The Vergecast - Congress releases tech antitrust report / Apple’s next iPhone will be announced on October 13th

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn bring in Russell Brandom and Adi Robertson to discuss congressional report about whether Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google are violating antitrust law. Dan Seifert stops by to discuss Apple's upcoming iPhone event on October 13th. Links: Global TV shipments hit record high last quarter, report says America’s internet wasn’t prepared for online school I regularly forget that I have New York’s COVID-19 exposure notification app Congress releases blockbuster tech antitrust report What Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook have at stake in the antitrust fight Apple made ProtonMail add in-app purchases, even though it had been free for years Oracle and Google’s Supreme Court showdown was a battle of metaphors Apple quietly stops selling Bose, Sonos and some Logitech gear — only Apple audio remains The Supreme Court is taking on Google and Oracle one last time Apple’s next iPhone will be announced on October 13th Apple Watch SE review: pay a lot less to give up only a little Why Apple needed the FDA to sign off on its EKG but not its blood oxygen monitor The Apple Watch heart monitor sends too many people to the doctor YouTube 4K has come to Apple TV, but we’re waiting on HDR, 60fps, and iPhone/iPad playback Disney movies are now available in 4K on Apple’s iTunes store Apple sues recycling partner for reselling more than 100,000 iPhones, iPads, and Watches it was hired to dismantle  Samsung Galaxy S20 FE review: the right price for the right stuff Samsung Galaxy Note 20 review: stylus tax Google Nest Audio review: the sweet spot Google Fi now directly sells Samsung phones and adds a new 5G map G Suite is now Google Workspace in a bid to merge Gmail, Chat, and Docs Gmail has a new logo that’s a lot more Google More early Prime Day 2020 deals have kicked off on Amazon Meet Ricky Desktop, the most viral beatmaker on TikTok SPACs, explained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about a big congressional antitrust report with Addy Robertson and Russell Brandon. We get into a little bit of Google versus Oracle at the Supreme Court. And then Dan Sefert joins us, talk about Apple's iPhone event next week, Prime Day, and a bunch of reviews across the site. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. 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 Verchcast.

We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic Gold. medalist and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom.

A community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of congressional justice. I got this. I got Russell.

I think Russell faked it. But I'm going to accept it. I'm your friend, Eli. Deidre Bone is here. I'm your Worst Nightmare. Ooh, good. Addie Robertson is here. Hey. Russell Brandon is here. Why? Hello. Addy and Russell are going to join us for the first half to talk about the big congressional antitrust

report a little bit about the decade in the making Google and Oracle hearing at the Supreme Court. Then later on the show, Dan Seferts going to join us. Talk about the Big Apple event next week. We had a bunch of reviews this week. Lots going on. I want to start where I always start. Should be unsurprising to everyone. It has been

30 weeks since the president of these United States intimated strongly that Google would be building a website for coronavirus testing. There's no website. Just, I don't know, 45 million engineers have been working on it diligently. They've managed to completely rebrand Google, like G Suite in the workplace. They've changed all the icons. They've launched two new phones. They have not yet made a coronavirus testing website.

So take that for what you will. and also, by the way, has just announced that he personally discovered a cure for the virus. I don't even following that. That's great. So chaos rains. More COVID updates. I just got to get through it. It's too much to bear that these past two weeks have been particularly crazy. But just some second order of COVID stuff I want to point out that we covered. Monica Chain wrote a great piece about broadband infrastructure and online schooling and just how bad it is. I encourage you to read this. A state legislator from Kansas, like a hardcore Republican, state legislator from Kansas, shared the piece and said, this isn't my constituents face.

It's a bipartisan issue. It's really interesting. Please read that piece. It really brings it home. Nicole Watsman wrote a review, I guess you call it, of New York State's COVID-19 exposure notification app that plugs into the Apple Google APIs. The headline is great. I regularly forget that I have New York's COVID-19 exposure notification app, but that is exactly how it's designed to work. Like, you're not supposed to know you have it. If you haven't downloaded one of these apps in your states and your state has one, please get it. Let it put it in your phone. It will in some small way, even if some small percentage of people have it and use it will have an impact is what we have been told and what I'm choosing to believe because I'm an eternal optimist.

And lastly, just I think a really interesting second order effect of all this. Global TV shipments hit a record high last quarter because more people are home and upgrading their TVs, which will obviously lead us in the second part of the show. Prime Day is coming. It's TV buying season. It's all happening at once. but you see that second order effect of the virus hitting in all kinds of ways. I bought a TV for the first time. Ooh, what did you get?

I bought like a TCL 50-inch. TCL's a safe brand to go get. You can just kind of trust it'll work. Yeah, we really like them here. Yeah, exactly. It has the Google TV, like, Android integration, but I haven't turned any of that on. I just put it straight into the PlayStation. That's it.

Yeah. Russell, would you like us to spend the next 45 minutes talking about the difference between Google TV and Android TV, which is what you actually probably have, because we could do that. No, but I do want the listeners to know that I'm gold ranked in Overwatch now. So we get some cred there. I will say as we go into the conversation on antitrust, the Google TV, Android TV, Chromecast, YouTube, is like the best argument for actually not regulating these companies because they will just slowly collapse on themselves. Anyway, to end it, COVID is the biggest story in the world.

The fight for racial justice is in the world. It is top of mine for us. but a lot of this news. And in fact, I think this tech antitrust report is going to have lasting just titanic repercussions into the next years. Welcome back to Squackbox, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on antitrust, releasing its long-awaited report on big tech. And that report is now officially concluding that Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have monopoly power. And Congress must take action, they say, to change antitrust laws. I'll begin by saying the chaos of this report being released was very interesting. There are three competing reports, I think, in total. There's one from the congressional Democrats, and there are two from the Republicans. None of them disagree on sort of

the facts, the conclusions of the investigation, that the companies are acting anti-competitively and the kind of fundamental conclusion that some regulation needs to happen, where there is a massive disagreement is on what should be done. But I just want to highlight that and underline that. There's very few bipartisan facts in America at this moment in time. Just very precious few facts that both parties agree on. And both parties agree that Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are acting anti-competitively, and they have evidence of it. And that's a remarkable thing. So I just want to start there and underline it. But Russell, take us through a little bit of the, you know, we thought this thing was coming on Monday. It got held up. Now there's three reports. What happened there?

Yeah. So how often do we talk about embargoes? How much do Vergecast listeners know about embargoes? Basically, you know, a big part of the news gathering process is people will say, we're releasing this and we want to tell you about it in advance so you have time to like put together an article or a review. And it's not just something that you slapped together in 10 minutes because you want it to be first to tell everyone. And so they'll say, okay, like here's this, you know, it'll be, it'll lift at this time and we'll give you this. this briefing in advance. So that happened Sunday night. We got that. Like, we were ready to be working on Sunday. And then they were said, oh, no, no, no, never mind. Like, we're not doing that. And that happened sort of a couple times. And we were really puzzled by it. You know, it was no secret to this report was coming at some point. But it seems like the reason that happened was, so the House is controlled by the Democrats, which means the Judiciary Committee, which is what was issuing this report, controlled by the Democrats. The Democrats sort of knew what they wanted to say and we're putting together this 500 page report, but they kind of were figuring the Republicans would go along with

it. And I think at the last minute, the Republicans were like, we're not signing on to any of this and in fact are going to have two other reports, even though that's kind of confusing. And we don't fundamentally disagree with what you're saying, although we disagree with what, about what should be done. Yeah. And so one of the reports... is from Congressman Kenbach, a Republican. In his quote, I think he said it to Axios and he said it to Reuters, I agree with 330 pages of the Democrats report, which are the facts. And then his report is called the third way and has some other. I don't know what the second way is. I've been very confused about the title of this report. Well, I think the second way is Jim Jordan's way and he's trying to do

some Clinton-esque middle path because that worked so well for Bill Clinton, I guess. Right. So then the other one was Jim Jordan, who's like, you didn't talk about Section 230 in conservative bias at all, which is explicitly not what this whole proceeding was about. Is there actually a report for Jordan? I've gone through this. I have looked and I've found like a statement. I'm not sure he's actually put out a comprehensive report. I think his office mostly issues tweets. Okay. I think that constitutes his report. Okay. So that's his report. You know, it would help with the conservative bias problem in Google rankings is actually putting out the report because then the web crawler would have something to index. And then you would show up higher in the ranking. And then you would show up higher in the

rankings. Really, like, very, very good at Facebook, not so good at SEO, is what I'm taking away from this. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's totally fair. I do think it's worth, like, underlining what this doesn't talk about. Like, it's really about competition. And this is, you know, I think for Facebook in particular, when, you know, all the conversation about Facebook up until now has been mostly about data privacy, which this was not about at all. It's not about, like, We own your data or you own your data and how are we sharing your data. It's also not really about moderation and saying, you know, these platforms have bad things on them. We should be working harder to take down bad things or not take down things that are only kind of bad.

It's really about these companies' businesses, which in particular, like, the business of how Google makes money is actually really complicated and mostly opaque to sort of the average Google user. And so a lot of it really gets behind the scenes and talks about the sort of behind the scenes deals of who shows up in what search bar and why. Yeah. And I think that split, we have talked about this so much and others where people have talked about it so much. Everyone is mad at the tech companies and they're all mad for different reasons. And this is the first big congressional report with recommendations. And it, it does. doesn't hit all the reasons, right? Like, the reason that Basecamp is mad about their email app at Apple is radically different

than the reasons that conservatives are mad at Twitter. And so to, I think, push them all together has always been an error. It's easy to do, and you can kind of see why you would do it, right? Like, not letting your app on the store kind of feels like not letting a tweet on your service, but they're actually radically different problems. And this one is, it has always been focused on. competition. So, Addy, give me a sense of, I mean, it's 450 pages, so do your best. But give me a sense of, you know, what the report says. I mean, we've obviously talked to Congressman Sassalini,

who was the chair of the subcommittee. I would not say there was a ton of surprises here based on those conversations that we've had on the show, but there's a lot of information. So give me a sense of what it says. So, and this is a really great report that Russell did that you can look up, But as we've talked about, there are four kind of different cases against each of the companies. And Amazon, a lot of it is based on the idea that it's competing with its own sellers on this huge retail platform that they make this case is just way more powerful than any brick and mortar store. And so it's using a lot of data that it gets in shopping to just clone and sort of compete very unfairly against the people on his platform. Facebook, a lot of the attention is given to its past acquisitions. So Instagram, there were these hearings about Facebook going into destroy mode if it didn't

get Instagram. It's focused a lot on that to sort of nobody's surprise. Then Google, it's just this huge search giant. It also runs Android. It bundles a lot of these things together in a way that is potentially anti-competitive. And then Apple has the app store. Like it has iOS, which is this huge platform and it has the app store and it makes apps that often compete with apps on the app store while charging a commission to be on that store. So that's the kind of general case against them.

And then there's a series of remedies that like we've talked about are from the Democratic majority. So part of them, the parts that the Republicans, the sort of third way report agree with are we should give more resources to antitrust watchdogs. So like the Justice Department. And again, these places are already investigating tech companies. So we're waiting for those reports, too. And then there are some sort of individual remedies. Like they talk about interoperability, increasing that for social services, and making these sort of bans on self-preferencing.

So companies have to offer their own services with roughly the same terms as sort of other apps that are on their platforms and competing with them. Where it gets really interesting is, first of all, they're suggesting that the consumer harm standard is too narrow. That's been a really huge deal with the entire antitrust debate. And so they're trying to make the case that we need to take into account the effect on, not just on consumers, but on people who are selling things on platforms and on democracy as a whole, they say, yeah, here it is. clarifying that they're designed to protect not just consumers, but also workers, entrepreneurs, independent businesses, open markets, a fair economy, and democratic ideals. So this is just a sort of sea change in how antitrust rules have worked for a while. And then the other thing that's just a really

tangible, potentially huge change for the platforms is trying to limit how much sort of vertical integration they can have, trying to make them separate the core businesses and the platforms they're running from adjacent businesses that are often competing with the companies on that are using those platforms. So Amazon, for instance, it runs its own site. It sells Amazon basics, which are the products. It sells on that site that often clone other competitors. It has a huge streaming service. On its streaming service, it runs studios, which is a company that produces and distributes movies.

It has its own game studio. It's just this massive behemoth. And this creates potentially gigantic problems for that. And then it just on the sort of Facebook side of things, it recommends a stricter standard for later mergers. So anything that a company tries to acquire from now on, it's recommending that they take a much closer look at it. Yeah, I thought that one to me jumped out as, I mean, how often are we talked to? Like shifting the presumption from you should be allowed to merge and you have to find reasons not to, to you shouldn't be allowed to merge and you have to convince us that it's okay. just that alone would like really alter the way that these big companies do business and the way they think about doing business, which is to just be relentlessly acquisitive and shut down any competition in their zone.

There's this great quote in there from a VC where he says, like, Amazon is the sun. Like it feeds us and nourishes us, but if you get too close to it, it will incinerate you. And it's like, oh, wow. Like everyone is very existential about the existence of these companies to the point where they're making, metaphors about the sun and our relationship to the sun. Just a side note. It's a well-written report. It is a, you know, there's a lot of, if you just look on Twitter, it's, the reactions

are what you would expect. The sort of lawyers and academics and activists that we track are all very happy about the report. The tech industry, that set of pundits is like, this report doesn't understand anything about the tech industry. And I think the answer is very much that this report gets it so on the nose that you have to, you have to struggle to find inconsistencies inside of it that you then kind of like make the whole criticism. So one of the inconsistencies is a lot of this report, and obviously this is

self-serving to us, so take it for what we will, but a lot of this report is about how the tech giants have crushed the press. That's actually where this whole process started. Cicillini was investigating the effects of big platforms on local media. That's literally the core of all this. And so there's a part in here where they're just going on about how the media needs an antitrust exemption to bargain against the platforms. So all the local news stations in America can band together. And so I just read this Chris and it's like, how is it how is antitrust enforcement good for tech platforms, bad for them? And it's like, because they're huge. Like if you, if you're expecting rigid ideological consistency from the government of the United States, like, I have something

to tell you. It's like there's a, it's not going to happen. Like, we make different policies for different industries. And it's that, I think that criticism that it's badly written is I've just been comparing it to what is actually written. It gets it right. The investigation is there. The facts are there. The amount of complaints are there. There's reporting in here that we haven't honestly quite seen before. And then there's just the notion that this is a different kind of industry and these platforms are different. And so you gave the example of Amazon basics. They actually directly address the comparison to store brands in stores. And they say the reason Amazon basics is different is because Amazon has perfect market information. They know what everyone is

searching for. They know the prices they will pay. And they can make products to fit into that and put it right at the top of your results in a way that Walmart or Target cannot do in their own stores. And so I think it's responsive to the actual state of the big tech companies in a way that I generally think when we read government documents of this type or when we read court cases, we're going to talk with Google Oracle. Like they're just lost in a, world of metaphors that make no sense. This report is very much about the thing it's about, and it accepts it on its own terms and talks about it in those terms in a way that I think is really powerful. So that leads me to, I think we should just kind of take it maybe a little bit company

by company. Well, actually, I want to jump in with one other thing that I thought was. So we mentioned sort of the acquisition aspect. And it's sort of near and dear to my heart because I think of when I think of like the good times for the tech industry when people liked it. And it was sort of like, there's this idea of the startup marketplace. If you just can't get acquired by Google or like, it's way harder for Google to acquire companies. And so there's a lot of less, there's a lot less big ticket acquisitions happening at all. The classic argument has been, well, this is going to be terrible for venture capital. It's going to be terrible for startups because it'll be so much harder to exit, right? And one of the things that has happened, that they show in the report is they say,

as soon as the big players enter a market, the VC investment completely dries up. Like, we've had this round of VR startups. They got acquired. Like, no one is looking for another, like, Facebook bought its VR startup. It doesn't need another one. You know, it's, you know, Apple has acquired the ones that's going to acquire. If you're, if you're making a, sort of ephemeral social network, like no one wants to fund that. And they sort of directly tie it. And so the argument is that by tamping down on those acquisitions, you'll actually get more activity from venture capital and more startups, which I think, you know, we've seen that drying up as companies have gotten bigger and sort of like, you know, where did all the cool startups go?

It's there. Just take 4% of Google's market share. You've got in revenue and you've got a spectacular business and no one will do like I keep coming back why doesn't apple have a search engine maybe because they don't want to make ads they don't want to tracking they don't want to do stuff but like the idea that no other company is interested in a from scratch search engine and you can't fund it even if you wanted to is is nuts to me and I think that speaks to that uh we've heard it we've heard it called the kill zone like anything just like it's related to that son metaphor about Amazon. Like anything that's a little too close, they'll, like the big platforms will just kill and they'll tamp down innovation there. And I, you know, maybe building a search engine is too hard,

but I don't, Silicon Valley does not usually accept too hard as a blocker for anything. Like, Elon Musk is trying to put a chip in your brain right now. And like maybe some other people can build a search engine. I do think that we should talk about the companies in turn. We might as start with Google on that note. So Russell, you did write that piece sort of examining the report through that lens. It's very much how it's organized. It's interesting how hard they came at each of the companies. And on top of that, Google is facing what will eventually be released a lawsuit from the state attorney generals of this country for antitrust behavior. So what's the state of play with Google? Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. We're also waiting at any moment. And it's sort of being delayed in

similar ways that sort of this big Department of Justice report. But yeah, so I mean, Google is in some ways the weirdest one because it's doing so much at once and so much of the actual business is kind of behind the scenes. So search is a dominant browser. There's this whole section of the report that goes into Google's kind of dissembling around market share of like, well, we define market share differently or we don't think about market share at all. But like, I think anyone listening to the show, like, Google is the search engine. Chrome is kind of the main browser. And, you know, I mean, there's just not a lot you can say about it. And I think part of what they look at is the ties between these things that, you know, Google maintained dominance in search through the shift to mobile because of Android. It sort of, you know, was so hard to break into search because Chrome was the dominant browser, you couldn't get those licensing deals from, you know, there weren't that many other places to go. And so I think the implicit threat here is, okay, if we get the big bill and the Democrats sort of get all the legislative asks they want, they're going to start saying, okay, you can't demand this.

And we saw this in Europe that, you know, you can't force manufacturers to bundle Google services with Antro. In fact, everyone just wants to, they want Google services anyways. It hasn't been like a huge thing. But when you say, okay, all of those deals are no longer in effect, does the sort of conglomerate Google still hold together? Or is it, do other competitors start to find kind of cracks in the armor? But that to me is the one where it's hardest to know how it's going to play out because it may be that like, I mean, Chrome is a good browser. Like Google is a good search engine. So it may be that they retain their dominance even without that.

I don't know. I think we've seen a little bit of the early returns on sort of these, the browser ballot type pick your search engine. And the smaller search engines in Europe are actually complaining they're losing market share because of it. Like people are affirmatively picking Google search when they can because like I know that one. And it's that I think we saw that with the original browser ballots with Internet Explorer way back in the day too. Like, it sounds like such a good idea. We'll just present more choices. But maybe in practice, it just, uh, it further entrenchedes the incumbent.

I mean, the part where that seems maybe most not true is one of the slightly weird marginal cases, which is Google info boxes. Like, that's a thing that Yelp, which has been one of the biggest critics of Google search has been complaining about is when you search for something on Google, it's going to return results from other Google services. And stuff like Google's business. views are like they're not particularly great necessarily. Like it's much less clear in that case that they're the thing that people would affirmatively pick. But that's also like a much smaller business than say being the company that makes browsers. Yeah. And I, you know, the, um, throughout the report, there's all these like little damning moments of documents and emails the committee got of, you know, Sundar Pichai when he ran Chrome being like, we need to push Chrome on more people. And like,

now, like when we talk to him, you know, he's the CEO. He's like, we're just doing our, best, we're living our values, but then you see what he's like as the executive in charge of something. And you see the conversation inside of Google about promoting Chrome on the search page. And they're like, this feels icky. And they're like, we're doing it anyway. And I think just that internal debate is reflective of the real stakes of this in a way that gets erased over time. Like, I think now we would say, of course Google is promoting its own properties on its own pages, but the first time they did it, they actually had a debate. You know, it's funny because when I think of, when you think of antitrust, you're like breakups.

But Google, like the Google breakup idea here is much less Google search from YouTube or whatever and much more this page of search results and this ad network. They all need to be a little bit more independent of each other. So they act more fairly. And that has always seemed a little bit, I know, more nascent. It's like a little less tangible. But then it's coming in the context of this gigantic DOJ report that we're expecting, where one assumes their answer is going to be just break up Google.

Yeah, and like, I also think it does get into weird, like, so the report does a good job of just sort of presenting the evidence, but I think it does get into a little bit weird ideological territory. Because so one of the things that Google has done, and this is specifically what Yelp is mad about and a bunch of other places are mad about, is sort of hoover up information. So one of the case studies is like Celebritynetworth.com was it's great. I love that Celebritynetworth.com. made it into a congressional report. Imagine that this is the one that takes down Google, and Sundar's like rolling in bed and I can be like, celebrity networth.com. That was the one. But, but like, so this guy did a lot of work sort of collecting the net worths of all these

celebrities and delivering authoritative data. And Google sort of eventually kind of Sherlocked it into an info box that was just you would Google, you know, Russell Brand of Net Worth and it would just sort of come up in the infobox and you wouldn't need to click through. Except it's not Sherlocking. It's more like they just literally took the app and put it into the business. But so this is what's weird.

It's at a certain point, you're like, who owns the information about a person's net worth? Like, is it not fair? Like, if they had just looked and had a person type it in and they were just, like, reblogging things from... Like, it's just odd. At a certain point, you do get into this weird copyright territory where it's like,

they're just trying to communicate the truth in a way that's like profoundly economically advantageous to them and disadvantageous to like the vertical search providers that would be their direct competitors. But like they are providing this service. And like if you start to bring antitrust law into that, that's regulating the extent to which they can convey like accurate information. I don't know. I feel like it gets into very, dicey territory that's like harder than just, you know, the three biggest social networks shouldn't be owned by the same company. You know, like it's the question of what a post-antitrust Google looks like is a is really the hardest of the four companies to me. And it's not like any

of them are easy. I mean, I don't know. That makes sense. Like that's, that is sort of why it's an antitrust case and not say a copyright case, though, because the question isn't whether this is a thing that's legal, which yeah, yeah, it seems like it is. It's whether or not Google doing that ends up in the long run creating a system where nobody makes something like celebrity net worth and ends up just harming the market in general in the long term. But yeah, it's weird. And Genius tried to sue Google over basically the same thing and it failed. Right. So the Genius case is right there. You know, Genius is a little, I don't know, craftier as a company. Right. So they had the lyrics on the Genius.com website and they encoded all kinds of stuff into the lyrics to prove that

the Google was copying. Like they had Morse code in some of these lyrics. They had like weird, weird typos and things in the lyrics. And then Google lifted it. And they're like, look at, like, you didn't put that Morse code in there. We did. Like, we caught you. And Google's entire response is, well, we license our lyrics from the same provider.

So obviously. And Genius is like, but we give the lyrics to the, okay, you're just lifting from a website. You're not paying anyone. The song lyrics, ultimately, the copyright to them is owned by the artists, by the labels. So, like, they're not even involved in, like, that to me is, it's at the heart of this whole thing, which is, if you, if you are starting genius.com, and you know your end result is eventually Google will take our entire, the value of our entire website, and then put us into some weird litigation where we're pretending to own the copyright to song lyrics we didn't write, which we're going, like, you would never start it. You would never start Celebrity Network. Like, this is what Addy is saying. And that, that is like what the, report is getting at that if these companies have unchecked power will kill competition. You wouldn't even start a company because Google will just take it away from you. I just think that's, it's very hard to write a law to make Google stop it, other than saying

Google stop it. Well, but when there is pressure on Google, it like has the technical capability to change. One of the big dramas was they were putting misinformation into the infobox because people would deface Wikipedia. And then the info box pulled it from Wikipedia really fast and then it would show up. And so they partnered with Wikipedia to make it so that if somebody went after a Wikipedia page, it wouldn't immediately show up in the infobox inside Google. So a little bit of pressure on them might make them change in theory. But the whole thing with this info box is it's actually part of a larger discussion of regular organic search results getting pushed down by other Google properties besides just them sucking up the information.

Yelp isn't just mad because they might have been scraping Yelp. They're mad because Yelp shows up 50% down the page, even if it's the first result, because there's a big Google Maps box and there's like four ads and there's another thing over on the side. You just got a constellation of Google stuff before you get to anything else. Google would argue that that is making the product better. You type in local restaurants near me and Google just tells you the answer instead of delivering you links to other search providers that we'll give you some further answer. In the context of this report,

I don't know if that argument has carried any water. I don't know if the committee believed that the product is getting better. But that's very much Google's argument. It's like, we just made our product better. Yeah. And maybe that they don't care, that they're more worried about the ecosystem of startups

and, you know, diversity of sources, information, et cetera, et cetera, than they do about whether or not Google gets to make its best possible self on the search result page. Fair. Let's go through the other companies a little more swiftly, because I want to talk about what is already happening in response to this report existing. The companies aren't changing a little bit, and I do want to make sure we talk about Google and Oracle for just a minute.

Amazon, we've talked about we've had Lena Con on the show. She wrote Amazon's Anitrust Paradox. She's on the committee. There's a great report and protocol about how the committee sort of divvied up the tasks. LenaCon actually worked on the Google side of it. somebody else worked on the Amazon one, but Amazon is like where this kind of this sort of antitrust inquiry we should change the standards energy came from. Eddie, what's your read on how the committee is approaching Amazon beyond just shutdown Amazon basics? That's really hard to read is the

problem. Like, Amazon is so many pieces. Yeah. Is it just stop preferring your own products? Is it stop competing against your own sellers? I mean, that's what the non-discrimination stuff seems like it could potentially be going for is that you have to be able to offer, I mean, potentially you could say they should not be able to use data that say sellers can't access or something like that. But I'm not totally sure what this means for Amazon. I mean, I do think you're going to see Amazon does often very quietly the kind of thing that we see Apple and Google do kind of loudly where they're like, we're launching a TV show network now. And it sort of is good, but also it's sort of that it's successful and prominent because it's coming from this dominant technology company.

So Apple, or I mean, Amazon will do that with like vacuum cleaners and TVs. And I mean, that is in a large part what Amazon Basics is. And I think that's definitely in danger. I think also there is a lot. lot of, because they have so much leverage, the different levels of selling a third-party product on Amazon, like there's the sort of Amazon marketplace where you're just like a dude with some products in his house. And it's like a website that you can sell them on. And then it's like, now you're storing them in the Amazon warehouse and Amazon's doing fulfillment for you. And now

you're a preferred Amazon seller. And now you're a featured Amazon seller. And you're sort of moving up the prestige pyramid in Amazonness. And all of those moves are deeply embedded to you sort of using more of Amazon's infrastructure services and giving them more data on just your customers and your broader operations and also just more favorable terms for them as a seller, because they have an immense amount of leverage. And I think one of the things we would see in the non-discrimination rules is they would lose a lot of that leverage for just legal reasons. Like they would no longer be able to write contracts in a certain way. And I think a lot of that would be very subtle and behind the scenes.

But I do think, like, they're exceptionally profitable for a retailer. And I think that leverage is a big part of why. I think you bring up a really interesting point there, which is that the report does not issue specific things that it should happen to Amazon. It says, these are the things we discovered happening. Here are the remedies in general, non-discrimination rules. There's one line in there that's like, the company should not be allowed to use their superior bargaining positions, which is like adorable. Like that's like a prohibition on doing business in general.

Like that's all bargaining. Someone has a superior bargaining position. So it's, I think it's important to connect the sort of abstract remedies that are proposed. Here's how we should change the law to the fact that they. have all this evidence. Russell, you pointed out in your piece that Facebook is surprisingly the shortest section. So let's go through that quickly because I want to end with Apple just because Apple seems like the most responsive at this moment. Like it is doing the most things to make people happy. But go through your Facebook quickly first. Yeah. I mean, so I think then this was,

you know, at the time of the hearing, we got this, this sort of look at the documents around the acquisition of Instagram. I think a big part of it is making the case. that Facebook's acquisition of Instagram was not right. And like, in retrospect, that was a miss by the government. Like, the government should have, at the very least, applied more scrutiny to that. But then, I mean, the question is, okay, what would you like to do now about this? Congress can't really pass a law to split them up. It can strengthen antitrust laws. And this is where we get into the consumer welfare standard stuff. But a lot of it is them kicking the ball to DOJ. I mean, I don't think there's a world in which the FTC successfully

separates these companies. But like, I mean, I think that. The FCC is like we're mad at you. Give us the change from your pockets. Right. Yeah. Like, that's all they got. A lot of it is them just sort of building out the case and saying, all right, some actual regulator take it from here. Because, you know, and the stuff that does need to be legislated around, it tends, with Facebook specifically, tends to be privacy election stuff and kind of speech regulation rather than antitrust. So I mean, I do think if there wasn't a classic antitrust case to be made against Facebook, they would have found it and made it. And so this suggests to me that there kind of isn't. As a VR person, I find it really funny that Facebook owns like this entire platform and

entire market for entire genre of hardware, but that genre of hardware is so small. that it doesn't even come up in the report really. Because, yeah, this is a thing that Oculus developers are complaining about is that, like, Facebook makes this really great hardware that's tied to this platform that's tied to Facebook, and they constantly are getting Sherlocked. But that's, like, way down the road. If VR somehow becomes a huge thing, then Facebook has a problem. You know, what's interesting about that is there were, I mean, obviously,

when Facebook bought Oculus, Oculus was in a different position than Instagram. So a lot of this report goes into the fact that Instagram was on its way to being a viable business, which is opposed to how Facebook talks about Instagram, which is we found some hobos on the side of the road. We liked their app and we gave them everything, right? And that's like Facebook's version of the story. And the story in the report is Instagram was scaling. They were not having your classic run out of server capacity problems that has scaled. But like they were on a path to sustainable growth.

And they could have just grown and been fine. Oculus was not there. Like Facebook bought Oculus when it was still like a bunch of duct tape and some like stolen Samsung OLED panels out of a phone. And they were stumbling towards a product. And so I think Facebook has just a much stronger case that they invested one company that was ahead of the curve before it was anything close to viable. The question is really why aren't there other VR companies for these Sherlock's developers to go to and say screwy Facebook. I'm leaving you behind. And that circles all the way back to what is the VR investment like space look like?

And it looks like no money because everyone assumes space will just win, which doesn't seem healthy. Well, like Daydream. I mean, Adi, you were writing about this. Like, Google could continue to bankroll the VR platform. And it so much does not care. Yeah. Well, Apple's going to put one out soon, right? That's what we think.

Or maybe it is something is going to happen there. Actually, let's talk about Apple. This is the one where I think a lot about Microsoft's sort of retconning of its antitrust case, right? Bill Gates is like, yeah, I didn't invent Android because of the antitrust case. That's his preferred way of thinking about it. But in many ways, the sort of 90s antitrust, Eddie written about this, like the 90s antitrust battles with Microsoft opened the door for new players like Google to emerge, open the door for things like Chrome to happen.

and it did open the door for maybe Microsoft. This is what Gates is saying, that he was distracted and he missed the trick in mobile. I don't know if I believe that entirely, but right, just the, they didn't break up Microsoft. It did not happen. But the presence of the regulation threat,

the presence of the scrutiny, enable other players to come in and it changed Microsoft's behavior. Do you think we're seeing that with Apple? Right? Like, there is the epic lawsuit, which is ongoing. It seems like the,

judge hates them both, to be perfectly honest. Like, she does not like the arguments either side in that case is making. Obviously, the scrutiny is there. And then we're just seeing Apple kind of back down. They're letting the game streaming services in there. They are backing off on in-app purchases for apps like Proton Mail and Hay. They're getting hits from Microsoft, which just changed its Windows store app policies. Like, they're kind of giving up a little bit.

Or they're backing off some of their positions a little bit. I mean, their game streaming backing off is. It's still pretty honorous and limited. Like the last we heard, there's still, you have to basically approve everything as a separate app, which is pretty wild. But yeah, they do seem responsive whenever there is an individual instance of they're just doing something that's clearly, really potentially anti-competitive. The cases you mentioned, there was the sort of parental control apps that they ended up letting back in the store. So it does seem like they're willing to sort of back down on individual cases, and this could maybe lead to something more macro. Yeah, I just want, if you pass the law that says you can't self-deal on your own platform, like, that has huge consequences for the app store. The question is whether Apple can show up and lobby their way into some carve-out for that law because they can say, look, we already did all the things. We're doing it on our own. You don't need to regulate us. The market is taking care of it. And I, I am trying to, I'm trying to decide whether I think Apple is pursuing these changes. Well, it's obviously for both.

both reasons. But on what balance? Are they pursuing the changes for, because I think it's good for the ecosystem, because they know that they're just going to keep getting hit over the head from Microsoft and Facebook and Sony and all the other companies that are mad at them? Or because they see the regulation coming and they want to make the argument. It's both, obviously, but in which direction does it lean? Yeah, I mean, so the thing that really struck me on this was, so if you're just, if the rule is just you cannot treat your product differently on the platform than you treat competitors' products. Like, Apple is almost the most egregious case, although it's rarely sort of seem, it doesn't seem as evil when they do it for whatever reason.

The one that struck me was, you know, NFC on, in payment apps, NFC's sort of a great way to do payment apps. Like, it's because it's short range, and so the security's better. And anyway, it's what you would like your payment app to run on. Apple's payment app on the iPhone runs on NFC. I think they just opened it up in iOS 14. So now sort of Square can get in the game. After, like, a fairly pivotal few years for mobile payments. So, like, just the fact that they said, all right, well, we get, we get a few years where people have to use our thing is actually incredibly valuable as something like,

that is opening up. Are they just not going to do that anymore? I mean, that's like the most Apple-y possible thing in the world is like, we solve the problem and we want you to use our solution and we think that it'll make everything. Like, it's just, that's the classic Apple thing. I think, you know, that's a fairly low-stakes version. I don't think Apple's betting the company on Apple card and that whole payment infrastructure. They're sort of hoping it happens, but I think they would be willing to see that float down the river if it meant that they could avoid an intense regulatory fight. I do think the question of app store fees, like the one that is being pushed by Epic right now, they are dug in on it. They cannot compromise on letting people run an independent

software distribution network on Apple devices. Like that is too core to the proposition. And I don't know, like, I think, I think if you, it would be very hard for, for tech antitrust people to see that as anything other than just a violation. Yeah. I mean, I think this is the one where I think the criticisms of the report, specifically related to Apple and the iPhone, hit home the hardest, right? You are asking Apple to change its DNA. Yeah. Well, and you, how? You even see, I mean, this is when, when the, when the, I think this came out with the hearing, but they had all. of these quotes from Steve Jobs saying, you know, look, it's very simple. If people want to buy books on an Apple device, they're going to use iBooks. It's the bookstore for Apple devices. Like,

that's how it is. And you can almost like hear his voice saying this. And he's like, no, of course that's how, like, don't be an idiot. And I mean, that is, that's the DNA we're talking about is he's like, well, no, we'll just make the best bookstore. And then we'll force people to use it. And that's, that's the Apple way. And I think, and that's how they've been doing things for 20 years and it's made them like the largest company in the world. So like, yeah, I mean, they're, they're like pretty used to it. Yeah. And I think that where do you, where do you tell them to stop? Right. Like, okay, Fortnite shouldn't have to pay. They should have their own in-app purchases. Seems reasonable. But you developed your LiDAR sensor. You put all the money into developing in it on

the back of the phone. And on day one, it has to be open to everyone before you even figure out how you want it to work. Like, there's just no way to, like, you might as well say hardware companies can't make software, and software companies can't make hardware. Like, once you're down into that part of the stack. Yeah, well, so that, the NFC and the alternate app store thing, all three Apple will fall back on, well, we need to keep our platform private and secure, and this is the best way for us to do it. And so it's actually a very similar problem to the Google search results pages, at a certain point, solving this problem requires dictating product decisions to these companies, right?

If Apple were to open up in the way that we are like, you know, the antitrust thing might want them to, then they would have to, when they're making their next, you know, NFC thing, they've got this ultra-wideband thing coming, right? They would be forced from day one to create an open API. They would be forced to, like, read people in and how it works. We would all know exactly what's coming because everybody else would leak. They wouldn't have their big product reveal. And when it came out, there'd be Apple solution and like four other solutions.

And it would be a little bit messy and Androidy in terms of what works and what doesn't. It completely changes how they think about making their stuff. And either you just say, yep, the government now gets to be in the room with your product managers. Or you come up with some other way to slice it. Like you said, like the hardware people can't make software. that is equally problematic. Well, so like the extremely Microsoft approach. And this is how Microsoft has done everything for a long time.

It's only recently that they've been more integrated. Microsoft would make the new feature of Windows and loudly announce it. And then like quietly say, actually, we're not shipping the consumer version of that. These four licensed software products can make use of this Windows feature. And all of you are on your own. And then we being the extremely gentle and understanding tech critical, that we are would say, why don't you just integrate it and make it on your own? The Appleway is so much better. Every time. That is like Microsoft plays for sure DRM destroyed itself in the face of

the iPod being an integrated solution. And Microsoft was like, fine, here's the fucking Zune. And we were still like, you're too late. The Zune is a great product. And I think it died an untimely death. But that was the cycle that Microsoft was in was they would build a platform capability and let other people build on it. And they just quite frankly, lost. every turn to Apple building the integrated product. It's one of the reasons Intel is losing right now. They show off a new product, a new thing that they can do in a laptop. We're like, cool, when is it shipping?

Well, you know, in like six months to 18 months when one of our OEMs finally puts in a product. It's like, okay. Yeah, and this is like, this is why I started the Apple conversation in this way. Is the pressure enough to move Apple to a happier place? Do they feel responsive to move to that more comfortable position before the regulator show up and say, now you're Microsoft. Like, now you're just building platform capabilities.

Yeah, I also don't think any of the antitrust people, like, there are a lot of people who have sort of dedicated their career to making tech antitrust happen. I don't think any of them got into it thinking of Apple. Like, I think they've become a test case for this. It's sort of in the way that Facebook is where, like, they're very big. they definitely like throw some elbows from time to time so like

would you you know if you can get Tim Cook in the room with Zuckerberg and Sunerpichai and Jeff Bezos like do it but I just don't actually see like if they are the first ones to get hit by this it will basically be

collateral damage like I think people are mad at Amazon and Facebook and Google and And Apple is kind of a long for the ride on this. Except they have like the big high profile lawsuit where all the teenagers are making memes about how they're... Yeah, but that happened after... That happened like that happened after the hearing.

That's what was so crazy. Like the hearing, when the hearing happened, they asked Tim Cook straight up there. Like, have you ever retaliated against a company for violating the... for sort of disagreeing over the app store terms? And he said, absolutely not. And then they just moved on. And two weeks later, all hell broke loose. No one will tell.

us if Tim Sweeney has talked to the antitrust committee, but I feel confident they have. It would be weird, right? It would be weird if they hadn't. All right, we have spent a long time of this. I do want to spend the last just a couple minutes of this segment talking about the other gigantic tech policy thing that's happening, which operates at a far different layer of the stack, way away from consumers. But depending on how this goes, could have just gigantic consequences for the way that people build software. So, Addie, I think we first read about Google. and Oracle suing each other nine years ago? Oh, it is older than this site.

Yeah, I mean, it's forever. The first time they went to court was like nine years ago. It was like one of the first big ongoing coverage. Brian Bishop, we sent him to the trial. I remember thinking of it is the test run for Apple and Samsung. Like, it was the beginning of the verge. I was like, how will we cover trials? Like, Brian, go to this seemingly inconsequential Google and Oracle lawsuit and we'll

like do a dry run for Apple and Samsung. And he was there for six months, like just forever. It was pure torture. Thank you, Brian. We called the Goracle. Gorical. It has gone up and back from the Supreme Court twice, and now it's there. Arguments were yesterday morning.

Addie, walk us through, honestly, what was its stake and what happened? So what's at stake is, yeah, basically, we have explained this on our site a few times, but back in when Google was developing Android, it decided that it wanted to make it, you relatively interoperable with Java. It used Java application programming interface libraries. So basically there's like certain structures that it uses that give you access to Java functions roughly. I'm terrible at explaining this because I'm not really a programmer.

But basically, Oracle says this is the, which had bought Java in 2010, says this is the equivalent of you just stealing our code. Our code is copyrightable. and it also threw in some patent claims. And this has been to court several times now. It finally made it to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court, after a COVID-related delay, finally heard oral arguments. It was just a giant string of metaphors.

It was like an hour and a half of metaphors. Yeah. My favorite was the QWERTY keyboard metaphor. Yeah. Can someone explain it? I saw this flying by in Twitter. And I was like, I can't, I don't even know how QWERTY relates to Java. I'm just going to let it wash over me.

Okay. So the thing with the case is that it's kind of very loosely, there are a couple of big arguments that Google is making. The first one is that the code that Oracle is using is that that aspect of it is not copyrightable, that they couldn't declare that they just own the structures that let Android call certain functions. The second one is that it's fair use in part because it's the only way to get to a certain functionality or a place, like it's the merger doctrine. And Google's claim that's where the QWERTY keyboard analogy comes in is that after a while, like if you invented a QWERTY keyboard, at first there's no reason someone else shouldn't come up with a different keyboard. You could, it's a bad analogy because you can't copyright the QWERTY keyboard, but bear with me. If you could, then at first it's not a problem. But after a while, if you want to make a product and you want someone to be able to use the product, you need to be able to use a layout that people understand. That's the Cordy analogy.

So imagine that every key on the keyboard was like a Java API call. That sounds like my dream. That's all I want in life. He doesn't love it. Well, Adi's right. It's a bad analogy because you can't copyright the layout. But basically Oracle is saying the structure sequence and organization, right? Those are the SSO.

Structure sequence and organization of the Java API calls is the Cordy keyboard. And Google is saying, well, you can't copyright that. It's an index. And we wrote all the code underneath it. And even if you could copyright it, just reusing it so people can use Java to write on Android is fair use. This has gone up and down. I think, Addy, like any number of computer scientists have said Oracle is a bad actor here, and they will completely redo how people write code, any number of other tech companies. So Microsoft's general counsel and president, Brad Smith, wrote an article with Kent Walker, Google's general.

Google's general counsel in the Wall Street Journal like an op-ed, I mean, like Oracle's being a dick. I mean, it's like literally everybody, but Oracle thinks that this is a bad idea for Oracle to win this lawsuit. But Oracle, I think, is just winning this like convoluted metaphor battle. Like, it just does not seem like the Supreme Court understood the real... To come back to what I was saying about the, um, about the antitrust report, the antitrust report lives in the world of the tech industry.

It's using its language. it understands that you can disagree with it, but it's not a bunch of metaphors about, I don't know, like retail stores and books and indexes and cordy keyboards. It's just describing the things as they are. The oral arguments were just an endless series of metaphors about other things, some of which had nothing to do with the reality of the situation. I mean, some people pointed out on Twitter that, like, Google's lawyer didn't necessarily do them a ton of favors in that aspect in that regard. Like a lot of the reason there were so many metaphors, there was like, it's like a JK Rowling novel. It's like somebody's football team. It's like a hit song.

Was that they didn't really manage to distinguish between, say, what an API is, like just this basic functionality that lets something interface with something else and say writing the code of TikTok. Like if you write a video game code or something that does some very clear expressive thing, that's copyrightable. Like you can copyright code under certain instances. And they didn't really distinguish between something that is really clearly creative and, say, the idea that you could have a basic code structure that lets, that enables like this basic functionality. So we ended up getting left in the land of like, it's like art. And you can copyright art.

And then next to this is the procedural history of the case, which is that Google has won in front of a jury on these exact claims, but then a court of appeals throughout the jury verdict. So then another whole thing that they're arguing about is whether it was a. for the court to throw out the jury verdict. Which you should explain more than I can because I cannot, I have no background for that. So like the really basic way of thinking about it is in any lawsuit, you have questions of fact and questions of law, right? So like the first thing that you are trying to establish like, what are the facts? And so you go to a jury for that. Like did you do the thing?

Did these things happen? Did Google copy the code? And you present all the evidence and the fact finder. says yes or no, that's the jury. Then when you appeal, you assume the facts are correct and you appeal the questions of law. Was the law correctly applied here? Should the law, should this set of facts reach this outcome in the law? And that's usually why appeals decisions are very narrow. That's why there's no juries. That's why you don't really get new evidence presented and all that stuff. It's a big deal for a judge to throw out facts. To throw out

what the jury said was a fact. This was fair use. This wasn't copyright infringement. and say, I'm interpreting the facts my own way, which is what happened here. So that's just like an issue for the Supreme Court to say whether it was appropriate for the appeals court to substitute its judgment for a jury, which is a fact finder when an appeals court is supposed to litigate questions of law. So like, that's very wonky that those are the precise terms. Usually when you say people, questions of law, you get all mixed up between law and fact. And honestly, there are like probably some legal scholars who would tell you there's no difference

between like right very philosophical but the real question is the jury says what the facts are was it copyright infringement was it fair use those are factual questions and then the appeals courts are supposed to answer questions of law now whether the Supreme Court decides to kick the metaphor can down the road and just say you can't throw out a jury verdict is like a real possibility here I think that the Supreme Court especially in an 8-8 moment like no risked at Bader Ginsburg is like who knows what they will do. But if Oracle wins, like, and we'll see what happens, but if Oracle walks away with a win here, like literally the nature of how we code software will change, unless there's some legislation

that makes this okay. So we're tracking it. I don't want to, it is taken over a decade to get to this point. I don't want to let it slide by on our show, but just go read some of the coverage. I think your piece is going to come out by the time this podcast is out. It is chaos. It is like the ultimate example of, is our legal system prepared for tech industry chaos and like what is really happening with computers? And the answer is no.

I want to point out my favorite metaphor, not because it's the weirdest, but because it's the most convoluted, which is someone makes a special collection of herbs and spices that they then package and they can copyright that. But then they also publish the instructions for going to a specific aisle in the grocery store and finding the collection of. of herbs and spices. And the code is like the herbs and spices. And the directions to get to it in the grocery store is like the API. I love that. That's great. This is the classic fried chicken law.

Classic. They call it the KFC rule. Yeah. When you take a computer science class. It's great. Read Addie's piece. Tell me what your favorite metaphor for an API is. You can tweet it to at Backlon.

Great. That's my Twitter address. We've been going on about legal stuff for too long. We got a break and talk about some phones. Thank you very much at Ian Russell. It's great to have you. I'm sure we will talk to you again as both of these issues continue winding on. Thanks a lot.

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Upwork.com. Dan Seyfert. Welcome. Hello. Oh, you're going to be a busy man next week. Yeah, I mean, like all of us are. But yeah, we're pretty busy in the coming week. So it's time to hard shift from hardcore policy talk to gadgets.

Apple, sort of as expected, announced that on October 13th, there will be an event. They seem much more comfortable with everyone saying it's the iPhone event this time around. Compared to earlier where they had to walk back and they didn't announce an eye. phone. So new iPhones on October 13th. I think we're expecting four two phones, two sizes each. Yep. Seems about right. Yeah. That's what all the rumors have been pointing to. The invites at high comma speed, high speed. Gee, wonder what that could be. So when I first saw it, I was like, oh, this is, they're going to do the arm Mac. Like, hello, fast Mac. Right. And then everyone's like, oh, it's going to say, it's going to have 5G. It's going to be faster. And I was like, but

5G is slower than 4G. And that's where my brain is. So it's a, so it's a It took me a while to get on everyone's level. But yeah, it's obviously a reference to the 5G iPhones coming. I mean, you could be right as well. No, I'm actually, like, very confident that there will not be a Mac. Well, no, but we are expecting new A-series chips and the new iPhones because there always is. And they haven't released the iPad Air yet, which we know has the new A-14 because they don't want anybody to speed test it before it's in an iPhone.

So you could salvage this theory of yours. It just won't be related to the Mac. It just won't be the thing I thought it was. I could just pretend. I was always thinking about something else. So yeah, so high speed. We're expecting iPhone, what are that, 13, 45? 12.

What number is it? 12. Yeah. It doesn't even matter anymore. Why do they still have numbers? It's like the only thing in the product lineup that still has a number, except for the watch, I guess. There is a possibility that they call it iPhone 115G.

They pull a Samsung. There's also the possibility they could call it an S line. Does they have to redesign it? Yeah, no, the rumors it's going to be redesigned to look more like an iPad Pro. Yeah, and they just like necessarily have to redo the antennas for 5G. Yeah, of course. Especially if they do millimeter wave. And if they redesign it, they're going to rename it.

Exactly. So iPhone 12, maybe they'll call it the iPhone 12 5G. I would almost bet money that they will definitely not call the iPhone 12 5G. It's just very not Apple. So iPhone 12s, we're expecting probably a 12 pro. Fair bet that there'll be a LiDar sensor on the back. of that one. And then sort of the mainstream iPhone 12 with 5G. And then an iPhone 12 mini is like the thing I've seen out there. They'll make a small one. They'll call it a, they might call it

many, but they'll be a small one. So it'll be, normally it's like iPhone 11 was iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, I've 11 Pro Max, and now it'll be iPhone 12, iPhone 12, iPhone 12, iPhone 12, and then there'll be some fourth one that'll be like a smaller version of the iPhone 12. You don't think they'll do iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Max, iPhone 12 Pro Max. I don't think so. Not based on the rumors mill for the past year has said that it's been like the small one will be something like a 5.4 inch screen. And then the next size up is 5.8 and then 6.1. And then what's the latest rumor on the big one?

Like 6.7, I think. So it wouldn't make a ton of sense to call something a max if it only has a 5.8 inch or 6.1 inch screen. Okay. And then we're just assuming the pro will have pro stuff. But our stuff. But not 120 hertz. But not 120 hertz still. We don't know. Okay. I mean, like, I'm trying to, I don't live in a 5G coverage area. I barely live in LTE coverage area now. So I'm trying to like, how, why am I going to buy this phone? And I'm like struggling.

Nilai, you're lucky you live in a, we have an electricity coverage area. Yeah. Yeah, my power just went out for like an hour and a half. Okay. What's the battery life? Like, Apple. So I'm just thinking besides 5G, what are they going to layer in this one? It's a new processor and a 5G modem. Maybe there's a visually different design.

I mean, that's a great question because the one thing that really hasn't come out in the rumor mill is anything about the camera systems. Other than, like, you can guess that there will be a LIDAR sensor because the iPad has it. The only thing we know or assume because of the rumor mill is that it won't. won't have 120 hertz on the screen. We don't know what the resolution will be that we can guess on the sizes from the rumor mill. We can assume that it won't have USBC, but there would be a nice surprise if it did.

It won't. Why would... Why would 2020 make something nice happen? You just said that to troll Dieter. You just want to make Deeter man. I got to go. And then do we think there's anything else at this event? You know, like how long have we been waiting for air tags to show up?

How long have we been waiting for them to do something to the Apple TV, if only just cut the price in half, which is what they should have done two years ago. I guess there's like two little bits of Apple TV news this week that made me realize, like, just how weird the Apple TV is as a product and just like how bizarrely limited it is. So like this one is just a deal, but whatever, it's a deal they should have made ages ago. So Disney movies are finally available in 4K on the iTunes store. Yeah.

Like the idea that Apple sold the most expensive streaming box on the market. and you couldn't watch Marvel movies in 4K on it. Like, what, what have we been doing this whole time? Yeah. That should have been the whole review. You could, but you just had to do it through Disney Plus. Yeah, but like, come on. Like, right, like someone else's service could do it or you could buy it.

But, like, just like out of the box, the thing couldn't do it. Okay. And then the YouTube 4K situation is, it's just so upside down. I don't know who to blame. I don't know if you're mad at. But you can now watch you. I watched a YouTube video in 4K. How are the blacks?

Not great. But I did it. I watched a YouTube video in 4K the other day. But it doesn't support HDR on YouTube on the Apple TV. It doesn't support 60 frames for second. So like it's still just like doesn't do all the things. And then there's like this crazy like you can't do it on the iPhone or the iPad. And it's just like someone is to blame.

Is it Google? Do they just want you to? buy a new Chromecast? Is it Apple? Have they been secretly lying to us how fast the A10 chip? It's an A10 in there, right? Who knows? It's some extremely powerful A-series chip in the Apple TV 4K. Have they just, do they, can they just not do it? I don't think that's the case. I think they can do it. I think it's, it's like a, it's, it's, it's got to just be still wackadoo codex stuff, right? Same as it ever was. Yeah, or just like fighting between these two companies.

The way Google wants to do it is they want to send all of your data to the web first. Yeah. And then, right? And, like, Apple doesn't want. So the Apple TV is just in dire need of a refresh. Yep. To just bring it to where it should be, let alone become, like, the primary winner in the marketplace. Yeah, I don't actually, it's like, it needs a refresh in so far as, like, they should make it a

dongle or they should make it smaller or cheaper or something. But just as, like, have a remote that does things on the TV, what the Apple Tee really needs is they need to make whatever deals they have to make to get what Google got on the Google TV, right? The new Chromecast. They just need to be able to have the Apple TV be the home screen, the Apple TV app on the Apple TV. Here's a real question for you. What if they do nothing to the box and they redesign the remote, would you buy a new Apple TV?

You have to buy the box to get the remote? No, because I've already like thrown away that remote and got a different one. No, you did throw it out. It's at the bottom of your couch cushion. And you just are not able to actually find it. So anyway, so iPhones for sure. Maybe Apple TV, I just, I think that they're going to not. Air tags, the four circles and like, someone's like, oh, the circle looks like an air tag.

So maybe at some point they've got to release these damn things. They put, you know, the UWB things in the old iPhones for a reason. There's also the rumor that there's a bunch of audio stuff. So Apple just pulled a bunch of third-party audio products out of the Apple store. And there's been beat stuff sort of ambitly floating or Apple will make AirPod branded over your headphones. There's rumors of that. And so it's rumors of the home pod rumors just keep like bubbling back up. Like maybe there will be it won't be a new home pod too, but there will be a mini home pod.

What if the refresh of the Apple TV is it's a home pod with an HTML port on the back? I mean, it would honestly be the smartest move they could make. I mean, that's what the fire TV is. Brilliant. Yeah. It's just funny. We came off of this like hour long. conversation on competition. I'm just like, why are you trying? And like, they should keep trying.

I mean, I would, what have we learned about this, both categories of product? We talked about TV and now we're talking about HomePod. Yeah. The winners are cheap ubiquity. Right? Like, a Roku has the processing power of a, like a hamster on a wheel. That's like a really beefy. A hamster's fit, though, right? It's a muscular 4K hamster. Uh, high-res hamster. Yeah. Well, is it, is it tort? Is it or speed that you need on the... Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's a sprinter or the lifter. Please tell me what kind of hamster you think is on the broken wheel.

But like cheap ubiquity, right? So like they're cheap, they're everywhere. That's the Echo Story. It's the Nest story to some extent. Apple just like wants to be at the high end of the market. Are they going to allow themselves to make the $50 dongle that's supported by advertising, which is what everyone else makes? Yeah.

Well, the original, or one of the original justifications for the Apple TV 4K being at the high end of the market was this idea that someone was going to game on an Apple 4K or Apple TV, which never really panned out. So, like, do they dive deeper into that or do they just leave it alone? They've got Apple Arcade. We've heard a lot that Apple Arcade has big ambitions. There is a report that they want AAA games that can compete with things like Breath of the Wild out there. There's rumors of a controller, right? I mean, that would be the reason to have an A14 processor in Apple TV that plays the same games as your iPhone or whatever. It would be the reason to have arcade.

The same question you could ask about the HomePod, are they going to make the HomePod puck that costs $30 where the business isn't selling the expensive hardware? It's your Apple One subscription gets you a Siri that works. That would actually be very compelling. If there's regular Siri and there's functional Siri and that costs $9 a month. I don't know if any Q's thought about this yet. But like those are I think big questions Like we're expecting something else here Right two phones and some other

Set of things that are too small for their own event That don't distract from the phone So that means you can't have the ARM Mac That definitely needs its own event Yeah right that's a big moment for them You can't they already did their iPads You need phone ecosystem stuff Yeah right like stuff you wouldn't have your

You would not have your own event for a cheap Apple TV Yeah and that would definitely won't distract from our phone You would not have your own event for a cheap home pod It won't distract my phone. So it's that category of stuff I think we're looking for here. We'll just see what it is. But I think the question for Apple is whether they're going to go down market to compete with where the winners are or whether they're going to like states. Are they going to put an Apple TV 4K plus with games next to the PS5?

Right? Like that just is what are you walking into next to Xbox and the cloud? Like all the stuff that's happening, they've got some big questions to answer. So back to the phones real quick. One of the questions for me is the thing that's happening. this year is we've seen phone companies like Samsung in particular go, all right, you know what, we're going to sell you $1,400 phones, $1,500 phones, and then we're going to have the main phone or a phone that clocks in at like $7,800.

Google just like said, yeah, we give up making flagship phones. We're going to make the Pixel 5 at like that, you know, $6, $700, $800 range. The iPhone has been there. The iPhone 11 is there. So will Apple give themselves permission to like further increase the cost? of the pros so that, and then how are they going to break down their prices? Because one of the things they've done with the Apple Watch is they, like, they made a new one that was inexpensive with the Apple Watch SE.

Are they going to try and do that with the iPhone again? And, you know, there's still the iPhone SE floating around, right? The new one, that's cheap. So where Apple decides it wants its product mixes to land in terms of price for its phones is actually kind of up in the air for me. I don't think it's necessarily as predictable as it has been in years past. The market isn't it predictable anymore. To your point, Deuter, if these four phones pan out, we are staring down an Apple iPhone page that has five current models on it for you to choose from.

And then if they decide to keep prior generation models at a lower price, as they historically have done, you could in theory be choosing between eight different iPhones when you go buy an iPhone, which is just like, what a concept. to think about, but like, you know, you had your, your piece go up today, uh, just laying out how Samsung's doing that exact thing because they are hitting every single price point. But we kind of know the answer, right? There's the, right now, there's the iPhone 11, which is the one you, we just confidently recommend to people. Yeah. Just buy that one. That's it. That's the one that they want you to buy. And then if you're a gigantic nerd, you buy it, an 11 pro. That's what we buy. And then if you are budget conscious, you buy the, SC. And it's like, that's the, you're still going to land in that spot, right? Well, they're going to

have the, still what it's going to look like. You're just going to have a little bit of screen size. Yeah. But there's going to be the SE. There's going to be this rumored mini. There's going to be the, whatever the successor to the iPhone 11 is. I guarantee the split between the SC and the mini is bigger than the split between the mini and the regular one in price. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. The mini will be pretty, pretty high up there. And it'll probably, it'll be like a $50. Yeah, the pitch will be it's everything you like about the iPhone on a slightly smaller package because we heard people like small phones. Sure, they have. Right. And I do, the Pro Max, the LiDar sensor and probably all of the 5G bands, that's another very easy distinction for them to make is we're going to let millimeter wave happen on this big phone. But not on the smaller one. That's interesting. Yeah. Right.

Well, what a bunch of companies are doing is they'll sell you a 5G phone, but if you want the VRVR phone, but if you want the VRVR. Verizon version that you get to use if you happen to live next to the right street corner, you have to pay 50 bucks more. Or 100 bucks more. Or 100 bucks more. Yeah. Which is ridiculous. These networks just like, they're just like not there yet.

Like physically there yet. So, all right. So like you can just see them say, okay, that the top end phone has all of the stuff. It's a very expensive. We are not anticipating a lot of people are going to buy it. All of our marketing effort is in the middle zone. I'm, I'm curious. see how Apple positions the iPhone in this moment. Like every company is having is like their challenge to

tell you that what you need right now is a new phone because you don't. Just like in a very deep level, you do not need a new phone. If you have a reasonably new phone, you're doing fine and you are not this set like the cell for the galaxy note or whatever. Dieter's, we're going to talk about a minute. But like taking notes on the go is like maybe not as compelling of a $1,400 problem. position as it used to be. And so like, I'm, I'm deeply curious. I think, you know, Apple's good at reading a moment. I'm just deeply curious how they're going to position all of these phones right now and try to get people excited about having a new mobile device when we just talked about it. Earlier in the show, TV sales are through the roof for the first time in forever. Yep.

Because everyone's just at home all the time. A little more Apple stuff. There's actually a bunch of watch news here. Dan, you reviewed the Apple Watch SE, strapped one to your child. How'd it go? Well, I review the SE independently. I'm also working on a piece on family setup, which is the strapping one to my child part. That's to come. So hopefully it'll be up soon,

giving myself a little bit of a deadline push here. But yeah, if you look at SIE now, there's a review of the watch SE. It's fine. It's a series four that you can buy now at a lower price, and the series four was great in 2018. Series four is still pretty great in 2020. WatchOS 7 makes it really fast.

The SE is really fast with watchOS 7. I didn't have a series 6 to side-by-side compare it to, but I really don't think that the faster processor in the series 6 is really going to materially make a difference in your day-to-day on an Apple watch. No, the tough thing about the SE is that it's the one everybody should buy, except you don't get it always on screen. But it's the one that you should buy. Right.

Yeah, I mean, in my review, that's the thing that I miss the most. I don't really care about the blood oxygen sensor. Don't really care about the extra heart reading stuff for my uses. Not having an always-on display is, like, the bummer, but really a lot of people might not care about that. They hadn't cared about it for years until the Series 5 came out. So I think that one will be really popular as a gift to this holiday season as well. Like it just is like at that price point where you're not like shelling out an embarrassing amount of money to be that person to give a really expensive gift to

somebody if you're buying them an Apple Watch. Yeah. I want to call out we, Nicole wrote two great pieces about the health sensors on the watch this week. So she wrote an explanation of why the EKG had to be FDA approved because Apple is specifically making claims about what it can do for health and not the blood oxygen monitor, which Apple hasn't made any specific claims. Which is an interesting place for Apple to be. Like, look at this great sensor. It's like in our ads. It's the climax of the Apple Watch ad is like the person in space saying it does it.

But why? Because it's only, it's good for high elevation stuff. If you're in space, you need to know otherwise. So that's really just really interesting piece on. just the sort of dueling regulatory paths. Like she explains it really well. And then there is a study, which I think is really interesting to think about,

which is having the heart rate monitor on the Apple Watch has resulted in people overgoing to the doctor in like too many false positives. And that's just one of those things to unpack. Like, yes, it has saved some lives. Apple is very proud of it. That's a good outcome. We're happy about it.

But there's a flip side to it. And there's actually. rigorous health studies happening about the nature of these false positives. So you should cover me that really good work. Um, we should talk about prime day. It's happening on the same day as the Apple event. Yeah. This is why I said you were going to be busy. Next week's going to be busy. There's like a lot going to be busy. Prime day is two days because it's prime days. Get it. Uh, but yeah, it's Tuesday and Wednesday. Best Buy thinks Black Friday starts on Tuesday. So they're launching their Black Friday sales on a Tuesday in October. So just come up with another dumb name.

Look forward to that, but you know, I don't know if you want to buy some stuff get it on sale next week Anything good yet? I mean like I will see like Amazon's got some stuff on sale now they've got like talking about TVs They got some fire TV models they're like half price or something right now they've got an echo show five at half price But like you can never trust Amazon device sales like when I say devices like they're echoes and Kindles and stuff like that because they are literally always on sale like if you paid full price for an echo, you somehow stumbled on the one day a year where it's being charged full price. So like, you know, it's hard to say. We'll see. Amazon's, of course, you know, hyping it up as like a super big deal for them because they want you to go on and buy stuff. But like, yeah, we'll find out. And if there are good deals, we'll be covering it. And, you know, we'll let you know.

I told Cameron I was going to write the piece about how you should buy the $300 prime TV to run zoom on it. It's like half a threat. I might just. keep saying it on the podcast. I think you should buy a cheap TV to run Zoom on it. And now you can stick the Facebook portal TV on top of it and it has Zoom. It's too much. All of those things collect too much data. The $300 TV is definitely collecting too much data. Data collection hydra thing that you also can do zoom on. Yeah. Put that thing on a separate network in your house. That's what I'm saying. All right. We're going to take a break. There's a few more reviews talk about. We'll be right back.

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database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, Dieter. Yeah. You reviewed the Galaxy S-20 fan edition. Yep. Pantheon of great names. Surprise, they didn't throw a 5G in there.

There might be one technically. And the Note 20. Yep. Tell me about these phones. They should be the same class of phone, which is there's the good one, and then there's the inexpensive one. For this S-20 FE, they did it right. They took out the most expensive parts.

They left in the parts that you care about, like maybe 5G, but definitely the 120-hertz screen, decent enough cameras, and they're charging $699 for it. It is a great product at a great price, especially if you can find a discount because Samsung phones are discounted all of the time. This is the phone. I think I mentioned this on the show before, but Samsung did not plan on making this phone. You know, when they had the S-10, they had like the S-10E, and then later on there was the S-10 light or whatever. when they had their S-20 event, they did not have this phone in their roadmap. The S-20 event

happened. We all went on lockdown and they're like, yeah, we need something cheaper. And so they made this phone. Wow. That fast. Yeah. That's incredible. Because they're Samsung and they can just make whatever they want, whenever they feel like it. Remember we used to make the joke that when Samsung saw a problem, they would just scoop

up a thousand engineers and throw it at it? That's exactly what they did here, except it was probably like 10,000 engineers that were like, foo, make a phone. The note 20 makes no sense to me. It's $1,000,000, and it doesn't have a high refresh rate screen. Everything else is fine. Like, that's it. But why is it, it should be like $200 cheaper.

How can they make the S20 FE at $699, and this thing costs $999? The answer is the S20 is actually probably an A series, but we don't need to go into that. But it's not a good deal. It's a weird phone. You're just paying a tax to get a stylus if you really want one, and you should not buy it at full price. The original headline for my review was don't buy it at full price. If you can find it for two, 300 bucks less, go for it if you want a stylus. Also, AT&T, if you're on AT&T, AT&T, AT&T will just fire one of these phones at you for no reason. Well, they'll fire

an ultra at you, right? Yeah. But it's like even more reason to never pay for this phone. What you should do is walking into an AT&T store, just like a loiter a little bit, you know, cough, like draw some attention to yourself. You will walk out of that store with a note 20 Ultra. It will just happen to you. Don't go into a store and start coughing, no. Like, that's probably not a good. Yeah, don't do that. Yeah, yeah. You'll definitely walk out of the store at that point. Just be like, me over here. And they'll be like, here's a phone. Dan, you reviewed the Nest Audio. Yeah, it's good. It's a good speaker. If you're, if you're looking for like a Google Assistant speaker and you don't want to spend Sonos prices, then this audio is great. You compare two of them

together. Does stereo, pretty loud. It's a much bigger upgrade over the Google Home. So if you got a Google home from like 2016 or whatever, the NEST audio is definitely an upgrade over that. And if you listen to music a lot, it's a much better experience than the Ness Mini. So if you're in that Google Assistant ecosystem, it's a good pick. It's hard to compare these smart speakers across ecosystems though, because like it's hard to like imagine someone being like, I've got four assistant speakers. Oh, the new echo came out and it sounds really good. I'm going to throw all those in the garbage and then switch over. It just doesn't seem like a realistic thing. But when the new echo does come out or when I have a review unit, I will certainly be comparing

them head to head and telling you which one sounds better. But for most people, it's like, I'm kind of in this ecosystem, even more so than like a phone. It's a very sticky ecosystem. Yeah. My new thing is I have Nest minis next to big Sonos speakers. Because the Sonos speakers with microphones are so slow to assistant. Yeah, they're so bad. But the Nest Mini isn't. I put this in the review that the Sonus 1 is a better speaker speaker. It sounds better. It gets louder. It's more powerful than the NEST audio. But if you want a smart speaker, the NEST audio is a better smart speaker. Like, it hears your voice better. It's compatible with more things that the assistant can do.

It'll get new features for the assistant much quicker than the SONUS will. So, I mean, priorities, I guess you could just stick a NEST mini next to your Sona speakers like you do. The weird thing about this Nest audio, you're right. No one is going to switch for this. And so this really does establish that people are going to be in the ecosystem. But it's a question about new buyers. Is this thing designed to appeal to new buyers first time? I've never had a smart speaker before.

Which one should I get? Or is it much more likely that those people, I've never had a smart speaker before, oh, someone threw a Nest mini or an echo spot into my, you know, Christmas stocking. or I tripped and bought one at Target or whatever. Is that the more likely entry point? So this speaker in particular is like if you're in the ecosystem good, if you're not in an ecosystem, you're going to buy one, it's a pretty good chance that you're probably going to end up buying

one of those cheaper ones first before you buy this one. It's my guess. I don't know. Yeah, I think the intent with this is different. Like if you're buying this, you are buying it specifically because you want something bigger, louder, more powerful than what you can get with an S-mini. And Nesmini is great for accessing the Google Assistant. But if you want to use a speaker day in and day out to listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks or anything, for like a long period of time, you're going to have a better experience with NIST audio.

And I think it's at that price point where it's not a huge expense. Like $100 isn't, you can definitely spend a heck of a lot more for speakers. But it's enough that you're like, I'm intentionally buying this. I'm not getting it accidentally for free when I bought a Nest Hub or. You know, I'm not walking out of the store and, oh, these are on the thing for $20. Let me just throw it in my car. Like, it's a much more intent purchase. So here's my question.

Does the Nest audio exist to keep me from buying a Sonos one? Like, I've got a Google Home. It sounds like crap. I want a better speaker. You know, I'll just get a Sonos. That's good. I know that's a good speaker. Is that, does this exist?

Because I've got a Nest mini. I want to get a nicer audio speaker. What should I get? Oh, well, I could just get the Google one because I've already got this little mini thing here. Does it exist to keep me from buying a Sonos? Yes, they're competitors. They are competitors in this space. They're not buddies.

Like, Google would rather you buy their speaker than Sonos' speaker. Yeah, I think Google has a real positioning problem there, right? Like, we have seen Apple, and obviously the home bottle was way more expensive, but Apple made the entire case about sound quality. And no one cared. Like, just no one cared. And, like, how many, like, stereo forums. influencers did Apple, like, convinced to write gushing posts about how they could throw away all, like, now those guys are back on the forum, saying, like, I spent $8,000 in speakers

again today. Like, you know, like, they didn't throw away all their speakers for their own bots. I guarantee you. And, like, it just didn't work. Like, it just fundamentally didn't work. Like, I think the sell of, I want to buy a fancier speaker. I want it to sound better is, you just, you're buying into, like, an entire. lifestyle. You're buying brands. You're buying famous brands. And Google doesn't have any of that.

And so I think they're in a weird place where they have to build up that cred. Amazon has been slowly doing it, you know. But we're looking at a $100 speaker. And those brands, those legacy brands, your Denons and your Ankio and all these other ones that I'll probably mispronounce as well are not for $100. Like you were just way beyond that, right? These are like, the Nest audio will be on Walmart shelves, Target shelves, you know, Best Buy, what have you. It is an accessible thing. It's not big. It doesn't require, like you literally just plug it into the wall.

There's no speaker wire to hook up. There's no receiver to plug in. There's none of that. No, no configuration. No, I was talking about Sonos specifically where Sonos has the brand equity of being like the fancy one. Yeah. I mean, like Sonos, what Sonos did really well was they have that great sound quality that a lot of people like and they kind of had that. but they bring that simplicity that I was just talking about of like you just plug it in and you're done.

And like you're not hooking up speaker wire. You're not configuring things. You're not, you know, whatever you do with speakers. Yeah, you're taking all the fun out of it. Yeah, they take all the fun out of it. But you can listen to music. And so like, I think, I think honestly that conflict that you pointed out is tougher for Sonos than it is for Google. Because Google is really, like they have the Google Home Macs, but like most people are not buying the HomeMax.

it's probably not something that most people are investing in because it's more expensive and it's bigger. The next audio is in this sweet spot of like, which I, oh, that was my headline, wasn't it? Yeah. It's like this sweet spot of price and performance and it's good enough. And like that's really where Amazon's echoes have like kind of sat for the last couple of years as well. Like they're really accessible prices. They're always on sale. Google's probably going to put this thing on sale all the time as well.

So like they sound good enough that for the average person, even for me, like, it's certainly enough of an experience that, like, I'm not, like, compelled to go to the next step and then the next step beyond that. Yeah. I just think that of all of these, which is the one that's most interesting, it's the new Echo show with the screen that moves around, right? It's like, you're just kind of like up against it. Like, everybody has dots and minis and all this crap in their house. Like, you know, it's, like not hard to find everyone with a first-gen echo. Like, they have been flooding the zone with the microphones and the speakers. making the case to upgrade, I think you have to add something else. So like, a moving screen is like, ah, shit. Yeah, I mean, like, we've seen that over the years with Amazon's. Like, Google took four years to replace the Google homes. That was like an Eon.

But in Amazon's case, they've been updating every single year, and they've already done, like, the sound quality upgrades. Like, the echo you buy today sounds a lot better than the echo that came out in 2015. The echo dot that you can buy today sounds way better than the first echo dot. Like, they're surprisingly good audio quality out of them. So now this year it's been really interesting that they completely flipped the design to give you a reason to upgrade. So now the echoes are balls instead of cone or cylinders and the echo show moves. Like, they knew that increasing the audio quality on the echo show is not going to get someone to upgrade an echo show.

There's, like, real diminishing returns there. But if the screen follows you around, it, like, moves around like that is a very complete. telling reason, assuming it works. It's amazing how simple I am at the end of the day. I'm like how moves. I got to get that one. We are way long. Deeter, I just wanted to quickly talk about what's going on with G Suite.

It's not G Suite anymore, Nelai. Well, so they took, the only reason I'm bringing this up is, like, this is like one of those moments where the Verge just drove a very dumb story. So they were obviously, like, preparing to roll this out, and they rolled out a new Gmail interface a little too fast. and so it broke Gmail search for a lot of people. In like a really particular way.

In a very particular way. So if you search for something, you could no longer select every message in your entire inbox on the desktop that matched. You could never do it on the phone. And then like delete them or mark them red. And so every power user of email

just like fell into this like chaos mode. And like a flood of tips came and we wrote about it. And then Google is like, crap, we're going to fix it. And then the next day they're like, we're rebranding all of G-suite. That's part.

So it's called Google Workspace Now. They added like a new tier for small businesses. They changed all their icons. And so I wrote this thing. I was like, here's the rename. Here's why they want to make you to not have to open up new tabs anymore. So everything works inside everything else. And they're changing the icons.

And I bet that's going to annoy people. Here's all the new stuff. The end. Tom Warren says, hmm, that's all that's really interesting. And he just writes a post saying, they're changing the Gmail icon. That's all anybody cares about. Because it's like not a pretty icon, really. It's just kind of like,

none of the icons are good. They're all just kind of a mess. The Google Docs icon is like, why is that a doc? I don't understand. It's rolling out to, geez sweet, business users first. There'll be some, you know, consumer stuff. The confusion of what exactly Google chat does for consumers versus businesses will continue. Google's really proud that they sort of beat Microsoft to the punch on the

little fragments of apps inside other apps thing. Oh, good. They made OpenDoc again. Yeah, the fluid stuff is still like sort of in beta, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like available not. I don't know. It's called Google Workspace now. I guess it's nicer to say that than G Suite.

But yeah, you know, they're just like everything eventually turns into OpenDoc or Wave. Remember what? It was called Google Apps. I will say that they've done more to G Suite apps in the past year than they had like the three years prior. But there's a new guy in charge, right, Javier? Started to improve the iPad app a little bit. Yeah, there's a new guy.

Javier Saltero. Yeah, yeah. So he's done a bunch. They're moving forward. And yeah, so there you go. That's what's happening. You're going to have a new Gmail logo. It's connected to a massive re-arcontracting of the entire product.

It's not my fault. But you knew this is coming when they put meat on the Gmail app, right? We begin where we end with an obvious antitrust violation from Google. Exactly. Okay, that's it. This time, we are actually way long. So we got to wrap this up. I want to call out two more stories.

You might have heard about SPAC's special purpose acquisition vehicle, the hottest tech boondogle going. It's how companies are going public without having no public. It is wild. Liz Lapato wrote a great explainer of it. It's very fun. I encourage you to read it. The interview you're only lightly interested in business.

It's just Lizette or best. So just go read it. And I have to call out this interview, Jake Kastranakis did. If you're on TikTok, you have probably just heard one of these beats. The guy behind all the most. viral beats on TikTok. Literally, he's named himself Ricky Desktop, which is an amazing name. He's 22. And the way he talks about being famous on TikTok is the most calculated shit I have ever heard. It is incredible. It's like restored my faith in humanity that the kids are like,

I'm going to get famous. I know what to do. I'm put water drop sounds before the beats. So famous TikTok dancers can do a woe. Like that's how he's thinking about it. It is wild. I encourage you to read it. It just a side of TikTok that hasn't been explored and just a, like a great interview with a hilarious character, Ricky Desktop, my new hero. Check that out in the site. You can tweet at us, Dieter's at Backlund. Dan is at DC Seafurt. I'm at Reckless. Dieter, you got another one coming on Tuesday? Yeah, we are going to be talking to a guy you might have heard of. His name is Marquez Brownlee. He does a YouTube channel. He's like a young upstart. Yeah, yeah. So I'm looking forward to that. That'll be on Tuesday. That's great. And then obviously,

Apple event, Prime Day, review season continues. Big week next week. Eventually, there's going to be election, too. It's like some little minor news in the background. Just a lot going on

through October. We're trying to get through it every day. But we'll see you next week. We'll be a big one. That's it. Rock and roll. Go vote.