The Vergecast - Confusing new Apple products, Netflix password sharing, and NFT cults

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler discuss the announcements from Apple this week, HDR video standards, and all the news out of Netflix and Tesla. Apple launches redesigned iPad with a bigger screen and USB-C Logitech updates Crayon stylus with the USB-C port missing from the Apple The new Apple TV 4K has a remote with USB-C and a lower starting price Apple’s new iPad only supports the old Apple Pencil–and need an adapter to do so Apple’s Magic Keyboard Folio for the new iPad has a 14-key function row The new iPad makes no sense Apple announces new iPad Pro with M2 chip and Wi-Fi 6E Netflix password-sharing crackdown will roll out globally in ‘early 2023’ – and here’s how it could work Netflix announces Profile Transfers – for when it forces you to finally pay up Netflix is all-in on binge-watching Netflix is ‘seriously exploring’ a cloud gaming service Can Netflix reclaim the ‘Netflix for games’ crown from Xbox Game Pass? Elon Musk is “excited about the Twitter situation” Tesla is “smoothing is vehicle process to avoid bottlenecks” Elon Musk’s frisky earnings call touched on the Cybertruck, Twitter, and teh future of Tesla Elon Musk says Starlink will keep funding Ukraine’s government ‘for free’ despite losing money Help, Foxconn has gone from AI 8K+5G to ‘3+3=∞’ Google adds replies and stars to Messages — and is taking the RCS fight to iPhones Lightroom is (finally) all I need for photo editing I went all in on eSIM and I have regrets The next generation of Thunderbolt seems nice but less necessary than ever Adobe’s latest AI prototype gives even the worst dancers some impressive moves GMC Sierra EV Denali revealed: plug-in-powered pickup goes premium Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the verge cast, the crew tries to explain the weird products out of Apple this week. We'll break down the news from Netflix and Tesla and a lightning round that gets a little spicy. 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. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. 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 sure.

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. And welcome to Richcast, flagship podcast. Dongletown. It's a lonely place, but we're all in it together. That's really the experience of using modern technology.

You're alone in your house. The things aren't going to plug into one another unless you engineer a solution. but you know that you're connected to millions of people worldwide who are going through the exact same frustrating problem. Who all know what a dongle is. We all know what a don't know. It's a real, how do we end up here, man? I don't know, man. I love a dongle, though. I'm excited to talk about dongles. Mistakes were made. Standards were organized and standards organizations are the problem. Oh, my gosh. All right. Well, that voice you hear is Richard Lawler. What's up, Richard?

It's going on. Good to be back. Immediately joining the show with a spicy take. I love it. About standards organizations. That's how you know it's a VIRGAST, everybody. Hell yes. Richard is here in place of David Pierce, who I believe is in Texas. What?

He went without me? I don't know. I just got a slack from him today and said, I'm getting on a flight in Texas. There was no... Shocking. Preview of this Slack. There was no follow-up from this Slack. He's just in Texas now.

He's just in Texas now. It's a big state. It could be anywhere. Everybody's getting into Formula One. That's what it is. So hopefully David comes back at some point. I wish him well in Texas. I don't even know a part of Texas he's in.

He just said he was in Texas. But anyway, Richard's here. Alex Cranz is here. Hello. I am very curious to know where in Texas David is. Well, if anyone in Texas sees David, let Alex know. Let me know. Don't say hi to David.

Just be like, hold on. I have to DM. Just take his picture on the street and send it to Alex. It's suvalence. Yeah, it's fine. I've consented, so it's okay. It's not from above. It's from with it.

It's Sue Vailas. All right. I'm your friend, Eli. Welcome to Vergecast. There's a lot going on this week. I was looking at the rundown before we started. Boy, this is going to be a Vergecast. That's all I can say about this episode of the show.

It's going to be one of the most averged cast, a verge casts of all time. That's what I got for you. We got new Apple stuff. Apple more committed to dongles than ever. Yeah. I think Apple has decided to react to governments around the world attempting to standardized ports by saying,

fine. Now our shit will be more frustrating than you could possibly imagine. You want us to do it? We're going to do it and there'll be dongles. Hundreds of dongles. What combinations of magnets and dongles do you want? You're up because you've never seen one like this. So there's a lot going on. New iPads. New iPad Pro, new Apple TV 4K, new remote,

new keyboard cases for these iPads, the whole thing. Then Kanye West decided to buy Parlor. Who knows why? Netflix is running on password share. Tesla had an earnings call. Foxcon did some Foxcon stuff. And Richard confidently told us before the show began that he's been crypto-pilled. They get everybody eventually. Who knows what that means?

I don't know. I don't know if that's true. I think that's a complicated reverse troll. Just a ton going on. Let's start, obviously, with Apple. I want to say it's a weird move, but Apple has done this before. They did not have an event. They just issued a bunch of press releases.

and we were off we go. I mean, they did do a video. You can go out and you can watch like a 20-minute video. And I guess if you like hunch forward and watch it really closely, you'll feel like you're watching the normal like stream. I didn't watch this video. Did you watch this video? I watched part of it.

And then I was like, I don't have to watch this video. Yeah, because I just go on the website and look at the stuff. I got the press release. Yeah, I'm good. I'm ready to go. But they did do a video this year. We're practically in range of having the things in our hands. I think I can skip the video this time.

the spec sheet. I'm good. I've seen an iPad. Yeah, right. So this is the, this is the weird zone. All these companies are in. You can have the big event, maintain all the surprise, show the stuff to us in person. We love that. I'll sit through a video in your theater just to see the stuff in person right away. That's a fine trade. And obviously, like, talk to executives and the people and take picture, all the stuff. Yeah. Good trade. Then there's what Apple has been doing, which is virtual events where we all watch the video together. short from the comfort of our homes and then we all look at the spec sheets. Hold hands in the metaverse.

Then there's this, which is, what if you would just put out all the spec sheets right away and then also make this video in case what you wanted was to watch a video at home. And I would say this is the least effective of the approaches to the modern product announcement. 100%. But please don't go back to making us all stream the video first.

I think just put out the press releases. So they put out all the press releases, like lots of stuff. Yeah, a lot of stuff. Like a shocking. I was expecting like N.I. There was a real surprise this week. And so we got two iPads. We got the Apple TV.

A lot of their events recently, I feel like we haven't had the surprise come in. Yeah. But this time, I was actually shocked by some of the things. It was good to have that back. What were you shocked by? What shocked you the most? I didn't see a new Apple TV coming this week or two new Apple TV. That's double.

Okay. It's not, okay. It's a new processor. It has a new chip inside from a newer iPhone. It is still the same. Yeah. So, yeah, the Apple TV is basically still the same as. A15 now, they've removed the fan, which most people did not even know the Apple TV had a fan,

but more recent Apple TVs have gigantic slow fans in them. Now they're not a fan. Here's the weird part about the Apple. Well, two weird things about these Apple TVs. This is what shocked me. One, it's still expensive. They lowered the price to $1.29 for the base model, but it's still incredibly expensive. Like, Rokos are more or less free. They frisbee them to you when you walk into Walmart. Amazon is just like automatically shipping them. You just sneeze in Amazon's direction. If you have Amazon Prime, you can get a fired TV stick for nothing. Apple's at $1.29. So they lower the price at $1.29. But that $1.29 model is really weird. It has, it's 64 gigs of storage. No Ethernet. So it's like, it's just a weird, it's like a more

expensive cheap thing. No fan. No fan. They put an A15 ship in it. People don't even know that the old Apple TV 4Ks had fans. And they had a big, slow fan at the bottom and some men's not. Now they don't. Whatever. So that's 129, 64-givers storage, Wi-Fi only. Who is that for? Because for $20 more, you get double the storage. You get an Ethernet port, which if you are actually serious about streaming 4K, you probably want this thing near some sort of hardwired connection. And then you get a thread radio so you can support matter and have it be your home home.

This is like the easiest $20 you should spend. Yeah. Like the most future-proof $20 that you can have in your home. I keep wondering why they didn't drop the price of the big. model one more. Like, if that had been $100, $50 difference, I would still be, I would be here saying this is an outrageous price difference. How dare they?

But also it would make, like, more business sense for Apple because they'd be pushing it. It feels like they Motorola did it. Oh, yeah. Where it exists to go on sale for $99. And like, they don't expect you to buy it for $1.29. They're just, they're going to put it on sale. And they're going to say, hey, man, we give you a discount. This is the Ted Lasso discount.

You got to watch season three. $100. Yeah, if you sign up for Apple TV, you get one of these for free, right? Or for an inbox. Okay, maybe. I'm still saying that 149 model, if you're going to spend this much money in a streaming box

and you're not getting an Nvidia shield from my shield people out there, of which Alex is one. It's still the best one. It's super not the best. Because you can do pass-through, you can do audio pass-through to your receiver, which the Apple converts,

the Apple TV converts the audio. And so if you're really serious, about your home theater audio. That's true. That's the only reason to get the shield. I love them both. I still use the Apple TV because I also use a SotoSpar. I don't care about pass-through.

It's truly the only way to do Plex. Oh, my God. That's not true. The right way. And did you know, it can gently warm your weed for you while you run Plex on. Yeah. It can do everything. It's a magical device.

Anyhow. See, I believe it's good. It's really expensive. I like it. But you should just spin it. the money for the really good one because it's $20. So like. It's just a bizarre situation.

It's super weird. And also the storage, I keep coming back to like, why do I need so much storage on my Apple TV? I can understand like RAM, you know, and I could understand like wanting to load up more of the movie or whatever that you're streaming so it can serve directly. So it's not like, I get that. But it's games. Some people put games on Apple TV.

That's what I got for you. How many? If you did gaming on Apple TV. Apple TV, then I guess it would matter. I just think it's so strange that now it supports both Dolby Vision and HDR 10 plus. I can't, I can't think of exactly how many devices have that. Oh, this is Samsung. The Samsung H-D-R.

Samsung H-H-H-Sterns. And Dolby Vision. Usually you have to choose. Yeah, there are a few. Highsense has H-D-R-10. Well, so if you just look at it. So, oh, boy, talk about standards bodies, Richard. This is why standards body should be abolished, and I should be in charge.

Just the feudal lord of. of all tech standards, Nehai Patel. Vote Patel, but really in sort of a dictator way. It's a great glow-up. So Dolby Vision is a standard. Apple support it. It would be huge fanfare. Apple's one of the biggest supporters of Dolby Vision.

They put in the Apple TV. The iPhone supports it. Max support it. Apple loves Dolby Vision. You can record in Dolby Vision on an iPhone. Samsung has never supported Dolby Vision. Yeah. It's always supported HDR10 and then HDR10.

The difference between HDR10 and HDR10 plus is effectively the difference between DolbyVVVision. vision HDR 10. So HDR10 has the same wider dynamic range. Bright things get brighter. Right. It's darker as Dolby Vision. Same wider color gamut to a certain extent. Dolby vision has dynamic metadata. So it moves the dynamic range along with the scene. That's how the compression works. HDR 10 is fixed. H.T.R. 10 plus dynamic metadata. Now, you can argue about the fine distinctions between all of these things. I think Dolby Vision looks better than H.S. Other people can't see it. Whatever. But now the technology is the same. Samsung just refused to support Dolby Vision and even

TV. They were totally committed HDR 10 plus, as was Amazon. Because they didn't want to pay, because Dolby Vision, you have to pay to like use their product. You have to pay to like master all of your stuff. Like, you have to go through a process with Dolby Vision. And HDR 10 plus, they can just be like, oh bam. That's HDR 10 plus, baby. Enjoy. And there's like just weird mafia level licensing shenanigans in the background of all this, whatever. But Samsung sells a lot of TVs. So at some point,

it was just who was going to blink first? Was the industry going to just support HDR10 Plus because it's on all the Samsung TVs? Or Samsung going to be like, screw it, we're paying the money, and we're going to support Dolby Vision because all the services are on Dolby Vision. And it looks like Samsung won. Like, they just flatly won.

And now Apple, the biggest booster of Dolby Vision, is shipping HDR 10 plus in the Apple TV. I don't know if they won. because they still have to get like all of the different people making content have to start mastering in HDR 10 plus a lot of them are still mastering in Dolby Vision in HDR 10. They're not doing that that metadata. They do have like Netflix and Amazon had at least some HDR 10 plus stuff, I believe, or at least no Amazon did. I can't remember Netflix was actually doing it. Like everybody is slowly kind of doing it. But they're all irritated because they still have to like go, okay, now they have to do an HDR 10 master. Now they have to do an HDR 10 master. Now they have to do an HDR. 10 plus master and a Dolby Vision master. But I think if you get the HDR 10 plus master,

it's easier to go, it's easier to fall back to HDR10 for sure. It might be easier to go back and forth between Dolby Vision. I just, this is why I said. I told you'd be the Vergecasteest Virchcast of all time. But it'll be ugly. Here you go.

It won't be as pretty as Dolby Vision. How many profiles of Dolby Vision does your TV support? Let's get into it. Yeah. We'll see. I mean, I'm dying to see. Apple never really figured out this big plan they had

to run everything in Dolby Vision. including the user interface, and then dynamically remap into SDR, and now potentially an HDR10 plus, because that's what Amazon's app supports. That was what the Apple TV shipped with this, where the whole thing permanently ran in Dolby Vision, and they would dynamically remap content. It just like didn't work. So that's where you get match content and frame rate, and that's how you should run your Apple TV. Now you can, now there's another thing to switch to. So we'll see if they can get to a place, which is where everybody wants to be, where you're doing this seamlessly without blinking the TV to black. I do wonder, though, Apple's always had kind of an issue with the

handshaking on Dolby Vision. And like, it's this thing called Edid. And it's basically when your set-top box handshakes with your TV and says, this is the kind of signal I'm going to send. Apple can sometimes be really wonky about that. And you have to very specifically set up your Apple TV to get the handshake right, to get it in Dolby Vision. And I wonder if, like, we're going to see some weird handshaking issues with these new ones where it's like, HDR 10, HDR, HDR, DLB Vision, who knows? Yeah. Because that's been like a big frustration for new Apple TV users.

When they roll out new TVs and new versions of the H.DMI standard every year, they have plug parties. Uh-huh. Usually go listen to the H-DMI, spectacular episode of the Vergecast. They talk about this. All the manufacturers show up, all their engineers show up with all their stuff, and they just plug things into one another to make sure it all works. I've always wanted to go to one.

But it almost never does. Well, that's what they do. The Ed is like really, like, Apple's kind of notorious for having one of the best eaten, like, that handshake. But it's also still kind of like wonky. Everybody's kind of crummy at it. It's great. I love it.

All right. Well, if you are attending an HTMLI plug party, let me know. I'll just come with you. I'll just pretend I work at your company. You'll be your plus one. At the HTML plug party. So we're going to talk about this thing for 10 minutes and not talk about the most important development.

All right. The remote has USBC now. I'm just worried. I'm like, I'm like, you can't feel. There's an anxiety building. It doesn't do crypto, Richard. Go ahead. What's exciting?

Remote has USBC now. It doesn't have light. Talk about your plug parties. So this is the year where Apple's bullshit about USBC is catching up to it. It is fully the year. Like, all of these devices are all over the place because Apple didn't just go with the standard and they shipped lightning all over the place. So the Apple TV remote for years has been a lightning.

You don't have to charge it very often. It's like every six months. Yeah. I haven't charged mine in like a year. Yeah. So then, and this year with the update, now it's USBC. This is fine. People probably have USBC connectors in their homes now.

Europe has mandated USBC for new devices. Apparently they don't include a USBC cable. But there's no cable in the box. And this is what I mean. Unless you live in Brazil, then you can get a USBC cable in the box. Because the Brazilian government is like, what are you doing? You have to put cables in the box. This is what I mean.

Like, Apple is just, just like, God, it's a middle finger in there. It's like, you want USBC? It'll be the most annoying, most difficult implementation of this possible. So no cables in the box. It's different than all your other stuff. We didn't do the phones this here. Whatever. Wait, Richard, does the box have like a different layout? Like, how do they fit the cable in there? I don't know. Does it just come taped on the side with a big middle finger? I think people figured this out by looking at the website spec sheets. So I don't know if anyone's actually seeing the packaging yet. Somebody said, Richard, not me.

a photo. But I bet there's just an empty slot in every other global release. And you're like, huh, what's that for? For the Brazilians. All right. So that, but the Apple TV going to USBC is kind of like neither here nor there. Right. Like, yeah. It's a remote. You plug it in once a year. You probably one of these cables in your house. So be it. Unless you're like deeply in the Apple ecosystem and all you have is lightning. And like one micro USB cable. You're just like, no. Have fun going to micro center. There's no way to charge this thing. unless you have USBC already in your house. Like you just get it and your remote doesn't work and you're screwed. So it goes.

That one's fine. It's the iPad. So that's the Apple TV. Yeah. Right. It's surprising how the prices work. It's surprising that Apple caved on HDR10 plus. It's a little surprising on USBC, but like whatever.

It's a surprising they announced it. It's surprising they announced. Yeah. If anyone thought we weren't going to start with the Apple TV, I don't know what show you thought you were listening to. Of course we're like deep in the Dolby Vision profiles. It's the Virchcast. All right. Then there was the stuff we were expecting, which was new iPads.

And I think we were all expecting the new iPad Pro, which we can get through very quickly, I think, but we should come back to because it's also caught up in this USBC noise. So the new iPad Pro has an M2 chip. It has Wi-Fi 6E, which is Apple's first Wi-Fi 6E device. It's great, unless you use more Wi-Fi channels in your home if you have Wi-Fi 6E router, which I just bought Eero as Pro 6E's. They're great. Super stupid expensive, and I only bought than because I'd podcast from home twice a week. You look wonderful today. I was thinking there was something a little different about you today.

And it's that, it's an extra 50 megahertz of bandwidth. Hell yeah. That's, I don't know what that is. It's the sun's low in the sky. It's a 50 megahertz difference. It's a 50 megahertz,

not bandwidth of spectrum. That's what I'm doing. It's, uh, yeah. I'm not even doing that. I'm actually in 2015. This thing is probably on 2.4 gighertz. I just have routers that don't crash in two minutes.

That's, I bought new ones. That's all that happened. Anyway, so the iPad Pro has M2 Wi-Fi 60. Otherwise, same design, same features. Same displays. Yep. Same boulder rolling down the hill of Stage Manager when iPad OS16 comes out.

Same displays, right? Yeah. LCD displays, no changes, just as much. The micro LED display in the iPad, the 12-inch. Yep. Then I remember Chris Welch wasn't a great fan of last year. He thought there was like some weird roll-off in the light. with those in weird ways.

Yeah. I've always liked them. It's weird, but the 11 does not get micro. That's what I was holding out for. I was so excited for an 11 inch with micro. And I was like, oh, well, I won't spend way too much money on an iPad pro I don't need now. It's a whole reason. Yeah.

Take that, Tim Apple. Yeah, I really showed him. Instead, I'll be buying dongles from you at $29 a pump. Okay, so that's how I've had pro. But then there's a new iPad. Right. Which is totally redesigned. Bigger screen, USBC, the camera has been moved.

So it's at the top in landscape. New keyboard cover. Old pencil. It was redesigned the weirdest pencil. Like, everything about this kind of shocked me. One, I didn't expect a total new redesign because normally that's like, like Apple for these press releases is usually like, here's a little M2 and the iPad Pro. Go.

And I'm like, okay, I get that. I don't need to see that in person. This is a whole new device. So I was expecting, like, I would have expected a lot of big things. But then I think about that pencil. And I think about, like, all of the pictures in the Apple and the jobs theater of people playing with that dongle and that pencil. Oh, my God. Of course.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I get it. I get why you couldn't do an event for this guy. You just want to hide the pencil from people. Yeah. So this device is full of compromises. So a 10.9 inch display, the new flatter edges. So the same kind of design language.

the iPad air in the pro. They updated the cameras. Like I said, they moved the front camera to landscape. Wi-Fi 6. So Apple's finally, like, adopting Wi-Fi 6 across its line. Touch ID and a power button.

I complained about this on Twitter, and people were like, you know, critically mad at me. Apple keeps saying this is an all-screen design. It's got a bezel. Dude, the bezels on this thing are ridiculous. Like, go watch the video.

This is the reason you should watch the video. Like, because they show the thing a lot. And you're like, oh, those bezels are huge. Like you could Like you could live in that And I understand That they're not calling it Edge to Edge

Now they're saying It's all screen What is the difference Between all screen And edge to edge display Those things mean the same thing This has HP touchpad Bezels

Well okay Just close your eyes Pull over in your car Close your eyes Imagine this Let's just go through this exercise Okay Imagine

The bezels were 10 times thicker So it was like A little tiny Display And lots of bezels Right But otherwise the same

would you call that an all-screen display or an all-screen design? I mean, I would if I worked at Apple. Right, I'm saying, but people are like, I'm like, this is not all-screen and people like, yeah, it is. There's nothing else with screen. Okay, just like push it out. Imagine the screen was four inches, but it was the same size case, and there was just that much bezel around it.

And I was like, this is an all-screen design. Would you agree with me? I mean, no, you wouldn't because you're not bonkers. Yeah, no. Because words have meanings. Now imagine the screen. mean, there's no bezel. And I was like, this is an all-screen design. Would you agree? Yes, of course you would. Yeah. So there's at some point between filling to the edges and a little postage stamp with five-inch vessels where you can no longer get to say it's all-screen. Somewhere in the middle. This is where you're at the point right now where you're like, this is not all-screen. Richard, do you feel it's all-screen?

You got to hear both sides. You got to hear both sides. You got to hear both sides. The screen is all-screen, right? I agree that the screen is all screen. The screen is nothing but screen. There's nothing but screen where the screen is. There's no notch. There's no porthole little for the front facing camera, nothing like that. It's just screen. It's all screen.

Okay. So you're saying it's what you mean by it's an all screen screen design? Yes. Go ahead. Yes. By the way, even the thing is an all screen because there's a camera there. Like, definitionally, it's an all screen and camera design. All right.

So that's the new iPad. They've added USBC to it. But because they went with the old pencil, the old pencil charges with lightning in a famous Johnny Ive design decision, you charge the old pencil by plugging it into the lightning port of the old iPad. It's beautiful.

But now it's your USBC. So now what you do is you plug a USBC cable into your new iPad. And then you plug a $9.00. Which is female USBC. So you plug your cable into that and then female lightning, so you plug your lightning pencil into the other end. And my God, man. So, I actually like the don't like the dongle.

Okay. I'm sorry. I don't like the don't like the dongle in that I want to own one. But I like that they were like, okay, we only want to use the old pencil. Why? So now we've got to plug it in and we want to go USBC. They make a new, they've made it for years a better pencil. But it can only be charged by magnets.

And they're like, we can't do the magnets because it's going to mess with like the camera. or something. So we can't, no magnets. So we got to use the old pencil that has the goofiest way of charge. And we got to plug it in. But we can't just sell somebody a cord because they would have sold you a cable. They wouldn't have included a cable. They would sell you a cable that's female lightning on one side and USBC on the other. And like, that's a terrible cord. You can never use that again. And now you just like, you got your little dongle. And you plug it into your USBC cable and you're good to go. My theory is when Apple rolled out this Apple. pencil years ago.

Uh-huh. They were like, people are going to love this thing. And they made like 10 million of them. Yeah. They were riding high. Maybe Tim Cook pressed the zero on his number pad one too many times. He's made too many of them. And they're all in a warehouse.

So like, you know what? We're just going to get rid of them over time. But they could just give you one. I'm going to absolutely prolong a take from news reporter Amar Shakir, who pointed out that one explanation. And I think it holds some weight is that a lot of schools have iPads, the base model iPad that we're talking about. And they have a lot of those pencils already. So making it work with the old pencil, they don't have to replace the pencils. Why can't you support both things? Hey man, technology's

well, they're already going to be all of those, they're going to want all of those schools to go and update to the new iPad, which is now what, $150 more, $100 more. Yeah. So we got to talk about the pricing because this thing is really expensive. Really expensive. For what it is. So it's $4.49 for the 64-gay model. the old version started 329. The 329 iPad was like this close. I don't think it wasn't impulse by. It was still too expensive for that, but it was like teetering on the edge.

Yeah. Like 250, 299 is like, I don't know, I'm going to buy this 20K that can break it. Right. 329 right on the other side, frequently discount it. Right? You could buy a resource one. You buy a useful or whatever. 449 is no longer in that territory.

That's just $100 less than an iPad air. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird. And then the keyboard is another $250. We should talk about this keyboard. It's what's it called? The magic smart folio. For the 10.9 inch iPad.

It's the magic keyboard folio for the 10.9 inch iPad. It's got a trackpad. It's got buttons. It's got function keys. Oh, I love that. Which is another really interesting addition from Apple to the iPad line. This thing, and it's got a kickstand. So it effectively turns the new iPad into a surface.

You know, and there's an arm surface this year. But only this cheapest. iPad has the function keys. Right. So the iPad Pro still has the same keyboard case with no function keys and no Kix-Ton. I can't defend that one. I believe you mean the magic keyboard folio for 12.9-inch iPad Pro. We have to use the right names. Oh, my God, kill me.

I don't know. There's something here where Apple is just caught in the middle. Yeah. Right? They didn't update the new iPad. If they just moved the camera to the side and added function key, to the keyboard would have made a little sense. They didn't do any of that to that iPad.

They just bumped the processor. This iPad is like a substantial redesign. It is clearly designed to be used in laptop mode, right? Landscape, front facing camera, keyboard case with function keys, a surface-like kickout design, slightly more expensive. This is the iPad is the low-end laptop replacement. This is the iPad that goes up against the $500, $700, $700, $700, cheap Windows PC, high-end crowbook, I guess.

It's weird. It's a weird product. But it's $700. And they're keeping the 329 model in the lineup. It's not going away like it usually does. Yeah. No, I thought Monica did a wonderful story this week, just like trying to wrap her head around why this thing exists and pointed out that, okay, if you get it, you have to get the key, and you want to use it as a laptop. You have to go get the keyboard.

So now you're spending $700. So now you're spending $700 on this thing. And for that, you can get a really nice Windows machine. that does all the things and isn't like the iPad OS, which we all enjoy, but also it is not a laptop OS. I will say Monica put a line in this piece,

which is very good. It's called the new iPad makes sense. You know, we'll read it. But in the middle of it, she's like, it's not a computer, I don't care what you say. And I was like, wow, strong words for verge.com.

The website founded on the notion that we should just argue about what words mean for the rest of our lives. But I get what she's saying. Monica was like, no, line in the sand. She was like, it's not a computer.

Our laptop reviewer is like, this garbage isn't a computer. But they're obviously trying to get it to compete. She's owned. She's earned the take. She's earned the take. But it's weird, right? Because the surface, the arm surface is this form factor. Exactly.

This is Microsoft's form factor. And the arm surface is also limited in what apps it can run, right? Because it's Windows on Arm. We'll see what its battery life is like. But this new iPad is more of a head-up competitor to the surface than ever before. It's just, it's cheaper. But then they can't do as much because it's iPad OS. This one can't run stage manager because it's not an iPad Pro.

Just a weird product all the way around. Like I'm not sure what Apple was doing. I'm not sure why they went USBC on this one and then didn't do their console. I forgot about the piles. I'm sorry. I forgot that it doesn't do the piles. It doesn't do piles. No piles.

One thing I'll say Logitech updated, it's crayon, which is also what's what schools by. Mm-hmm. USBC port. You just plug USBC cable right in this thing. That's the way to do it. Outdone. But maybe they can just break off that lightning part of it. Snap it off.

I don't get it, man. And here's somebody who has given a 9th gen iPad to a child. Actually not having a home button is going to be, is weird. It's going to be weird for a lot of people. Yeah. So we'll see. We got a whole episode. Whenever David comes back from wherever he is in Texas,

he's going to do a whole Wednesday episode on the iPad, how to even pick one. David has more feelings about stage manager than anybody. The most feeling. Today, before he DM'd me about being in Texas, he had dug up a story that I'd written for Engadget in like 2008, where Steve Jobs was talking about task managers and what they represent to people. I was like, I don't remember writing this. David's like, I found it. I'm like, I don't know. So that's coming Wednesday. Very good. But yeah, just a weird set of products from Apple. And this USBC moment for Apple is coming. And it just feels like the company hasn't grabbed onto it. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, it didn't go all the way.

It seems like it's fighting it is like what I would say. Yeah. I don't think Apple wants to do USBC. I think this is shocking. They're being dragged through the door, kicking and screaming and clawing into the floor. I don't think they want to do it. I want to be clear about this. Apple invented USBC.

The standard exists because Apple wanted it to exist for that 12-inch MacBook. They were so proud of it when that MacBook came out. And now they're like, how dare you force us to use the standard? that we invented. Sometimes your children betray you. And this is one of those moments. I'm sorry, Tim out.

Let's roll that. All right, we got to take a break. I told you this is you need a Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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Okay, we're back. Lots of other news this week. So Netflix had a bunch of news. They had earnings. Tesla had earnings. Elon Musk said he was never going to be on an earnings hall again. Guess what? He was on this earnings call.

Talks a bunch. Both start Netflix, Richard walks through it. Netflix has had an interesting pandemic. When everyone came home, suddenly everyone subscribed to Netflix. And their subscriber numbers exploded, way beyond their projection. just really they kind of gobbled up what they expected the next few years to take within the next few months. And the downside of that has been that as the pandemic has kind of progressed and we're now years removed, they aren't growing anymore. They already added all the customers. They can't find more people to sign up for Netflix.

People are leaving Netflix because there are other streaming services. Other Hollywood studios and the big companies have gotten into streaming and they're spending a lot of money to do it. And earlier this year, Netflix lost customers for the first time in 10 years. So they came out with their earnings report this week, and we finally got news that the password sharing crackdown that they have talked about to try and turn around and reverse this trend will roll out globally in 2023. They've been using it in a few Latin American countries.

Whether or not people like it depends on who you ask. If you ask Netflix, everyone loves it, and it's great. If you ask people in those countries, they say it's confusing and they don't like it. So it's weird because Netflix has to frame this is like a feature edition. they can't frame it as, hey, we've noticed you've been stealing for a number of years. They can't come at it that way. They've got to be like, hey, you're sharing your account. We love it.

Would you like to pay some more money to keep doing it? And I just don't think that makes sense to anybody. Like, I think most people like intuitively understand that they're being shaken down. And it's like not a little amount. It's not like, hey, do you want to spend 99 cents a month to share this password? No, you will have to spend $7.99, which used to be what Netflix costs. And also, you're going to have to watch ads. and they may or may not suck.

That's brutal. And if you want to watch Netflix on a TV that's not at your house, it could get complicated now, especially if you're there for more than a month and stuff like that. Like suddenly the rules have changed. It's not just, oh, hey, you know what, I'm here. I'm going to sign it with my Netflix account and watch stuff. It's not going to be like that anymore.

Have they talked about how they're going to figure that out for people who are traveling? They have, they detailed that a bit on their support page. It's partially like if you're signed into the app and stuff, I think, as part of it. Like if you sign into the app on your home network, right? It really only applies if you are signing in on a TV,

I think is what they said. Okay. So like, you know, if you're watching on your phone or something, you're traveling, you've got a whole different, different kind of thing. But essentially what you are dealing with is

you're going to, you may run into this if you are trying to sign in on a TV that's somewhere, not where you live. All right. So you got to tell all your exes to watch Netflix on their phones

and use Airplay. Yeah. I have to tell my mom. mom. She's just not going to have Netflix ever again. Yeah, but for your money, you just like pay the money. She can pay the money. I'm not paying. I feel like the password sharing thing is complicated with like the number of people, like roommates and old friends and ex-girlfriends.

Like, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to like not talk to you anymore. This is over where you're on the account. By the way, and you start Venmo $7 a month where your Netflix is going to have ads. Those are your choices. Don't you ever just do like the hard cutoff? were one day, like one day I signed on and I was like, why am I getting all these recommendations for shows about babies? I do not have a baby.

Yeah. And I remember my old roommate had a baby and was just using my account. And I was like, I don't talk to this person anymore and just annihilated it. And they're going to make that easier. So just like, change the password, demanded sign out, no more baby content. Wow. So if what you want to do is to be petty with your ex-roommate. Yes. Or your ex, your ex, your ex-boyfriend, your ex-girlfriend, like, I think everybody should be just a little more petty. That is a feature. That's a feature.

Yes. But yeah, I think essentially, if you are, what it comes down to is verified, the idea of verified devices. It's sort of like your home Xbox, if you have like an Xbox or a PlayStation, which one is your home one. So if you're watching on a device

that you've already verified for, they don't exactly have all the details, but like if for a month or so, if you are away from home, you won't get prompted for a code or, like, a text message or something to verify who you are. But if you stay away from home for a while, suddenly it's going to ask you you to verify the device again. Or maybe it'll ask the people who are back at your home location to verify

their devices. It's going to get real complicated for you. That's what I'm saying. I'm very excited for the cat and mask game of people trying to break Netflix password sharing rules. It's going to happen. It's going to be incredible. I was going to say it sounds kind of like screeners. And with screeners, you have to verify a lot of times. And then your friend will be like, can I have the screeners? And you're like, no, I don't want to be like getting a verification code at 3 a.m. and having to just text it to you. So I'm not doing that. So a lot of people are just going to...

You mean screeners for review movies and stuff? Yeah, when you're reviewing movies, when you're reviewing TV shows, they'll send you like, you'll have to like log in and you'll have to get a two-factor authentication and it's a whole thing and it's fine. But you can't do it with your,

your friends ask for the password. And you're like, no, it's too complicated. It's two-factor. So if they're doing like a two-factor kind of deal here, that problem, that, like, that complication will probably push more people to be like, man, get your own account. I'm not texting you.

codes at 2 a.m. Some friendships are going to fall apart over this. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to see friendships fall apart. It's going to be great. I'm excited. I can't wait to write 500 stories about Netflix password crack time. But it's all this back to what Richard is saying, right? Netflix is sort of like out of human beings to sell Netflix to. So it needs to get more of them by kicking more people off password sharing.

So it has like created more Netflix customers than sell to. And it needs to basically raise prices and cut costs. Like they're at mature company saturated market moments and like here we are. And it is really interesting to see them in this mature company era of theirs because they have suddenly turned into the cable company. Yep. On their earnings call, the only thing they want to talk about is how they are profitable and none of their competitors are.

They just want to remind everyone that they make money. And HBO Max, Peacock, you name it, Paramount. They're all just plowing millions or billions of dollars into a hole and setting it on fire. and it's going away. Okay. Well, two things. One, to be fair, if I was competing against Peacock and the AT&T implosion of HBO Max, I would point out that I was profitable all the time, too.

I'd be like, you know what's true? They're just lighting money on fire. Two, I am now compelled to disclose Comcast Universal's NBC unit, which is the proprietor of Peacock is a minority investor in Vox Media. I assure you they did not like what I just said about Peacock or anything we've ever said about them ever. Didn't we also make a Netflix show? Two, we've made a Netflix show. It's great. You should go watch it. It's called The Future of It will single-handedly save the company in this time of turmoil and strife. Our company also makes TV shows all over the place. There's a Chad Mom, the creative director of Vox Media Studios.

Very excited about partnering with the people who make F1 Drive to survive to make a show about the PGA tour. These just been tweeting about golf for months now. I don't know what it goes on over there. I just see the golf tweets. there's a conflict of interest everybody golf tweets from my buddy the end that's the disclosure this week the other things the Netflix talked about they announced the profile transfer so that you know when you get kicked

off someone's account you can take your account and walk and create a new account that you will hopefully pay Netflix for they hope but you can't merge accounts like don't they know that people get married sometimes and you have multiple Netflix accounts oh no it's all over man you got to decide who are you now it's like changing your last name but it's your Netflix

I gave up my Netflix I gave up my Netflix other interesting things Netflix so they're all in on binge watching I think there's been a lot of this conversation especially because House the Dragon is out Hsuamax really all in on sort of these week by week drops other Hulu does week by weeks for its big shows like all most of the streamers are at week by week

Netflix still just drops them all at once does not get the water cooler conversation does not get the sort of weekly ringer podcast about what's going to happen next it just all happens at once and they're committed to it they say this is what creates the value for Netflix subscribers. I don't know about this. Here's the quote. We think our bingeable release model helps to drive substantial engagement, especially for newer titles.

I feel like it's the opposite. I feel like they lose out on that sort of week-by-week anticipation. Yeah, I think this is one of those situations where they're going to have regret in a couple of years, because these other companies have all figured out the water cooler situation. Like, these are mature entertainment companies that have been doing this in many cases for decades and decades. And while, like, viewership habits have changed. Some stuff haven't. People still only have a limited amount of time to watch shows every day. And that like getting ahead and everything is really frustrating for people. It's like, I don't want to binge watch. I don't want to watch a show, a group watch a show with my friends on Netflix. Because then I'm going to have to be like, okay, I can't watch it. There's a conversation that they're having internally where they have some debate and they just released or they're going to release this new Ryan Johnson movie in theaters. And there was a Wall Street Journal article about the kind of the debate that executives had over. whether or not they should do theatrical releases and how that would affect the kind of movies

that they can get and put on their service. And also the release, the release strategy. My guess on this, my personal guess, based on basically nothing, is that Reed Hastings was forced to give up his position on the ad thing. He had to, kicking and screaming, they were losing customers, the investors were scared, they had to do something.

They added ads. Yeah. They're going to take binge releases from him and from Ted from their cold dead hands. So until they have the new CEOs, they're going to still do binge releases because that's what they want. And that's when you'll see it change. I agree with you the ad thing. This is like, right, Netflix is out of people.

So you got two choices to make more money. You got to create more people, which you can do by kicking people off of their password sharing. And then you got to make more money from the people you got, which is showing some of those people ads. That's it. That's what you got. The binge thing to me is just, right, they're already starting to break, right? Stranger Things was in two drops. The new Guillermo Dol Toro thing.

Two drops. Right. Like, they're getting there where they realize I got it. Like, here's another disclosure. The new show, the new series The Watcher on Netflix, based in New York Mag's story. New York Mags is part of box media. You know, the whole thing. It's good.

You should watch it. Anything with Bobby Connovali, I'll watch it. It's great. He was in Mr. Robot. You know how I feel about Mr. Robot. Great. That show would be better if it was week by week, right? It's a cliffhanger show.

It's a thriller. They should stop it every week and make people try to figure out the mystery. Instead, everybody watched it all once. and everyone's like mad about the ending, which I won't spoil, but it's a New York Mac story which you could have read. So how much can you possibly spoil it? But that's weird, right, to get everybody focused on the end and like whether or not the thing completed itself successfully versus over a long period of time making everybody focus on the twists and turns of the mystery inside of the story. At some point, they're just going to have to deal with it.

Well, I think they also have to deal with the fact that at some point, right now they're profitable. Competition is increasing. I mean, I don't think most of these streaming channels are going to survive. But the competition is there. They're having to fight other people for some of these dollars and some of these subscriptions. And you can't just keep churning out content. At some point, the kind of like infinite content has to become finite. And so if they're the only ones in that binge mode being like, we're just shoveling stuff in your faces, while Disney's over here doing, we do two shows a week. That's it. And it's Thursday night and have fun. Like, they're just going to run into a problem of money.

That's why Disney is doing so well is it's being very cautious about its rollout. That's one of the reasons that HBO Max and some of these other ones have struggled is because they weren't cautious. And they were shoveling money at people and just being like, yeah, make as much content as possible. And Netflix is the worst offender there. And you're seeing that burnout in Hollywood. You're seeing those ramifications in the entertainment industry. And at some point, I think that's going to catch up with Netflix itself. Yeah.

We'll see. We'll see. The other thing Netflix is doing, right, they've got to get. They got to create more customers. You fire the people from password sharing, make them pay you ad ads. Those are your choices. You also make new products. So they are now, quote, seriously exploring a cloud gaming service, which makes sense.

Netflix is very good at streaming video over the internet. In its simplest form, cloud gaming is just streaming some video to you over the internet, accepting some input back from you, adjusting that video. Right. In a, you know, performant in low latency way. They got to do it, though, right? I mean, it's harder than it sounds. Actually, getting the games.

You think of the games? Jay Peters did this great story this week called, Can Netflix Reclaim the Netflix for Games Crown from Xbox Game Pass? And he spoke with a bunch of different people about, like, what are the actual challenges there? And Richard, you're right. Like, that was one of the biggest challenges is they don't have all those relationships that Nvidia and Microsoft have with game developers to make games.

Like, they've got a lot of games on their platform, but they're primarily indie games. from indie developers. It's for mobile. Yeah. Yo, but Ubisoft is like, you want Assassin's Creed? We'll stream it anyway.

Yeah. Ubisoft will do that for anyone. We could probably have, we could probably have Assassin's Creed on the Verge website at any point if we wanted to do it. Here's what I'm saying. Look, we've got big updates to the re-design coming. And soon the biggest update of all, which is the entire Verge will just be a level of Assassin's Creed.

We're going to bring back stage. And you'll have to do the Eagle Dive to find a new story. That's what bird noise for today. I can't make the bird noise. That's the noise they make in the game. I've never played these games. I don't know what they do. You've got to play at least one Assassin's Creed.

What are you doing? I played the Viking one. Okay. That's not the best one by far. I mean, it's like the most like beautiful one. Yeah. But like, what's, what's the good one? They all blur together.

The one in Italy, it eats you. Okay. That's like an early one. I was just, I was always told never to finish one. They made, they made three with him, I think. I'm really up to date on my Assassin's Creed floor. Sorry. I had, I had assassins.

Yeah, there's people listening to us right now who are hardcore assassin creed fans. I'm so sorry. They're writing the slash fix and like, please don't email us. Like, I just, I'm sorry. But Eizio was the wrong. I know they don't have the middle finger. That's like, there's my lore knowledge. They don't have their middle finger.

Yeah, because they've got knives. Which is way cooler. It's true. My wife used to be like, are you playing the game where you stabbed people in the face? And I'd be like, I am playing that game. I am right now. That is a totally accurate description of this game. But Ubisoft will be anywhere, right?

Yeah. The problem is Ubisoft is one of the last large independent game studios with, you know, a triple A title like Assassin's Creed to drop on everyone. All of the other studios are getting bought by Microsoft. Whoops. And just Microsoft. It's pretty much just Microsoft. You get into this weird space because you build a service that only people who are hardcore gamers would want. And then you don't have the games for those hardcore gamers.

Like, you don't have a reason for those people to turn off the PS5 and the Xbox series X or S or S or gaming PC that they already have. Do you think that cloud gaming is only for hardcore gamers? No, but it's hard to sell to someone who isn't a hardcore gamer. Like, if someone who plays mobile games on their phone, maybe they should try cloud gaming, but how would you convince them to do it? Yeah. I think it's like hardcore gamers want AAA games, generally speaking, right?

And you're just regular person who doesn't own any consoles but would probably want to play a game. is going to want to play those same AAA games. Those are the ones that are in the marketplace, the call of duties of the world, the Destiny 2s. And so, like, they're going to, you're going to have to have support for those. If you want to get those people who are like, yeah, I don't want one, but I want to, like,

mess around with my friend who plays this game a lot and, like, see what they're doing and experience it. So you have to, like, you still have to have those triple A games because that's where the audience is, whether they're hardcore or cash, I think. Every time I talk about gaming on this show, people yell at me. So I'm just going to lean,

directly into it. This is my personal... They can all yell at me. This is my personal cultural war trolling. Either you have Madden or you don't. Yeah. I play a lot of Madden and now Chris Grant, the publisher of the Virgin Polygon, is trying to get me to play control. That's where I'm at with gaming lately. I buy all the games. I just bought Cyberpunk. Haven't played a minute of it. No FIFA?

I buy them all. I don't play them. But here's my thing. If you didn't play it when it was broken, you didn't really play it. I watched all the videos of the weird map clipping and I was like, this looks amazing. and then I just never played it. If you are a Netflix binge watching subscriber, right, sit down in front of Netflix,

you want 16 hours of content to fill the empty hours of your day. Sure. What you could sell to that audience is like a great single player story-driven narrative game. Those don't exist. Right? Start playing this game, experience this long story. You'll come to the end of it. It'll be whatever. The entire modern games industry is like veering away from that, especially the AAA titles into, you know, GTA5.

It's like an extremely long-running, massively multiplayer world that asks you for money in one way or the other every five minutes. Right. They're all MMOs because they just want to, like, get as much of your money as possible. They're trying to create their own subscription services effectively. So, yeah, I think Netflix is going to have to figure that out. How do they, are they going to make a Strangers Thing game? Do you want to play a Strangers Thing game?

like a AAA. Why, do you keep calling it Strangers thing? I think that's a fanfic that is not officially licensed. It's the evening. Strangers thing is, I don't know if you've heard about this. Strangers thing. It's a 60-hour, extremely dark, gritty reboot of perfect strangers. You went in a bunch.

Balky Bartokamist, wandering the streets of Chicago with the knife. I was going to go. It's strangeer's thing. Belke's just like, hey, guys, what's up? I can't even try the accent. Cousin Larry's a drug dealer. Strangers thing, everybody. There's like 90% of the office has no idea when talking about it.

Perfect Strangers was a show in the 80s that I am guessing, based on having watched a lot in the 80s and not anytime recently, I'm just going to guess it didn't hold up, just based on what I remember a stranger. You mean, cousin Balke, who like held a lamb and was like, I'm from another country. In other countries, we don't have things. We just have our little goat. But can you be racist against a fake country? The verge cast, everybody.

I think I know the answer. All right, so that's Netflix. Rebooting Perfect Strangers is a dark, gritty 60-hour single-player video game. Gonna be incredible. They're all going to have like the little five o'clock shadow. Oh, it's great. It's some large gun. It's going to be great.

Oh, it'll be right. It's going to look fantastic. Yeah, it's just cousin Larry, walking. Yeah, it's going to be great. And then cousin Larry is going to do the eagle dive from top of the Sears Tower, stabbed people on the streets of 1980s Chicago. I don't know why this game hasn't been made. I would play the hell of it.

Sorry, Leon. All right, let's talk about Tesla. Is that a good segue, everybody? Speaking of diving off of skyscrapers and stabbing people in the face, Tesla had earnings. They're doing okay. Walker Serox. Yeah, I mean, they're doing all right. I think the big thing that kind of jumped out at me was Elon talking about Twitter again

and saying he's excited to buy. it and he's sure definitely going to buy it in a couple of weeks. No, they've got to close on 28th. They're eight days away. So they're next week. Yep. Yeah. So this time next Friday, he has to have purchased Twitter.

And he's currently saying he's very excited to buy it. Yeah. But he also like, they're shipping cars. They're shipping almost too many cars, right? They're not shipping too many. They're shipping everyone they can make and they are just running too hot. So they're trying to create efficiency in how they make cars. And in particular, for whatever the next.

car is, Elon is saying, for all the effort we put into making one model three, we should be able to produce two of whatever the new car is. Yeah. But I would like kind of want them to first go back and figure out how to make the cars not fall apart when somebody sneezes in one. Yeah, that stuff has gotten a little better, but it's still the thing that plagues Tesla. Like I was looking into buying a used model three for this commute to New York that I'm doing once a week. And all of the forums like you should buy a used model three the best car i've ever had teslas changed my life also make sure you buy an extended warranty and reserve at least two weeks of time a year for the inevitable repairs and it was just like it's just stated as fat like it's just part of that community now in a

way that is a little too normal but it's yeah the door might fall off there's still the but they'll fix it eventually it'll be fine it's the door latches on the model three in particular you can live with that yeah so yeah i mean i think eon still got some quality control to you i think he said they're putting out a cheaper car. He promised the cyber truck will hit next year. Okay. He did not reveal the design for the windshield wipers. They're still working on it. It's going to actually be 12 different wipers all around the edge. Three wipers in a triangle.

I'm telling you. It's going to be incredible. But, you know, they also did like in the earnings, they said that they're making money. I think that was kind of one of the little concerns everybody had is that Elon had to sell a bunch of stock to buy Twitter. And that hurt Tesla stock. And it's like, okay, but are they still making money? Like, was this always just a stock-rich company?

Or can they still keep going and still produce these cars when he's off spending everybody's money on Twitter? And they're doing it. And frankly, being distracted by Twitter. Yeah, super distracted by Twitter. So they're doing it. And I'm really curious to see if he's like, I don't know. I keep thinking, is Elon going to stay the CEO of all these different companies? Because ever since I learned that he has 20 direct reports at Tesla, like my brain just screams.

at that knowledge every day. Yeah, but he's not like doing like best practice one-on-ones with them. He just shows up and it's like, did you do, did you make the car drive itself? Not yet. Okay. We'll say it's next week. Yeah, that's true. So, you know, analysts did not like Tesla's quarter.

And the thing that you are saying about their deliveries, they made too many, they can't deliver. They can make the cars, but they don't have the transportation capacity to deliver all of them. Turns out their layoffs actually let go some of those people. That's true. So, well, just see. I mean, I think Tesla's in a strong position, but they, this Twitter thing like looms over Tesla in a real way.

And it will be, like I said, it actually closed the deal. Like my headline is like, welcome to hell Elon Musk. Because owning Twitter is going to suck for him. Like he is too easily trolled into doing and saying dumb things. And when it's like state actors and weirdo politicians on both sides, trolling you into moderation decisions that they favor, it's just, it's welcome to hell. That's like literally he should run away screen. But now he's saying he's excited about it.

I hope he just bans all governments and politicians from having Twitter. Oh, I don't think he's going to do that. I think he's going to do the opposite. He's going to sell it to the government for $50 billion. Twitter employees, Bloomberg reported Twitter locked its equity grant, so it's not handing out equity in anticipation the deal will close. So we'll see next week. Yeah. Then speaking, and more Elon news, just an absolutely bizarre back and forth about.

about Starlink and Ukraine. Obviously, Elon started shipping Starlink units to the Ukrainian military and to Ukrainian citizens. The government was paying for some of it. The United States government, other governments around the world were paying for some of it. Turns out of it Ukrainians are doing crowdfunding to pay for some of their own service. Other people were setting up crowdfunding accounts to pay for some of their own service. Elon claims that he had been paying for it all out of pocket. Starlink is like not a profitable thing. And he's like, actually the biggest challenge for Starlink. He said this many times before all this happened. Right. The biggest challenge for Starlink is just not going out of business because

usually everything goes out of business, like satellite-based internet companies got a business. So then he said, we can't keep funding this forever. The government should pay for it. That got leaked. That turned into a political football, especially because Elon keeps tweeting about Russia and peace plans. And he's just making a bunch of bad decisions there. And then there was a lot of pressure. Hey, you're threatening the access of Ukrainian military is relying on. You're obviously a puppet of Putin, which Elon of course took exception to. And now he says he will keep funding Starlink. for the Ukrainian government for free, despite losing money, which I would just note, the United States government,

other governments are in the world, we're already paying for some of this. So it's just deeply unclear what is going on here. Also just one of those, if you take free stuff from a billionaire, boy, do you end up beholden to the billionaire. Yeah. Yeah, I think like this is one of those situations where I have a rule of thumb where I try not to tweet about international politics.

And I think Elon should also try not to tweet about international politics. But soon he will own Twitter. Yeah. This is what I'm saying. This is going to be, he is too easily trolled and to respond. Like, he got in like a Twitter war briefly with the president of Ukraine who is at war. It's just he should not tweet in this space. It's bad.

Like, I think he got a lot of goodwill with Starlink. Did really well for him. And now he needs to just like be quiet. Like, yeah. Or he could do nothing, right? He could, he could, it's, I think it's legitimate for. money losing business that's providing a critical infrastructure service to an American ally. A hundred percent.

To ask the American government to fund that service. I think that is a totally reasonable request. That it gets reported should, you should, you could just not react to it. Be like, yes. In fact, we did ask the United States government to pay for this service. The same way the United States government is like paying for missiles and ammunition to go to Ukraine. Like, great. Like, that's, Boeing does not get trolled into responding to its, to criticisms of its,

of its defense contracts. But that's the Elon story is that no one else, no other CEO ever operates this way. And there are reasons. And we just keep finding out the reasons why they don't. Yeah. Well, when he owns Twitter, it's all going to get stupider. Especially because, right, he's up against Kanye West buying parlor, which is gross and weird. Connie tweeted a bunch of anti-Semitic things.

He got kicked off the platforms. And then he basically had conned into buying parlor, which is bleeding money. Mechanica Kelly has a great story about how Parlor was basically dying and they conned Kanye into buy it. There's no other way to describe it. And then obviously Trump and Truth Social, which is falling apart in a series of extremely chaotic recriminations, including its own former executives, going to the Washington Post and providing all of the evidence that he had given to the SEC about how badly truth social is run. So at the end of it, just like in this flaming pile of alternative social service wreckage, there's an Elon and Twitter with nothing to stop him. It's going to be weird.

I mean, we can all stop using Twitter. Why do you think we read us on the whole website? Why do you think I've made it at Twitter? Keyed up. Because I'm ready. Anytime you want, ready to pull the escape patch. You have to start tweeting a website more. All right, we've got to take a break.

We're going to, we'll see. I mean, I'm as addicted to it as anybody, but at least we have an escape hash. You know what I'm saying? All right, we've got to take a break. We're going to come back. Richard's going to tell us about his crypto obsession. I can't believe how excited. about this. We'll get back.

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We're back Richard Lawler this week you fell deep down an NFT rabbit hole because as

everyone remembers CNN decided it would start selling NFTs and then they decided they would

stop tell us what happened here my friend I will have you know Their NFT marketplace lasted 16 times as long as CNN Plus.

First of all, that, just first of all, yeah. Okay, let's take the win. Let's take the W there. The CNN Vault, which tried to sell moments because who doesn't want to buy digital tokens attached to news articles about famous events and trade them or sell them with your friends? That's a thing people do. It's something that everyone wants. I was sitting at home hoping someone would launch a service like that.

and then CNN did. No. I actually spoke to someone who had spent more than $10,000 on. Wow. That was what they thought. You're kind of looking at what they own on these moments. Like there are, when you take a look at these things that these brands launch, these Web 3, these NFT things, you think, okay, nobody's buying that.

There is someone who is buying it. There are, there are, there is a certain number of people who have the money and have decided, yes, I am going to go ahead and invest. Because CNN sounds like a reasonable company. They're not going to rug pull and just disappear overnight, like some of these shady NFT operators. And that's exactly what they did. 16 months later, they were like, yeah, no, we're not doing this anymore.

And the community is a... Wait, there's a community? I'm surprisingly not really pleased about it. They, CNN said that they're going to give some refunds. How many people besides this one person? Every NFT project has a community. Every NFT project has a Discord and there are at least five people who come on there every morning and say good morning to each other and they talk about their days.

It's actually beautiful. Stop trying to crypto pill me. You should join a few. You should get into the NFTs. No, I'm not coming in. This is like the end of the fun. First of all, you're trying to get me in at the end of the party when all the streamers are falling down. People are sweeping.

Like, no. Come over and help clean up. I've got some really nice NFTs that I can sell you at a good price. I have stayed out too late with you in my life before, sir. And I am not doing that again, especially when there's crypto involved. Everyone survived. It's true. It's right. Where is your, you are notably, we're joking, Richard is notably skeptical of NFTs and crypto. Now that you've talked to these folks, where is your feeling at?

It's really unfortunate. And I feel like these people have been taken advantage of. Like you had these brands just kind of grab at these projects and they launched and they had these promises. They said, we're going to give you utility. We're going to give you special experiences. We're going to give you access. We're going to allow you to do this and to do that. And then none of those things happen. They sold you magic beans. And then they said, okay, stay tuned with our social channel and our Discord. And then they waited a year until everybody forgot about it. And then they said, yeah, we got your money and we're just going to leave now. Yeah. And they rugged everybody super hard. We don't have any bigger plans here. It never got big. It never scaled to a level where we're going

to continue doing it. I think there was a report earlier this year that CNN had made $300,000 from it, which, you know, isn't a small amount of money for a person, but for Warner Brothers discovery isn't enough to stay in the business. Yeah. It was not even enough to fund one extra day of CNN Plus. They're like, we can't even, not even an extra hour. That's not to do it for us. And CNN is far from the only brand like this.

Like I'm, as I said, I really am in a lot of NFT discords. Every company that you can name has tried to do web three things. I'm in one for the gap. And many of them have either completely. abandon their communities, or they just keep dropping things to sell to these same people who already bought in. And the people are hoping that the company will do something that will bring in new people so they can bring it so they can sell the tokens that they bought early at a profit, but they just keep pumping money out of the same people over and over again. And that's really

where the cycle is. That's brutal. Well, I'm going to continue avoiding it. I'll just keep getting updates from you from the scene. You talk to this person who spent $10,000. Did they have a reason besides like just speculation? They just, they're into NFTs and, you know, they get into the community. When you, when you are in one of these things and I compare it very much to a cult, because that's really what it is. You have this like magical belief that things are going to go up and everyone shares it. And you can get in and you can kind of log in and every day you'll have maybe five or maybe

500 people telling you how great things are and how you're in the right place and you're doing the right thing and you're going to win eventually. And that sense of that community is really what people are there for. But to be in the community, you have to buy things. And some people buy a little bit more. All right. Well, I can't wait to start our NFT collection. Oh, next year.

The He'll turn is coming. I'm doing it. It's coming right out when we read as on the entire site is an Assassin's Creed level. It's the future of all media. Speaking of nonsensical future ideas, I'm going to try to get through this as quickly as I can. I told you this is going to be Vergecast. Dovergecast. Are you going to talk about Wisconsin?

I'm going to talk about Wisconsin. So the Packers are bad this year. Look very bad. I'm sorry. No, I'm not going to tell me. They're very bad. I predict the Aaron Rogers will destroy at least two more surface tablets by the end of the year. That's my personal prediction about the state of Wisconsin.

No, the state of Wisconsin, there's a company called Foxxon, which you may have heard about on the show before they were supposed to build an LCD factory in Wisconsin. They have not built that. It's mostly a series of empty buildings. They did build a dome, which they continue to claim. is a data center. It is not a data center. The data center is located outside the dome and a shipping container at the port-a-potty next to it. This is true information. I mean, is that technically...

And even that isn't a data center. It's just a shipping container with some Dell servers in it. It's like the Apple version of... It's like the Foxconn version of the All-Screen. Yeah. Right? Like, it's close enough that it counts. There's some screen. Yeah.

There's some screen. There's some data center. There's some data center around the dome. They plugged it into the dome. All right. So Foxcon, when it goes into the way... Wisconsin, like 2016, 17. They're just doing whatever they're doing.

And one of the enduring mysteries of what Foxham was doing in Wisconsin was they kept talking about something called the AI 8K plus 5G ecosystem. This is a real phrase they said in my belief to just bamboozle dumb local politicians in Wisconsin into thinking they were doing something cool. Like they just fired buzzwords at these hapless dummies and they got a huge tax break. Right. Scott Walker was like, I love AI 8K and 5G. I sound great now. Yeah. Welcome to the Wisconsin Valley. They just went to CES. Yeah. They saw what was like on the little banners around and they're like, that's it. At one point, they set up what was essentially a CES in Wisconsin, like a fake trade show with like big TVs and drones, like all the CES stuff that we go to and ignore to like find the real products. They set up one of those. So, A.I. AK, so Josh Jezza, who did most of our Foxxon reporting, won awards for that Foxxon reporting. We have spent years alternately trying to figure out what Foxxon means by AIAK plus 5G and laughing at it.

And in one very notable instance, receiving just anonymous threats from Foxconn executives, telling us to leave them alone. And then in the same breath trying to explain what AIAK plus 5G is. It was very confusing. None of this matters anymore because Foxxon just announced a new plan to make a new plan to make electric vehicles. They were like, we are ambition is to make EVs

for Tesla. I don't know if you just heard us. Tesla's making every car at 10. Tesla is very good at making EVs. It does not need

a contract manufacturer. It makes the cars. I don't know why. Anyway, Foxxon announces two reference designs of its new EVs. And then the president of Foxxon says we have a new

strategic vision. Are you ready for it? Yes. It's three plus three equals infinity. Well, you said, Is it 3 plus 3 equals infinity or an infinity symbol? It's like the symbol. It's a symbol.

So then the Foxconn and Wisconsin website has been scrubbed of all references of AIA K plus 5G. Oh, no. And it has all been replaced with 3 plus 3 equals infinity. So I don't know, man. 3 plus 3, by the way, it's three industries, electric vehicle, digital health, and fee robotics. Who knows what that is? It's not the same as it. They're going to make the robot.

They're not going to make the cars. They're going to make the robot. I can't even begin to explain what Fia is. Fia is a subsidiary of Fon. They set up to take over the, whatever. They're going to make the Tesla robot. So it's three things. The three is electric vehicle, digital health, and fee robotics.

And then the plus three is technology. It's five Z solutions, semiconductors. By the way, the logo for semiconductors is just the USB logo. So I don't know what's going on there. And then industrial AI, which Foxxon has branded IAI. This is a real thing with a link to something called, the IAI Institute, and that link just doesn't work. So I don't know what that is.

I tried. I clicked all the links on this website. Can we all list ourselves as just employees of the IAI Institute? Like, Richard, you're now chairperson. I always was. Yeah. The IAI. You should sell some IAI NFTs, Richard.

Why didn't they go with you plus me equals us? It was right there. It's a deep thought. It's going to miss some people, but for those who appreciate it. here's what I got is first of all three plus three six I don't know I just want to put that out there as a thing that I know is infinity is the as the father of a four year old I'm really confident that three plus three equals six this is this is something we're working on actively in our house not looking at it in the Foxconway yeah second of all you can't just list industries and technologies and be like here's what you do you take these three industries and you just throw some 5G solutions at it and arrive at infinity don't know what that means. Third of all, none of this is going to create jobs in Wisconsin. Right?

Like at the end of the day, they have an empty building. They've got a dome. The website has been updated to brag about the dome. Yes. But the brags are like, the dome is nearly 100 feet tall, which I would note is not 100 feet tall. So you've built like an eight-story dome. It's just not impressive. And they're like, you can see it from the,

highway, which I don't know if you ever driven through Wisconsin. Wisconsin is mostly cornfields. So like being able to see an eight-story building from the highway, it's really not that big of. But, you know, people go out of their ways to like find the largest ball of twine. Yeah. Like is there, is there just a vendor sitting out there next to the data center with like a bunch of little little globes selling them to people who pass by who.

drove off the highway to be like, what's that globe over there? No, you don't understand. If you drive by there, your parents' house is like right by there. Yeah. They built just huge roadways to support what they thought would be 13,000 jobs. We're building like 100-inch TVs. So they built roadways and water and power to support manufacturing on this massive scale and to move these like giant TVs.

Yeah. And none of it exists. Like, if I was still a teenager in Wisconsin, like, I would be, I would only be drag racing by the dome all day long because it's just like six lane roads that are dead empty. Are there people in any of the buildings? Sometimes. That's why sometimes. The dome is apparently like an event space. There are no pictures, by the way, of the inside of the dome.

And Foxxon continues to claim the dome is a data center. They say there's going to be a network operation center there. And I believe what network? There's one day center in a shipping container. Like there's like a power strip that shuts down the shipping container and turns it back on. It's just truly bizarre. But anyway, so AI, look, AI AK plus 5G is out. 3 plus 3 equals infinity is in.

You let me know if you know what that means because I'm working on it. I'm really excited about it. It's real bad. But the you got it. It's just everybody going to read the website. Because the part about the dome, where they just insistently refuse to say what's inside the dome. It's incredible. Have you ever looked at an eight-story circle from the highway?

Because now you can. Foxcon. Some other things to talk about, David wrote a big piece about Google and RCS. They're adding replies and stars to messages. And they're doing it in a way that's super annoying. So if you're in a group chat with an iPhone user and they fall back to SMS and you do a tap back, in Android messages, they're going to start getting the annoying SMS. It's like so-and-so did a so-and-so-like-your-thing.

It's so petty. It's so petty. It's so petty. It's so good. That's a good piece. Interview with some Google PMs who worked on the thing. Chris Welch wrote about the new feature in Lightroom, content aware Phil is coming to Lightroom.

So now you kind of don't need Photoshop to your photo edits, which is kind of amazing. Yeah, we had Adobe Max this week. They announced... It was Adobe Max this week, yep. They did this big update, and Chris is like super, super excited because we're finally Like, Lightroom is super annoying. I was really shocked. I was honestly shocked when I saw this pop up on the website.

Because when I first got in this business, I was told if you use Lightroom, you're punk and you don't know anything. Only pros use Photoshop. And I'm not a pro, but I wanted to pretend I was one. And so, like, to see actually that Lightroom is good now and see somebody who's a really good photographer like Chris Wells say it, I was like, oh, dang, that's big news. It's good. It's expensive, which is its problem. But it's good. It's been getting better.

It's really good on the iPad. Is it subscription-based? It is. Okay. And what you get for the subscription is a bunch of storage, right? Yeah. So it works out. But it's really good on the iPad.

All the jokes about USBC aside, Lightroom on an iPad Pro with the second-generation pencil, like the whole thing. Mm-hmm. Choice. And, you know, especially with the newer chips, super fast. Before the MacBooks went to M-1 chips,

I preferred Lightroom on my iPad because it was so much faster than my Intel MacBook Pro's. Wow. It's a thing. Yeah, I mean, it just looks really, really cool. The other big news that came out of Adobe Max was that, like, you know, every year they do something wacky and they're like, this is the future. And this year, they're like, if you give us a picture of someone, we can make that, we can turn them into a puppet and make them dance. I mean, that's pretty cool.

And yeah, there's like Jess Weatherbed, who's a new reporter. She's on our international team. She's lovely. She watched all of the Adobe Max stuff, paid attention to it. And she'd put a jiff into this thing. And it's just these two cutouts of people doing the Opa Gungum style. The Gungum style. Yeah.

If you haven't seen this, you should. It's worth it. It's like they're deeply unsettling images. Adobe has not figured this out yet. I've rarely been more terrified. This is my TikTok strategy. I'm just going to do an AI version of myself doing TikTok dances. Watch this and then watch the trailer for Megan.

That movie looks bonkers. Allison Johnson has a big piece on e-sim and what that's like. Allison obviously is a phone reviewer, so she switches from iPhone to Android all the time with a physical SIM card. Just do it. Yeah. With an e-sim card, you got to get corporations involved in your situation. And that sucks. Turns out that sucks.

She was actually at the office when she did the switch. And we just, everybody just heard an, oh, no. because she's like, I got to call Verizon, because she was like on the phone with the horizon doing the switch, but they did the switch. And because they did the switch, the phone she was on no longer worked.

So it just disconnected her. But then the new phone didn't work. This is the promise in the peril of ESIM, right? The promise is you can provision your phone onto anyone's network at any time without a piece of plastic. Yeah. He's like, push the buttons and see. That promises, I would say, halfway realized.

Right. The real NSAID that promise is you open the cellular settings on your phone. You see all the available networks in your area. There's speeds, their prices, their plans. You pick and choose and switch. Oh, that's a way better promise than what I heard about ESIMs. I want that one. But we're nowhere close to that.

That's just me saying, here's some cool shit that could happen. What's the promise you think? That would be really cool. I want that. You can kind of do that on an iPad. What's the promise you heard? I just heard that, oh, are you traveling internationally now? You don't need to find one of those stupid little SIM card removers to switch your SIM out.

You can just be like, bam, internet. So your promise of ESM was, we'll reduce paperclip usage worldwide. All right. So it's a spectrum. Spectrum. On the high end of the spectrum is free and open competition, a more informed consumer, making better and more rational choices, a little couple of ticks below that. You won't need a paperclip.

And then there's where we are, which is, oh, shit, the carriers have locked you in. And actually switching your account from one phone to another got substantially harder. because it's not just moving piece of plastic, it's moving someone else's software authorization for a piece of hardware, which is exactly what it sounds like. So we'll see. Maybe it'll get easier.

We'll see, but that piece is really good. You should read it. It is really the promise in the peril. Like the promise is apparent. We all know what the end state should be. The reality is very different. And then there's a new generation of Thunderbolt

that Mitchell Clark wrote about. This is really interesting. So Intel gave up the basis of Thunderbolt or the basics of Thunderbolt for USB 4. So now Thunderbolt and USB are, kind of the same thing. I don't know. I kind of don't understand

why Thunderball exists anymore. Yeah, I think it really struggles to exist now because USB 4 is like going to be really fast when we start seeing it in actual products. I can't wait until it comes to the Apple TV remote. It's going to be amazing in 2035. It brings us right back around to where we started.

The problem is standards groups. We need a standards group focused on getting rid of standards groups. Are you guys with me? Are you in? Let's create it. Neil is starting it. He's the chair. How have interviewed the heads of Benny Stan?

groups over the past many years. They're the most politician politicians I interview because their job is to make sure no one's mad. But everybody ends up mad. But everyone's always mad. They suck at their jobs. They can't, but they're, it's like an impossible job. Yeah.

But this seems like the difference is the, if you have the USB 4 V2 device or cable, then certain features are optional. But if you are, if you have Thunderbolt, then those optional features are definitely in there, is what it sounds like. on some of them. I mean, that's kind of what we've seen so far with Thunderbolt in USB, right? Like, I can run my monitors off of a USB port on my computer,

but they're going to run a lot nicer off the Thunderbolt one because it's got a higher bandwidth, guaranteed. And USB has always struggled with being like, yeah, you can pick and choose everything. Oh, no, your laptop exploded because you use the wrong charger. It sucks for you. So 10 minutes to transfer that video file,

because you are using the wrong cable. But it's very Dolby Vision, HDR 10, Plus, where it's like, yeah, one of these is good, but the other is actually way better. Yeah, I think that's right. If more expensive in every way. Yeah, and one involves paying Intel licensing fee. Yeah. Fair enough.

Some other things to call out our Homeland series continues. That's a big series about TSA and security in America. It's the 20-year anniversary of TSA, which is frightening to think about. But Sarah John and Sergio almost have a piece about the Portland van deductions in 2020, which is just a thrilling caper. So I encourage you to go read that. Nicole Wetzman has been paying a lot of him. to the fertility features that are being added to all kinds of tech products, including the Apple Watch.

All these things are getting added. They're filling a void that exists in the context of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. So, like, this incredible collision of tech companies seeing a market, the culture war, and the politics of abortion changing dramatically for the worse. Yeah. And people kind of not knowing what to do or what to believe or how to use these products or what data is collected. She's doing an amazing job reporting and all that. There's also this weirdness. She and I have talked about it, a bunch about, is that, like, the research isn't there. All the research now isn't being done by scientists with no real financial incentive. It's being done by these companies who do have a financial incentive. And they're like, these fertility products are pushing really weird things. Like, we have methods of birth control that we know work that don't require you to own an Apple Watch and be like, oh, not this week. honey. So like, that's, yeah, she's doing just a tremendous job on this stuff. Yeah. I mean, this is, I think, one of the biggest verge stories you can think of, like what it, all the

the colliding themes inside of it, right? The law, the culture of the United States, the politics, bodily autonomy, the tech industry, data privacy. It's all colliding in a really extraordinarily messy and somewhat depressing way. And Nicole's just doing a great job covering it. Yeah. Last few things, right as we have been talking, Andy Hawkins covered the launch of the new GMC Sierra. Evie Denali, horrible name. It literally just happened. So I basically have no idea about anything except it gets 400 miles of range. Compower a whole house for up to 21 days.

And it looks ridiculous. I was thinking it looks kind of cool. It doesn't kind of cool. The headlights looks like the headlights. The headlights are all bad. I mean, it looks like the Silverado. They just GMCed it up a little bit. Yeah.

And the inside has a vertical touch screen with touch controls for climate. I have never wanted to control the seat in my car while I'm driving more than on a giant vertical touch screen. It's ridiculous. It's going to cost $107,000. So cool. Oh, but they change the name of the frunk in it. What's the name of the fronk? They're calling it the e-trunk.

The e-trunk. Just watching your face as you realized that was, I'm sorry. It all just happens. And then lastly, Charles Plain Moore reviewed Black Adam, which I haven't already yet, just went up. But I think it's bad. Yeah, he told me, he told me earlier today. It was not very good. And it's kind of mean, but not in a fun way.

Good. Well, I'm trying to get the Rock and Decoder. So if you know the Rock, send him to me. He can answer for his crimes. He should answer for his crimes. All right, that's it. That's the first cast. We have, as always, gone over.

If you have eyes on David Pierce, just take a picture. Send it to Alex. You can tweet at her. She's at Alex H. Kranz. Richard is at RJCC. I am at Reckless. We love hearing from you. Wednesday is iPad. Yeah. All about the iPad. And the piles.

David's so mad about staging. Look for that on Wednesday. Dakota this week was Meredith Whitaker, the president of Signal. She talks some shit about RCS2. Ooh. It was a good one. All right. That's it. That's for our chest. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at vergecast at the verge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.