it. So basically, the only lens was whatever DSLR you threw on the top of it. This is cool for people who own DSLRs already and think, wow, wouldn't it be fun to throw this lens on a phone sometime? You know it's nonsense because they made a point of demoing it

with this giant, giant telephoto lens. And they actually brought a smaller portrait lens too, and I kind of would have liked to try that, and I didn't get the chance to, because that might have felt almost practical. Like, I can imagine a more compact lens, strapped on the back of a phone, halfway towards something I might ever use.

having this huge telphoto that's like three, four times the size and weight of the phone itself strapped to one end of the device like weighing the whole thing down and with no like meaningful camera body to grab onto it's frankly a terrible experience.

It was really awful. It's cool. Again, this is in that space of constantly. This is cool, this is fun. I'm shooting with a massive lens on a phone and the photo comes out really lovely. But awful, awful experience. You'd never ever want to use that in a million years. And then the Xiaomi equivalent was a little more practical.

I just love the theory that you're like, okay, carrying a big lens around, totally doable, but carrying a whole big camera around way too much. That's like... Oh, that's where we draw the line, yeah. Yeah, I guess. Who would want to do that? Who'd want to carry a camera body around? God, awful.

Finally, someone's come along and solved that problem. But you said the Xiaomi one is a little more reasonable. Yes or no. I think it gets around a couple problems with this. One is they had much smaller lenses, which immediately one may over. Their solution is much more proprietary, much more custom. They basically had this small lens they built for themselves that magnetically attached to the back of a custom version of one of their phones.

So it didn't actually attach to the existing camera. It goes right in the middle of the phone's body, which immediately makes it a lot more balanced. You don't have the lens all in one end. It's in the middle. It feels a bit more like a real camera setup, a little bit more comfortable to hold. The magnetic attachment is quicker, it's easier, it's less bulky.

It just feels a lot cooler and a lot more sci-fi. They also, because it attaches to the body of the phone rather than the camera, it can't take advantage of the image sensors in the phone. So what they actually did instead was put a sensor into this lens. It's this one little self-contained unit that has lens and sensor, and then magnets to the phone. The perk of that is you can get a bigger sensor in there. So they had a four-thirds type sensor rather than the one-inch that is the biggest you're going to find in any phone right now.

So you're getting a bigger sensor and a bigger lens. The lens was still something that could actually fit in your pocket. it pretty comfortably. It magsafs, well not not magsafe, magsafe, but it basically magsafe's to the phone pretty immediately and then uses an optical connection to transfer the data and then the phone handles all the actual processing. So that I get because it immediately felt like, oh, this is just like a lens add-on, like someone like Moment does but a lot better. It's a bit like Allison pointed out this line of Sony cameras from like 12 years ago or something that clamped onto a phone. And this is, ultimately it's just a lot of

that again more than a decade later they just replaced the clamp with a magnet but you know it works it's cool obviously we'll come down to price and things like that and this is so conceptual that we're nowhere near anything like that though Alison my my stake in the ground on friday show is that i think this is an extremely good idea and i sincerely hope that somebody actually makes and ships this thing but you're you're more of a camera person than i am in general what do you think of this whole what if you just shoved a camera onto your phone idea you you literally live literally through the Sony QX because we looked it up on Theverge.com and it was a David Pierce review. I don't know. I just like, I saw that come and go. This is the clamp thing. And you're,

at first you're like, that's great. This is cool, like big sensor for your phone. You just take it out, put it on. And that was obviously like way more clunky than something on magnets on your phone. But the thing it did not solve is that you're, you're carrying around an extra thing. You're still like, carrying, and at that point, do you just carry a camera? And that's where it falls apart a little bit for me. I think it's cool as hell. Like, yeah, I want to try that. I want a magazine lens on my phone and I'll give it a shot, but I just had such deja vu where I was like, we're doing this again. Oh my God. Yeah. There are no new ideas, just new attachment systems, I think is like basically where we are with technology right now. Yeah. Um, Alison, the gadget that you

that I would say I have the most questions about is the new null AI phone, which I have now spent a lot of time staring at and don't understand at all. And I would like you to explain this thing to me, please. Yeah, I have a similar feeling about it. So this is a company called New Nol. They're based kind of in blockchain stuff. The first thing they said to me in my briefing was that they never sold cryptocurrency, and they were emphatic about that. So that sets the stage for this. It's a little, a kind of rectangle phone, like a small phone, runs Android. There's sort of two parts to the screen. There's this, like, top little display, and then the bottom one where the normal phone stuff is.

And on the top part of the display is your avatar. Like, it creates a version of you based on your, you know, some photos, video, you talking, whatever. and that is your AI assistant. And the idea is you upload, you like go around to meta and, you know, Google, download all your data because they all have a system for like data portability. And you bring it over to the Noodle OS and you upload it there and you train this, you know, AI version of you on all your stuff. they even have this like in the onboarding. I didn't see this, but they described it that you can describe the things you want in the future and kind of like input that as like, here's the kind of thing I'm interested in doing. Wow. It's so wild. Like, so this little version of you,

when you summon it on the phone, kind of pops up and just stares back at you and you tell it to do stuff. And that was the like, there's a lot of. the like similar, you know, calling Uber was like the thing. Every AI assistant was doing at the show. We're just calling Uber's all over the frigging place. But like write a letter or, you know, someone calls and the AI version of yourself answers the phone and talks to that person and answers questions. They're like, oh, Allison's in a meeting right now, blah, blah, blah. And you could be like ask about some, uh, my availability to do something and it would answer. So the one that really got me, they showed me some live demos on this device. They had it buy a car insurance policy. And the thing they told me was that they actually bought a secondhand car so that they could run through this demo. And it was

going through, it's very kind of rabbit R1 in that like you tell it to do something and then it's, you see it clicking through the Geico website. But it's actually doing it on your phone. As far as I understand, yeah, I ask the question of like, is this doing this for me? Is it on a computer somewhere else? And I'm not 100% clear on it. But saw it all happen. It answered the question.

It was like, how much you commute every day? And the idea is it shows you where it's getting its answers. It kind of like shows you its work. as you go. So, like, go to Google Maps or whatever and be like, you commute 40 miles a day or whatever it is. And then went through and paid for the insurance policy. And they were like, we need to go cancel this now. Oh, my gosh. It was wild. Like, I just don't even, like, saw it with my own eyes. I'm like, I have a hard time believing this. Like, so yeah, it was, it was one of the wilder things at the show, I think. There are two parts of that that that I find.

incredibly interesting and one of them I also find incredibly weird. The one is I actually think the idea of like having you train your own assistant by going and doing the various exports from all the other apps is actually very clever. Total privacy nightmare. Yeah. But in terms of like if you want to sort of solve the cold start problem of how do you train an AI, if you're willing to do that, that's actually like an incredibly smart way to do that is just go ingest all the algorithms from all your social platforms. and let them just go to work. Again, don't do that. Yeah. But if you're going to, it's a pretty smart way to do it. The thing that I don't understand is why this company decided that what I want when I summon my virtual assistant is me, staring at me doing this. That's like, it seems so weird to me.

I know. Yeah. I would feel awkward looking at myself on my phone. Like, am I bothering you? Were you doing something important? Yeah. I don't know. Dom, did you get to try this thing?

I did not. I'm kind of sad now that I didn't get to see some tiny terrifying. Alison, did you get to see a tiny AI Allison? Did they make one for you? No, no. But they say they're shipping this thing. It's going to go on sale in May. It's like $375.

And then they said two months after that, it's going to be a product that ships in the wild people have in their training. their own AI's on. So I don't know. It may not be long. I'm going to go ahead and bet the over on the release date on that one. Yeah. May first I'm going to guess is going to come and go.

But hey, I hope I'm wrong on this one. Dom, you saw a bunch of other weird phones with weird ideas about things on the back. Because I guess how I would say it. Including one, I think the company was Nubia. Is that right? You found a phone with like a. with a scrolly circular dial on the back. Yes.

I love a good circular dial, but I don't understand what this thing is doing. So Nubia is part of ZTE. They're the company that make the Red Magic gaming phones as well that people may be more familiar with. That's kind of their biggest brand. And yeah, they announced an absolute ton of devices this year, and they had a few really weird ones.

I think the camera ring was the strangest. It was on a, I think it's called the Focus 2 Ultra, if I've got that sort of sounds the right way around. And it was a very cheap-looking mid-range phone, but it just has this round camera module with a kind of brass ring around the edge that is a rotating crown, just like you would get on, you know, like rotating crown on the watch or something. So the bezel of the camera can rotate. The main way they had this set up was just that it works as a zoom dial in the camera. So you can hold the phone and just with like one finger on the back, just rotate that dial and it zooms in and out. So it's a bit more natural than the sort of clunky pinch to zoom or swipe to.

zoom that you tend to have on phones these days, which work fine, but they're slightly awkward movements. It definitely felt more natural than I thought it would to just have my finger resting on the back, swiveling this thing. It was a very kind of, it's very easy to move. It had a little bit of a ratchet to it, but not too much, and it didn't require a lot of force to move. It was a very kind of quick, easy, smooth, rotate this wheel. And the camera just zoomed in and out. I'm not sure if you can actually adapt it. What I hope you could do is customize that to do other stuff, either within the camera, changing like exposure or something. It'd be cool. Outside the camera, scrolling by just swiveling this wheel on the back of the phone. That's the kind of thing I'd like

to see from it. And I'm not sure if that's in there or if that ever will be. But yeah, I like this. This is a real product. It is actually a thing people can go and buy. Definitely not in the US, but elsewhere in the world, I think this will be real and available. And I don't think the phone as a whole look like a total winner. But this is fun. I like that as a concept. I'm sort of intrigued by this one because I think like we're definitely in the age of wild camera bumps on phones, right? And I like everybody's trying to either make them sort of the whole aesthetic of the phone. Like that's the pixel idea, right? It's like what if the whole look of this thing was the camera bump?

Or just like pretend they don't exist, which is like what Apple's doing? They're like, what camera bump? There's no camera bump. Don't worry about the camera bump. There's no camera bump. You've never seen a camera bump in your life. But this I think is very cool because it's like, okay, there is. There is hardware on the back here and you're going to feel it with your finger.

And I like the idea of actually making it useful in some way. Even honestly, if it did nothing, but it was just like a little fidgety thing on the back. There's still something about like, you've made this phone more tactile in a way that I actually really, really like. A fidget spinner built into the back of the phone. I love it. I mean, that's like 60% of what this pop socket on my phone is. It's just a little fidget spinner. And I think that kind of thing.

But Dom, I totally agree. like if you could map that to other stuff on the phone, the way that you can like on some phones map the volume buttons to scroll up and down or like, you know, turn pages in the Kindle app or whatever. Like little bits like that I think are very cool and should come back to more smartphones. Alison, did you see any other cool phones? I feel like there's a bunch of like the nothing phone seems fine. There's like the solar smartphone concept.

But was there anything else that like really jumped out to you on the mobile side of things? I got to give a shout out to the coffee phone. which was a concept. This is from techno. And I went over there, like techno, Chinese brand, they had a bunch of concepts

on their booth and there's like a trifold. They had a slim phone because we're doing slim phones. But there's you could actually like pick up and use, which was cool. So I went over there.

I was like in line to see the slim phone and I got kind of the rundown on this. They had these like sustainable concepts where the back of the phone was made out of like some kind of coconut fiber. And the woman showing them to me, she was like, this one is made out of coffee grounds, and you can smell it.

And it smells like coffee. And I smelled it. And it smells like coffee. Whoa. I know. Is that cool or is that? I thought it was cool as hell. I loved it.

I made everybody standing around me smell the phone. I was like, Julian, smell this phone. Made it my whole personality for the 30 minutes. I don't. I don't know. I was like, that's so fun. That's not a thing I've ever going to be able to buy. So, like, the most practical cool thing I saw, I think, was at HMD. They had a whole thing. It was wild. It was at the FC Barcelona Stadium. Oh, sure. Okay. HMD is the company that makes Nokia phones now, right? That's like in the U.S. Yeah. They're the Nokia one. Nokia and their launch, they sell phones as HMD now.

which you can actually buy one in the U.S. But they have, it's some earbuds that come in this kind of rectangular case, and it mags save chitues to the back of a phone, and it doubles as a little power bank. So it's got like, it's somewhere, it's like 1,300 milliamps or something like that. Not huge, but there's like more of a battery in it than your typical, like, AirPods case. the earbuds just kind of like pop out of the sides. They're real chunky and kind of weird looking, I think,

because they need to fit into this case. But I think that's genius. Like I'm used to charging my AirPods. I'm used to carrying those around with me. Wouldn't it be cool if that did something else for me? Like if my phone's running out of battery, you just slap it on there and you get a little more charge. It was like, I love it.

I, A, that's a very good idea. And B, I'm looking at this photo that you took of it now, and it kind of looks like you've magneted a vape onto the back of your phone. Oh, it does kind of like, like, babe. Oh, no, how far away are we from Chitou, vape? Not far. Clearly not far. Oh, it's going to happen. You can vape and charge your phone, and also there's headphones inside.

It's like, that's how you get the teens on board of G2. The ultimate multitasker. Oh, no. Well, thank you for that, David. You're welcome. We've really done something here. Okay, so there's one more gadget I want to ask you about, and then I'm just curious to hear favorite things from the show, and then I'll let you get out of here. This Nintendo Switch-looking thing that Samsung made,

what is this thing? I see like this is like an image that got passed around the Internet, and people are like, oh, my God, what a cool thing that Samsung made? It's like a foldable Nintendo Switch. Did you guys see this thing? What is this thing? Yeah, this was at Samsung display. And their booth is full of concept devices, like, very much, like, we don't make these things.

These are just ideas. Aren't they cool? Maybe someone could adapt them and tell them. So they had all kinds of stuff, all kinds of folding displays. But the coolest one was this gaming handheld that was sort of set up with a very small sign that said, you know, it was like, do not touch. Everybody wanted to come over and touch it. It was very difficult not to just pick it up and touch it and someone would yell at you. But it just, it does what it sounds like. It's like a little switch-looking thing that folds in half and you open it up and play your games and you fold it up when you're done. It's green and yellow, so it's not a switch, but it's definitely a switch. I thought it was one of the coolest things. I've like never travel with the switch because it just kind of seems like that. bit too bulky. I'm like, what if it folded? Maybe I would take it around then. There is something about this that I find, like, irresistibly cool. I don't, like, I have no idea

what I would use it for or if it would change anything for me or it would just stick a giant crease in the middle of all of my video games. But like, it's very cool. There's something, there's something about it that I'm like, I'm in on all foldables, as you well know, but this one I'm in on as well. Yeah, like immediate appeal. I mostly wanted to touch it just to try. the d pads because the way this is designed is that the analog sticks have to go somewhere when it folds so the d pads are kind of just like holes with buttons around the edge so the analog stick can slot into these holes and they look like the worst d pads ever made and i'm fascinated to try them just to feel what those buttons are like and how that would work to play anything on oh i hadn't even

understood that looking at this picture they're like they're like down sloping buttons so that the stick has somewhere to go in the center of them. Yes. On the inside edge of a ring. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's probably not a great idea.

Doesn't seem like it's going to work. But I like it. All right. Before I let you guys go, I want you each to tell me just your favorite thing that you saw. It doesn't have to be real. It doesn't have to be plausible. It doesn't have to be a thing you're going to buy. But what's the thing you saw at MWC that you were most like just into for good reasons or for bad?

Dom, you go first. For me, it is the the Xiaomi camera concept that lends the magnets onto the back of the phone. I agree, David, I'm all in on this. I want this to exist. I say that as someone who's a sucker for the the Xiaomi photography kit

that they have for the ultra phones, which is a little camera grip that has a battery pack and slaps on the side and gives you a shutter button and zoom dial and stuff like that. They didn't show those things off together and I'm kind of shocked they didn't have a version that had that

because then it really is just like a mirrorless camera, you pull apart, you pop the lens off, you pull the grip off, now it's your phone, you slap those back on and you've got a full-size camera. And I love that. It's very cool. I genuinely do see the potential in this. Very, very expensive potential, I'm sure, but potential. I would buy this if it existed. I honestly, like, what if you had a really good camera that had Instagram and TikTok installed on it? Just makes sense to me. It just makes sense to me. And I think the answer is probably just your smartphone camera is good enough on its own, but like, no, it's not. We can do better.

Yeah, that's the closest hesitation I have is like the Xiaomi camera is almost that good, right? Like the 15 Ultra is such a great camera that you almost look at, well, when they're doing that well anyway, do they need this whole other lens to slap on the back? But yeah, why not? Even bigger sensors, even bigger lenses. Let's keep going. 100%. Alison Ruebeg, what was your favorite? Not to be boring, but like the 15 Ultra, I think. Just that. Really? Yeah, though, like the upgrade, and it's a minor one kind of on a spec page is the periscope zoom is like, they were like, what if we took a telephoto camera on a smartphone and made it good?

And you're like, wow, that would be awesome. And they did it. It's like massive. And it makes the whole back of the camera look silly. But I haven't tried it out myself. I'm dying to. Like, what if a telephoto camera was good? Is such a, like, radical thought for a phone?

You know, take portraits inside where your subject is moving a little bit. And, like, that might actually work with this phone. I don't know. I'm thrilled. I want to try it. I also love that the pitch for it isn't what if a telephoto was good at a hundred times zoom because we've had that pitch again and again and again and again from Samsung. It's what if the telephoto was good at a hundred times zoom?

if the telephoto or periscope was good at four times. Like, it's just really, really good at four times and it's great there. And it can go up to 120 times and you should never do that and the photos are awful. But they're not pitching it on that. They're not pitching on the fact that you can shoot a skyscraper from the other side of a city. They're just saying like, yeah, what if you could shoot something on the other side of the room and it would actually be a nice photo that you want to use with bouquet and beautiful colors and all of that. Exactly. Yeah, I love that. And I think the message that Allison and I have been yelling into the universe that digital Zoom is not Zoom. it's cropping, is finally seems to be giving us some real benefits. And they're actually starting to solve this problem. And Allison, I think you and I specifically deserve real credit. We did it. We got the W. I'm proud of us. I also think, by the way, it's very cool to see Xiaomi back to doing like really cool, interesting, weird smartphone stuff. Like that company was out in front of so many smartphone trends. It was doing the all-screen stuff really early. It was doing foldable stuff really early. It's like they've been pushing interesting trends kind of out ahead of a lot of companies for a long time.

So I think this is the kind of thing that like it seems weird, but might start to pop up other places. And Xiaomi's history of doing this well and early is pretty strong. So it was cool to see Xiaomi like back at the forefront of fun ideas about smartphones. But we'll never get to buy them. No, we won't. Alas. Dom, you're going to have to get all of them. And we're just going to live vicariously through your experiences with cool phones that we're not allowed to have.

Can you send me one, please? Awesome. Well, thank you both for doing this immediately after flying one of you, not a long time and one of you a very long time. But it's nice to see you both. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. All right.

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Support for this show comes from from. What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But WhatNot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people

in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T-com.com. slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. Welcome back. About a year ago, Kevin Rose and I got on the phone to talk about Dig. Back then, we were mostly reminiscing. The Verge did this big package of stories about 2004 and all

the tech that happened that year. And Dig was one of the things that launched in 2004. So we were talking about the early days of Dig and how community has changed online and how the like button changed everything and on and on. But I asked him at the very end of our chat if he'd given any thought to bringing Dig back. And he kind of said no, but he said no in a way that made it clear he actually had given it a lot of thought. And it turns out that not that long after our conversation, he started to give it a lot of thought, like a lot of thought. And now it's coming back. So dig after, I don't know, it's still technically around, but it's changed a lot over the years. And it is definitely not the dig that you remember if you remember the original dig.

But now Kevin Rose, along with Justin Metzell, who's going to be a CEO at Dig, and people like Alexis O'Hanian, who is the co-founder of Reddit and is now going to be an advisor and an investor in Dig, the goal is to bring it back and to make a new kind of social network out of it. They have big ideas about how AI can make it easier for moderators. They have big ideas about how we can do community better. These are people who have learned kind of every lesson there is to learn about social and the Internet. and their goal is to get it right this time. So originally when I talked to Kevin and Justin, I didn't actually intend to use it for the show. We were just having kind of a product briefing,

but I enjoyed the conversation so much that I figured I'd just play it for you here. So this is Kevin and Justin and me, and we pick up when I essentially asked them, why now, right? Kevin said he had been approached by various owners over the years about whether he wanted to buy the dig domain

and buy the website and buy the whole thing back and try it all again. And it was said no. and the timing was wrong, just didn't feel right. But this time, it felt right. And so I asked him why, and specifically, what changed between then and now that got you back in? Here's what he said. Listen, the big, obviously we all know that the hottest thing to talk about these days is AI, right?

And when we talked about that, when we talked last time, that you were like, that might be the thing that makes some of this stuff sort of newly possible. Right. And I think that that is, it is a very delicate topic to cover, largely because one of the things that I believe that may dig and makes Reddit a special place on the internet is that you know there are humans behind the scenes with real opinions, real conversation going on, real stories that they find interesting. and you don't, the second you start to sterilize that, then you're just an aggregator of information. You're a fancy RSS reader with some voting on it. And it's like nobody wants that or thinks that's the future.

And so if anything, we want to figure out how to reinvent and reimagine what it means to build communities and bring people together. And we see AI as a partner on a variety of different. fronts. But the first front that we'll tackle is very much like how can we remove the janitorial work of, you know, moderators and community managers and convert what they do every day into more of a kind of director of vibes culture and community builder than someone that is just sitting there doing the laborious crappy stuff. that, you know, comes in through the front door.

And that's a lot of tooling that needs to be built in. And we did some pressure testing there to see, you know, what different models are out there, how they handle different types of content, how we can surface that stuff, what kind of knobs and dials can we expose to different moderators and different community managers so that, you know, they're able to have a more honed and completely transparent version of what they're building. And I am speaking to the future a bit

and not all this will be there on day one. That strikes me is the kind of thing in sort of broad strokes that a lot of these LLMs are actually like really well set up to be good at. Yes. In a way that I feel like a lot of people tell me things that I'm like maybe in a decade LLMs

will be able to do that. This one where it's like basic kind of content understanding and sorting and shuffling is like actually pretty well within the realm of what a lot of this stuff can do, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. And also just, you know, these models can also be discreetly defined

and there can be multiple agents working on your behalf. So we very much see a world where, you know, and I'm just making stuff up here for the sake of whatever for random banter, but there's everything from an AI agent that converts your entire subcommittee into Klingon. And, you know, there's another way.

one that you have a meditation group and you don't allow a certain type of profanity and that's automatically auto-moderated, right? Or at the very extreme end, and I think this is something that, without giving away too much, you'll see down the road. But, you know, I think of dig less like rebuilding a content management platform and more like creating the next version of Figma. It's almost like akin to the shift from Photoshop to Figma, where you went from, I'm defining the pixels as a 800 by 800 square and as by file new to a, I have a blank canvas and I'm just going to allow the dynamic rearrangement of information in a very flexible way as driven by multiple members of the community. So if we can create more of a dynamic canvas where, you know, agents are layered

on top of that to assist, to help, to do wild things, to create games, to do whatever they want that community wants them to do,

then we have something and we have the ability to wake up one morning and be completely surprised by what, you know, our audiences create. And I think that marching towards that end goal

is going to be a wild ride, you know? That's a really fun way to think about it. That's also, like, huge, right? Like what you just described is you could be sort of, anything up to and including

the whole internet. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, it's like, forums have been, and conversation has been such a kind of like, as defined by CSS kind of world. And it's like,

those things get updated or refreshed or changed, you know, whatever, once every few years by the platform owner, or, you know, you install a new WordPress theme or whatever it may be. But, you know, if I'm in a eventual later sub-community on dig that's about stocks, you know, and I want a real-time stock ticker, I should just ask my bot to go make one and drop it in there for me.

You know, it's like, that's all going to be possible, right? And that kind of flexibility and malleability of a future version of dig is what ultimately gets us really, really jazzed and excited. And the thing that Alexis has said about Justin is that, you know, and it's very clear and I know it's quite well in working with them, is that you need somebody running these social platforms with a high degree of integrity and someone that's always going to point to that North Star and say, the community eats first. This is all about the community. This is all about serving those people and creating the best possible experience for them. Because from my point of you in watching all the rebellion that happened against Dig and the rebellion that's happened

multiple times on Reddit, largely a lot of that is driven by those people that put in so many hours of their life as being treated as second-class citizens and not really, you know, being taken, their needs being taken seriously. And so, you know, one of the first things I did even before buying Dig is I went out and personally bought thousands of dollars. of Reddit ads. And I targeted all of the moderation communities. And I put in forms, some of them targeted, some of them open-ended questions, asking moderators what they were missing. Were their pain points? Where are they struggling? What do they wish existed that isn't being built for them? And I got thousands of responses that, of course, I dumped into AI. And themes started to emerge.

and it's that level of attention that we need to be giving these people and helping them build the tools so that the back office and the suite of tools that they have looks as good as the front does. And that's just never been done and that's something that's on us to build. Totally. And it's interesting to hear

you talk about paying attention to the community as paying attention to the moderators, which I think is like, I spent a bunch of time with Reddit mods during not this most recent Reddit Mod revolt, but the one before that. It's like every two years, this happens all over again. And the thing they were saying is like Reddit actually takes pretty good care of its users and horrible care of the moderators,

who are the ones who actually spend all of their time taking care of their users. And they really felt that. And they were like, the reason our users have a good time is not because of Reddit, it's because of us. And like appreciating that, the middleman there, I think is a hard thing to do because most people don't notice it. But I think it ends up kind of being the job in a lot of ways. I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with that. And then I also think that we can, it's not just about building them good tools,

but it's also about giving them agency in a way that they haven't had before. And what I mean by that is like, it's just like, it's a real bummer to me as a creator. Like if I step outside of the dig realm for a minute, and I say like, listen, like, a good example is like, you know, I own my email newsletter list, right? And in some sense, until they take it away,

I can't export all of my Twitter data and take it with me, right? Like, how do we make sure that if a community comes along and they want to have a deeper, more real connection with these people that they spend so much time building up these communities,

like, it's not all for nothing. It's not like just some big corporate entity controls that. So we think deeply about these questions on how we can give them more real ownership and all the things that we build and do versus just making them unpaid, you know, moderators that don't get a lot of recognition, you know?

Well, and I think the thing that was really interesting, as we've even thought about it, was it was like, it's like that question you can ask. Like, what would I do different if I was to do something like this again? And having both Kevin and Alexis with their own stories, their own paths that each of these things have taken, I mean, it feels like I have the game guide to, like, look at, and play really well from the beginning.

I know where the secrets are. I know where the secrets are. I know where to look. And again, that doesn't mean that every single thing is super clear. But that's mostly because both, you know, Kevin, myself and Alexis very much value human-centered design. We want the community to dictate a lot of these things. But the difference was like, how do we square up from day one to let them know that it's like, this is a place for people to gather for communities?

And we recognize that people are able to gather when people gather. when people catalyze and like a make it happen by building communities online. And I think it's even more important now that we think about those things and how it's working and how to do it in a healthy way. What's your sense of what you're kind of wading into with that conversation? Because on the one hand, I feel like there is more need for that than ever. And people are really aware of kind of how important community is. But also we've spent most of the last decade just being burned by that over and over and over in every different way.

So I feel like you're going to run into a group of people who both desperately want what you're talking about and are also more skeptical every day of whether you will actually do it and deliver it to them in the long run. Well, it's a balance because it's like a lot of modern social media with the algorithm. Like, it's like outrage culture. It's just like, what can we serve you that is so counter to what you believe that you'll see it and you'll just like want to throw your phone across the room? And so it's like one of the things we have talked about is like how do we, obviously we're going to use AI to be able to make things more efficient. And hopefully that means there's relevancy service there and there's interest that you have and the spaces that you follow. And we can, you know, branch out from there to grow some of those things. But like there has to be a balance where it's like instead of doing it behind closed doors or, you know, really just saying, well, if you're mad, you're going to click a lot more.

So let's just get everybody really mad. we can really start thinking about like how do we get people into communities is the first, but then also like when you're in there, like what does it mean to show up in a community? Like who are you in that community? You'll have people that post content, like post original content. You're going to have people that make comments and they're funny and they're enjoyable. But you have people obviously that make other kinds of comments and those people exist too. But it's like you also have people that like just support other things.

They're not the ones finding the stuff, but they're upvoting it. and they're sourcing from like the earliest stuff. How do we get that to the top here? And those people deserve to be celebrated as well. So one of the things that Kevin and I talked about from the beginning is like, you know, there's like all these very simple, you know, systems that we already have for like commenting systems and branching and all that stuff. But it's like even if we start there,

we cannot stop asking the question about how to like give people the respect for being really insightful, for being really encouraging, for being really funny. at times, or just even saying like, hey, this isn't really adding to the conversation. And maybe that's okay. And people do need to see that a bit. So I think for us, it really is just about when people create communities, they should have control on what kind of community they're looking to create. It should be efficient and easy. And it should be something that, like, other people have a real understanding of like, what does it mean to show up here? What are we talking about? What are we sharing? And how are we doing it?

Yeah, and I think just adding on top of that, the one thing that you'll see, And I think this is important to hit home with you is that, you know, Dig Day 1 is very much our, like, MVP, let's just ship this. Lots of, lots of bugs, lots of broken things. Like, we're rushing this out. We're going to get it out. But we're going to fast-fall that every couple weeks with just, like, just new stuff all the time. So when we get there, what you'll see that is a radical transparency that you will see, you won't have seen anywhere else. there will be no such thing as shadow banning.

You will see a full audit log of what's happening to who and why. And I think this is where, you know, we can kind of lean on AI to be a helpful participant here and that there's a couple of different ways you can imagine this. You can say, okay, I'm a community manager and I run this community. I generally want this type of conversation to be happen here, and I want to disallow this type of conversation. Okay, those rules are written and available for everyone.

You can see when AI takes action to enforce some of those rules. And if you even feel like it, you can add an extra agent on top of that that grades the moderator's own actions and says, I agreed or disagreed with what this moderator actually did, right? And so there's layers of this in a transparency that I think a lot of the people that are very skeptical of these secret algorithms that promote agendas or do different things. I think they're really going to enjoy seeing that audit trail and exactly what's happening behind the scenes because we just think that's such an important piece of trust here

is to let them know that, one, be very clear about how to show up, but two, when action does happen, which ultimately when you get to tens of millions of people all playing in the same sandbox, there will be, being very transparent about why and how these things happened, you know? Yeah. It just seems like part of what you're going to have to figure out how to square

is making something that is very fun and interesting and exciting to be part of, but isn't like a game to be won? Yes. I think a lot of the mistakes Dig made in its first iteration. And Kevin, you and I talked about this too, is like, Dig kind of became a game you could win. And so people figured out how to win it and win it even with things that shouldn't have won it. And it just starts to become this impossible like SEO spiral into madness and bad content. That's right.

And I feel like that's a, that just strikes me as a really tricky but important thing to get right. Like this has to be fun, but you can't win at it. I feel like the internet doesn't have that much of that right now. Everybody's trying to win on the internet. That's right. And we think deeply about this. And I think you'll notice this. I don't want to get into unreleased features, but on day one, you'll notice a couple of very obvious things

that on user profiles that you've never seen before. There's, well, we might as well just like say it, because it'll come out when it comes out, but like there's no such thing as following in dig. And we've replaced some of the core what have been considered to be quote-unquote vanity metrics in the past with what we believe to be our first attempt at things, that are much more tangible and real

and inspire you to do positive things inside of the ecosystem versus a game that's just one versus who's got the biggest follower count and that's what we're really excited to continue to tweak after we get it out there. Man, if you can fix the social metric thing, you will have done the internet a great service.

Like, truly, we don't have a thing that's better than likes and followers and both of those are bad. Yes, and we've, we, that's, you know, going back to Justin's point, like when you, if you were a fly on the wall in the, the Alexis, Kevin, Justin, hangout space, yes, there are the, the kind of table stakes, like lessons learned stuff that we need to pay attention to and are just going to continue to hold true today from the past. But a lot of it is like, okay, screw what we know to be

true. Let's go back to first principles. If we were designing this from today, let's just imagine a world where let's challenge all these assumptions that we previously had, not just for the sake of challenging them, but really, truly sit with them for a minute and say, what might me do differently? And that's led to some really different outcomes already. Yeah, that's cool.

So, Justin, I'm particularly curious for your perspective on, like, the nostalgia versus newness thing. Because, like, my sense is, like you guys are saying, there is a real group of people out there who loves dig and remembers dig and will care about it and we'll come back for it.

But I feel like that only gets you so far. And especially in terms of like the product you guys are describing, it sort of rhymes with old dig, but it's very much not old dig. So like, I don't know. How are you thinking about the balance of those two things? Yeah, you know, we had a different version, I think, of this that was probably a little more of a departure from the dig that people know that we were kind of actively working on as we spun things up earlier this year. And we were at an offsite together all like doing a hacker house. And what I ended up just like waking up one night. I couldn't fall back asleep because I was just like, I don't want to go out the door with a product

that is duct taped together that does not feel like an enjoyable space to be in, of course, but also just like the people who knew Dig walk in and they go, oh, Diggs back. Oh, that's great. You know, we've seen so many threads on, you know, various platforms, people talking about Digg, and it's always like, oh, man, I miss it. It's time to bring it back. And of course, just because we want to bring Surg soda back does not mean Surge is as good as we remember. And I get that. What we want to do is really build. the platform that really works for our modern world that we exist in as well. So what we've really done, and at least here in the beginning that you'll see, is like there are a lot of things that feel

innately like Dig, and it is a very stripped down experience. This isn't like you can do anything and everything. It's a very tight experience on day one, but the goal is two-week iteration release cycles. So it's like discovery and delivery happening in two weeks and going out the door because we have a group that is tenacious. They are really hungry and they're really passionate about what we're building. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, there's an interesting thing where it's like, I do feel like you're going to get a lot of people who just go to the website because it's dig. Right? And that is like a very powerful thing to have going for you.

But it comes with weird expectations, right? Like, if it looks like it did 20 years ago, that is both good and bad in a way that is, I think, really hard to sort through. Yeah. And I think that's, But I don't think it's like we have to throw out all the nostalgia. Like I think it's like, you know, if you come on day one, it's 99.9% nostalgia and you're like,

damn, this is like a slightly updated version of dig that. I can confirm, though. It's not a skeuomorphic website. I can confirm that. Okay, that's good. That's fair. But I think that the, you know, the one thing we didn't want to do that Justin's alluding to when he said that he stayed up that one night because I got the call the next day or maybe

two days later and he's like, hey, I just, I just trashed. I'm blowing everything up. I threw away a bunch of stuff. And I was like, okay, let's talk about it. Like, what's up? And the insight that he had there that I thought was super sharp was that, you know, let's get that, let's get that nostalgia bump that we get, we all know we're going to get on day one and what we can ride that for a couple weeks. And that trust with any of these communities. And ultimately, playing the long game here. It's built up week over week, month, over month,

feature over feature, and this is a multi-year adventure for us. This is not something where dig's going to eat 50% of Reddit's traffic by the third month. You know what I mean?

This is us trying to stay as nimble as possible to have as many different wild shots on goal, all with a very important direct line of communication with the user base so that we're listening and rolling that into everything that we do. Well, the thing, too, that I really do want to bolt on here is, like, I love what you're

saying about, like, we're going to get this thing going, and it will be some of the nostalgia. But, like, at the same time, like, the reason why we made that decision was it was, if we brought people back to dig and they were like, man, I just want to dig back, and then they get it, and they're like, oh, this is not what I wanted at all. Like, like, okay, yeah, no, this is a totally new thing. Now it's a chat app or something. That's where we'd feel like we kind of duped, just like took the name or like, let's just do whatever we want on this thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the spirit of it. But then on the other side is like, I also don't want, you know, Reddit folks to come over on that first day. And just like, okay, so this is like just like Reddit with worse features, less stuff and less people. And so it's like we really need to like figure out what is the first step that it looks like to build dig.

and then we'll figure out the rest of the steps from it. Yeah, I think it's like, you know, this is a horrible analogy. It doesn't come up with something better. But like, in my head, I'm like, okay, the old dig users were used to Photoshop 4. We're giving them Photoshop 6, and in 18 months, they'll have Figma, you know?

And it's like, it's kind of that world where, and we're going to bring them along every step of the way, right? And so if we would have just dropped Figma on day one, people would have been like, what the hell is this, you know? and it's going to happen not because we're just going to roll out features that we expect will just work flawlessly,

it's going to happen because we roll back features that didn't work and we roll out the next thing. That's how we're going to figure out this whole thing and in the future. It's that agility that a big competitor won't be able to have. And it's the fact that we've written the backend from scratch in a way that is so nimble it allows for rapid experimentation

in a way that a competitor won't have that is going to give us the edge here. Yeah, yeah, it sure helps to not be a public company in need of giant growth at this particular moment. 100% of the social universe. 100%. That's why you nailed it. Like, we're, you know, we don't even have ads on the site.

Like, there's no, there's no plan for ads anytime soon. Like that, and if we do, we're going to do it in a way that's completely different, you know? And we've already got ideas around some of that stuff. But it is we're saying, it's like, as we're breaking in this new vehicle and we booted up and we kind of like, you know, we've got that fresh new car smell and everything is like, you know, just trying to make sure like the panels are bolted on correctly. It's going to be a fixed taxonomy of topics.

And that'll be day one. We are going to very much fast follow that into open ended, build your own whatever you like. And so when that happens, you know, to your point about smaller micro communities, if you just care about knitting, like, damn it, we want to have the best home for you to go build a community about knitting. And you may need very specific things for that community that we're just not even aware of, right? But, you know, we want to make it as flexible long term so that you can describe those things and have those kind of like happen. So it's going to be a lot of steps to get there. But to your point about, you know, will they'll be logged out people that just come for the home page because they're like, show me the homepage of the internet today? Absolutely.

Right. I was just going to say, you're trying to sort of do both of those things. You want to have the one sort of shared experience, but also let people kind of define their own inside of it. Not a percent. It's like if you got a niche weird thing, then you'll have a pocket in a home for that. that, you know, I've been into lately into Japanese denim and I would love to have a community that just talks about that all day long. That would be, I'd be all about that, right? And so it is, it is a world

where we will get to embrace and open it up to anything and everything, you know? So why I launched this now? I'm going to let you guys go here in a minute, but like, to your point, you could sort of build this thing in secret forever or you could just like launch the thing the minute you have a website and say,

coming soon and have a wait list. Like, why, why now? Why is this the right moment? Well, I think, I think it's because somebody is, is going to connect these dots here. A new startup will connect these dots and that they'll see that we have competition in market right now that has largely neglected the user base. And I'm not just talking about Reddit here, but across the board, that it's been largely driven by, by people that it's a top-down development approach and that these are the features, you'll like them, and they are what they are. And, you know, if you don't like it, leave. And I think that we have the ability to flip the script there.

And then also, it's just the most opportune time to lean into all these advancements that we're seeing on the technology front. You know, it's like when I built the first version of Dig, I was rack-mounting my own servers because AWS didn't exist. That's how ancient I am. And when EWS came out, I was like, oh, my God, if I had only built it now, how much easier would this have been? And this is another one of those moments where I'm like, I said, you know, Alexis and I look at each other and we were like, oh, my God, if now is another one of those moments where it's like, God, there's so many things we could fix, you know? And when you see as an entrepreneur and, you know, Justin obviously knows this quite well, but when you see problems and you actually see solutions, to those problems and no one's doing it. And you have a lot of domain

expertise here, you know, and you've got the co-founder of Reddit that is like, hey, here are the five things I wish I could have built. And he's literally like, but never did. And we've got all the stuff that was on the cutting room floor that he just never saw the light of day. And we're like, damn, those are good ideas.

We're going to go do it. All right, we've got to take one more break. And then we're going to come back and take a question from the podcast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling,

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Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. Let's get to the Vergecast Hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge11. The email is Vergecast at the verge.com. Send us all of your questions about everything all the time. That's just the best thing we do here is try and answer your questions. Like I mentioned, we have some really fun sort of bigger picture stuff coming out of hotline questions

that I'm very excited about. So stay tuned for that. For now, we have a question about printers. Burgecast, it's David from the center of the United States again in Missouri. And I'm not actually sure I haven't called about this before. But here's what I need you to do. Before, amidst all this talk about how Apple is declining as a company, as if it's new, I need you to get Apple to do their thing, to work their magic on the whole concept of home printing. I'm not even sure if I have to explain.

Do I? I feel like they're the only people who might actually be able to make it acceptable and not a blight on the rest of our consumer electronics lives. If anyone's listening, and if not, I need you to make some calls. Thank you.

This is the thing I've actually done a fair amount of research on at this point. I talked to Corey Doctor-O on the show a while ago about printers and the mess that is HP and other companies starting to DRM the ink so that you can't use third-party ink. It's a real like razor and blades situation where they sell you the thing pretty cheap, but then the thing you need to actually use the thing is what's expensive and they lock you in. And it's a crappy business. And the thing about printers is everybody also hates their printers. So it's not even like it's a predatory market in which you still get a good product for too much money. It's a predatory market in which the product sucks. But here's what I figured out.

And I think this is just the answer. It's not an answer I like, but I think it is the answer. There just is no business in consumer printers. As far as I can tell, there is just simply no way in 2025 for a company to make a very good printer. and come with the cost that it would require to make a very good printer that people would buy and that would make any money for the company that made it. I think it's just that simple. This is why you see that there are super, super expensive printers at the high end of the line,

and then there are cheap, awful, crappy printers at the bottom. I think of it a little like the TV market, actually, in the sense that there's this high-end world in which you can buy a high-end television for tons of money. That market, we talk about it a lot, but that market is like this big. The much bigger market is big, cheap, crappy screens. That's where we are. And the way that all of those companies make money is not by selling you the television. It's by selling you ads. It's just the market now. You get companies like telly who are like, look, we don't need a dime from the TV because we're going to make so much money on ads. You get companies like Roku and

Amazon that are deep in the TV business now because it's an advertising business. TVs are not a hardware business. They're an advertising business. And in the same way, printers are not a printer business. They're an ink business. They're a subscription business, which sucks, but seems to be the case. And realistically, if you think about it, you're like, okay, I hate my printer. Would I pay three times as much for my printer to be awesome? I think the answer is just no. I think for almost everybody, the answer is just no. I've been talking to people about this for a while, and that is the only conclusion I have been able to come to. But before we get out of here, I want to play you a chunk of an interview that Sean Hollister and I did

with Framework CEO, Nirav Patel, for last week's show. We didn't actually run this clip on the show last week because it didn't really fit the other stuff we were talking about. But one of the things people always ask Framework to make is a printer. It's a perfectly good idea, right? You want something that's upgradable, that's repairable, that just kind of works, that you can fix yourself really easily, like printer. print just what if somebody made a good printer? So we asked her off, what would a framework printer look like? And his explanation was really interesting. So before we go, let me just play you this chunk of our interview. And the reason we are not building a printer is actually that we haven't

identified a plausible path for us to recoup the investment that we would take for us to build a printer. It's not like a laptop or a desktop where we see that clear path. It's actually very easy for us to recoup the investments we're making in these products. We actually, you know, easily have already on the framework laptop 13. As we look at a printer, we can't see a mission aligned path to making that investment makes sense. So we can, we think, you know, we can go and work with suppliers, we can build a team, we can build a printer that people love, and it will be a massive money loser for us. And that's why we're not building a printer. So even beyond the mature and, and, you know, bad, there's also the

can we survive in this category as a business factor. But what is the fix? The fix that doesn't make sense for you? What could HP do tomorrow to fix their printers other than get rid of all the DRM? Sure, if we knew the answer for that, actually, we would go and enter that category. Unfortunately, I don't think we're getting better printers any time soon. Just doesn't seem like that's in the cards. What are you going to do? All right, that's it for the show today. Thank you. much to everybody who came on and thank you as always for listening or watching. I should say,

we've been getting better and better at putting more stuff on the Tuesday show on video. I can't promise we're going to do it every week. I can't promise we're going to do it for everything, but that's the goal. We want to do as much of this on video as we can. We know that you like watching it on YouTube. We've heard from a lot of folks who want more video. That is the plan. We're working on it and we're getting better at it, frankly, quicker than I expected. So it's pretty awesome. If you want to find us on YouTube, please do. If you just want to listen of the podcast, rest assured that the video thing is not going to make the podcast worse. It'll always be a listening experience first and foremost.

I promise that's the plan. All right, that's it. It's time to get out of here. As always, you can continue to hit us up on the Vergecast hotline with all of your thoughts, questions, feelings, whatever. 866, Verge11, Virgcast at theBurge.com. We want all your feedback on the video. We want all your feedback on all the stuff that we're talking about. Seriously, if you have an interesting iPad use case you want to tell me about, I am all yours.

This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Willpour, and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil I and I will be back on Friday to talk about AI news, politics. It just continues to be gadget season, too. There's just more gadgets. I'm hoping I'm going to get this base iPad. We've got lots of stuff to talk about. We'll see you then.

Rock and roll.