The Vergecast - Emulators are taking over the App Store

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss third-party iPhone app stores, game emulators, Google Android and hardware team restructuring, the latest TikTok news, and more. Further reading: Third-party iPhone app store AltStore PAL is now live in Europe The free Delta game emulator for iPhones is live on Apple’s App Store A new NES emulator was briefly available on the Apple App Store The first Apple-approved emulator for the iPhone has arrived... and been pulled Apple opens the App Store to retro game emulators Google is combining its Android and hardware teams — and it’s all about AI Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now AI isn't useless. But is it worth it? Facebook’s AI Told Parents Group It Has a Gifted, Disabled Child Big Papa Joe, world's biggest TouchWiz Fan - The Vergecast (clip) Facebook’s AI Told Parents Group It Has a Gifted, Disabled Child   Sony might have perfected Mini LED TVs with its new 2024 lineup Broadcast TV still exists, and now it’s sort of getting a built-in DVR TikTok Notes starts rolling out as a new rival to Instagram TikTok gives users more in-app ways to buy event tickets. TikTok divest-or-ban legislation could suddenly be fast-tracked in the Senate Report: ByteDance still has access to US users’ TikTok data despite Project Texas The president could delay a TikTok ban an extra six months under a reported House proposal. TikTok to restrict users who repeatedly post problematic topics from ‘For You’ feed Twitch’s new TikTok-style Discovery feed is rolling out to everyone soon Spotify is developing a remix feature to rival sped-up TikTok tunes Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to ‘inject a sense of crisis’ Boston Dynamics’ new electric Atlas robot is swiveling nightmare fuel Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If there's one thing this show is actually about. It's displays. It's displays. Yeah. Classic audio subject. It's David's favorite subject. If you're going to talk, displace, you want to do it in a radio show. That sounds right, yeah.

I'm going to make a TV show that's just. sound next it's going to be sick yeah i feel like that that's been done quite a lot i also feel like netflix just greenlit that for me just now congratulations sound with david pierce it's pretty good it's just you listing sounds you like i was seeing him like in a little little robe sitting at like a fireplace behind him and be like and now here's another sound yeah exactly yeah right he's like playing p rube ron he's like babies laughing I feel like I have to disclose it on the EP of a Netflix show Oh yeah, we got to this right away

You didn't even said your name and you've already disclosed This is great That was Neely I'm Nealai The Netflix show is called The Future It's great You should go watch it This is Alex Kranz Hey, what's up?

That's all I got David Pierce Host of Just Sounds with David Pierce It's an honor to be here Oh my God, I love your work It's good Yeah You know that

When you plug a USB device in to Windows and it's like, do-doop. It's a good one. That's episode three. Yeah. I'm just offering my, you know, you got a brainstorm. It's a spinoff for the Vergecast. All right, there's actually quite a lot of news this week.

Yeah. We've got to talk about what's happening. The iPhone emulators have hit various app stores around the world, which is actually really interesting. Google has reshuffled its Android team, which we should talk about. Meta launched its big AI push to compete with chat, GBT. It is true that Sony announced the next generation of its million illity. TVs. That will be a full hour in the middle of the show today. Then we got a couple of

lightning rounds. And David's going to do something he calls headline blitz with David Pierce. Speed red. I'm going to, it's the just sounds, but it's me screaming headlines at you about TikTok. It's going to be incredible. I also, I just want to, I'm going to try to summon some energy in the world. It appears not today, but there might be a lightning round sponsor in the future. So if you could, everyone, Listening could just... Send us the good vibes. We're going to make it happen.

Yeah. It's a guy named Steve. He gave me 20 bucks. I love Steve. Thanks for the 20. It's not Steve. Sorry, Steve. Okay, let's talk about emulators on the app store.

This is a big deal. So if you've been listening to Vurchas, you know, the Europeans did some regulating as they want to do. They basically said, you have to allow other app stores in Europe on iOS devices. Those other app stores started appearing. one launched this week, Alt Store Pal. What's the first thing these alternative app stores want to allow? Game emulators.

It's the thing people want. There's been a little bit of back and forth about which emulators are going up first, which ones aren't. Apple responds to this by saying, you know what? We are going to allow emulators in our app store now, because we don't want people installing these other app stores. That means emulators have come to the Apple-run iOS App Store, the first good one called Delta.

is out, it's been 10 years in the making, basically. Riley Testout, the developer isn't cranking away on it in various ways, gray area ways for 10 years. It's here. People are playing it and they're loving it. It's good. David, you've been tracking this all very closely. What's the vibe?

Yeah, I'm just looking to see if this app is still the number one app in the app store. It is, in fact, still the number one app in the app store. So it was like two weeks ago, as you're hearing this on Friday, I think two weeks to the day since Apple did what it likes to do in these cases, which is just sort of update a support page without really telling anybody. But there are people watching these things. And basically, over the last five days, really,

we got the first Apple emulator, which showed up in the app store and then fairly quickly was revealed to be a clone of the old version of Delta, which was an app called GBA4 iOS, spelled just like it sounds, really pulls off the tongue. And it quickly got, pulled from the app store and then another one came out I think it was called Bimmy it was out for a minute and then the developer pulled it out of what the developer said was fear which we should come back to which I think is fascinating and then like you said Delta came out we've talked to Riley on this show before he was on the show last fall talking about emulators he's been working on this forever and at one point a few years ago thought he was going to be in the app store and then that got ripped away and has come up with I would say increasingly creative ways if you want to do some more

to get this thing out. As soon as the announcement came out that third-party app stores were going to be allowed, he announced he's been working on one. Like, this was always the plan. And then I think it seems like basically just out of nowhere, Apple was like,

yeah, you're cool, you can do this. And he was like, sick, I've been building this for 10 years. Here it is. And it is like, I mean, it is a remarkably good app. For what it does, we can talk about the legality of ROMs and emulation. We should talk about all of that.

I did a decoder episode with Sean Hollister on all of this, like two weeks ago. It was very good. But it's just so funny. This is like a version 10 app that just showed up on the app store all at once. Like I think I can say this without getting me or Riley in trouble. This thing has been in test flight for a very long time because there's a lot less review on test flight.

You can just test apps in beta. Some people can have them. I have had it. It's like it's out there. And now all of a sudden he was able to just flip the switch and it is the number one app in the app store. So much pent up demand for something like this. It's fascinating.

So we should talk about the legality of it, Alex. I know you've been tracking a lot of that stuff over time. There's a war on emulators generally occurring. Yeah, yeah. Nintendo, for the longest time, was like, you know what, you do you, because the emulator audience, I think, was fairly small. And I think they have been kind of probably dreading and looking at this moment and knowing it was going to happen at some point.

Because you can get them on Android and go to town. But iOS. But it takes some work. Yeah, it takes some work. And iOS is like there's some impact there. And if you can just automatically download this and then get your ROMs, that means you're not going to pay Nintendo for kind of a similar version of it on your switch, right? Like, why would you do that when you can just have it on your iPhone?

I mean, so the answer for the longest time is why does Nintendo make a Game Boy Advance emulator and sell ROMs? And the answer to that has been they don't want to pay 30% to Apple. Yeah, it's kind of like, I think the more accurate, like, emotionally, their response is, you know that meme of your beloved? The meme of my beloved. Singer. Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey. You know that one of Mariah.

That's what I think of. The meme of my beloved sounds like a very, very inexpensive Netflix. show. That's just a couple guys in an iPhone. That's like a free-vy show. Yeah, right? That's on freebie.

But you know that the Mariah Carey meme where she's like, I don't know her and puts the glasses down? That's kind of been Nintendo looking at the iPhone for the last 15 years. Fair enough. Yeah, I don't know her. Go away. But if you put Nintendo games on the iPhone, you just reduce the value of Nintendo's hardware.

Right, right. That's the thing that has been the problem. That is the thing. That's what Nintendo is most focused on is they've got a really good business of focusing on the hardware. And they've opened up, right? They've done some more development. Super Mario run, I believe. They've got some good games on there. And they've even recently, as like, I believe late last year, we're kind of like, yeah, we're going to start exploring more stuff on iOS. But for the longest time, they've not been a fan of it. And they've recently started going after these companies again. The company's in like little groups. Yeah. So Jason Citron, the CEO of Discord is on Decoder next week. Look at for that. Discord just got what amounts to a cease and desist,

like legal orders saying delete these channels, these servers, that are hosting emulator groups, and they just wiped them out. Yep. And it's actually, when we talked about it, you know, he's like, the lawyers won't let me say. But basically he's like, we don't have a choice. And no one really knows how they ended up and not a choice. So you're just in this weird.

moment where this stuff has been tolerated because the distribution is zero or a handful of people in test flight who know Riley. Or illegal in a way that's like fine. There's a lot of arguments that it should be legal, but it's been tolerated. Now it's in the store. Like Apple's like, screw it. The last thing we can allow is the rise of successful alternative app stores because there's demand for these emulators.

We have to allow it in our store to keep people away from the alternative app stores. And it feels like this whole conversation is going to come to some kind of head. I totally agree. And I think this is sort of a truism of gaming in general that has held true over time, that people who want to play games will jump through a surprising number of hoops in order to play games. It's why all of the cutting-edge PC hardware is given to gamers first, because they're the ones who will pay for it and do the work to adopt it. It's why Apple allowed game streaming for the same reason.

people will go out of their way to do whatever they have to do in order to play games. And so Apple has started to pull this stuff back. But I just keep thinking about when we did an episode on emulators on this show last year, Chris Plant, the energy of Polygon, basically said when I asked, when are we just going to get Spotify for old video games? Why can't I pay 20 bucks a month to play all of these ROMs perfectly legally? And he just looks me dead in the face and goes, no one actually wants that. And his point was just that this group of people is so small and so irrelevant

to the rest of the gaming industry, that it's actually not worth the effort to care about them. For Nintendo, for anybody else, that it's like, you leave them alone because odds are, they're also buying your new games, and so that's great. You don't want to piss them off, but it's just kind of a live-and-let-live thing

because it doesn't mean anything to anybody else. I think the fact that Delta is so successful, and the fact that this has become such a big thing, is going to be a really interesting moment in that story. Because this is the first time ever, it looks like there is actual honesty, to God, mainstream demand for something like this. Because if you just download Delta, there's nothing there.

It's just an app with nothing to do. You have to fill it with stuff. And that stuff has to come from somewhere. And that stuff mostly comes from places that are not you dumping ROMs that are yours from your Game Boy cartridges, which no one knows how to do. And no one is going to know how to do. And you can just go on Google and search for ROMs. And they're all right there.

So like this stuff is just out of the shadows in a way. It never has been. I feel like notable Plex owner, Alex Cran, has. a response for you, David. It is a lot easier if you want to back up your carts now versus 20 years ago. That's true. There's a lot of different ways to do it. I think you can technically do it with some of the analog consoles and there's a whole

bunch of little tools and stuff. And to be clear, Nintendo doesn't care as much about the NES games and the Super Nintendo game. It's like when they went after Yuzu. That was because Yuzu was doing much more, like it was doing the switch. Yeah. The thing actually out right now that you can buy. Including Tears of the Kingdom.

Like before other people were playing Tears of the Kingdom, people on UZUZU, people on Yuzu were able to play Tears at the King. And this next part I say, as someone who owns the Super Nintendo version of the analog, loves a retro game. Have you played a retro game lately? So I'm watching Fallout, and I was like, I should play Fallout One. And then I looked at it, and I was like, I'm not going to play Fallout One. Yeah, it's like watching old movies.

It takes a very particular kind of person to be like, yes. You know where they really work, though? Is on the iPhone. Yes. All the games that look like crap on your 60-inch 4K TV look great in a little square on your iPhone. It is the perfect place for this kind of thing. But it's in some ways, right? I don't know this.

I just know this hypothetically based on, you know, the internet and all of the carts that I have legally downloaded. This is great. I feel like the fact that I'm, one, in charge of this operation, two, a fucking copyright lawyer. and three, deeply aware of the situation is all that. Like, I'm going to jail when I leave here. Yeah, they're actually sitting out there. But just for Neli, David and I get off. The Nintendo police are here.

They're like, Nintendo, don't. I'm sorry. I couldn't apologize more deeply if I wanted to. So let's set aside the legality, right? Because it is actually a weird gray area. There's a lot of parallels to Napster and ripping MP3s. And it's a lot. Yeah.

The law has changed. Maybe we'll come back and do a whole thing on the legality of that. Let's set that aside. One huge problem Apple has here is it traditionally has not allowed emulation of any kind. And now it is allowing it, which means an entire library of software that people like better than Apple's software is available in proving a very important point. Right? Like, Nintendo games are better than the games that Apple has half-heartedly supported for 10 years.

years. Yeah. And they are running in emulation. They're not coded in Swift. The controls are better. They're more portable. It's better. Like, the whole thing is showing a vision of what the iPhone could have been the

whole time if Apple would just let go. Yep. And I feel like that's actually the bigger problem for Apple and all of this. Like, the next emulator that comes out is going to just be Windows 95. Right? But it can't. That breaks the rules. This is like the parsing Apple's review guidelines is so funny here

because you can just tell the number of meetings they had to make sure what you just said is impossible. Let me just read you two sentences. It says, additionally, retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games. So much going on in that sense. The following sentence, you are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these guidelines and all applicable laws. Which applicable laws? Who's to say?

But the phrase retro game console emulator apps is so specific and so lawyered to absolute death, what counts as retro? Who's to say? Apple can do whatever it wants. What counts as a console? A PC probably doesn't. Like it is so narrowly tailored to just let Apple do whatever it wants and nothing else in the funniest way.

I just think this is going to sum. somehow end up with all the Nintendo emulators getting kicked off because Nintendo raises a stink and we're just left with like Atari Links. But there can't be a universe, by the way, Atari Links emulators rule. I had California games on my Atari Links. That shit was awesome. You had an Atari Links? Oh yeah, I did not notably have a game gear.

No. I had the other thing. That's a bummer. I'm so sorry. I had the ostracized. You had the one that I could only find it like the off-brand toy store. It wasn't great. I really wanted the TV tuner attachment.

We're going to come to TV tuners later in the show. We'll come back. It's all thematically linked. I'm just thinking about my Atari links. It had the little cartridges that were like very thin. That was so cute. The Xbox 360 is a retro game console at this point in time. Is it?

Yes, of course it is. Maybe. It's two generations ago. It's 20 years old. I think part of this is going to be these companies who are actively selling it, right? Like Microsoft is pretty active in supporting old games, right? They're very backwards compatible. Nintendo is actually pretty backwards compatible.

Sony way less so. So I think there's a real potential of seeing like a PS1 game. If you are Microsoft, you have a 20-year-old console, why aren't you putting that emulator on the store tomorrow with the ability to download games for three bucks and you're giving $30 a buck to Apple? Who cares? That is free money.

Some consoles are harder to emulate than others, right? Like the Nintendo consoles, most of them are really easy. In 64, super hard, even on an iPhone. today, it is really hard to get in 64 games playing properly. And I think Xbox might be the same. I need to double check this. But I'm pretty sure the Xbox 360, you don't see as big a robust emulator community around it as you do like Sony games.

And part of that is, again, you can just go buy those games. Like if you have an Xbox, any kind of Xbox, you can just go and play Saints Row 2 or whatever. Yeah, Sony is an interesting example because Sony has done a really good job over the years of making its current consoles. And I confess, I don't have a PS5, so I don't know how true this still is now. But for a long time,

there were a lot of PS1 and PS2 games that you could play on a PS3 and a PS4. Like, they've done a good job of keeping that stuff available and making it part of its cloud services and all this stuff. So I think if I'm Sony, I can sort of see it in both directions, where one, it's like, okay, this is helping me sell PlayStation.

So I want to do that. But on the other hand, I kind of agree that if Sony was just like, hey, for whatever, 10 bucks a month, you can play every PS1 game on your iPhone? Like, I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat. And it's just sitting there for them. It is true that some of this stuff is hard. But have you heard of the staggering power of the A-Series chip?

So, as you guys were talking, I was looking this up. And apparently there's only really, like, one emulator right now for Xbox 360. It's only for PC. It's called Xenia, which love the name. And on Reddit, there is discussions. People are really weird about it. they're like, yeah, it sucks. Or it's fine.

But it's apparently like one of the only ones. No, there's one called Zimu. Oh, there's also Zemo? Zimu's for the Mac. How could you forget about Zimus? I'm so sorry. We're all just Googling. We're just Googling this furiously right now.

The point is Microsoft is very capable of making the product. Sony is very capable of making the product. It is free to them because they already own the library. The demand is obvious. And the thing it's just going to prove out is Apple's way of doing things has unnecessarily restricted user experiences on the iPhone. And that is the danger. Because once that falls away and people are like, wait, this is better than when Apple is in tight

control of this ecosystem, which is what we hear, by the way. When we talk about antitrust and control, we get an awful lot of notes from people who are like, this is what I'm paying for. It's for Tim Cook to push all the buttons on my phone for me. Well, and I would point out that one of the really hard things about regulating that is proving the other way. Because a big part of what, like, the DOJ in this case is saying is that it would be better if it wasn't like this. And that's so, so, so hard to prove. And this, to your point, is going to be a very real way in which it is going to get a lot better very quickly because it changed.

And I believe, I don't know, but I believe that's why the emulator rule is global and not just in Europe, where Apple is, required, like legally required to allow other app stores, which would just go ahead and do this. They know, they can see the outsized demand for emulators. If you allow other app stores with more permissive rules, people will flock to those app stores, they'll get the demand, they'll be like, in Europe, we get game emulators. Why don't we get them here? Well, I guess we need rules to allow other app stores in the United States, and they're not. I think they'd rather soon be in a lawsuit with Nintendo than have any political capital to open up the app model. And that'd be a wild lawsuit, right?

Because a lot of these games were made in a... Copyright was super weird in the 80s around video games, if I remember. It remains super weird. Yeah, it's not easily sorted. So this would be a fight for Nintendo regardless. Well, it depends on who you're suing, what you're suing them for. Like, again, the things that you would map it to are still Napster and Grokster. Yeah.

In the Supreme Court and the appeals courts in those cases, like invented theories of liability. Like with Groxor, it was like, you are enabling copyright infringement. You know it's happening. You're marketing the thing for copyright infringement. Now you are liable for copyright infringed, even though you've done none yourself. Yeah. That's a bunch of steps down there. You've got to get all the way there.

I'm not sure that you're going to do that against a single developer. I'm not sure you can prove that case against Apple. By allowing these emulators on your store, you know, you're marketing the eye. phone to do this copyright infringement. There's a lot of road. That's a lot of steps. Okay. Yeah. It's also Apple is like the second sentence of that thing in the guidelines that I read is Apple pretty clearly foisting that responsibility on whoever is shipping the emulator. They're like, oh, if people use software in here that isn't yours to own, that's your problem.

We told you not to you've broken our terms of service. Well, that's why they pulled the one app too, right? Like the GBA for iOS. No, that is very confusing. Yeah, I agree. So IGBA comes out. That's the first emulator hit any of these stores. Okay, so not GBA for iOS. Right, but then Riley tweets, hey, this is a fork of GBA for iOS, the thing that I made long ago.

That I definitely never had on my phone. Right. And his point was Apple makes all this noise about how the app stores controlled and safe. And here's just a bootleg of my decade old project that they let slide through while my real project is sitting in review. Yeah. So he's like very irritated about this. Apple pulls the app, and then in a classic sort of Apple way, there's no public explanation given of what they're doing. There's nothing we can link to. There's Mac rumors saying Apple has told us on background that they've pulled it for these two reasons, one of which is copyright. It's so important in this context to remember that Apple's review process is insane. Like in all seriousness, like anyone who claims that Apple's app review process is consistent and has.

rules and make sense is just out of their mind. Right. And like we see this all the time. It's so easy for bad apps to get through while people get their apps hung up on absolute tiny technicalities that don't actually have anything to do with anything. It's it's lunacy. And so I think what happened in this case is once it became obvious that this app was just a rip of Riley's app, it's very popular.

This is a new thing. It makes sense from Apple's perspective to say you've violated. the rules by borrowing someone else's app. I think there's even the rule is borrowed in scare quotes in Apple's guidelines that they can't borrow your work, which is a very funny way to say. And so I think in this case, it's pretty easy and protected for Apple to say, you just boosted somebody else's app. You can't have this.

Well, yeah, and it was like, it basically had wiped some of the licenses that the original was developed with. Classic. Off of it. Classic, back faith move. Yeah. And, like, filled it with ads, right? Yeah.

So it was just all around like, no, this is garbage. And the guy apologized. We see in the app store all the time. Do you remember when Flappy Bird came out and all of a sudden there were 40,000 flappy birds that all had a million ads? Or ChatGPT when it came out and was first really popular. You could search for ChatGPT and there were a billion things that kind of looked like chat GPT and were called Chat GPT, but just had ads and would like steal your family from

you. Like Apple is bad at this and just continues to pretend that it is like in a, hold of everything that happens on the app store, and it just is not. Nope. So that's emulators here in the United States around the world, because Apple knows if it allows emulators in alternative app stores in Europe, people want them here. It's bad. So it's allowed them here.

Wait, can I ask a legal question, though? This is the thing I've been wondering about the last couple of days, is this has been going on. This idea that we now see what better looks like, and that could be bad for Apple. I've been trying to figure out in my head, if I'm Apple, am I, more worried about, okay, this sort of proved the point that the iPhone gets better if we allow this. One thing, now it becomes more legally dicey. They're going to say, well, now we have to allow all these other things because we've proven

the point that it gets better when we do. Or does Apple say, we've thrown you a bone or two, let's all shake hands and move on? Does that make sense? I'm trying to figure out, like, which is the winning strategy there? I'm going to ask some AI generation program to generate Tim Cook and Jonathan Cantor and Tim Cook saying we've thrown you a bone or two. Now let's shake hands. It'll blow up.

Like, we're going to blow up a data center with that prompt. It's an unimaginable situation. I think the danger for Apple is they will get forced into allowing more and more things. This has long been the danger. This is why they have fought it for so long. We don't know what kinds of things will happen in the European market because other kinds of app stores are going to let other kinds of things happen. So there's only one app store in Europe right now.

It's by Riley Testout. It is called Alt Store Pal. It's going to launch with Delta, obviously. And this clipboard manager app clip, which is a type of app that is forbidden by Apple in the regular app store because a clipboard manager can see all the things that you're copying and pasting and da-da-da-da-da. Totally normal that have clipboard managers on desktop computers. Apple is not allowed it on the phone. So here you go. Here's this one other kind of thing you can do in the iPhone that you couldn't do before.

Is that going to be enough to turn the tide of regulation around? I don't know. Emulators obviously were. Yeah. Right? So there's only one store right now. Yeah. Yeah, there's only one store.

And there's no porn or gambling. And I feel like we made a bet. I think I may have lost a bet somewhere. How quickly porn. Well, I think Riley's been working on this store for a long time. Yeah. And he didn't want to put porn on. Give it a minute, Kranz.

I absolutely do not believe you have lost this bet yet. Okay. It's coming. The Second Division OS App Store opens. The floodgates. Wrong phrase. I'm sorry, boy. Don't cut any of that.

There's only one. The point is there's only one store we don't know. But the second, there's another compelling thing that you can accomplish with an app from another store that is compelling enough for anyone, any significant set of people to go download that store and get that app. Apple will allow that thing. It seems inevitable that that is just how the flow of innovation is going to go now. we always joke that just the hint of competition makes these companies behave, just like a whisper of competition. Here you have both mandated competition because of the regulators.

There's now other app stores. And there's going to be way more than a whisper of competition. There's going to be just people trying stuff because it's a land grab in Europe for iPhone customers again, which is cool. Yeah. Yeah. And that pipeline of cool apps come out that Apple doesn't allow to, Apple allows it so that people don't go through the hoops of downloading an app store.

Like what it seems is now obvious, and I'm so curious how far this will go, is that it is more important to Apple to keep you in the app store than to keep its rules about the app store. Oh, yeah. Like Apple will bend massively as long as you stay in the app store. And it's going to be so interesting to see how far that extends. Like I am on record with like the Apple sports stuff to say that betting and and gambling is coming to Apple platforms in a way that people do not yet see. And I think this, like, porn, I think is probably a pretty bright line for Apple that it won't

cross for a variety of reasons. But, like, there will be popular betting apps that do things that Apple's apps won't let you do. And, like, how far will it go to keep as much in the app store as it possibly can is going to be a big question over the next year or so. I think the port is going to happen as well. I think they're going to do like, yeah, I think they're going to be like, oh, you can age gate it and then use face ID to access your PornHub account. And they'll tell a security story about it. Yeah, yeah, they're going to do a whole security story about it.

This is, no, I disagree. Okay, yeah. Because you just see too much porn on the subway? No. Although, here are two things. One, I was riding the subway in to work this morning. A woman was watching a horror movie with full speakers, no headphones. Oh, cool.

And there was just a lot of deep breathing and then screaming. just horror movie. And for a while it was just deep breathing, so everyone was looking around the subway car. Incredible breach of subway etiquette all the way around. And I was like, should I just give her my AirPods? Like, this might be worth the 200 bucks right now. Yeah.

I honestly believe that if you are listening to something on full speaker, everyone else within earshot is now firmly within their right to come over and press pause or rewind. We're all watching this together now. You just sit down next to the person. Yeah, we're all watching this together. And I can be like, oh, can we just go back 10 minutes? I missed the part that was happening.

You should be able to sit down next to them and be like, we're watching this together. Just do the double tap to go back 10 seconds. Yeah, exactly. Don't do that, but if you do, let us know how it goes. Probably not well. I'm guessing. Not well. Okay, that was a side note.

Here is why I think Apple won't just like let porn happen. Okay. There was nothing to watch the other night, and I did it. I watched Argyle. Uh-huh. Welcome. She's bad. We're just bad.

real bad. Did his hair ever fix his hair? It's not, I don't want to say anything about this movie. What I want to say is throughout the entire period that I was watching Argyle, I was trying to imagine Tim Cook watching Argyll. Is that just like, if Tim Cook wouldn't do this, it won't appear on the app store? I think that is as good of a content understanding for Apple as anything. And you're like, this is about as far as he's going to go. Yeah. Like he had to sit there. And then he had to tell Matthew Vaughn that that was a good movie. Right? Like there was obviously a screening.

This is a big Apple movie from the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughan. Yeah. Duolipa's in the thing. And then they all got up and the lights came on in, you know, Apple Park. And Tim was like, right? Yeah. There's like a part of me that says like that there's a boundary on Apple's behavior. And I don't know exactly what it is about the image of Tim Cook watching Argyll that makes me confident.

The boundary will never get to porn. Yeah. But if you just sit there, I don't watch Raghagh. I can't stress this enough. This is not a good use of your time. No, it's awful. It is just not a good use of your time. But if you watch it and you imagine Tim Cook watching it,

and be like, this is what I paid for. Yeah. Then there's a part of your brain that's like when the whatever Apple product marketing manager comes to him and says, all right, here's how we're going to solve for the porn revenue. Yeah. Like that person will just like get yeated on something. He's like, my brain can't process this. He's just got a little spring in his office.

It's a beautiful Johnny Ive, liquid metal. It's gorgeous. It looks kind of like the Webby Award. The design is obvious in its minimalism. But it's just a box on a spring. It's like, bing, yeah, all right. That's enough to talk about Tim Cook and pornography in the same sort of mental space. We're sorry.

David, I know you're covering it. Are there more app stores in the mix here? I think so. So the first phase of this, there's been a handful of folks saying it's coming, right? And a lot of it is gaming. Epic has been loudly talking about doing this. The folks behind the set app thing,

which is like a subscription to a bunch of Mac apps, they've said they're working on some stuff. So I think we're going to get more of these, and there's going to be a set of them that are like very professional and very legit and are sort of big businesses unto themselves. And then there's just going to be this crazy minefield of new ideas. And I think those are going to take a while from what I can tell.

It's like it's hard work to build one of these things. And I think in Riley's case, he's been running alt store for a while. And so there was a bunch of paperwork and stuff to do to get this working. There was the you have to get like a million dollar line of credit or something to open one of these app stores. Cool. But he was able to, from what I understand, jump through these hoops relatively quickly. if this is just a... Yeah, because Tim Sweeney was like,

here's a million dollar line of credit. I need this to start happening. Basically, right. And then if you're the Macpaw folks who have been running set app for a while or your epic, you have the resources to do this. But if you want to just spin up an app store

from nothing, it's actually pretty hard work. Yeah. And so I think that, my guess is like this fall and maybe even into next year is when the like truly weird stuff is going to start to happen. But it is going to happen. My question is,

is what is the next set of emulators? Like, just to stay focused on emulators, maybe Apple's not going to allow Windows 95. It's a Atari Links. It's definitely Atari Links. But, like, maybe Apple isn't going to allow Windows emulation in this App Store at the gate. But you can see maybe Alt Store is going to allow Windows 95 emulation,

and we're all going to be playing Leisure Suit Larry on our iPads, right? Like, you can see Commodore 64. Is it a Commodore 64 retro game console? I don't know. Yes. But I guess. Yeah, I believe there was one. briefly on the store.

There you go. I mean, what is the definition of a retro game console? Right. We could do another half hour on the Birchcast. I'm confident. But as that starts to open

and the library of acceptable software starts to expand, which Apple has never allowed. They've wanted everyone to stay inside of their user interface. And for good reason. I don't think these are bad things that Apple wanted.

They didn't want a bunch of weird flash ports in the iPhone in the beginning. They made very serious rules about how apps should look and feel so that the user experience would be great. I think that the time limit on needing to do that has long since expired. So now it's like what else is going to be allowed here? And you can see that emulation of various kinds of other computers are going to very quickly open the door to floods of other cool software,

which most of which, by the way, won't be monetized by like weird micropayments and hats. Yeah. Because it's just old software. I'm curious, one that I think will be kind of interesting is SCUM VM. So SCUM VM is SCUM VM is, is a lot of... What was that game? Monkey Island. Yeah, Monkey Island, pointing click games,

all made by LucasArts, which is now owned by Disney. And ScumVM is kind of like independently maintained by other people. And I'm like, oh, that's a really, that's one you always see anytime a system starts allowing emulators, the PSP, the Vita,

like even the Steam Deck. That's one of the first ones you see. And it's like, is it going to pop up soon? Are we going to get Scum VM? Are we going to be able to play the dig in Monkey Island? on this thing, or is Disney going to come around and say, hey? Yeah. We'll see.

Look, there's a part of me that the thing I'm looking forward to most is some sort of retro Windows or Mac emulator that just lets me run a non-creative cloud version of Photoshop on an iPad. That's coming, right? It's coming. West Davis, our weekend editor, post on threads of video of him playing. It was the Kirby, the Canvas Kirby game. Yeah, on an iPad. for the Nintendo DS, but he was playing it with a stylus on iPad.

And it's like, that's better than any idea. And Apple's had for an iPad game. Yeah, I was like, that's cool as hell. I love that. That's not great. I'm excited for it all. Little chaos is good for this market. Yeah.

All right, I want you all to go, we're going to take a break. You all go, just watch the Argyle trailer. Don't, don't do that. Why would you tell people to do that? Go do anything with your life other than watch the Argyzai Trail. I've never watched a movie where I've like openly wished the Apple TV had a 2x button. I'm just like, because I can't stop in the middle. Yeah.

You don't just like walk out of the room? Like I'm just going to go do laundry. I got to know what happens. It's just like a curse. This is why I watch so little stuff. Yeah. Because I got to know. And then I'm like committed.

And like now this is my personality now. Like I'm a different. David, I think we need to just find the worst content possible and be like, you're in it now. You got to keep going. Eli, I've heard of suits. All right, we're going to take a break. I'm going to yell at David a little bit.

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And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. that's w h a t n o t dot com slash sell whatnot dot com slash sell all right we're back for me it was the scene where she started ice skating wait who i haven't seen it yet this is spoilers we cannot do this listen sometimes i would say the verge cast is known for long diversions down strange rabbit holes. This is just like objective cruelty to our audience. I'm just, you know that famous story where Tim Cook looks at his lieutenant? He's like, why are you still here? Yeah. I literally imagined him standing up in the Steve Jobs

theater when that happened in the movie and being like, why are you all still here? Matthew Ravon just crying, running, weeping from the room. It's not good. I have so much to say about how bad this movie is. All right. That's a Tuesday episode. No, that do that on decoder. Get that. It's a full, we're going to get Matthew Vaughan on Decoder and be like, all right. So the big reveal of this movie. How do you make decisions and let's change that? All right.

Speaking of Decoder, there's an org chart change at Google. Okay, that's a good, that was a good segue. I pulled that one off. I was rehearsing that one. Yeah, I loved that. And I looked in the mirror this morning. I'm like, we're going to get this right today. Just nail it.

Yeah. So Google is getting a whole re-org. or it's not just Google, it's Android, right? Because David, you actually spoke with Rick. You got the whole thing. Yeah, so the place to start is that Google is a famously well-run company with an org structure that makes sense to everyone and is structured in order to make everyone produce good work.

We all agree on that as sort of the premise of all of this. No, Google is just abject chaos all the time. And this is like, in large part, deliberate. Like, from the beginning, Google's whole thing has been like hire really good people and just sort of like turn them loose. And it's just like a loose construction of smart people who make things. And that's fine as far as it goes. That's how you get Gmail, which was somebody's 20% project 20 plus years ago now. It's also how you get 400,000 messaging apps and all of the weird things that Google has built and killed over the years. But basically the thing that I have come to understand over the last couple of days of talking to people, including this. new team at Google, which is basically a combination of Google's hardware team, which was run by Rick Osterlo, and its Android team, which was run by Hiroshi Lockheimer. Hiroshi also ran Chrome, Chrome OS, Google Photos, Google One, and a smattering of other stuff. But it basically oversaw a lot of the most popular platforms where people actually interact with

Google stuff. All of that is now being smushed into one team under Rick Austerlo. the platforms and devices team. And the idea very much is to make all of that into one team so that they can run faster with AI. Like the whole story over and over is just AI. We have to do things faster. We have to make our moves more quickly.

We have to be able to pivot faster. We have to be able to build new stuff faster. We need to have hardware software and AI all together. We need to have full stack everything. Like Google, I think as we've seen over the last, what, 18 months now, got caught sort of off guard by the speed with which AI took over the world. Like Google built so much of this foundational technology and yet didn't beat Chat GPT to market. Like that is a failing of that company.

And they are now racing to keep up. And I think sort of smushing the hardware and software together, particularly on phones, is a pretty huge shift in trying to make that go faster. So I have a number of questions here. one I think Google was initially Alex's just laughing I'm just laughing I was like the speed

with you I've got some questions I'm reading this I mean it's an org chart I have a number of ideas about this org chart change but the core one is what you just said which is Google was caught off guard by chatchipa it's failing the company where it's been a year now LOMs are not as good as people said they were

going to be like the humane like even if you imagine a version of the humane pin where the hardware was perfect and it was fast. It's still like, that's the wrong bridge. Yeah. They just, there's no way for them to fix that problem. Right. And we have not seen any meaningful improvements on hallucination for any of these models, really.

So you're like, yeah, they were caught off guard. And then they were really worried that Google search would go away. Satya Nadella has out there been like, I'm going to make them dance. I would, it is true that Google started dancing. They did a little tippy tap dance. But Sacha and Adela didn't do it. Right? It's like, but that wasn't, Bing has not been the beneficiary of said dancing in any way, shape, or form.

Google, I would say, dancing without rhyme or reason. Not a lot of rhythm in the dancing happening in Mountain View. Agreed. And so it's like, if you believe that that is a thing that set them into action, that's the thing you're talking about, like, to what end? I don't know if I'm being completely honest. And I feel like this is the strange. moment we've come to in AI. Like, you had Drew Haustin on Decoder this week, I think, and he repeated the line that

Sundar Pichai and others have said that AI is as important as fire. Like, people just say that unironically, that this is the most important thing that has ever happened to society. Like, literally, that's a thing people say out loud. And is it? Like, is there any actual evidence of that so far? I mean, I would say, Yeah, Liz and I...

Fire, Alex. Yeah. Fire. Also electricity. I would say there's ample evidence it's not crypto. Like, I think we're there. Yeah, I think Liz and I have talked about this a lot. She gets like weird 2 a.m. text for me just being like, do you think that like AI is the biggest thing since the internet?

If Liz is not responding to these texts with AI generated responses, I don't know what we're doing here. No, she's always fully in the conversation with me. It's really nice that she returned. my calls. Thank you, Liz. But I do think that, like, AI is, artificial intelligence as a whole, not necessarily just generative AI, is a pretty big moment, right? Like, like, it is a form of automation that is, that is enormous, and it covers a whole lot of different industries. And that kind of big C change is very rare. And it is as big as big as the Internet. It is as big as when we started automating, you know, machinery and stuff like that. Like, it's a big moment. But it happens in fits

and spurts and stuff. And right now we're kind of in a moment. It's a technical term. Right. It's only obvious which things qualify in retrospect, right? Like if you're running one of these companies, you look at what the internet did 25 years ago

and you look at what mobile did 15 years ago and you say, okay, a whole generation of companies died at the hands of these changes and the world changed because of these changes. Like if you believe that AI is the next one, you kind of have to bet everything right now even before it's ready. Because if you don't, you'll get left behind by the companies that do. That's one side of the bet.

The other side of the bet is that at this moment, there is nothing about AI and chatbots and this thing that is that important yet. And so we're in this place where it's still, I think, we got that incredible pop of like, oh my God, I cannot believe this thing is as good as it is when chat GPT launched. And there has not been a moment that has surpassed that since then. Maybe I'm wrong. I would be curious to know if there are folks who feel like we've hit higher highs than that in terms of like remarkable achievements in AI.

But to me, it feels like we're still riding that one single high. But if you believe that it is going to be as big and fast and powerful as so many of these people do, you don't have a choice but to bed. everything on it because otherwise you're just dooming yourself and your company and your employees to death. Yeah. Yeah, and fine. I think all of the big high point moments

in AI since then, or at least the ones that have like made the news broadly, like broken into mainstream news, not just this show, have been bad. Yeah, they've been failures. Yeah, they've been failures. They've been swaggy popes. Yeah. Like, you know, weird, weird, woke

mind virus controversies like fake ones, like, just like all over the place, like, barred, just getting dates wrong, all over the place. Like, the thing that is notable at these systems right now is that they don't know anything. Yep. We're going to talk about meta as AI launch this week. I generated a bunch of images of stuff, and it just, like, doesn't know how clothes move. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's like, oh, this isn't that useful. And that's, like, so I just want to stay there for one second. Like, you're making this bet because you're like, we have to accelerate our, our AI moment. It's still unclear, like, what that moment looks like in the end. And maybe that the whole point is, like, move faster, figure out what's right and what's wrong. Osterlo gave you the example of the pixel camera.

Okay, I get it. But they've been doing AI stuff with the pixel camera. But this is his example. Yeah. And he's like, we're going to do that, but faster. It felt a little to me, and David, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, it felt a little, like Silicon Valley in particular is very hyped on AI, right? Like there the conversation is, what are you doing with AI?

If you're not doing something, you're stupid. And a lot of this felt like almost an response to those people being like, yes, we also care about AI. We're big. This is our performative moment to tell you that we genuinely believe in this. But it was really for that audience, not necessarily for the right. I think that's half right. Like I think that's exactly right. I think the other audience is investors, right?

To right now, if you want to continue to run the company that you, run, you have to tell an AI story. You just do. Like that's, that is where we are. It's, it's what everybody was doing with mobile 10 years ago is like, if you didn't have a mobile strategy, what are you doing? Now that, that thing is AI, right? Like, it's Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect example of this. Like, Mark doesn't talk about the metaverse anymore because nobody wants to hear about the metaverse and they sell shares in meta when they do. And so now they're telling an AI story. And in a lot of ways, the AI story and the metaverse story actually run together, but they talk about it differently

because that is how you win and you get people excited and you convince them that you are marching towards something huge. So I think you're right. They're telling that sort of same story to two audiences because without them they don't have the runway and talent they need to get there at all. Okay, so this was but the first question.

Okay, sorry. Is this the right goal? Yes. That's just the first one. And I think the answer is probably yes. Like it has to be the right answer. Yeah. We have to show movement towards this goal. We have to unify Google famously messy teams, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Google now has Google DeepMind, which itself is a merger of Google Brain and DeepMind, the CEO of that, Demis Sassabas, who's been on Decoder, and I asked him how all this merger work? And he was like, it'll be fine. Recently, some Lee comments suggesting he's not so happy with it. So, right, so now you've got Google research in DeepMind. We'll see how that's going.

And then you've got this new group, which, you know, You know, from a thousand yards, if you squint and you're hammered, is like, oh, this is, they're doing an Apple. Yeah. They're doing hardware and software and services all under one roof to make better complete products. They're going to vertically integrate everything right when the FTC is like, hey, stop that. Yeah, it's perfect technique. I mean, you do have to be hammered to make that claim.

Like, I don't, but you see it, right? It's like, you squint. You're like, oh, hey, then they'll do all the products over here. They still have a Samsung to deal with. like if Google's like now the pixel rules because we made the software custom for the pixel do you want some of the Samsung? Also, you just announced a bunch of

our AI stuff in your phones. How are they going to manage that? Google is very sensitive to this question. I raised this question to Rick and Hiroshi and their response was essentially, no, you're wrong, everything is fine, the partners love us, don't even worry

about it. I'm paraphrasing, but only just. But I think... I mean, they gave you a quote from the CEO of Qualcomm for the story just to be like, see? And it's like, dude, he sells chips to every, he doesn't care. That's right. Christina Moman does not care if Google and Samsung are beefing as long as everyone's

on phones. Yeah, it's all about the power of Snapdragon. Yeah. I think there are two things going on here. One, I think there's an interesting thing here to compare what Google is doing to actually what Panos Panay did at Microsoft, which is he was running Surface, and then he was running Surface and Windows. And the way that they came to see it was actually what we need to do is we need to make the best Windows PCs and then give what we make back to the ecosystem.

So like the Surface team actually pioneered a lot of things that really worked well on Windows. They did a lot of work on the handwriting stuff. They did a lot of work on detachables. And then essentially gave that back to partners who were then able to make better Windows PCs as a result. Can I tell you a story about that? Sure. I feel I can tell the story because it doesn't work there anymore. Okay.

So one of my favorite CS moments, I'm walking around at Microsoft. booth with Panos. And we're talking about that exact concept. Why do you make these things? Because the surface machines were there and the partner machines were there. And I was like, this has got to be weird for you. And he was like, no, no, let me show you something. Pano's.

And he's like, that's my hinge. And he was appointing at one of the partner machines. He's like, we, that's our hinge. And that's my displayed, blah, blah, blah. He was like, this is all our stuff. And like what we're doing, like, we're just spending the money to innovate because none of these OEMs can actually outspend Apple. So this is worth it to us. And I asked him for years to give me that story,

like in a printable way. But obviously none of the partners are going to be like, that's Panos's angel. Right. But I think there's something to that, right? And if you are the company with the resources to feed the ecosystem, you can kind of rising tide, lift all boats, that situation. And if you're Google and what you need is for AI to win broadly and for Gemini to win specifically, doing that work on the pixel and then giving it to Samsung, theoretically works for everybody. I say theoretically because I think Samsung has a long history of not being psyched about Google's situation internally anyway.

Tysen, I guess, still exists. I would not bet Samsung is thrilled with this change at Google, but I do buy the theory that if Google manages this correctly, it could pull Android AI as a whole along with it. Well, and you're talking about phones. We've been talking about phones mainly, but it's not just going to be the phones, right? Like, it's going to be in the TVs and the watches

and all the other places, too, where Samsung doesn't have as big a sharehold, right? Like, Samsung TVs, they sell a lot of TVs, mainly to Neli. But... Tyson, maybe. I love it. Oh, that's a good sound. Actually, the Tysen starts.

up sound on the TV. Do, do, do, do. It's like... Ooh. Just sounds. Episode five. But there is all this other stuff. And in those cases, like, yes, this makes a lot of sense, right?

Like, Android TV. Okay. Just before you go off into Android TV, because there's nothing I want to talk about more, but the raising success of Android TV. It's all you think about, I know. Google bought Motorola famously. Yeah. And Andy Rubin, the founder of Android who worked at Google at that time, was, again, is another CS story.

He was walking around CS and he saw how hard Samsung was skinning Android, got furious, locked into a battle with Samsung to bring them back into the fold and ruin Android less. Yeah. Touch whiz. And the deal was Google had to sell Motorola to Lenovo. That's what, that was the concession that Samsung extracted. to stop it. Like, it wasn't because I yelled at them about making bloop, bloop sounds and having, making everyone go to the bathroom because of TouchWiz.

It was because Andy Rubin was like, what are you doing? I will sell Motorola and stop competing with you directly if you real TouchWZ Beckett. That's a lot, right? And many things have happened since then. We've, now it's called One UI. Like, it's all different now. Google since then bought the failing HTC, turn that into whatever pixels we have now. Like, the relationships are different.

It seems like the tensions are different. But there is actually history of Samsung being so irritated that Google would compete with it head up by buying Motorola, that it started peeling people off. And Google had to make the big concession. Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, touch was sucked. Like, it was hurting Samsung, wasn't it?

You know, many people... It was hurting me to look at it, so I just assumed. Famously, someone has called this show and insisted that ladies love the whiz. This is a real thing that has happened on the show before. I forgot about that. Big Papa Joe, baby. We'll run the clip. We'll put the clip in the show notes.

That's a real thing that has happened. We've been doing the show for a very long time. Yes. I don't know if people liked Touch Wizard or not. I don't know if that was a good idea. I'm just saying that tension was there. And part of the reason Tyson exists is because Samsung wanted its own operating. system, it does not want to, it wants to be in control of its future. Right. And it has this

massive dependency on Google and phones. And it did not want that in TV. It's anywhere else, it doesn't want these dependencies. I'm just saying, you look at this and you're like, oh, you're, you know, you do your drunk thousand yards squint at this org chart change. Like, oh, they're going to, they're walking right back into it. I call that the 2 a.m. Liz text squint. Yeah, I think that's right. I guess, I think the thing that's the thing that is different from 10 years ago is like, where are you gonna go? Like, Samsung knows Tysin

is not a move at this point. There's just no, there's no option outside of Android if you are a smartphone manufacturer. Samsung, if it made Android worse or tried to go to the AOSP route and build their own apps, like it didn't work last time and it super wouldn't work this time.

Yeah. And the other side is, if you believe that AI is the thing, you need Google more than ever because Samsung has been way out in front of promoting Gemini, it's getting a lot of these Gemini features ahead of pixels in some cases. I think if you believe in the AI revolution, Samsung is actually sort of forced to increase its dependency on Google,

not try to get away from it. I mean, what if they end up going with like Harmony OS or whatever Huawei's operating system is on, right? How's that going for them in the, U.S. Not great, but I don't know. I think, I don't want to just immediately say they're totally locked into Android, although they very much are.

I think there is, like, options available to them, especially as we have this. I say this, in all sincerity, make me a list of those options. Yeah, it's Harmony OS. They're just going to go all in on the Chinese market. This is why you need middleware and super apps. You got us there. Yeah, it was coming, inevitably. I'm hopeful for a more focused faster Google.

That's what Rick is saying he wants to move everything faster. He wants to ship more things. I think the best thing Google to do would kill even more products actually right now. Just reduce the number of Google products by half. And then loudly announced that it will just keep iterating those products for five years. That'd be cool. That would be a huge change. Do you remember in like 2011 when Larry Page came back as CEO and he did, I think it was on an investor call?

said the he gave the whole like more wood behind fewer arrows speech and then Google promptly killed a whole bunch of stuff that it had been working on like this is just the Google cycle right they're like they realize oh we're not making enough money and or the world is changing the first time it was about Google Plus was like we're going to reorient everything around social which went super great and that's why we all use Google Plus now it's just the same thing again right like Google sort of lets its company sprawl let's everything get weird hires lots of people, builds a million messaging apps, and then at some point you go,

oh, this is actually making us interesting, but it's making us slow. And we have to all point in one direction now. And that's what you do when you have to point in one direction. And for Google, that one direction is very much AI. Like they made a couple of other little org changes today as part of this announcement at DeepMind and Google Research and elsewhere. And like Sundar Pichai in particular is very clear that the message is like move faster and move towards AI.

Like that is Google's job for the foreseeable future. Will it work? Yes, because Google is a famously well-run company with a culture and structure that makes total sense. All right. Well, Google I.O. is coming up next month. Yeah, that's right. And I anticipate we will, we end up talking to all of these folks at I. Every year. So we'll just see how it's going. We're like, one month in, did it work? Just stare really hard.

And then AI, soon at Arpa Chai will say, yes, it did. And then that'll be it. All right. You know, we have meta is competing with chat, GPT, in our list here. They are. They announced AI products. They're everywhere. You can chat with a meta-AI on literally any meta-surface you can think of. Instagram, WhatsApp, for some reason. Have you done that? No, I have gone directly to meta.a.i. And only asked to produce images of Jesus made of spaghetti. The true correct use. Which it won't do. It will not produce any religious iconography. If you ask it to produce images, of a Middle Eastern man from ancient times made of spaghetti. It will happily do that.

But it's not Jesus, per se. You know, you can... It's open to interpretation. You can get to a state. You can prompt engineer your way into something that... I believe... We can look more Jesus-y.

So the reason I mention this, just to point out, this has been going on for months now, crazy AI-generated images are constantly going viral on Facebook. The last one, I think our friends, Hard Fork covered it. Jesus is a crab.

Just like hundreds of thousands of likes. Was there a shrimp? There's crab and shrimp. Oh, there's crab and shrimp. Oh, I got deep into Shrimp Jesus. I totally miss Crab. Yeah, I think Hard Fork was Shrimp Jesus. There's also, you know,

carcinization is like a real phenomenon in evolution where everything turns into a crab. And it has been true of, yeah, generated Jesus as well on these platforms. and then the one that just killed me. It's a quick post on us. I wrote it. You can go into it.

The Images of Jesus made of spaghetti on a Lambo also made of spaghetti. Oh, my God. It was so good. The last one I saw had 36,000 likes. Oh, my God. It's very good. And if meta is going to release AI tools, we've got to see if we can just close the loop.

Yeah. And the answer is no, actually, that spaghetti Jesus on a Lambo is not nearly as good as the ones that are currently on meta's other point. platforms. So whatever tool the spammers are using, a little bit ahead of Meadows tools currently. I like that. That's good for them.

Meta's got some work to do. Yeah. Mehta should always be a little bit behind its own users. That feels right. I do think it's interesting, though, that part of this also meta released Lama 3, which is the new version of its own LLM. And it seems in a very real way, like we have a pretty strong sort of four-party race right now between Claude from Anthropic, GPT, whatever.

Gemini and now Lama to be like the model. We're in this space where it's like it feels like computer chips from a million years ago when like every subsequent one that comes out every two weeks is like a little bit faster. And just the sort of speed and success is going up really fast. But these four companies are all like deep in it. They have a ton of money. They're very invested and it is kind of happening really fast. Yeah.

Although I don't know that it's quite like computer chips and that they are all bad in different ways. Fair. Right. Like, as chatbots, Molly White, who writes Web 3 is going just great.

She just had a newsletter. She's like, I'm kind of interested in this. Like, I'm more positive on it that people think, given how she feels like her cryptocurrency,

we'll link to the newsletter as well. But she's like, I asked it to write this newsletter and she has all the results of all the four. And she's like, the thing about them is I told it to write like me and it just is scolding you. Like they write like angry schoolteacher

or that was her phrase. And it's like, Like that's the thing. Like, they can generate copy. Is there a reliable way for anyone to say whether the copy is generated is getting better or worse, even within a single model or between them? As a critic and an editor, yes. But I don't want to read it all. But you look at four columns of like middling work and you're like, I'm that kind of rank these.

Yeah. They're all garbage. All of you get D minuses. Like, get out of here. Well, in that way, it's actually kind of an interesting parallel to the computer chips thing, because we're in the phase where they're all passing benchmark tests with increasingly impressive scores that don't mean much to real people yet. And the question is, like, is anyone actually going to make real use of the sort of raw

capability of this stuff that means anything to anybody? And so far, the answer is largely not really. Yeah. But I do think one interesting piece of the meta puzzle, at least, is it has mass of distribution and it's zero percent afraid of using it. Yeah. Like if you use a meta product, boy, is there AI next to you now. It's just happening.

It's just here it is. Just talking to you. Meta's AI showed up in a Facebook group for people with gifted and disabled children, made up a child it had and said it was very happy in the New York City of Public Schools. Oh, no. Yeah, that's just a thing. And someone said, is this black mirror? And the AI responded, no, it's not.

It's just me, meta AI. Yeah. It was like a story in 404, which we also link many links. Thanks to everyone. I'm just saying the most notable stuff with this air. And I was like, when it's going a little sideways. Yeah. I mean, they've gotten really, really good at making machines that are impressive at confidently lying.

Yeah. And that's. The goal. I mean, it's always been the goal. Yeah. Like, just go put a little suit on it and have it run for office. Like, it's got it down. Finally.

Yeah. Finally, a president I can get behind. Yeah. Lama 3. It's like, I'm shrimp Jesus. I'm proud to be an American. That's enough AI talk. Let's talk about the real thing.

Many LED televisions. Yeah, we got the TV. It's been heavy, man. Sorry, David. Policy updates. There's been Europeans. AI stands for awesome interpolation. All right.

So, Sony, this is the most important story of the year. I'm with you for now. Until next week. I'm telling you, there's a revolution in TV is happening. just lock in. All the TV makers are like, Neil, I get it. Yeah, because I do.

So at CSs last year, we saw a bunch of mini-L-D televisions. I confidently predicted that many LEDs would bring prices down and people would start buying bigger TVs. There's a little bit of data for there. There's a little bit of data about some other thing that I'll talk about in a second. Sony has started skipping CS. They've done it for years.

They announced their TVs this year. Sony slowly pulling back from OLEDs, which is really interesting. So the OLED I have, the A-95L, QD, Oled, QD, O-L, QD, Qadadadad, very bright, very colorful. They're just sticking around. No updates to the flagship O-Let and the Suniland. Wow. All of the flagship TVs are mini-LAD TVs.

They're the Bravia Nines. Sony won't tell you how many backlight zones they have. They will just tell you increasing percentage. incredible chart. They're just like 325% more dimming zones. Just more. Just more. Don't worry about it.

It's just a lot. So I've seen, and that's 325% more than last year's X-95L, which I've seen, which is a beautiful TV that only if you're paying attention to, do you see any blooming? Now, it's brighter. There's 325% more zones. I'm anticipating that there will be no blooming or it'll be even harder to see. which means you can now get gigantic, super bright LED bright TV with the black levels of OLED

without the burn-in problems. How much is that cost? And it's better for gaming because it's faster refresh of LEDs. Yeah. No, I totally am all for that. And with someone with a 2017 OLED, really, you cannot understand how much I'm all for that. It's also 50% brighter than the X-95.

I'm just telling you... But how much is it? They're not... They're not like a number that's good. No, Neil, I tell the people, tell the people, what is the cheapest one of these costs? The 65 inch is 3299,

which is not out of whack with top end OLEDs. Let's just, can I just say that, can I just say that price number slightly differently? Yeah. It costs $3,299. If you're like sitting there. 3299 is like, oh, $33. That's what a normal TV costs now.

No, no. You're going to have to stand the wall for 10 years. years. If you're out there cross-shopping and LGG3, you're like, oh, that's interesting. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. You're going to have it on your wall for two years, and then Neli Patel is going to come on the Vergecast in 2025 and say, listen, everybody, there's another 325% increase. Well, so here's the problem. So the 895 only goes up to 77 inches, and the top end Brabia nines are 85 inches. That's so much TV. Which is $5,49. I just bought this TV last September. Like, what am I doing?

This is bad. Like, I have to send her to college, right? You know, like, that's going to be a couple days of college by the time she's ready to go to college. That's like some textbooks. Yeah, a single textbook. Yeah, you get 24 hours in the storm, kid. I bought a new TV.

I'm just saying, these TVs represent a huge shift from OLED in this market. Yeah. This is when it's starting to happen. and I think that means the rest of the TVs are going to get cheaper. Like these are the crazy top ends that are supposed to compete with the high-end OLEDs. They have insane features. We're so far from the motion-smoving debate generally, like regular, you know, regular people, TVs, you just have to turn off motion-smoving.

At the high end of the market now, the TVs have built-in calibrated modes for the services, where the services can calibrate your TV for whatever they're streaming. So Prime Video Calibrated on the... the new Sony Bravia 9s will know if you're watching a movie or you're watching Monday night football and recalibrate the TV for you automatically. But it'll only work

if you use the smart TV function they have. It's going to be not talk about the details. If you want to run Bravia core and stream at 80 megabits per second you got to be so tight. You got to make some sacrifices. By the way there's some debate in the comments

of Chris Welch's story about this about whether it's called Bravia Corps or Sony Pictures core. I'll just clear it up. It's only a Bravia core on Bravia TVs, which the only place the platform supports 80 megatts bits per second pure stream. Everywhere else, it's Sony Picturescore,

and it doesn't have the one feature that's good. So Sony Picturescore is the bad one. Sony Picture Score is like, what if we made a not good streaming service with a small cat? Like, what if we made a streaming service where you opened it and was like, Madam Webb is the thing we got this one.

You turn it off. Yeah, I just didn't. I didn't redeem my credits from Adam Webb. No, I will say Sony does a thing that I appreciate, which is they just, they make the TV that is just the dope TV. And they're like, whatever it costs, no problem. But like, this $5,500 one is enormous. It has, what was it called, like, X wide angle for the viewing angle stuff.

It has amazing speakers. It's like, I just, Sony does the thing that I like. where they're like, here is the luxury version and we are just going to slowly make that one cheaper over time. And someday in 2016, I will own this exact TV in my house. And I can't look, I can't. It's going to take a long time. So that's the Bravi 9, the top ends.

So the flagship Sony TVs this year are mini LEDs and my 895, which we'll just soldier on. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's good though, because you don't have, do you have regret buying it? Do you have the phobo? I don't want to say it this time. Then the one step down, the Bravi-8s are regular OLEDs, not the QD OLEDs that I have in the A-95.

They've got all the same stuff, but you can just see Sony is, like, their biggest best, their push is mini-L-A-Ds. I think the rest of the industry will follow them. Then there's actually cheaper mini-l-D TVs. They don't have all this stuff. I think you use cheaper, generous. It's a very relative term. $2,300 for a 65-inch mini-el-a-D set is like, like that is as good as the X-95 is dead on competitive with an OLED, with a high-end

outlet. I think I need to just one in my house next to my 2017 OLED to see which is better. I got to like get them next to each other and see if it's truly better. All right. So I will end my gushing over Sony Solvism, which I haven't seen. I don't know if these are as good as I want them to be. I don't know what 320% more dimming zones mean. I don't know if these auto-calibrated modes that require to use their weird software

that basically tries to like ransom you into enabling Samba interactive TV, which watches your every move like a hawk to sell it to some snarling data. I don't know. All right, that's all just there. I'm just saying picture quality-wise, you can see what's happening in this market.

Yeah. Next to that is the fucking frame TV, which is like dominating the charts. And I just want to tell this story about the rudest text you can send me, the rudest text I've ever received. And I feel comfortable saying this because I post about it

And Casey revealed himself. Yeah. So, Casey and I have friends, as you can tell by the tone of my voice. And so, you know, he just got in your house. He's like, everyone's excited. Everyone's buying stuff. I just got in your house. And he's like, should I buy a frame TV?

He sent me this text at 12.30 in the morning. And he's on the West Coast. I'm on the East Coast. And I believe this conversation took another full hour. Like, I was like, I can't let this go. Something's wrong in the Internet. Yeah. Yeah.

You couldn't sleep that night until you get that done. I tried so hard to make this. fan by an LGG. I was like, you play video games. Do you like quality? Why did you want the frame? Because in the end, it was revealed that all of the people he was asking own frame TVs, including me.

I own two. One's just in the studio, in the podcast studio at my house. It just shows the decoder logo. That's all it does. Yeah. It does have a beautiful bezel. It was, yeah, sure. Sure. I'm trying to help you here, Neely. I'm trying. I'm trying.

The frame TV is like a 10-year-old LCD panel with a single backlight, no dimming zones. It's just a bad TV. Yeah. But people like it because the display is Matt and most people don't actually watch their TVs anymore. They watch TikTok. Neil, can I float a theory at you? That maybe people don't care about 325% more dimming zones anymore. Is it possible? They don't care about TVs anymore. I think the frame TV is the harbinger of Doom. What's the problem? What is the thing all streaming services are facing?

People are saying, okay, there's going to be a big black rectangle in my house. I want it to look best when it's off because it's mostly off. Wait, I just realized the Sony TV is basically like a cool gaming PC to the frames IMA. I've never, I don't think I've ever wanted to melt as much as I currently wish to melt. You have so many IMAX in your house, Eli. This is why it just sounds is going to be a huge hit on Netflix because nobody watches their TV anyway. It's just sound while you can look at TikTok.

It's going to be incredible. But I'm saying, like, I think, I keep making this joke that I could write 10,000 words with the frame TV. It definitely could. Maybe I just need to, like, rant into a camera for an hour. We can edit it together. But all I'm saying is you look at the market, you look at the quality of TVs that are coming, right?

There's a technology. shift in the TV industry underway right now with these many LEDs. I think they're going to be really cool. And then you look at what people are spending the money on, like what people think the best TV on the market is. What's still priced, you are worried about these prices. Go look at the frame when it's not on sale. Yeah. It's insane. You're buying a 2016, 2017 vintage vintage you know, edge-lit LCD pay. Like, it's bad. And they're charging the prices of an OLED because the display is matte and you can pay 50 bucks for the art store. And people are like, that's the best TV you can buy.

That's why Samsung will stick with Android. On the phone. On the phone. It all comes back to the phone in Android. Why is that? I just forgot. Because the Ties in App Store is killing it on the frame. There's a bad joke. Keep going.

Okay, we'll just cut that bar. Anyway, I'm just saying, I can just keep ranting about this forever and ever and ever. I like it, though. I'm telling you the Frameder of Doom for the streaming services. Because people are like, we don't watch this thing. We're going to pay a premium. Oh, you're saying because the TV is so crappy that when they do watch it, they'll be like, what's the point?

People are buying a TV intentionally to not watch it, is what you're saying. The point of a TV is no longer to be watched. Right, it's to just be there. It's like a binky. Yeah. Like, if I need a TV, I'll turn on this thing and I don't really care it looks like. The rest of the time, it's going to show me a picture. Is it that many people, though?

It is, I would argue, the Frame TV is San Francisco. of something's most important product. It is a product that has the most impact on the culture today. A thousand words. 10,000 words. I was like, I want to read all of these words. I mean,

when am I going to, I host two podcasts a week. I can't even justify to this group of people that we should talk about the frame TV that much. Everyone, I need to take a week off. I got a lot of emails asking for your 10,000 words on the frame TV. So I think we're going to have to just do this at some point.

Yeah, we'll carve the time out. We'll carve the time out. All right, let's do one more TV related. Just to end this segment in a place of hope and optimism. Oh, no. Are we about to go from Nealai's crazy to Cranz is crazy? Yes. Oh, no.

Well, because one of the things I noticed in the Sony story was that these TVs all have ATSC T.0. Tunes in them. Yeah. And this week was the big broadcasting conference in Las Vegas and AB, and everybody was making lots of announcements. And the big announcements, some of the big announcements I was excited about was from Roxy, who we covered back at CES and NBC Universal, Peacock, some sort of distantly related cousin of ours. There's no way. I'm sorry.

There's no way Peacock is a distant. Comcast. Yes. Is a part investor in us. Okay. And Peacock. We're distant cousins. I don't.

We don't know each other. I'm basically friends with Zoe DeCanel, so I'm good at that. Basically, yeah, yeah, it's fine. That's the worst disclosure we've ever had. I'm basically friends with Zoe Dachianel. That's the new disclosure. But they both announced that they were bringing new technology to ATSC 3.0. Right now there's a couple of channels in the country that broadcast on this spectrum that use ATSC 3.0, not a lot.

And right now if you go and you watch shows on those channels, it's just normal. TV. There's no reason to be excited. But coming soon because of Roxy, you're going to be able to pause and skip in your local news. And then on the Today Show, which I know everyone listening is a huge fan, you'll be able to do the same through the NBC Universal stuff. And so it's like it's a little bit, little, little, little something happening there. And eventually it could be something really cool. I still keep being. Like one of these days, Peacock is just going to be on NBC. And that'll just be the new NBC.

Oh, and they'll distribute over there. I got you. One day. The thing I want to reveal about the story is that when Alex was writing it, she realized that her TV does not have ATSC 3. Oh, no. It does now. Get out there.

I bought that tuner immediately. Bravian Nines. All right, we got to take a break. I'm killing. I've worn David down. This is what you get. This is your fault. My TCL Roku TV is quaking over here.

Oh, my God. No, that's just upset. Don't say you have a TCL Roku on this podcast. Speaking of TVs that are ruthlessly mining your data. Yeah. It's awful. All right. We've got to take a break.

We'll be right back with David Pierce's TikTok headline blitz. Okay. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that.

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Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus, and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual. They are doing well.

Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means. at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can

be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. That's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually.

Let's begin. All right, we're back. I would say that it's when there's not quite enough news is when our show goes the longest. I don't know why that is, but that has been true for 10 years. I think it's when I give you too much time to mess with the rundown before we start. I'm going to start revealing the verge cast to you four minutes before. Just live reacts.

We could just do a box of me reacting to you doing the Vergeass the whole time. It's rare that we get a show that's so out of control that we bring up Big Papa Joe. Here we are. That's a lot. All right. We got to wrap this thing up. We're just way, way over the line. I've promised it and now it's here.

David Pierce's headline blitz. David, take it away. I would like to just briefly catch you up on all of the things that are happening with TikTok. Because TikTok is not banned. it is still here, and it is wild. It's just how I would say it. So here's what has gone on in TikTok land just since the last time we did this show together in the studio.

TikTok Notes is an app that is coming out. It's only available in a couple of countries, but it's just straight up Instagram. TikTok just did Instagram, and they're like, here, would you like Instagram? TikTok made it. So that's a thing that exists. There are also now ways to buy event tickets,

like concert tickets and stuff inside of TikTok because TikTok hasn't found enough ways to sell you stuff. They want to sell you more stuff. I think that is going to work. I think like all of this concert stuff is going to move inside of music apps in really interesting ways. And I think TikTok is going to do it first and it's going to be really fascinating. There's been a bunch of like non-news news, news about the TikTok divestment stuff.

There's a new bill in the house that is being attached to, uh, aid to foreign countries that is partly now also a TikTok ban. So it's possible that that is going to move to the Senate much more quickly where they're going to have to talk about divestment and banning. The president has said that he's going to potentially delay a ban another six months to make this all happen again. TikTok has said it's going to restrict people who keep posting problematic stuff on the For You feed. It also was reported this week that all of this project textist stuff, which I would say we have relentlessly made fun of on this show for a long time, is basically just a bunch of nonsense. And that ByteDance has access to lots of U.S. users, TikTok data.

Twitch and Spotify continue to do their best TikTok impressions. Spotify is rolling out a remix thing so you can start to play with music in the same way that you can play with sounds and speed them up on TikTok. Twitch is doing a for you feed basically. I don't know how to say it more than that. They just did a for you fade for Twitch, which I think is actually very smart. The world is TikTok now.

Like everybody is trying to become TikTok and TikTok is trying to become everybody else. And maybe it'll be banned and maybe it won't. And that's all I got. I will say that TikTok trying to sell stuff relentlessly is just reaching new levels of weirdness for me personally. I found a solution. Okay. Okay. Here's what you guys are going to do.

You're going to go on TikTok and you're going to search deep talk, one word, deep talk. And then you're going to watch a bunch of those videos. They're going to be really weird. They're going to be nonsensical. You're going to be really confused. You're going to be like, this just looks like what Kranz's brain looks like on the inside. Yeah, yeah. And you like a few of those.

And then you're on deep talk and you're no longer on shop talk. Okay. It's great. When I say all AI right now, my experience with it is weird and bad. Yeah. TikTok believes I want to coil things that look like ropes so much. It's like you're going to buy a garden hose reel. You're going to buy an extension cord reel.

You're going to buy a USB cord reel, which I don't think you should be doing at all. It's just like, have you thought about reels? Buy them. Just buy them now. And the pitches are increasingly abstract and a little threatening. Yeah. Like, they're like, you will feel guilt if you don't get in on this hose reel deal now. Mine is a puppet.

It's already bad. It's already bad, Alex. Skateboarding on a leaf over water. That's all my TikTok is right now. And it's great. I'm like, I don't know what the hell's happening here. I'm just saying there are people out there right now who have bought like upwards of a dozen hose reels. because this algorithm is just ruthlessly manipulated them.

Yeah. I mean, I did buy something not directly from TikTok, but they should be a strainer. I went and got it on Amazon. It's great. We'll see. Do we have a sense of the Senate bill might be moving? Do we have a sense if it's going to happen or not?

At the moment, not exactly, but Lauren Feiner just wrote a really good story that the general assumption is that because it's tied to foreign aid, the Senate is basically going to have no choice but to talk about it. Like where we landed with the last bill is the Senate is just sort of studiously pretending it doesn't exist. That is going to be less possible now. And it's, I think it's going to get raised one way or another. Where it goes seems to be anyone's guess.

All right. We have time for, I think, two more. That was David's headline blitz. Everyone congratulate David. Please sign a note. You'd like more headline blitz in the future. You can sponsor the headline blitz inside of the lighting round if you'd like to. It's available for sponsorships at this time.

We're still, we're very close. Just everyone close your eyes and send good vibes for our first lightning around sponsor. And then we'll move on to the headline blitz. All right, Alex, what you got? Yeah, so Boston Dynamics, they make the robots. That's a good one. Yeah, they make the robots. Earlier this week, they said goodbye to Atlas.

And then the very next day, they said hello to New Atlas in the most terrifying video of all time. Yeah. Where like the legs did like some weird 360-degree hinge stuff. The head looks like some sort of lamp. It basically looks like a video game monster. And then we wrote about how it needs to have hair. We did do that. It was a good pitch from Alex.

Yeah. And I said, just make sure it's overreported. And boy, did Eve Pyser overreport the story of why robots need hair. Just asking directly some poor scientists, do you think the robot would be less creepy with fur? And the robot's like, no. The scientist was like, not the robot. You don't ask the robot what would make it less creepy. Don't worry about it.

Was this written by a robot? Yeah. Give the robot's hair written by a robot. Sorry. You should watch the video. Our former Virger Porter, James Vincent, I believe his post on the video was, it's funny that Boston Dynamics just leaned directly into terrifying. Yeah.

Just horrifying, horrifying thing. It's very good. Because it looks like a person, but it moves like a horror movie. This is probably what the person on the train was watching. All right, here's mine. I just want to end with this because, I'm just going to say it. Wait, so this is mine.

I just want to end with this. I don't know why I think this is so funny. Samsung is requiring its executives to come to work for six days a week now to, quote, inject a sense of crisis. Yeah, they got to get around that Google reorg. Yeah. Wait, so Samsung is like, we want to make this worse for everyone. So, right, they've had disappointing financial results, sales. are down.

They fell short of expectations in 2023. It's a crisis. We need to make you feel the crisis. The executives are now doing a six-day work week until something. And I you know, theoretically I'm an executive at this organization.

I feel like if I was like, I'm going to come to work one extra day a week, but it's just executives having ideas about how to not come to work anymore. I feel like our staff would be like, you're going to have the worst ideas in the world. Have fun.

By yourself. It's like, here's what we need. Everyone have more meetings on Saturday about how it's a crisis. That will solve the crisis. I cannot wait for the weird shit Samsung is about to start doing. Like just fully, they just did a buy one, get one free TV deal. That's a six-day work week idea. Like fully a six-day work week idea.

They're going to start giving away toasters when you open a bank. It's going to be incredible. They're going to have the wobbly guy and the lots outside the best. Is Bixby coming back? Bixby, full Bixby, but like got some attention. I finally saw the video of what's her name. Just crawling out of the water. Go go, go, Jojo's CWBixby.

Bixby's doing a country album. Let's see if that works. Can you imagine what a bunch of executives, unconstrained by the reality of making or doing anything, trapped in the office together. on Saturday, told it's a crisis and they can't go home on Saturdays until the crisis. Just imagine it's going to be incredible. I can't wait for what happens this year with Samsung.

We're going to get some cool stuff. Every TV is a 3D TV. Like just anything. Curved and 30 with AI inside. It's good. The whole rest of the world. Drew Houston on Decoder is like, we're going fully remote. You don't push your employees.

You get better innovation. Samsung's like Saturdays. Yeah. we're just going to stand over you and breathe loudly. Someone there is currently pitching bringing back the Galaxy Note, but now it has two stylises, and everybody is freaking out about how exciting it is. It's just a mat, like in the lead times on new products are long. Yeah.

So like four years from now, we're going to be like, what on earth? Yeah, instead of a stylist, it's nunchucks, and it's going to be epic. We're going to look back on today. Yeah. You can directly trace it. Just poop all the way back to that. It's going to be a good time. What if it's a laptop, but it's 54 inches.

All I'm saying is I'm going to start calling, whatever happens next, we just have to start calling it Saturday Samsung. Yeah. Just as a family, can we agree on that? Yes, totally. Okay. As a person who is an aficiondo of weird Sony, I am very hopeful for the opportunity Saturday Samsung, my brain.

Party speakers. Right? Where are they? It's coming. Where is Samsung's answer to ULT. Row. Somewhere. It's coming. What was that little robot we saw that could...

Bali. I was just about to say Bali is about to get a lot of shine at Saturday, Samsung. Bali is a main character. Go, Bali, go. All right, that's it. We're way over time. We're just completely over. I apologize, but I don't apologize because the feedback we get is you'd like this to be six hours long. So we'll do that next week.

All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. And that's it for the Vergecast. week, hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.