The Vergecast - Computex 2022 laptops, Elon vs Twitter bots, and Apple ‘testing’ foldable E Ink display

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the most interesting laptops announced this week at Computex 2022. 33:03 - Senior reporter Liz Lopatto returns to update us on Elon Musk's deal to buy to Twitter. 1:00:30 - Gadget rumors continue in segment three. Stories discussed in this episode: Asus’ ROG Flow X16 is a big, powerful 2-in-1 gaming laptop With new Acer Swift 3, OLED marches toward the mainstream Acer’s new Spin 714 could be 2022’s best Chromebook The new Framework Laptop is another step toward a truly modular gadget HP’s new Spectre x360 16 laptop is all-in on Intel Acer’s new Chromebook Tab 510 puts LTE into a super tough, super bulky tablet Acer’s new Predator Helios 300 supports glasses-free 3D content How an Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day Elon Musk says Twitter deal ‘cannot move forward’ until it proves bot numbers ​​Elon Musk’s latest stunt: calling on the SEC to investigate Twitter’s user numbers Elon Musk’s silence on how he’d moderate the Buffalo shooting livestream is deafening Twitter CEO defends bot estimates that put Elon Musk’s acquisition on hold Twitter shares plummet as Musk raises new doubts about acquisition Twitter (TWTR) Deal Is Proceeding, Not 'On Hold,' Executives Tell Staff - Bloomberg  Elon Musk told us he was sending a car to space, then said he totally made it up Apple ‘testing’ foldable with secondary E Ink display, says analyst Apple will bring Live Captions to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac and more gesture control on Apple Watch iOS 15.5 arrives ahead of Apple’s annual developer conference Sony LinkBuds S review: supreme comfort doesn’t come cheap This is the design of Sonos’ upcoming Sub Mini Samsung SmartThings begins testing Matter devices on its platform Pebble founder: it’s your ‘last chance’ to make a small Android phone happen - The Verge Amazon’s new Fire 7 tablet finally has a USB-C port The defunct LG Wing is getting Verizon C-band because 5G in this country is silly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Vergecast will take you through the highlights of Computex. Liz Lapato rejoins us for this week in Elon, and Alex Cranz loses her fucking mind. Is E-Inc coming to the iPhone? That's coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

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with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to the Verdechast, the flagship podcast, Free Speech in America. Are we? Or deals coverage. The problem with the tech industry right now is like, we're going to talk about compensation.

We're going to talk about laptops. Yeah. But an equal amount of people are interested in the cool new laptops out of CompuTechs is the torture deal machinations of Elon buying Twitter, which means we now run like a finance site. Yeah. We run like an M&A site. It's good. I've always thought our future is hardcore Wall Street coverage. I know more about the SEC now than I did a couple of weeks ago.

I know more jokes that the SEC's name could stand for just because of Elon's feed. Anyhow, there's a lot going on this week. It is true. There's CompuTechs. There's more Elon Twitter. We get a lightning round. But I'm Nelai. I'm your friend.

David Pierce is here. Hi. I'm your friend who will always just tell you to go ahead and buy a MacBook air. No matter what you want, I will just tell you to buy a MacBook Air. Like at the end of the day, though. Really? I get it. You know, there's new airs coming out.

This is like the worst time to tell people to buy a MacBook Air. Just buy a MacBook Air. It's fine. You're going to be fine. Fair enough. Alex Cranz is here. And Alex is going to run the whole show with us. How are you doing?

Yeah, I'm going to be that person that tells you not to buy the MacBook Air. Just hold off. Just wait. Alex tells you to build your own PC. It's no problems. It's just as easy. Those are actually like the two farthest ends of the traditional PC spectrum, you understand. Yeah.

Yeah. I also think they might be the only options. Like, I don't know that there's anyone who exists between those two sides of the spectrum. It's HP. Hewlett Packer, the whole company. All right. There is a lot going on. Like I said, there's Computex this week.

So lots of CompuTech's news. Liz is going to come on. We're going to talk about Elon and Twitter and where that deal is. And then I think we're just going to spend about two hours talking about Amazon adding a USBC port to the Fire 7 tablet. Doesn't that seem like us? That's what we would land on for the last two hours of the show. It is the thing in the rundown that made me go, yes, as I was reading it. So I don't know what to make of that, but here we are.

David, I think you put this rundown together. There's no Project Gena 5Sysist news on here. Whoa. It's a real mess, dude. It's a racier. Our nation's fourth 5G network stumbles to reality. My favorite sort of running thing about the tech industry is everybody's bad slides. And unfortunately, there were no bad slides to see.

There's nothing I can read. There were no bad slides. And so, yeah, we're just stuck in Vegas with no service ever. I'm just going to look at my new favorite site, which is fiercewireless.com, which is a hardcore trade publication for the wireless industry. Oh, see, look, here's some news. I see, what were you doing, David? Did you know that the new director of the National Spectrum Consortium has issued some comments on ORAM? Are they good comments?

Bad comments? What they are is not important. It's just that they exist. It's just when you see the NSC, you don't think the National Spectrum Consortium. No, actually, the National Security Council didn't say anything about ORAM. This industry trade pub got into it. Anyway, they're confident that they will accelerate the development of next generation technology is critical to support U.S. competitiveness. in case you're wondering what the status of O-Ran is.

That's good. I know all of our listeners are worried about the status of O-Ran. I think they are. David's like, you know, like we're spinning up these new episodes. Like Alice got her mini-series where she's like, plupidoop is going to make you a trackball. I'm going to do one that's just like a deep dive on O-Ran. You know that thing on the office where Ryan just opens up a word document,

writes a fake URL at the top and gives it to Creed for his own blog? We're going to give you a podcast that's just for you. It's going to be nine hours long, and it is not going to be, it's not going to be safe for the broader internet. Andrew and I are going to get together or we're going to make a cover song of Iran by Flach of Seagulls, but about O'Ran. Okay, that I meant too. All I'm saying is, I'm obsessed with this wireless technology. I hope you are too. If you work at the O-Ran Association, leak me some documents.

Huh? That could be a way for us to become friends. You and me together. All right, let's get out of the realm of theoretical, in into the realm of the extremely real, which is hardcore Windows laptops. David, you're, this is a long list of hardcore Windows. Well, I guess there's a couple of Chromebooks in the mix. This is the time. What's going on at CompuTech? Tell people what CompuTech is. Yeah, so CompuTech is a huge, like truly huge conference that happens every year in Taiwan. And basically this week, I think along with CES is probably the time when we get like the peak into

computers. Like, like good old. fashioned computers. And like, CES is like a TV and car show. CompuTech is when people are just like 13 inch laptops. Let's do this. And then they just like throw them out of a truck at you. This year was both like, I mean, to be honest, I don't know what I expect because it's laptops.

Like laptops are laptops are laptops. And we had that like one cool phase a bunch of years ago where everybody tried to change things and then nothing has really changed. And now there was a ton of news. There were a bunch of new laptops, including a bunch of really good ones. And I would say, generally speaking, not a lot of, like, wild new ideas about laptops. So we basically have, you have companies like Acer and Aesus who are just out here launching every laptop they can possibly think of.

And the big upgrade this year is they're all going from 11th generation Intel processors to 12th generation Intel processors, which is a big deal, big performance, big battery. It's all very exciting. It's also just that thing that happens every time there's new intelligence. I mean, you say that nothing big happens. in, but it looks like Acer has a laptop that's going to have 3D content on it. Yeah. That seems very 2009.

A laptop that'll make you dizzy. Yes. You know, we are definitely in the part of the tech hardware cycle where they assume that people who are around for these ideas 10 years ago are, like, have children or jobs. You know, like, they're like, you, they won't remember. And it's like, no, we're still here, bro. Like, it's really true. remember when you try to do stereoscopic displays

but now they're burying it under more complicated terms I think the one for this one so it's the it's the Acer Predator Helios 300 which is an unbelievably great name for a laptop that's a great name I'm super in on that it's a 15.6 inch laptop has a 4k display and the the description of how of what Acer did is it has a liquid crystal lenticular lens optically bonded on top of it

and it can toggle between 2D and 3D modes. Does that sound cool as hell? Yes. Does it mean anything? Almost certainly not. And are you going to want to use it? No, but it sounds rad.

So I'm into it. I don't care. So the lenticular lens is the thing that lets it send images out in two different directions. That is a very familiar. You've seen one of these before in your life. I think what they're doing is when they say optically bonded, what they mean is our glue is really cool. It's fast. So they've glued it.

They've laminated it very tightly to the main. display and then they've got this additional. Monica did a whole write-up of this tech, Spatial Labs, uh, in like last year, like almost exactly a year ago. She like went and like did the piece on spatial labs and ACE her. The questions she had then was like, oh, this demo is really cool. What are you going to ship it? What are people going to use it for? And they were like, 3D design. Some answers. Um, she actually had one. They sent one to her, but it's very much like, now they're shipping one and they're like 50 games. It appears like the, with the promise of more to come, which is one of those sentences that you just hear like a want-want-want at the end of.

51 games. Yeah, exactly. But no, I think that's the thing with all of this. And this is true of like there's a lot of this happening in the PC space right now where there's stuff coming that you're like, oh, that's neat. And then you're like, will it change anything about how I do anything? No. It's like, that's how I felt about the 360 hinges on laptops that have been coming around for forever. You look at it and it's like, oh, that's cool.

I can, you know, I can prop it up like a tent. And it's like, sort of, it's neat in a way. but I have never once in my life, I think I would die of joy if I, like, walked into Starbucks and somebody was using their Lenovo yoga in tent mode. Nothing, I would, I would shake their hand and ask them many questions.

Do you remember when Lenovo would, like, put on the icons of the modes and the marketing? They'd be like, tent mode, wide mode. And wide mode was just, like, laying totally flat for no reason. Like, flipped around mode. And, like, they'd actually drawn icons for all of this. Here's my theory about all of this.

All of this is designed by people who have, like, cool, jobs. You know, like, you're a laptop designer. You have like a stereotypically cool job. Like, if you were cast in a rom-com and you're like, what's the cool job for your character on the rom-com? Like, laptop. Laptop designers, like, on the list. Yep. It's right up there with like print magazine editor who just circles things on a glass wall, which is my dream. I've been doing this for 10 years. I've never circled one thing on a glass wall. Have you carried a large binder full of loose leaf paper with all of the magazine inside? No. Every now and again people ask me when I'm going to,

if like, are you going to leave the verge? Like, you happy there? I'm like, well, I haven't circled anything on a wall yet. So we've got a ways to go before I've reached my goals. But, right, you've had these stereotypical jobs. And so you imagine these moments when, like, someone, like, takes their laptop and they put it into tent mode or like, they're like, hang on, let me push this button. And then, like, the building flies out of the front of the laptop and spins around in 3D. And you're like, this is the coolest. Not only did I have a cool job, but I have a cool piece of hardware that enables me to do my cool job in the coolest possible way. And then in real life, most people are like, my job is Excel.

Yeah. And when I actually do 3D design, I need a very powerful computer that's plugged into the wall. Which I think is how you get from that demo to 50 games. I think that's right. And that's fine and good for that device. 3D is actually the best thing to ever happen to Excel. If you're one of the 3D Excel fans up there. The number's just flying at your face.

These tables really do pivot. Can I just say this? We did the Decoder episode with Kat Norton, Miss Excel, and it was like, maybe the third piece of media she'd ever done, but it went, so we weren't first, but he means. And she's wonderful, and she deserves all her success. But that episode, like, went viral. And so now, like, months later, the Financial Times is writing stories about Excel and TikTok, because it is just sort of like bled its way through the media.

So, like, one of the most stuffiest financial public. applications is like Excel is on TikTok, you guys. So the learning here is that Excel is like they always say, you know, porn drives new technology. Like, no, no, no, it's actually Excel. Yeah, one of the real feces of decoder is like every job is Excel. And if I just spend an hour with you, you will admit to me when your job turns into Excel. But no, I think the thing that was interesting to me about Computex was exactly that thing that you just said, right? Where there's like all these nifty things that everybody is perpetually working on.

And we see this to CES every year, too. There's like three bonkers new ideas about how you can put a screen and a keyboard together. And what it turns out people actually want is just a laptop. But then you get a couple of things like there was, Acer has this new thing called the Spin 714 that Monica on our team, who has basically seen every laptop that exists is super excited about. And it's basically just like they took a good Chromebook and made it nice looking, which sounds like a relatively small thing, but it's not at all a small thing. thing, and, like, that's cool and exciting. And then you have, like, the HP Spector, which is, I think, like, for years now, one of the sort of go-to, if you're going to buy a Windows laptop.

It's, like, the XPS 13 and the Spector X-360. Like, just buy one of those. You'll be very happy. Wait, I'm sorry. You think this computer looks good? I mean, have you seen a normal Acer Chromebook? Yeah, yeah, but they're in the competition with a new hot-looking HP Specter Chromebook, right? Which is, like, it's $1,000, but that thing looks great.

I'm just looking in a picture of this. And I'm telling you that on the bottom right corner of the display, there is a giant HTML sticker. Well, you've got to know. Like, this is exciting. AK.D.M. No, you're, I will say, you're actually missing the worst part, which is that above the display on the left, it says in, in teeny, tiny little letters, it says antimicrobial corn and

gorilla glass at the very top left of the screen. This is like they couldn't get the good stickers. so they took any money. You know, like the H.D.MI Foundation was like, yeah, we got 20 bucks. Will that get us a slot? You know, and it's like, it's the ad that would normally be on, like, the back of the NASCAR, like, underneath the tailpipe. Like, that's the money.

And they're like, no, no, actually on this computer, you can have it right on the front. No, everyone will know. Also, I can't believe this is true, that the H.D.MI sticker is not on the same side of the computer as the H.D.M.I. Port. It's just telling you it exists. Yeah, it has HTMLI. It's plenty of... Somewhere here is HTML.

Look, I'm in the market for a new... So this is $750, which is expensive for a Chromebook, but it is also true that, you know, the new HP one is, like, floating at 1,000 and above. Yeah. And this one, like, the specs on this one are very good. It's like a high-level... I-7.

Current-gen Intel processor, like, good storage, good RAM. Like, it's just a good computer, which you can't say of a lot of Chromebooks. You know what it has? HD my port. Not a lot of can say that. Yeah, and this one actually says it to you every time you look at it. Look, I'm in love with a high-end powerful Chromebook that looks cool.

So, you know, I'll put this on my little, my little stew list, but it's going to come with like the gorilla, or what's the stuff, the goo-gone. Can I say the first we talked about is the Rogflow X-16, the Assuse? And what's in, actually, the display isn't all these are fascinating. So we talked about the one that does spatial. 3D. This one, mini-LED display with 50012 dimming zones. Mini-LED is starting to come down, right? The MacBook Pro's had them. Macrook Crows are obviously a little bit more expensive. I think it's fascinating to see, okay, this display style is coming down. And then there's one with a new

OLED. There's like an inexpensive OLED display. Yeah, it's called the Acer Swift 3. Like affordable OLED. Yeah. Like $750? $800. I mean, that's it. How big is that screen? It's a 14-inch. It's $8.99. And substantially, cheaper than your average OLED laptop and looks really nice. And yeah, that's one of the things, like, outside of all the wacky shit that everybody is perpetually trying to do, like, just give us better screens seems like that's, that one's actually happening. It's like, make the processors faster, make the screens better, make the keyboards, not horrible.

Like, that is the recipe for a pretty good laptop. I do think the prices are interesting, too, because for the longest time, like, most laptops sold We're like under $500. Everybody just wants cheap, 1080P, 15-inch display. Great. And now we've got a lot of sub-thousand-lars in them. And that's cool. Like an OLED for under a grand would not have thought of that ever.

Can I tell you this story? So we had the guy, Alan Young on Decoder, the Foxconn guy. Then Josh Trez and I, a couple days after that episode, we took a call from a guy who's been in the display industry for a long. time cantankerous older gentleman who was like foxhound was always a lie they're never building anything i know all these so we got to take this call so you get in the call and we're like expecting to hear whatever it was good call i'm not going to reveal everything he said but it was like an old school display manufacturing executive called to tell us i've been following your coverage here's some things you missed go chase it down i know these guys it was obvious to everybody in the industry they're never going

in manufacturing and then he's like i know people like oleds and i know you like you're many LEDs, but LCDs are just always going to win. You can always just build them. They're getting better and faster. And I started laughing. He's like, why are you laughing? I was like, my whole house is OLEDs and mini, like, there's four TVs in the house. Three of them are, one of them is plasma.

There's two OLEDs and my, you know, my laptops in the LODs. And he's like, how are you? I tell your readers, don't buy the TVs I'm buying. It was just like the harshest burn I've ever heard. It was just like, his whole case is just, we're going to keep making LCDs. That's it? He was like plasma was a flash in the fucking pan. And you know, there's OLED stuff.

They're never going to get brighter. They're all going to die. People are going to realize it was a disaster. LCDs. That's always the future. And I was like, you know, I like, I like my LG OLED. He was like, tell your readers. Don't buy what you're buying.

I was like, God damn. Wow. See, this is the stuff that happens at trade shows. It's like some sharks and jets stuff. Like there's like the OLED crew walks into the bar that the LCD crew is already in and things get quiet and it's like it's a scene this is what happens at copy text every year every year at compotex there is a musical theater gang fight between various display manufacturers they're just hammering TVs over each other's heads all right let's talk about these two this super bulky

chromebook i just think the fact that chromebooks are they're starting to hit new form factors outside of the we made a three hundred dollar one to throw in your kids classroom and get destroyed So now they've got Acer's got this Chromebook Tab 510, which has LTE, which is fascinating for a Chromebook for many reasons. It's also just like super rugged. Yeah, the idea is basically like I think it's 400 bucks and it's not a particularly like impressive looking or super powerful device. It's running on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7C chip, which is basically this is designed to be a much more like mobile thing. And in their press release and stuff, Acer talks about it as. like a mobile, like, video conferencing system?

So it's a mobile device running a Google operating system with a cell radio that's designed to make calls. Cohen. I'm just saying, like, they made a 7-inch Android phone. Yes. But it runs ChromeOS. It's 10.1 inches. No, it's 10.1.

It has the exact same aspect ratio as the Nexus 7, and I've assumed that it is exactly that size. in every picture. Much larger pixels. Well, and it's weird that others are doing this because, like, Google, as we talked about in the show, has this very specific idea about what Chrome OS is for. They see it as, like, an enterprise thing and an education thing. Like Rick Osterlo basically said exactly that to me.

And they think of Android as the mass consumer main thing. And also, Android is so much better tuned to, like, mobile systems. Like, you can also make video calls on your phone, which has LTE. some of them even have a stylus and a keyboard. Like, it's crazy. But yeah, so the existence of this thing from Acer, I think, is A, nobody throws computers against the wall like Acer does. So I sort of love it for that anyway.

But also, just the idea that everybody is still out there experimenting, even as Google is trying to, like, segment Chrome OS into this teeny tiny little box is really interesting to me. How is it supposed to be the video Chromebook when it has a five megapixel webcam? Right, because, I mean, have you seen any Apple webcam? People crash shop in this. They're going to be like, whatever, it's cheap. I can shoot a gun at it. You could probably shoot a gun at this and it would be okay.

It's got a stylus. It's so thick. It's a chunk. It's got a garage for the stylus. I like the little pinstripe texture on the back. I mean, I don't, it's not that I like it so much that I'd purchase it. I'm just saying it's better than the normal thing. It's very 2014.

Yeah. Like, it just looks like this would have been so. super cool in 2014. Yeah. And eight years later, it just is existing. Eight years later, it's like, we have LTE guys. You heard about the fourth G? Cranes, I want to talk to about the sort of chip situation, all these.

But lastly, we should talk about the framework, which, David, you dove into. This is a modular laptop that we've covered for a long time. It seems like they're living up to their promise in some ways. Yeah, so the framework laptop launched a little over a year ago. And its whole thing is basically it's a relatively normal laptop, like no crazy ideas about laptops, no super new specs, but its whole thing is being modular and repairable and upgradable. So their whole idea is you shouldn't have to buy a new laptop every time you want a new

laptop. And they came out this year with, they call it a new framework laptop. But basically all it is is a new main board. And it has the 12th generation Intel chip. It's faster. It has all this stuff. You can buy it in a new body if you want, but you can also just slot it into your existing framework laptop.

And that is a really big deal. framework made the same promises that a million other companies have made over the years, right? There's Project Dara. Intel has done this a bunch of times. Everybody has tried to make modular gadgets and everybody gives up on them immediately. And Framework, at least, is out here doing the thing. They made the one. It's different than, like, Alienware and MSI and what all those guys were doing a couple of years ago,

where they were putting, like, I-9 processors, desktop processors and the laptops. Like, these are actual laptop processors. Yeah, basically, they're taking the, like, the Intel, you know, the 12th generation, the I-5s and the I-7s, and they'll just sell you the main board and you just stick it in where everything else is. And all the stuff, you can screw all the parts in and out. They have little ports for expansion and stuff. So if you want an HTML port, you put it in.

Ethernet, you put it in. It's just a little box that you fill with all the computer parts that you want. And it's kind of cool because it's like it's a new computer, but it's also just like new parts for your old computer that make it a new computer, which is this like wacky new paradigm of thinking about how people buy computers that I think is very cool. Old paradigm. I mean, fair. There was the best laptop ever made, did this.

The Motorola Atrix? No, the Apple G3 Powerbook Pismo. Oh, where you could pull the keyboard right off? Oh, yeah. This was a particularly weird era of Johnny I have keyboards. Like, we think that we lived through the butterfly era, and that was really bad. But that's because all of you are just too young to have, like, lived through that era, where he was like, what if it was a tiny wafer of nothing?

and you could also remove it completely, resulting in the springiest keyboard ever made. Also, it will be slightly translucent. So remember it? It was like translucent brown. Ah. But so when you pulled it off, you could do the airport card, you could do RAM.

Yeah, and you could do the processor. You could do the processor? So other world computing. Right, okay. So some like other people did the processor. Yeah, some other people made it so you could switch it out because I had that laptop for like four or five, like I had it for over 10 years because I could just replace the,

the old crummy G3 with a slightly less crummy G3. Yeah. And then a G4. And then the internet started to exist and the computer died. Did you have the moment of upgrading that laptop where like starting up every time was like a little bit of an adventure? Yes. Because I had a G4 tower and I upgraded like all the RAM and I swapped out the processor and the video card. And by the end, I'd be like, I can't turn off my computer.

It might never turn off again. Like, you just did never restarted it. If it restarted, you were like, well, time to go buy a new laptop. That might be it. Like, you'd look at the jar of change. We're like, I hope that there's enough in there. Speaking of Macs, it does look exactly like MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, right? Yeah.

And they're like, I think basically okay with that idea. Like the, when I talked to Nirov, the founder of Framework a while back, he was basically like, we've, the industry has gotten a lot of things about laptops right. like we don't need to screw those things up while we try to also do this other thing. Like let's just make a laptop that is nice and looks nice, but also does these other things, which I 100% think is the right approach. And they change the top cover. Can you replace the top cover if you have the old one too?

Yeah. So framework will actually sell you, they call it an upgrade kit. And I think it's $580 or something that is basically the new mainboard and the top cover. And the big knock on the first version was just that it felt kind of, I don't know, flaky. Like it just didn't feel like a particularly solid laptop, which is a possibility for something that is basically just a bunch of pieces screwed together. Like they didn't do any particularly impressive building. So to have it be a little more rigid, like it just took them time. But the idea is now they've like, I don't know, done something to the process.

So the top covers a little more rigid. And they'll sell you that too if you want. Or you can just buy like the whole new package, which comes with that new top. Lots of new laptops, lots of new chips. The framework is interesting, right? It's a new more powerful chip in the same cooling. set up as the old one. Alex, what should we be thinking about chips and all these new computers? I mean, we saw these chips like what back in February, I think, is when they announced all

of this stuff. So it was kind of exciting to finally see them in the things. I think right now, the big question is, how good actually are they, right? Like, how good are they doing on battery live, everything else? Acer historically is one of the first, like, folks out of the gate with new processors and stuff. So these will be some of the first ones. They'll try anything. Yeah, they'll try any. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, Acer in particular, loves to just try anything. They love to do anything. They're just like, let's see, because they have just such a huge business. They can afford to do this. They're like, what, I think they're fourth now as far as laptops go. But I think right now it's just, there's a lot of

questions. We're seeing them in stuff. We're not seeing laptops that are a lot thinner or a lot chunkier. We're not seeing big changes in battery size. So there's definitely some questions to be had about how much faster are they actually? How much better is the battery level? but we have to actually get a hold of them and start testing them, I think. Am I right in thinking that how that turns out is kind of huge and important for Intel? Because I feel like we're at this moment now where AMD is doing really interesting stuff. Qualcomm is coming along and it feels like Intel has been making noise about, you know, we're getting back to winning at this stuff.

And it feels like the Alder Lake stuff is coming out kind of slowly. And it feels like how it turns out and how some of these reviews go feel like it's going to be a really big deal. I think they would like it to be a big deal. I don't know how big a deal it is actually going to be, right? Like, I think Intel has been so behind the curve for so long that it's just, like, we'll be like, oh, my God, they caught up. But I think it's a real question of, are they going to absolutely surpass? And I think we saw that with the last generation, right?

The 11th generation, we started to see, like, oh, they're doing good work here. They've caught up with AMD. So, ideally, this is like, are they continuing to do it? Was that just a flash in the pan or can they continue to stay ahead of AMD? And they keep making this noise about using TSMC as a fab. Yeah. So if they can actually decouple their designs and make a 5 nanometer design, which is like, I mean, like, if you're at Intel and that's what proposed to you. Like, decouple design from manufacturing and make a 5 nanometer design for TSM to make, like, that is just so far outside of the DNA of Intel that, like, that company could just have like an allergic reaction to this idea.

But that's what they're threatening to do. Yeah, like, I mean, they kind of have to, right? Their foundries just aren't capable of producing the chips that they need to produce to stay competitive in the market. And they said, well, we're going to bill our Silicon Sun Valley or whatever they're calling the thing in Ohio. It's the Silicon Heartland. Excuse me, the Silicon Heartland. Like, they said they're going to do all of this stuff, but that's still years away. And I think we're kind of stuck in a spot for them where they're like, yeah, the really cool stuff is coming.

like we kind of have it right now. Yeah, we'll see. I think the answer is we'll see, especially if that Ohio factory comes online. But what are we going to do when we test these laptops? We're going to pit them up against a bunch of M-series chips and say, where's the performance versus the battery life? I think the battery life is actually more important. I would 100. Like, battery life is where everybody's going.

And they've all kind of started to change their philosophy on battery life too, right? Intel for years, their whole idea was we get through the processes as quickly as possible. so we save you battery life because we're just doing it so fast. And then you realize that that's not actually like, that doesn't scale well because you're using so much power to get it done quickly that you're still sucking up the battery, which is where this whole big little core thing came from where it's like we're going to use these really efficient core. So they're really changing, like not only are they changing how they're like, okay,

we're going to decouple, we're not going to build the chips ourselves, but also our entire fundamental philosophy of how we make chips go fast and save battery life. we're going to change that too. So there's like a lot of stuff they've got to prove consistently. I think they've proven it like once. But they've to repeatedly prove that they can do this and it's not just a one-off because Apple's already doing it. Yeah, I was going to say, you say we're going to put these things up against a bunch of

M-Series Max. And I feel like, you know, I don't want to write reviews before they get done, but I have an odd feeling we know how those benchmarks are going to go based on how this stuff has worked out relatively well. Just lapping everybody else in the industry right now. Yeah. Yeah, like Apple is just so far ahead at the moment. It's crazy. Like I said, just buy a MacBook Air. Wait, please wait. Yeah, don't buy a MacBook Air now, but like in general.

June 6, wait at least until June 6. Yeah, it's a good call. We've got to take a break. Liz is going to join us. We're talking about Yvonne. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro 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, Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea

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Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. We're back, Liz Lapato. Welcome to the Vergecast. Hi, thanks for having me. Good to be back. This is a segment that we are duty bound by law to call This Week in Elon. We will be at some point in the future relaunching our newsletter that Liz started called This Week in Elon.

We'll take three Verge reporters to support that newsletter at this time. I was saying to somebody earlier that I really like the idea that This Week in Elon is going to be way more than weekly. Like, it just feels appropriate that that's how it's going to work. This hour in Elon. This moment in Elon history. Okay. Let's discuss where Elon and Twitter are now. And then Elon has done and said a number of other things this week that connect to this deal, don't connect to this deal provided a provoked a range of reactions.

Well, let's start with the deal. Well, I just want to be super clear is that the deal's still happening no matter what Elon Musk says about it. Like, look, I think you all know that I'm like a longtime reader of Matt Lovie. I've been reading him since the financial crisis when he was at deal breaker. Matt Levin is a columnist at Bloomberg. Yeah, that's right. There's a thing that he said about this that I like can't get out of my head, which is like, if you have to look at the contract for the deal, you've already lost.

Yeah. And so I'm seeing all of these people on Twitter who are like, oh, but he can't disparage Twitter. And it's like, it's Elon Musk. He's going to do what he's going to do. The only entity that can enforce the non-disparagement clause is this Twitter. And they seem desperately to want to get this deal done. They've filed their proxy. They've said multiple times.

They think the deal's getting done. It's getting done at this price. They're not renegotiating. And Elon is just doing whatever. Yeah. So let's just start chronologically this week. There are many ways to come at this conversation. I feel as though chronologically is the only one that will provide us sanity.

And even then, it's kind of dicey. That might be too high a bar. Yeah, I don't think we're going to get to sanity. We can try. Let's try. So for those of you who haven't been paying attention to the stock market, prices have been falling. It's been kind of ugly. And so now the amount that Elon was planning to pay for Twitter, which was 5420, Blaze It,

It just seems high, if you will. So he's been tweeting a bunch of stuff about bots on Twitter. And he's, like, concerned that there might be too many fake spam bot accounts that might be as many as 20% of Twitter's users, that the deal can't move forward until Twitter proves the accuracy of its actual estimate, which is like 5%, I think. And I just want to pause here and note that in normal deals, these kinds of things get ironed out without me watching in a process called due diligence, which Elon Musk did not do on this deal. Decline to do. He actually said, I'm relying on Twitter's public statements. He said this publicly.

People just don't want to do due diligence and I don't understand why because then they're like, oh, I was surprised by this thing. And it's like, you didn't have to be surprised. Well, also, I will just, this is more Matt Levine quoting because his newsletter on this stuff is great. And he also keeps referring to Elon Musk as his boss because he keeps trying to go on vacation and then something happens. And he's like, my boss Elon Musk made me to write the column yet. It's a very funny bit. But his point was Elon constantly and consistently complains about bots because Elon's mentions are a disaster. He replied to me last weekend and then my mentions were a disaster of crypto spam. It was

like bizarre. So Elon is like deeply aware of the bot issue. He thinks the number is high. Then he says, I'm going to buy Twitter to fix the bot problems. And now his excuse is I don't want to buy Twitter because I don't believe that they're reporting of bots is accurate. And so Twitter for years, like eight years or something, right? Because in their quarterly reports are like less than five percent of our monetizable daily active users are bots. Which they have said is not a perfect number, we should say. Like they've always said, they say something about like applying significant judgment to it because there's no way to like perfectly pull who is real and who isn't on your platform. But they're extremely educated guess over and over and over again has been under 5% of users.

Less than 5%. But the number, and Liz, this is like a weird number, right, in the industry, is monetizable daily active users, which doesn't map. Like when you try to compare and contrast the size of Twitter to any other platform, you kind of quickly realize that no one else uses that number, that you can't compare dailies to monthlies

because monthlies are always higher, more people show up in a month. You can't compare monetizable dailies to dailies on other platforms because Twitter's only counting monetizable dailies, which means if you're on Twitter on other platforms, you can't serve you ads, so you don't

count. So it's just this one tiny group of users, then they're saying less than 5%. For all we know, Elon is like using his own home world Twitter client, and he doesn't count. So there's just like this weird numerical problem where there's no like to like comparison to anything.

And then there's Paragagagarwal, the new CEO of Twitter, doing lengthy thoughtful threads about how they calculate the thing to which Elon just replies with a single poop emoji. Listen, he understands how to use Twitter. This is more than we could say for certain other technology moguls out here, you know.

I will say, though, I just, I don't buy any of this shit around bots. I don't buy any of it. I think this is a negotiating tactic. And like, you know, Matt Levine came out and called Elon a liar. And I think it's worth mentioning that Elon has directly lied to us at the verge at least once. So, like, it's not like this is out of character for him to be, you know, disingenuous, let's say. You should say what the lie is, so we're not... Do you remember? It was like a Sean O'Kane story. I'm sorry, this is going to take a second.

I'm going to need to bring the headline up. But we had asked him some question about whether this rocket launch was true in his DMs back when we talked to him. And he said no. And then we corrected our story, which we had gotten from other sources. And then we had to correct our correction because our first story was right. Yeah, that seems right. I mean, just like, why do you think we changed our background policy?

Like, we just need to attribute the things to people who say to them. So I have a question about this. That one of the things that I've been trying to figure out is like, I think I buy all of that logic, right? Which is that none of the shit he's stirring is actually about issues that he has. And it's actually about him trying to get a lower price on Twitter. That makes a certain amount of logical sense. But the part that I don't understand is if that's what you're going to pick, why would you pick bots? Like why it's such an odd hobby horse to use to be like your wedge in this fight?

Like why would it be bots? Aren't a lot of his followers bots? Like we've heard about Elon's bot army. Like they've inflated his like reach in a lot of ways, right? They've inflated as perceived reach. So like bots have been good to Elon. Like maybe they've been bad to his mentions, but they've been good to him overall. So I was kind of surprised that he is now anti-bots.

I have a theory about this. and it has to do with cryptocurrency spam. We know that as of last year, Elon Musk impersonators had stolen more than $2 million in cryptocurrency. It's just that a lot of these bots seem to be crypto scammers. And for whatever reason, when they reply to Elon Musk, looking like Elon Musk with the name Elon Musk, but without actually being Elon Musk,

people really do think that there's some kind of crypto giveaway that Elon is doing and click. Yeah. And I can certainly imagine, as Musk is like super protective of his army of fans, that this is the kind of thing where saying, hey, bots are a real problem and I really want to deal with them is kind of for them, right? Like they're the ones who get hurt. And they're also crucially the ones who need to be reassured that he's on the level because

I found the story that Musk lied about. It's from December 1st, 2017. And the headline is, Elon Musk told us he was sending a car to space, then said he totally made it up. And you may all remember that he did, in fact, send a car to space. He did. Which ruled. I just want to put that out there. I know that was very controversial at the time.

The car in space was awesome. It looked very cool. We should just be clear about that. Yeah. If I signed a car to space, I would tell everyone the truth about it forever. I was like, what are you lying about? So, you know, like, I do think that, like, some degree of this is about his fandom, which he, like, really does seem to care about a lot. And, like, he needs to have a good excuse for why he can back out of the Twitter deal, not for Twitter, because I don't think he gives a shit about Twitter, but for them.

So he's still the good guy. So he isn't a little narrative. Yeah. And so, like, I think this is a transparent lie. Like, I think it's an obvious lie. but I also am not a member of the fan club. Well, so this is all happening in the context of a number of things. So as Liz pointed out, the stock market overall is down.

Ever since he launched the Twitter bid, Tesla stock is coming down, both because of the market and because a huge part of his financing is tied to Tesla stock. He's out there in the world trying to find other people to finance the bid with him. Maybe he'll be successful. Maybe he won't. if I had that amount of money, I wouldn't be like, yeah, Twitter. That's where I'm going to get my return on investment. But who knows?

In fact, a lot of very rich companies have made that particular decision in the past not to buy Twitter. It's true. Like, I don't know. Bob Iger was like, I don't know. Like, we're not doing that. Like, I think Apple kicked the tires. Salesforce kicked the tires. And Salesforce will buy anything.

Like, oh, seriously. That's a joke. I don't know if they'll buy everything. But it just seems like that's. you know, I buy a lot of dumb stuff. And if you have that much money, like a piece of Twitter might be how I think about one more PS5 game that I'm not going to play. You know, like, who knows?

Yeah. I don't have that much money, but you can, I can see how the thought process would scale. But it's a lot of money that is depressing his Tesla stock as he continues to basically take the freshman core curriculum of a liberal arts college on Twitter live in person, which is like just a thing he's doing, right? he tweets some like assonine thing about what if there was a more moderate party in the United States. And literally Dan Dresner, this is happening right now. Dan Dresner, who was my political science professor in college, it says, I beg you to add a political science expert to your tutors.

Brutal. See, Jeff Bezos, if you were better at Twitter, this could be you. Yeah. It's just like crazy. He's driving everybody insane. every one of his content moderation ideas, as I've said, is baby tweets for babies. Corinne wrote a great piece this week. Obviously, there's an extraordinarily tragic shooting in Buffalo.

On the big platform side, Casey made this point in his newsletter. The big platforms did like perfect content moderation of the live stream. Twitch had it down in two minutes. Facebook had its sort of usual Facebook stumbles because it is huge. but it started clamping it down where you could identify it, Twitter, clamped it down. Like, it was little platforms,

like streamable, where things got out of hand and they, because they don't have their resources, they don't have the, the teams or the scale, that's where it went. So the big platforms,

if you think about it, there was a bad guy, he live streamed, the shooting, was horrific, racist, motivated shooting. He said he was going to do it on Discord.

All of this stuff, when the platforms saw it, within minutes, they took action, which is a really hard thing to do. Twitter is obviously doing it, too. Elon hasn't said a word about this, right? If Elon's, Elon's conception of what the content moderation standards on Twitter are or should be is all legal speech, then your first test case is the video

of the shooting, right? You've said, if people want more tight content restrictions, they should pass a law, otherwise I'm doing the First Amendment, problematic for any number of reasons. This is his core classes education. But this video is legal speech, right? It doesn't, meet any of the exceptions. It's just morality and like honestly as an ad-supported business, like being a place where advertisers want to put their ads leads you to blocking this video immediately. Yep. This is just one of those spots where like you have to be okay with it because you're okay

with the First Amendment or you're saying, no, we have to take it down, in which case you have left your principles behind and now you're saying we're going to make judgment calls. That's why he's talking so much, right? Like, that's why we're seeing so many stupid and aing tweets from him this week is because, like, he's distracting us. Like, there's a very real question everybody has for him is you want to buy Twitter. You want to change how it moderates. Here is your first test case. And he is pointedly ignoring it.

So by, like, being like, I'm going to drop a poo emoji. I'm going to declare I'm a Republican, which is a shock to absolutely no one. Yeah, dude, you move to Texas. Like, come on. Like, you don't have that much. money and not be. But whatever. He's just doing all of this stuff to distract us from the fact that he had this test case and he blew it. Well, he didn't blow it. He just didn't say anything. He didn't say anything because what he would have said, like, if he held to his principles,

quote unquote, of being like the First Amendment guy, the First Amendment would require it to stay up. I want to be clear. He said a number of things, but not actually about the shooting, because he did talk about like content moderation again. And like this time he was like, oh, you don't want to be manipulated by the algorithm. You should get chronological feeds instead. And then he had time for Matt Taiibi. So congratulations to Matt on that about corporate regulation in California. There were images of a SpaceX launch. There was a royal portrait of King Louis the 14th of France. And then he the next day decided it would be cool to talk a little bit more about the important of open source code. So it's just it's a lot of stuff to say nothing.

that you could engage with if you want, I guess, although I don't think anybody here needs to have chronological tweets on Twitter explain to them. The features existed for years, by the way. You just push that button. You know, it does feel disingenuous when you've come out as like a free speech advocate. You have this very public test case.

And what you're tweeting about is the algorithm? Like, I would understand this if the algorithm you were tweeting about was the one that helps you locate and take down this kind of content, maybe. But that's not what was going on. There's a parallel here. And I feel all, like, all four of us have probably done our best to avoid this. But like, TikTok and YouTube are being taken over by the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial, right? And that, I would, I would just call that, like, this is the algorithm sees demand. There's a lot of demand for it and then like the underlying material is in public domain because it is just state media like the government is streaming the trial so anyone can use it that means content creators

can use it so like they're filling this gaping amount of demand for this trial and all kinds of bad things are happening like i think buzzfeed had a um great headline today or yesterday that was like i can't wait to watch the movie about how we were all wrong about amber heard yeah right like it's just spider like that's the bad algorithm like at play like you can see it happening in real Like there's demand for this. People are filling it because they will chase the YouTube algorithm or the TikTok algorithm. They actually have no idea what they're talking about. People are watching all of it.

The algorithm sees even more demand. The cycle continues. There is Kattenbarge at NBC News to the great piece about an Eldon Ring video game streamer who is pivoted to Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial coverage. And his goal is it's building his views. And he's like, when it's over, I'm going to pivot back to. Eldon Ring. This is how you get in the partner program. That's what you were saying. He was like, this is how I get enough views to get in and then I can go back. Then I can go back and now my video game content we monetized. Like that's just ice cold. Like that's the most cynical thing I've

ever heard. And if Elon's criticism of the algorithm was pointed at that, it would make sense. His criticism of the algorithm is like Twitter's manipulating you into only seeing the far left stuff that Twitter employees want you to see at the same time that there is a hard, right, racially motivated shooting in our country, like in the state that I live in. Like, that to me is, it's not that we need Elon to talk about every mass shooting in the country or weigh in on every public event. It's literally the thing that he wants to do would materially change how Twitter responds to these events.

Right. And so, like, understanding what he would do in this moment is actually really crucial to understanding how serious his free speech philosophy is. And I don't think that he wants to explain that to anyone. I feel like we already understand how serious this free speech philosophy is. Am I wrong? I don't know. You know, it's, it's chaos.

It's chaos. And I think the character of Elon is more chaotic than the person of Elon, right? That appears to. Like, the dude was fairly smart. Like, how he set up this deal to begin with, a lot of the original machinations of this Twitter deal, you're like, okay. I mean, however I feel about you, this was, like, kind of cool. smart. And now it's spinning out because his funding situation, he's like, we've now had this

horrible event happen and has very pointedly pointed out a massive flaw in his philosophy for moderation. All of this stuff is happening. And he's just like, I know what I'm going to do. Erect a billion straw men to distract you from all the things we actually need to be talking about with this deal. Well, and I think part of the reason this stuck out to me so much is that there's like, the thing I have always struggled with is like the difference between Elon Musk, like, the person and at Elon Musk, the Twitter personality, right? And at Elon Musk is just like a low-stakes shit poster, right? Like, he doesn't, he mostly doesn't engage on things that actually matter, except to just like sort of talk shit in all directions and, and like, giggle as everyone freaks out.

This is one of those things that A is very high stakes. B, matters to Elon Musk, the person who is theoretically going to own Twitter and will at some point have to make a decision like this. and C is going to make an enormous number of people incredibly angry no matter what you pick. And he does not actually tend to engage on that kind of stuff directly all that often. But in this case, if he buys Twitter, he's going to have to. And that's why I feel like the silence from him was so strong where it's like, I don't generally care what CEOs have to say after events like this. I don't know that it helps anybody to like get thoughts and prayers from Bill Gates after the shooting in Buffalo. I don't know if he did that.

I'm not picking on Bill Gates specifically. But in this case, it's like at some point, someone is going to walk into a room and say, Elon, what do we do? And he's going to have to decide. And, like, God help us if he is, like, the person he is on Twitter. But I think at some point, you would want to see that actual person be on Twitter rather than just whoever this character is. And it feels like we're, we still haven't gotten any of that.

The other thing that I would just add to this is that, like, adding to that specific kind of pressure is that it's It's very, like, at the front of my mind that, like, moderation on YouTube at one point led to a mass shooting. Like, that's a real thing that really happened. And so, like, this is actually a very, very fraught area that, like, I don't know that Elon Musk can weigh in on without making things considerably worse. Because, again, like, think about who his followers are. If he decides to criticize Twitter for taking down links to this shooting, that seems gross and wrong and a bunch of people are going to be mad. But if he says, hey, I've reconsidered, you know, my thoughts about free speech, I've got a more nuanced plan now. That potentially freaks out everybody who wanted to bring back Donald Trump to the platform.

And also, like, potentially, like not for nothing, puts Twitter employees at actual physical risk. So I just feel like it's a super ugly place to be. And like it's when we talk about how difficult it is to moderate these platforms, this is specifically the thing that we're talking about. And, you know, there was that thread from the former Reddit CEO about how he was like, Elon, you don't want this. Like, this is going to break you. This is going to be the worst thing you've ever seen.

Like, this was what he meant. The thing I'll add is, this is like inside baseball journalism, but I think it's a useful context here. We're good at this story now. The verge is good at it and like kind of the broader media is good at it. Like the thing happens. We're like, what are the platforms going to do? We reach out to the comms team at the platforms. We hear from the head of policy.

We hear from the head of trust and safety. They've made a decision. The decision has been like reasonably disseminated to their teams. They tell us the timeline on which they made the decision. This is how we know Twitch did it in minutes. Like in one very abstract way, it's like an exchange of form letters. Right. We're like, what did you do?

And here's what we did. And it all makes sense. And we've learned how to communicate about content moderation between professionals at like a pretty high level. And like that requires a comms apparatus and a policy apparatus and a trust and safety team. And then maybe they got it wrong or maybe they didn't. But like, whatever, we know how to have the communication. Elon's companies don't have press departments. They don't have comms.

They don't like communicating about what they're doing. He literally opened this by starting an online harassment campaign against. Twitter's top lawyer, Vigai, got it. Like, just crazy. Like, it's not going to work if he takes over and he doesn't have that functionality. Because if you're running the town square, the town square has to be accountable to people. And so, like, we should wrap this up. But, like, one of the funniest parts about this whole week is that Twitter had an all

hands this week. And they told staff that there's no such thing as a deal being on hold. Twitter saying they want the deal to be completed on the agreed upon terms, which, by the way, they have a binding contract. A long road to Elon into buying Twitter, which is like a crazy outcome. But you know who Twitter's head lawyer who would make those decisions and do what those things are? Is Vidshai Agade who is in charge of content policy. So now he pissed off the lawyer, which is just one of those like classic errors.

How much of this Twitter deal is just Elon Musk, his ego getting away from it? Like how much of this is just hubris? We're just watching like hubris. like, hubris happened. I would say at least 95%. I was going to say a little lower, but I think you're probably right. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like he thinks he can just chaos his way into whatever he wants, and Twitter holds all the actual cards here.

I will say that, like, one thing that I've been reflecting on for a while now is that the reason why Elon Musk thinks he can do this is because he's chaosed his way into a lot of things and out of a lot of things. just without consequences, or with consequences that are so minimal for him, like, for instance, a $20 million fine from the SEC, that, you know, it's a slap on the wrist. And so on some level, I think he genuinely believes the laws of the United States of America don't apply to him. And I am very interested in finding out if he's right, because if that's true, we have a problem. We need to end this segment before our producer Liam literally jumps through the Zoom and chokes me out.

He's been writing in all caps in red. We're over in the dock. This is a real thing that's happening. The one thing I'll say, two decisions out of the Fifth Circuit, which represents Texas this week. One, they let the horrible Texas social media bill go through, which is not being appealed to Supreme Court. Hilarious backstreet of that. They weren't expecting to win that. And now they have to find lawyers to argue their case in the Supreme Court.

and they can't find any lawyers who want to, which is very funny. Then two, Fifth Circuit, same crazy-ass Fifth Circuit. You want to see some wild, you want to see judges losing their minds. Fifth Circuit. They reversed an SEC enforcement order this week,

saying that the administrative state was not appropriate in this case, which is a real, if you're Elon, and your federal appellate court is saying the SEC can't do stuff to you. Ooh. All right, we got to take a break. Liz, I'm sure we will have you back on for this week in Elon for many weeks to come.

This is like the story of the year. It's very entertaining for a variety of reasons. Also, I think it might end with Twitter being gone no matter what happens. That's my current prediction. No matter what happens at the end of this, Twitter is gone. Like, Jack Dorsey might be like, delete. I'll do it on the blockchainer. Like, you never know. We'll see. All right. Thank you so much, Liz. All right. Thanks, guys. Bye. We'll be right back with a lightning red.

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slash vergecast. All right, we're back. There's gadget news. It's time for a gadget lightning round. We're opening and closing the show. It's an Elon sandwich with gadgets. Yes. David has been thinking about, like, you know, what are the default structures of the

Vergecast as we read, you know, refresh the show? Elon sandwich with gadgets. We should start naming them and putting on the wall like a deli. That's actually like, if you were to perfectly describe every episode ever done of the Vergecast, an Elon standards with gadgets is like about as close as you could get. It's pretty good. All right. I will tell you, I'm looking at the rundown.

In parentheses, it just says, we're just going to let Cranes be excited for like 20 minutes here. Go ahead, Alex. I don't know if I can do 20 minutes. I can probably do 45. There we go. This is going to be heavily edited for you, listeners at home. So Apple is reportedly testing a foldable phone that has, as a secondary display, the outside display, an e-ink display. Oh, boy.

I mean, it's Ming Chi-Quo, who, who. we've talked about a lot on this show, usually really good at like picking out what Apple's working on, what's probably coming, usually kind of considered to be spot on. I refuse to believe they're spot on in this case, as much as I want them to be. As much as I want an E-Inc iPhone, I just don't see how it happens. Well, so, okay, we should say, like, this is one of those things that, like, the longer you cover this stuff, the more you come to realize, like, the word testing is very important here, right? because like Apple is testing everything, right? Yeah. Someone at Apple has bought everything that exists that is an electronic on planet Earth

and has tried to build something with it. Like it just has happened. And so I think the part of what's interesting about leagues like these is they tend to come from the supply chain, which likely means someone has bought, you know, more than three of them. But the idea that Apple is testing a foldable with an e-ink display makes me very excited. Also means almost nothing about Apple's actual, like, future plans. This is the device that I want in my life more than maybe anything else in the entire world. But there is absolutely no indication that it's real other than that like somewhere in the giant spaceship in Cupertino,

someone is like standing at a desk goofing around with an e-ink screen on a foldable display. Enough e-ink screens that it got back to quote to talk to like be like, this is happening. This is being tested. And like we don't know what kind of, as we've discussed in the past, there are, multiple types of e-ink electronic paper. E-ink is the company. They get very testy if you use E-ink to describe all electronic paper. Electronic paper is the actual display technology. There's a whole bunch out there. I was very excited a couple of weeks ago because there's a new like rollable color one. And like just in no way, maybe, oh no, there's a five percent

possibility. I can see a five percent possibility of this phone existing in the world, right? Because 95% of me says Apple will never go with this display technology that feels really immature. They typically go with very mature technologies. Or they like Apple watch it and they're like, what if we just didn't have a display for most of the time? Right. And that's the 5%. I'm like, okay, if they put like a, they get a really good artist to do a really good e-ink wallpaper and they're just using it for like notifications and the clock. And it will look really, really pretty.

they'll be like, look at our artsy-fartsy e-ink display. I could see that. I've been thinking about this in the context of the Google AAR Glasses concept, where they, like, got closer to a useful product by making it do far less. Yeah. Even though it's just a concept, you know, whatever. We'll see if they ever ship anything. But right now that the Z-Fold 3 has a big E-Inx or a big OLED screen on the front.

There's other foldables that have big OLED screens on the front. And so basically you get like, you look at that screen. and you know it's running Android and then like your expectation is like now I have a tiny phone like what if instead of unfolding my phone to use it I just use the tiny shit version of my phone

yeah right and it's like I kind of understand it but you can see why you'd say well we'll just change that expectation by doing ink we'll save the power we'll let it do what time maybe a notification of like calls or like number

of eye messages but to actually use the phone you got on and fold it. Yeah. To me, I think what the Apple Watch looks like on your nightstand is an interesting analog there. Because it's become like a really useful use case for the watch that it's like it's also kind of your bedside clock. And it'll show you like just teeny tiny bits of information. And I feel like that kind of thing where you can have this thing that is always on and

uses almost no power but can tell you like sort of the bare minimum that you need to know, especially if Apple is invested in the idea of not making you look at your phone a thousand times a day, giving you more proactive information, all this stuff. Like, that's where a very basic thing that doesn't require you to open or even necessarily like touch your phone gets super interesting to me. What was that thing? The chumby. Remember the chumby?

I think ruled. It was like a little, it was like a little soft guy with like a little fluffy alarm clock. Yeah. Yeah. And you could like do Linux apps on it. The future of the iPhone is really the front is a chumby. I, uh, is Apple bought. Chumby? Is that, is anything? What's, what's, what she quo have to say about Applebine?

Mark German, where are you at? Get on the Chumby story. I just see, I can see them cutting it down. I'm with David. Like, you reduce the expectations of what that front display can do by using a different display technology. Maybe you get some battery left back. Because, like, the little dumb Android phone on the front of a Z flip is just, like fully ridiculous. Bad, yeah. Right. You don't need that anyway. Apple is announced they're going to bring live captions, the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. They're adding some gesture control the Apple Watch. I saw a bunch of people read this. This is a live captions in particular or like a step towards AR.

Hmm. Right? Because then you can like, you can like listen to immediately understand text. It'll be like the Google glasses. Yeah. I mean, in an interesting way, a lot of Apple's accessibility features have been kind of leading indicators for some of that stuff. Like it was doing really high-end screen reader and voice stuff with as an accessibility

feature before it brought it more broadly. It's been doing the like, gesture control that you can get on the watch is an accessibility feature that also like you don't have to squint that hard to see it as how you might control something on your phone by like pinching twice to answer or hang up a call that kind of stuff like i think the live captions is probably just a genuinely useful accessibility feature which i think is obviously a thing apple cares a lot about but like if you're going to do a r you got to have something like that that works right yeah it it seems like the first key thing right you've got to be able to listen and understand the text

so that you can like translate it to other text or something. iOS 15.5 came out. The new version of macOS came out. We're basically just in the run-up to WWDC here. Yep. The thing that is important about these updates is the thing that I failed to do, which is the studio display, got its update, its final update.

And Dan's like, are you going to plug it in and change your review? And I'm like, do I have to? So I promise that like today, here tomorrow, I'll plug it in, I'll give it the final update, and it's still going to be a six or whatever we gave it, because it still looks bad. I look forward to you looking very slightly less sunburned. Yeah. It's going to be great. Unless they radically change the crop.

I don't, I think it's still going to look bad. A bunch of headphones stuff, Chris Welch continues to curl around the vents at Sonos. But he got hugely, actually, congratulations, Chris. He's been leaking all kinds of son of stuff. You got the sub mini, which is a product we've all wanted. for a million years because the existing sub is $750, which is too much money to pay for a subwoofer.

It does not say how much it's going to cost, but it's going to be cheaper. It looks cool. I hope it sounds as good, because the current sub is really nice. Yeah. It's just not $800 nice. Did either of you also look at this render

and think, oh, Sonos bought all of the old Mac Pro trash cans and put a speaker inside of them? Just repurposing them. Because that's where I went. That's pretty good. It has a real early 2000 Sony vibe to it as well. Oh yeah, I can see that.

Yeah. It's like what if it was furniture, but also sound. Yeah. That does sound like a Sony marketing campaign. Would you like to sit on your ottoman and play music through your butt? That's like very party speaker. Hey, if you want to talk about party speakers on the Rochester, I'm here for it. We can go a full other hour.

Here's what I want to know. If you work at Sony. or JBL or whatever, and you are in the Bluetooth party speaker division, just leak me your P&Ls, right? Because we're on like 14 generations of these things. And they're, from what I can tell, a big business. Like, let me know.

What is the budget for LEDs? What is the bill of materials for extremely garish LEDs on party speakers in your division? When you have your product meetings, does the PM come up and say, you know, we've, you know, team, we've been looking at the research from the third generation of party speakers, which we just launched. And, you know, the data really tells us that in frat houses around America, we need to add even more cup holders to these speakers.

Like, you know, like, let me know. I'm, I've wanted the inside story of the party speaker explosion for many years. We're like four generations away from them just accidentally building a self-driving car around the speaker. Like, there's more innovation happening in party speakers than almost any other area in tech. they're great. We've had some amazing ones like float through the verge office. One more music thing. This is.

It's not party speaker related. But there's one of I think Chris Welch also reviewed this week. The one plus Nord buds review, which are these like $40 wireless earbuds. And I've also been using them for the last week after like a tour of every cheap pair of wireless earbuds you can buy because I've lost four pairs of AirPods and just can't justify buying more AirPods. And so.

he landed basically in the same place that I did, which is like, it's the, the case is a little big. The microphone's not amazing, but they're 40 bucks and they pair really fast and they're pretty comfortable and they're pretty good. So my new like mega cheap pair of like I just need some headphones to wear while I'm walking the dog is these. So if you're looking for something stupid cheap that won't hurt when you lose, these are the ones. How are you losing them? Okay, so I'm convinced my mother-in-law stole one of my pairs. Let's start there. Okay. Absolutely 100% convinced. She didn't have. have AirPods, and then I lost mine, and then she had AirPods.

Just saying, there was one pair that I still have, but I got caught in the rain, and so now the battery lasts, like, the time it takes to put them on, and then they die. A third pair I traveled with, and I think left in San Francisco, so those I'm never getting back. And then a fourth pair is just gone. I have no idea. I bought it, and all, like, like, shockingly quickly, like a couple of weeks later, they were just gone.

So I'm just now, I'm at the point. It's like AirPods and fancy sunglasses. I'm just not allowed to buy anymore because I will lose them. The Sony LinkBud's S, the case looks suspiciously like an AirPods case. So here's how you would know, because she'd never buy those in her. So you got to leave that line around and be like, how did you? Really what you come on the Vurchaseast for is ways to trick your mother and mom. You got to wear wire, David.

A bunch of new smart home stuff, I will say that one that's most interesting to me, Samsung is going to start testing matter on the Smart Things platform. It's like in beta. We'll see if it works. But it's the first big company to do it. And Smart Things is real. You know, like a lot of people have it. Yeah, it's the first one to go past the like, we are launching it soon thing into like, this is now a thing you can do.

And they're actually like, good. They went from launching a press release to launching a web page where you can sign up for a partner early access program that will come soon. So they've gotten to the forum stage. Is it only coming soon? Okay, that's a bummer. I thought at least the partners could already early access. All right. And we got to end this thing.

We have to talk about Eric and Pebble and the man. Go ahead, David. The man wants a small Android phone. Yeah, okay. So Eric Mijikovsky, who was the founder of Pebble and has since done a number of things. He's currently the CEO of Beeper, which is a cool multi-messaging app messaging app that I kind of dig, like really, really badly wants to make Google, I guess make Google make a small. Android phone. He wants a small Android phone to exist, and he seems to want Google to make it.

And basically what he seems to want, and by what he seems to want is, like, he explicitly said this many times over and over again, he wants an iPhone mini running stock Android. And the theory behind it is like small phones are good. Not everyone wants the big monster giant phones. And he doesn't necessarily want it to even be like super, super fancy, just like small, good, useful phone at a reason to be. will price. And he's trying to get 50,000 signatures. I'm not sure what he's going to do after that. Just like mail it to Sundar Pichai and see what happens. But that is his quest. And I guess it sounds like according to his website, over 10,000 people have already signed the petition. So he seems to be

well on his way. Am I allowed to sign it? I'm going to go sign it. You can sign it. I will say that Eric DM to me the petition was like, let's see if we can get Dieter and his new bosses to build this for us. Deeter, you got your first. Eric was at the screening a springboard that we did at the computer history museum. So we saw him there and we were joking about it. But I believe it. I just, here's what I know in my heart. People say they want this thing and then they go to the store and then they look around

furtively and then they gravitate towards the cheapest, biggest screen they can buy. And they buy that one and they take it home and they open Twitter and they say, why won't anyone make a small phone? And I swear to God, this is like the cycle of IP3's phones. And it's because they never actually give us a truly good small phone. The iPhone mini is a truly good small phone. talking about the battery life sucked for the first one it's because the phone is small that's like that's the thing like do you know what they do when they make the phone bigger is they put more batteries

inside of it it's a miracle you wouldn't have to you wouldn't have to do that though if it was an e-ink display then you could have small phone yeah and battery for years okay and bring back the ipod classic people want as an e-ing device that's what the people want eric call me let's do this the pebble was an e-ink display see see see Synergy. All right. We got to end this year. Sign the petition.

Let's see if we can force Deeter do something to Google. I don't know what kind of disclosure you need that to be. If someone can tell me what the Deeter disclosure needs to be, disclosure, Deeter's my boy. Like, I don't know what you want me to say. That works. Deers are co-founder, but now doesn't. I will say that Deeter and I are, we're learning what we can talk about because we want to be very respectful of the fact that we can't just share a brain anymore. And so mostly it's me threatening to buy him increasingly hard to use old digital cameras.

I bought him an Apple QuickTakeek 100. And I was mistaken because I thought that I thought it was a Sony Mavica that shot to floppy disk, which is its own set of challenges. I just want to be clear. But no, Apple actually had licensed it from Kodak. And it only works with a special cable. Yes. But you have to plug into a power Macintosh. Wow.

Software is never updated. and it only spits out eight VGA quality photos in a proprietary image format or 32 320 by 20 inch formats. Hell yeah. So Deer just sent me a list. He sent me like an invoice of all the cables he has to. This is who we are now. I'm going to bind them, Mavica next, though. If you're listening, man, the second you solve the quick take 100, you'll be

solving a camera with a significant number of motors inside of it to operate a floppy disk. It's going to be great. All right. That's the show. A wild one. Thanks to Liz. You can tweet at all of us. You know this?

You can tweet at David. He's at Pierce. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Liz is MS. Lepado. I am at Reckless. There's a bunch of stuff to call it on the site this week. Great story about how fears of electromagnetic radiation have spawned this entire industry.

of like snake oil RF protectors. It's very good. And then Mia did a great story on the content moderation challenges of the Buffalo shooting live stream. If you listen to that part, during our list conversation, you want to know more.

It's all in there. Mia did a great job pulling apart. Decoder this week was Nebula CEO, Dave Wiscus. That was actually a great conversation. Yeah, he was great. I really enjoyed that one. Usually creator company conversations are like how they're going to take over at Disney.

And this one was like, no, here's just how we're going to get people paid a healthy amount of money so they can live balanced lives. I appreciate it. And then Alex, you got, what's the miniseries? It's the last episode of the miniseries. And I spoke with Ben Heck, who was one of the first guys to really, like, start modding Xbox 360 controllers to make them more accessible. And I spoke with Bryce Johnson from Microsoft, who's one of the co-creators of the adaptive controller.

It was very, very cool. It was a good episode. It was wild. It's all good. Yeah, we just talked a lot about like PCB boards and contact points and kind of the challenges of making controllers accessible. Yeah. Ben Heck is a Madison guy. I've had beers and burgers Madison with Ben Heck in the past. Because he is a character. That's what I will say. The purest character you will ever find. Great episode. Listen to that. Other than that, that we've gone over, as always. So that's it. That's a Vurchast. Rock and roll.

Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. And if you'd like to the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino.

Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.