The Vergecast - Fake news, Touchbar, and the Surface Studio

Episode Date: November 18, 2016

The tech review season continues this week with reviews of the Macbook Pro with Touch Bar, Microsoft’s Surface Studio, and even an actual book that Apple released. This week on Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter give an overview of these products along with the topic of the week (or the month, or maybe the year): the problem of social media dealing with fake news articles that go viral. Paul sits down with Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor at The Verge to discuss it all. 00:48 - Fake news on social networks 05:44 - Interview with Casey Newton 33:57 - Macbook Pro with Touchbar review 39:56 - Apple’s book Designed by Apple in California 44:25 - Apple TV 50:20 - Microsoft’s Surface Studio review 57:54 - PS4 Pro 1:02:52 - NES Classic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let's start this party. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Theverge.com. The show is doing great lately. I want you to know this. You, the listeners, have multiplied a number quite significantly. Take a minute before we begin the show. And ask yourself why. Why do you keep a whole minute, though, 60.

A whole minute. We're just going to count one. No, anyway, whatever. It's the Vergecast. I'm Neilie Patel. Paul Miller's here. Hello. Deeder Bohn is here.

Howdy? We're going to talk about technology. We're going to talk about culture. I got to say last week, we very explicitly avoided politics and policy. But it's been a whole week of president-elect Donald J. Trump. And it's going to be a little bit unavoidable. Jumping in the deep end. Just going for it.

There's a lot to talk about, though. But I think we should start at the start. I think it's been the biggest news of the week since the election. We're going to come out of a couple different ways. We should start with it. It's Facebook and fake news is one of the dominant tech stories to come out of the election. And if you haven't been looking for it because it's not a story that has like great appeal to a wide number of readers, but I think it's a story that's tremendously important. So obviously, as you know, Facebook is the biggest media distribution system on the internet.

You might not think of it that way, but it's true. Most media companies rely on Facebook to distribute their content to get page views. There are entire brands that their entire strategy is based on Facebook. Facebook actually pays money to some media brands. They pay for Facebook live. So if you watch Facebook Live, our parent company, Vox Media, has a deal by which Facebook pays Vox Media to produce some amount of Facebook lives every month. We obviously run Circuit Breaker, Paul run Circuit Breaker with Ashley and Micah.

When we developed it, it has a Facebook distribution first strategy. We obviously get traffic from all kinds of other places. So Facebook- A lot of Facebook. Facebook is an enormously important tech and media company. Facebook thinks of itself as a tech company without the obfuscary. and responsibilities of a media company. So Mark Zuckerberg is out there in the world saying we're not a media company, we're a tech company. And one thing that's true that's happening right now is that a lot of fake news that was related to the election that is directly referential to the election. And we have no way of knowing, but it feels like may have influenced many voters is being distributed on Facebook. So what the most famous example is there's a fake story about the Pope endorsing Donald Trump, which has like a million shares on it. And I got spread on Facebook. Facebook and Facebook has no great tools to take it down or block it. It is complicated.

Or do they have the tools? Yeah, I mean, Facebook has the tools to literally create virtual realities. Right? They have the tools to wrap your brain in a simulation of another world. And here we are, disclosure. I disclosed the Vox Media thing. I also got to disclose that my wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. Sure.

There it is. So it's a big story. It is one of, I think, the most important stories in tech right now. And it's not just related to Facebook. It's related to Twitter. It's related to basically all of the platforms that now really truly control how media is distributed. And there was a time when fake news got distributed in email forwards. In fact, I got one from my parents last night. Nice. About the 28th Amendment. It's like a famous email hoax. It's been around like since 1992. The 28th Amendment. The 28th Amendment, it's about passing, it's so close to passing guys. And if you just forward this to 10 people, then Bill Gates will give you a dollar. Bill Gates will give you a dollar and Congress will pass a law stating that all,

Congress can make no law that doesn't apply to themselves as Congress people, which will keep them from doing all kinds of things. Snopes, Snopes says a mixture of truth. It's from 2009. Oh, yeah. But no, but the earliest version. Yeah, I read the Snopes. It's great.

By the way, Snopes, time of their lives. This is what they were made for. Like, Facebook should just buy Snopes. I need a Gmail plug-in that anytime I get an email from somebody, namely my parents, it automatically does a Snopes search and then gives me a button to click to reply to just send back the Snopes article. Just like, you got this story. Click this button to send the Snopes article back. That would be great. That should be built into every email client.

The Snopes button. it's a big theme. And if you look at how money in the media has shifted, newspapers are, unless you're the Wall Street Journal, or actually not the Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal just laid a bunch of people off. If you're the New York Times, your subscriptions are going up. If you're the Washington Post, you just got bought by Jeff Bezos. Doesn't matter. So you're fine. Yeah. Jeff is going to keep you in business. Every other print newspaper and a bunch of print magazines and print companies are losing money because the audiences are online and the audiences online are coming at you through Google and Facebook. And all of the print newspapers. profit from the media industry, the print media industry, has moved from the print companies to Google and Facebook. Like, it's a huge shift in money. So it's the incoming traffic from Google and Facebook. Yeah. And Google runs the world's biggest ad network and DFP.

Facebook obviously has its own big ad server. They have better ad targeting, right? They obviously have better ad technology than Condé Nest, whatever, or your local paper. So if they've taken all the money, do they have to take some of their responsibility to police the news. Paul, you actually sat down, Casey Newton, who's one of our great senior reporters, has been on the Facebook beat forever, and you sat down with him and talked about fake news a little bit. Yes, we had an excellent conversation. I would like to play it for you right now. Snopes.

Paul. Casey. How are you? Hey, I just came across a story on my Facebook feed that says, you're not a technology reporter. You're actually a bear living in the woods. And it has over 80,000 shares. I just shared it with all my friends. But I thought after sharing it with everybody that I would try to get to the bottom of it and see if it's really true. You are not unlike many Americans, Paul.

Okay. So, yeah, it's all over, well, it's all over my Facebook feed is all these stories about fake news and what Facebook is doing about it or not doing about it. What Google is doing about it. So yeah, can you, how did this even become an issue? Sure. So in the aftermath of our recent presidential election here in the United States, an election that had a result that left a lot of people stunned, people started to ask the question, well, you know, why did the population seem to react so much differently than the polls suggested that they were going to? And one explanation that at least some have turned to is that in the run-up to the election, a huge number of totally made-up stories about the candidates started to flourish. on two platforms in particular, one being Facebook, the other being Google. Facebook is a place where, at least according to the Pew Center,

44% of Americans get at least some of their news. And according to an analysis that BuzzFeed did, the most shared stories from the 20 biggest sort of fake news and so-called satire websites got way more engagement, or significantly more engagement, I should say, then stories shared by reputable outlets that were reporting the facts. So, for example, a story that falsely said that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump went crazy viral while stories suggesting that Trump is a racist nightmare may be performed less well.

And so now there's a lot of soul searching going on in the media about kind of how this happened and whether and what Facebook and also Google, which of course has a news platform of its own, should do about it. So, yeah, so there's this rumor that Facebook maybe had a tool that would, like, identify fake news, but they didn't want to deploy it. And there's also a rumor that there's, like, an internal rogue team that is working on something. Like, do you think, what do you think about that stuff? I have no idea. Yeah. Because it's all speculative.

Again, what is truth? Well, it's a great question. Hard to answer. Turns out, you know, the outlets who have reported those pieces of information are pretty reputable, and I do not disbelieve them. I should also say I have not been able to independently confirm the things that they reported. I've spent the past week talking to current and former employees at Facebook, and the people I've talked to you there say that the company sort of does take this seriously, but it's more complicated than a lot of people seem to believe that it is, but that in any case, they have not made changes to the algorithm or rejected changes to the algorithm based on how those might affect one political party. Now, at the same time, it is the case that, again, according to a different BuzzFeed analysis, conservative-leaning sites published more totally false news than less left-leaning made-up news sites. And so were Facebook to take some kind of significant action to eliminate fake news from Facebook

altogether or prevent it from spreading in some way, that likely would have an outsize effect on those conservative-leaning sites? And then there would be the second-order effect where if you are a conservative and you use Facebook and you started to feel like Facebook was not showing you the kind of news and information and entertainment that you wanted to see, it could break Facebook because you would just abandon the platform and maybe you would go start a kind of fair and balanced social network of your own. So if your Facebook, your number one goal in all of this is to just maintain the perception of absolute neutrality on your platform.

And so I think whatever Facebook does, that is going to be kind of the prime directive. It's interesting. Facebook recently had this big announcement, I want to say like six months ago or something. so about changing their algorithm to disfavor clickbait headlines. Right. Is that kind of intersect with this? Yes. And it gets pretty technical, but basically they tried two approaches to reducing clickbait earlier

the summer. One of those was to rely on reports from users of Facebook. So if you saw a story that was clickbait, you could report it as clickbait, and then Facebook would reduce the spread of that information. over time, the more reports like that it got. And then the other approach they took was just a purely software-driven machine learning approach where they looked for common keywords and phrases, like you'll never believe what happened next. And they would sort of automatically prevent those from spreading. Facebook wound up going with the machine learning route, and they wound up

jettisoning the kind of self-reporting mechanism. And what Facebook says is that gives Modo's report that they built this tool and rejected it. They're actually talking about that kind of one method that Facebook had attempted to reduce clickbait. So again, it gets really kind of complicated and technical and nitty-gritty, but Gizmoda says, look, like the fact that

they didn't wind up implementing that particular approach to reducing clickbait, like, has nothing to do with what we reported, which is they didn't use it because it hurt conservative leaning sites. I guess my big thing, this is so interesting to me

because it's like, it's instantly philosophical. Right. And what is the difference between promoting and spreading misinformation, which is obviously the wrong thing to do? Yeah. And being an arbiter of truth and a censor. Yeah. And where is that line? What does the difference? Well, it is on one hand, just an incredibly frustrating subject. Look, I think about this a lot as a journalist, right? Any, it, If you are a reporter, you're constantly confronted by these questions of ontology, right? How do you know what you think you know? And for me, it often comes down to, well, somebody told me and I trust them.

And I try to only talk to people who I trust. And when they lead me astray, I post a correction. But hopefully over time, you know, my track record speaks to the fact that I work as hard as I can to ensure the accuracy of everything I report. There are other sites out there, though, that just don't take that as their mission. And so the question then becomes, well, should they be allowed to put on Facebook at all. And as you note, if Facebook says no, then that does become maybe a question of censorship. It gets them into some pretty ugly terrain philosophically. Now, there's a flip side of

that, though, which is what if rampantly spreading misinformation winds up undermining our democracy, right? Like, then will Facebook still turn around and say, well, look, we're just a neutral platform. You need to blame these bad actors, not us. I suspect a great number of people are going to be turned off by that and may, in fact, abandon Facebook, right? So as much as there's a risk to Facebook kind of on the right of this perception that it is no longer a neutral platform, I think there's also kind of a risk on the left if people come to feel like Facebook is not trustworthy and Facebook does not take seriously its power as a major distributor of news. Yeah, I don't. I don't know what to do.

Normally I feel like I have like, oh, I know what they should do. It'll be fine if they just did my thing. I have no idea. Well, look. I mean, what's Google doing? How are they doing fake news? So Google was sort of first out of the gate to announce something really important, which is that it was going to classify some of these fake news sites.

And if it did classify them as a site that was sort of trying to pass off lies as the truth, then that site was not going to be able to use their ad network, which is, you know, one of the main reasons that these sites exist. They're profitable, right? Google has like a database of true things, right? Well, in order to be featured on Google News, right, like news.com, there's a sort of rigorous application process, right? And so a site like the Denver Guardian, which if you were to visit its website, looks every bit like a real news site. And is that's a big, big problem with all of these fake. I used to totally be able to spot one instantly. And now like I basically have to assume if I haven't seen this site before reporting something that was reputable, I have to assume it's fake until I know otherwise. Yes. What's it called the Denver? The Denver Guardian. I mean, you can go there. And, you know, it's very savvy of them to use kind of a city name because it makes you think, oh, well, this is just some local news site I haven't heard of before.

they published this viral claim that an FBI agent who had been linked to the leaking of Hillary Clinton's emails had been found dead in a murder suicide. This was one of the most shared stories in the run up to the election. And some people say, again, that it wound up increasing turnout for Donald Trump or a diminished turnout for Hillary Clinton, right? And it looks like a real news website. And so what Google has said is sites like that were not going to allow them to use our ad network to profit. And Facebook came in pretty quickly thereafter and said, you know what? we're going to do the same thing. So, I mean, one thing that these, you know, giant platforms can do is to just kind of make it harder for these sites to make money, which then gives them fewer incentives to do this kind of lying that they've been doing for the, you know, past many years.

I'm still amazed that those ad networks pop up that story about, look at this child actor who died. You'll never believe it. Right. Like, there's some of this stuff that's been persistent for a long time. But yeah, maybe that'll help. Maybe economics. Yeah, but you raise a good point, Paul, which is that this problem is not new, nor is it limited to Google and Facebook.

There are these ad networks, tabula and Outbrain, which post the, you know, get rid of belly fat with this one weird trick style headlines. And many websites, including perhaps some that we work for, use them because they generate a lot of money. And these sites will tell you all day long that they do their best to only put the very best content in their network. And yet you visit any single site on the web and what is in that box and it's absolute garbage. Right. So this issue does go beyond Google and Facebook. And unfortunately, the monetary incentives will always be to just post the most salacious misleading headline. Yeah. Well, I'm going to keep monitoring the situation. And I feel like I'm

not like a big sharer, except for stories about you being a bear in the woods. Like, I typically don't feel like I share and retweet or I guess I retweet like funny things. Yeah. Words that people say. Yeah. But yeah, I do think being a reporter a little bit, I'm not much of a journalist, but like, it has definitely made me just so skeptical about the truth. Especially because like even if you did a profile and it's not even hearsay, it's just literally reporting on someone. someone's life directly, well, you leave out 95% of the facts that you gathered during that time. So,

like, are you sharing the whole truth? I'm not trying to say that all of these things are equivalent and that Pope supports Donald Trump is the same thing as a slightly slanted story. But I think you're raising a really great issue, though, which is that one thing that every American can do, whatever citizen of the world can do in the aftermath of this election, no matter who you supported, is try to become a more literate consumer of news. If there is an issue out there that is important to you, you need to read more than one story about it. And you need to read more than one story from more than one outlet, right? And I'm not even talking about making sure you're reading articles from every side of the political spectrum. You can read the same article from three sites

that align with your political worldview, but at least expose yourself to to the chance that somebody got it wrong. If you want to gain a fuller understanding of what is going on in this world, you need to read more, you need to watch more, you need to ask more questions, and you need to think like a journalist and be skeptical of what you're seeing. And before you go to share it, ask yourself that question, is it possible that I am being scammed here? And if I am, I'm not going to put this thing onto the internet.

You may have to click on the headline before you share it. Just put it out there. It's a best practice. On that awesome rising note, I would like to thank Casey Newton, Bear in the Woods, for joining me. Paul, it's always a pleasure. I'm going to go hibernate now for the next four years. We'll have a great, great now. Okay, bye. Paul told me earlier that the interview ended on a rousing note to be an informed consumer.

That's the word I was looking for rousing. Rousing. Not an a rousing note. No, I said rising. I think it's true. I actually, that fundamental issue, just be smarter. Yeah. Could have stopped a lot of things in this election cycle.

One of the things I've been talking to some people on our staff about is like, I graduated high school in 96. The internet, the web in particular was a thing, was beginning to be a thing. And like, we would like have English classes where we would go online and research. And they would tell us, don't trust what you read on the internet. and give us like basic tools for like can you trust the thing that you're reading. And what's so surreal to me about the fake news on Facebook thing is literally fifth graders are taught how to avoid this problem. And yet we have this giant institution that is used by billions of people around the

world. And we're not applying fifth grade level analysis and like awareness. about whether or not a thing is true to these stories before we click the share button. I was thinking about that, that like, maybe it's Wikipedia's fault. It got too good. Yeah. Used to be a joke. Can't cite Wikipedia.

And then they're like, well... You still shouldn't cite Wikipedia. Turns out. Bring back in Carta. That's what I say. Well, actually, that's hilarious, first of all. Bring back in Carta. A CD-ROM.

Yeah, the whole thing. We should definitely do that with great, big, clickable interfaces and, like, slidy transitions. Bring back in Karta. Bring back in Karta. But, Deeter, you always talk about, like, the deals, like the gatekeepers and deals, right? Like, we're going to talk about Apple TV in a little bit. Yeah. The whole TV industry is made up of gatekeepers and deals.

You always talk about virtual assistance. So to integrate with Alexa or Syria or Kortana or whatever, you got to make a deal with Apple or Microsoft to get access to the thing. It feels like this is the point at which Facebook being just like a wide-up. and playground for every media organization, scrupulous or not scrupulous, is actually a net negative. And if Facebook made some deals and aggressively whitelisted things, it might be good. That is not what I usually think at all, ever. I never think that.

Switching to T-Mobile, I hear. Kid me. Do you trust the deal? Or do you trust the algorithm, right? Like, if you trust the algorithm, you know, there was a thing this week where the first result on a Google search for who won the popular vote was a fake news article. It was a lie. And theoretically, if you had asked Google Home that question, it would have gone out to the web, run its little algorithm, and given you the one answer that you get out of a voice

assistant, because it can't give you a bunch of links. And that one answer would have been a lie. Yeah. And so, like, yeah, I don't know. Do you trust the deals? Do you trust the algorithms? or do you just have to, like, go to the website that you trust in, like, form? That kind of bubble. Like, are, we have somehow regressed in our ability to, like, think critically about the media that we consume because, like, we are flummoxed by the opacity of these algorithms and the opacity of these deals. And it's, like, Addy wrote a great piece about, like, the intermixture of news with your friends

seems like one of the fundamentally problematic things here. Like you want to go to Facebook to see stuff from your friends. It's also showing you stuff from news. And then mashing those things together has you applying like the part of your brain that thinks about your social circle to the part of your brain that thinks about news. And you just get short-circuited and you end up using the internet like a third grader instead of a fifth grader, which is like we should be reading the internet at least at a fifth grade level. I like to think.

I mean, I can also make the death of the way. web argument here. I mean, this is going to be one of the darkest first segments of the Vergecast in history. There was a time we all browsed in desktop PCs or laptops, and we started either at RSS readers that we had picked ourselves from sources that we trusted or at portals of some kind. And Gadget, when we ran Engadget was very much a first destination for people that sent them out to all kinds of other blogs that we had aggregated news from. And you could trust us. At least we'd hope that you trusted us. Now, you're first stop or the a a a l.com was a huge portal yahoo.com was a huge portal is my go-to

remember the directory the directory that was a different time and but those portals were judge reports still exists a huge portal and those you knew there was an editorial organization behind them right both I mean that in both sense of the word there was a like a group of people as an organization and then there was like a thematic organization to the to your experience on the web as you travel through the portal. Now, people start at Facebook. People start at Twitter. There is no editorial organization behind either of those things. There are only these opaque algorithms. And there, and I mean, there's no, again, I mean it in both sense of the word. There's no group of

people operating as a unit with one mission to, like, show you good things or, like, present true things. And there's no operating principle by which the thing shows. Like, Facebook's incentive is to get you to stay inside of Facebook. That's why they built instant articles. That's why they built a video player. And they just want you to share more and more things, be more and more engaged. And it turns out fake news, which is designed to provoke outrage or, like,

confirmation bias, is it really good at keeping you engaged? You know, one thing I really like in the current media landscape is Reddit. Yeah. Because Reddit, wrong and misleading headlines get upvoted all the time. You don't click on the headline to go to the source. You click

through to the comments and look the most upvoted comment. Yeah. And it's typically saying, this is actually false or miscelling. And it's really helpful for science stories, for like future, you know, like, oh, new battery technology. It's going to fix everything. And then it's like a well actually kind of person.

Reddit is an automatic well actually machine. And even, even unlike the more conservative parts of Reddit, you know, like the Donald has a lot of people, you know, show up and say, uh, this is misleading. Like, I feel like that works better on Reddit for whatever reason. I don't know if it's the crowd, if it's the mood or it's the interface. But yeah, Facebook doesn't promote that. Yeah. This is going to be, I think, the biggest story of the year for these companies.

What is their true responsibility? And it is an incredibly difficult situation. I will say, oh, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, the thing to unpack to, like, if you want to get Casey Newton, who gave that interview with Paul real mad. Tell them you want to argue about whether or not Facebook is a media company. Because that's what everybody just wants Facebook to admit it's a media company. And that's true and fair.

It has repercussions if they do that. But it's like it's almost too simple and binary of a question, are they a media company or not? You actually have to unpack it and look at like editorial choices. And are they responsible for the stuff that people post on Facebook? and is an algorithm in effect an editorial choice and, like, claiming that it's not is actually, like, shirking your responsibility? I can make that all of those questions. In a way that probably would drive Casey even crazier.

Because media companies come in all shapes and sizes, right? So I think the question of, are you a media company is not one-to-one, are you the New York Times, or are you ABC News or whatever? Comcast is a media company. Comcast, another disclosure here on the Vergecast today. Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, right? Comcast, what do we know of Comcast? They started as a cable company.

They distribute media. They are in the media distribution business. If Comcast is your interface to television for most people, or it was for most people, you sign up for a Comcast account. They gave you a piece of technology, a piece of hardware that mediated your relationship to television, right? It could record shows. It showed you a guide.

It did all these things. That's how you got television. There's no way that if, you know, it was the election in 19, 1992 or whatever, and it came out that 1% of the television on Comcast was just blatant lies about political parties. We wouldn't be having this. Comcast wouldn't be out there saying, oh, we're just a technology company. They bear some responsibility for the things on their distribution network. Facebook is a media distribution company. They distribute media. Whether that media is made by their users and its pictures of your family, whether that media is made by news organizations, whether that media is made by whatever.

Zuckerberg's comment, 99% of things on Facebook are true. 1% of them are false. That's a crazy for any company. This is a classic internet thing where platforms do not want to be responsible for the content posted by their users. And if they take some responsibility, they get into a really legally murky territory. And it's a lot of work. Yeah. I mean, it's a classic internet stance and way of being that it's not our fault for what people put on the internet.

But then they take credit when Twitter leads to a revolution. or Twitter leads and activist movement, they're proud. They're proud of the good outcomes, and they say the bad outcomes don't matter. Well, yeah, I don't know. I just, I really, I really, I really, I really, I don't think you're supposed to know.

Two, two small things. One, this might be the story of the year for, I don't know if people have seen, but there's, I think it's a Forbes feature. I forget who did this. Two side-by-side streams. Wall Street Journal. Is that Wall Street Journal?

Yeah. two side-by-side streams. One is left-leaning, one is right-leaning or whatever. And they're so polar opposite. It's incredible. I would say the left-leaning stream is getting that stream of stories about how this election is Facebook and Google's fault. I would say the right-leaning stream is getting stories about how CNN colluded with the Hillary campaign and fed the questions from the debates. Like the right-leaning stream is not up in arms about Facebook. Facebook's algorithm, maybe they should be, or lack of filter for fake news. They're up in arms about media elites, as they're called, or the gatekeepers, this, you know, this great concept.

They're mad about us. They're mad about us. And they're mad about the times being selective with what they cover, even if they're not outright lying, hiding negative stories and promoting other stories. I think that's what the right is focused on right now. The conservatives are focused on that part of this media story. I don't think this fake news story is making a dent in that right feed. Everybody needs to look at this left or right feet because it really crystallizes this whole thing for you. Yeah.

I mean, I get what you're saying like a bunch of the population doesn't know or doesn't care or they're focused on another part of the media equation that they don't think is right. but overall, I think it's a net negative if the biggest distributor of media that exists on the internet is openly admitting that 1% of the things that it distributes are fake. Because that 1% is going to make you think someone is lying to you or the establishment liberal elite media is hiding stories because you don't see them, you don't see their lie. Like if you're unable to differentiate between lies and the truth and you see a bunch of crazy lies like Hillary murdered an FBI agent, You're like, why isn't the New York Times covering this? Why isn't this everywhere? I just think there's a larger danger.

You just end up in this zone. There's a larger danger of having a company like Facebook being in charge of what's true and what's false. Then there is a danger of people lying to each other on an open platform. I think it's just all about mediating that danger. Like, I don't necessarily want Facebook to read every post I write. You know, the thing that we do is cover Facebook. What if Facebook decides that every post we write about Facebook is a lie? It's maniacal.

It's going to be tough. That's why I think it's the biggest story for these companies, right? Not the biggest story for their relationship with consumers or their products or their rise and fall of the industry. It's existential. It's what is their responsibility. They got it. They did it. They're not hackers who dropped out of Harvard anymore.

They are the most powerful media executives in the world. Even if they don't want to admit they're a media company. What do they owe their society? That's good summer. All right. Do you want to talk about Lenovo Cloud's storage solutions? Absolutely. Let's read this ad.

Look, let me tell you some, Paul. Yeah. The cloud sounds magical. It does. But it's still just data stored on servers. Yeah. It's estimated the cloud, which is just servers, mind you, holds four xabytes of data equal to the storage capacity of six million average laptops.

By 2020, if we last that long, experts expect the cloud to hold 40 zetabytes of data, or the storage equivalent of 80 billion. average laptops. Most of that data stored on nearly 5.5 million servers operated by just 16 companies, but the cloud, again, not an adjuncter servers, isn't just to place store stuff. In fact, business increasingly relies on cloud for expandable computing power. Imagine, if you will, that you have guests coming over, but you only have one bedroom. Not actually that difficult to imagine. What if you could order an extra bedroom for a guest that you could just remove after they leave? This metaphor is very difficult, but just go with it. No, absolutely

have it. That idea is behind Lenovo's next generation data centers built for cloud computing. You just bring you a bedroom and then take it away. See, the cloud is all about giving your company the ability to expand and contract server capacity on-demand without actually adding more hardware. The November understands that on-demand access can give your company a tremendous competitive advantage. The faster you can scale up, the faster your development team, contest your applications. And that means you can get new product features under the market faster. But that kind of flexibility is worthless if your servers are down. Lenovo servers number one in reliability and performance because you don't have time for downtime.

I added that little click that's not in the script. You don't have time for downtime. Oh, but the line. It's a good line. Anyway, are you feeling handcuffed by private hardware software relationships? Lenovo Systems allowed to be a partner with leading software providers to ensure your cloud solutions best in class. Lenovo systems can even integrate with legacy software platforms to help you get your cloud solution up and running quickly. So learn more about how Lenovo is transforming the data center at www.

www.org.com slash datacenter. Let's talk about some stuff. A bunch of Apple stuff happened this week. You want to talk about the touchbar review, Deuter? We did the Macropro with the Touchbar. And we did. There's a crazy coffee table book they did. Oh, my God.

The coffee table book. So Jake and Walt both reviewed the touchbar version of the MacBook Pro. And the takeaway seems to be not changing the future of computing. Yeah. Just, uh, it's basically like if you close your eyes and imagined a touchbar review where the touchbar was like, man, fine. That's what these reviews were. Like, Dongle life is a hassle.

The touchbar is sometimes confusing when it tries to do too much, when it tries to act like just a simple function, you know, button bar. It does fine. There are a few moments of like, oh, hey, this is really cool. But, you know, the hardware is beautiful. The screen is gorgeous. The speakers are really loud. Yeah. So like the touch bar is useful when it acts like a regular set of function buttons, but when it tries to do too much or get too cute, it gets really confusing really quickly. The thing that you might not expect is Apple didn't do the thing that Apple usually does with laptops. So the things that Apple usually does laptops is make beautiful screen, decent keyboards,

incredibly good build quality, it's light, it's thin, they did all that. But battery life is a little hit and miss. Yeah, it's like, not great. I thought we were making all these sacrifices so that they could give us another winner on battery. Yeah. So it's all over the map. So like Jake

tested it across two different lap, two different 13-inch laptops and a 15-inch. And Apple was so concerned about his first test. They sent him a second one. Right. Now, the battery life on the non-touchbar version, the boring one, is like fine. It's exactly what you'd expect. And it turns out the internals are like radically different between those two devices, which is interesting. Also speaking to the internals, the speaker grill on the touchbar is like mostly for show. Most of the sound comes out the air vents on the sides.

What are we doing, kids? But yeah, it's like, it's just, it's super inconsistent. You are not going to know what your battery life is going to be and you can't trust it in our testing at least to hit Apple's claimed 10 hours, even if you're not doing crazy stuff. And that's not even getting into all the fetching about the, you know, sixth generation processor and the hard cap of 16 gigs of RAM, you know, et cetera, et cetera, which you could get into. I'm like, I'm of two minds on that debate, but mostly I sort of land on it would have made it five to 10 percent faster

if they had managed to get in there at the cost of like further delays. or it's like untested processors and the processes aren't even available yet. So I kind of am willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt that they made the right choices on the processors, although I do think it's aggravating that it caps out at 16 gigs of RAM.

But overall, the general sentiment, I've just been, I'm just owning this whole conversation. Overall, the general sentiment out there is like, eh. Yeah. It's like, it's fine, it's fine. I haven't ordered one yet. I desperately need a new computer. I mostly need a computer because I got new verge stickers.

and you rack stickers and you put on something. Oh, what am I going to do? What a hard life. It's hard. Did you talk about the last sentence in Walt's review? No. The last sentence in Walt's review is if you need to do laptop and you love Macs,

this is what Apple is offering, take it or leave it. Yeah. That's true. Not a thumbs up, not thumbs down, not review score. This is Walt's take on this thing is take it or leave it. And like that's exactly right. It's like sitting down for dinner when your mom cooks. Yeah.

You don't get to make decisions. Here's the big question. Here's the only question I have. Paul, do you know when KB. Lake quadcores are coming? Is there any? No idea. No idea. I think they should be really close.

If they rev them instantly. This is the thing. Yeah, people will be so mad. How fast are they going to rev them to that next gen of process? It's got to be a six month minimum weight. So can I hold out another six months? Can I get more stickers than six months? It's going to be a year.

There's no way they're going to rev them right away. Like I unless they're unless Apple is like legitimately freaking out over people's reaction to this thing, they're not going to rev them instantly. Well, they are like they are insisting that they're selling tons of them. Yeah, they do say that. Well, that's the thing. Like they are, I believe them. Like I believe they're selling tons of them because it's a really, really, really, really good MacBook air. Yeah.

The MacBook Pro is a incredibly good MacBook error. It doesn't seem like it's clear that it's a good MacBook Pro. All right. I'm going to get one. Fine. Are you getting at the touchbar? It looks like these processes are out. The quad-core cable-lake?

They're just not being used. No, if they were out, they would put them in the machine, right? The Spectre uses them. Intel says there will be over 100 different slim computers with KB Lake chips by the end of the year. I don't know, man. Spector, XPS 13, the Swift, Acer Swift 7. Quad-core or dual-core? Their reasoning was they couldn't do it.

Is it? Quad-core? Those are all quad-core? I don't know. You're saying that they said they couldn't do it. Apple couldn't put KB Lake in a MacBook Pro because there is no quad core chip for the top configuration. So I bet there's a bunch of dual core KB Lakes out there. It's unclear why they didn't just, I mean, I get it, right?

You don't want to have two different architectures floating around. It's unclear why they didn't put dual core KB lakes and all the mid-spec ones and then wait on the quad-core one. I mean, that's a thing they could have done. They could have released a bunch of dual-core mid-level ones and said the pro one, the top of the line, KB Lake, Quad Core, coming in X months. Shipping, right? They could have just done that. Nice. Right? The chip isn't ready yet, but we're going to sell this computer. That would be a kindness. But that would, that would mean trusting Intel not to screw up its latest and greatest processor. Well, and they've had some problems. Yeah, but then at least Apple, but all these people

are freaking out are going to be pointing at Intel, not at Apple, right? And that. Yeah. They just, their messaging around all this stuff is confused. So actually, that weirdly enough transitions me into this coffee table book. What's it called? It's called Designed by Apple and Cupertino. Apple put out $300. Yeah, in California. Designed by Apple and California.

We have it. We have the little one. It's two sizes. Of course. Of course. There's hubris and hubris Excel. So it's a beautiful book. We have it.

We have the $300. We have the small one, which is enormous. I promise you, you do not need to buy the bigger one. It's still huge. It's very heavy. It's printed on the nicest paper I've ever seen. Apple, of course, made their own paper. There's an interview with Johnny I, even Wallpaper Magazine. He's like, you know that we made our own paper. We developed our own printing thing. Actually, Tyler, Peter, on our video team made a joke about, of course, I bet you Apple uses their own paper. And I had to, like, walk over to him and like tell him that his joke was

correct that they had in fact made their own paper. It uses, you know, most printing is like four color. This uses eight colors CMO. I mean, it is beautiful, like the pictures of the neon colored Apple products in here, like the super bright iPods. There's a picture of the iPod socks. It's all just, it's so vibrant. The blacks or the blackest blacks I've ever seen. There are virtually no words in this book except for an intro by Johnny Ive. I forgot about the iPod socks. Is there a picture of the Magic Mouse charging? There's not a picture of the Magic Mouse charging. There's all these cool photos. Doesn't it end with the pencil? The last page is the pencil, which is a picture of a stylus.

Is it plugged in? It's not plugged in. There's all these cool pictures of like the tools they use to like carve the chamfer on the iPhone and like carve out the inside. It's neat. But I just Apple, the fact that Apple themselves made it and like not, it's just the most. I don't mind. 30 years. Whatever. That's fine. They could do it. It's not 30 years. It starts with the IMAQ. There's nothing before the, the first thing in it is the five-color IMAs. Not even the Bondi blue IMac. Yeah, which is nuts.

Like, how do you not talk about Apple design? How do you talk about Apple design and not talk about the original Mac? Yeah, I don't know. It's very confusing. Maybe that's just been covered some. It just starts with the IMAQ. It's all Johnny I stuff, right? It starts after the original IMac.

It starts with the five colors. Oh, not the Bondi? Not the Bondi. So here's my theory. It is completely unverified. I have no idea if it's true. I think Johnny I was like, you know what? I've done all I can do.

Here's a pencil. I'm fading. out and I want to put out a book in my stuff. I have no idea if that's true. Zero idea if that's true. Well, this is like when you put out of greatest hits, it means you're... Yeah, so James Barham, our great creative director, wrote a post about it, and he, his note was, A, he's a photography nerd, and he's like, these are beautiful photos. He loves the printing. You should read it's great. And he pointed out that the excitement he felt looking through those, like the first three quarters of the book. Remember the lamp IMA? The lamp, IMA. There's a great

I think you have the lamp, IMac with the wires, like how the hinge works. Like, it's neat. He's like, the excitement I felt in that section of the book started to fade as I came into new Apple products. Because everything's designed now. Everything's super designed now. Back in the day, I loved his post after you pointed out. Yeah, when Apple started out, they were raging against the beige box. Mm-hmm.

And there's no beige box to rage against. Yeah. Even gaming PCs are crazy designed. I mean, they look like Dragon. that will kill you. But they're crazy. Let's not say designed. This is the most user-friendly dragon ever created.

I literally, I bought a case for my own PC that I built. And among a shelf that probably had 50 to maybe 100 different desktop cases, I found one minimal one. Yeah. I bought the minimal one. Nice. Everything else was cool. It's just a weird moment for Apple. Yeah.

I just, I really, this book on top of the MacBook Pro on top of just a bunch of things they've put out in the world that haven't come to fruition, it just makes it. It's a great book. I get why you put it out now. It's the holidays. If you have an Apple nerd in your life, you feel like spending $300 on the finest custom paper, they'll be happy with you. I get it. But it's just weird that the $300 you should spend at the Apple store for the biggest Apple nerd in your life is not a technology product. It's a book of old technology products.

It's not the... So Apple TV. Apple TV. They put out the... Here's another transit. They put out the Apple TV. They can't get any of the cable companies to sign on to their guide service. They can't even make their guide service the Apple TV app, the home of the Apple TV.

Right, because no one's signing up for it. Right. They can't get Netflix to be in it yet. It sounds like they're going to figure out Netflix sooner or later. It's just a product that they released that it hasn't yet come to fruition. And I wouldn't say it's the best designed or best working television. Because almost every television product is flawed in some ways, but Apple's products is flawed in the fundamental way of not having that much television. Like they can't get through it.

The watch they've got PlayStation View now. So that's a they have sling. So you can watch TV on the Apple TV, but not from one of Apple's TV services, right? You can go to someone else's TV service, which is crazy town? Can I make a confession here? Yeah. And maybe the police will just come knocking on my door. I hope they do.

I stole live television the other day. How? Because I wanted to watch a football game. Oh, yeah. Seahawks Patriots. I'm a Seahawks fan. I'm a GamePath subscriber. So after the games, I get to watch them.

But I don't have an antenna. I don't have cable or anything like that. And I found this thing that it's like, it's great technology. It uses like some torrent style peer-to-peer technology to live stream something from Sky Sports rebroadcasting NBC or whatever. perfect 1080P great frame rate like very few glitches it just worked and it was beautiful

and it's like oh that's right I forgot that the best media experience is always stealing yeah that's really because then I like watched all the other games that I cared about this week on GamePass and GamePass is like some weird low resolution

it's like better if you chrome cast it from your phone sometimes it doesn't work but they're like their browser player is like garbage and blocky And it was just, oh, it was just so sad. I was like, man, that time when I was stealing. Yeah, stealing's great. So nice. This is a birch-cast motto.

Stealing's great. No, Dieter and I, Dieter, we're at the end of this, we're going to have a PS4 Pro because I think Deeter just wants to admonish everyone to buy one. But, Deter and I both have Sunday ticket subscriptions. The Sunday ticket is, their app is wildly inconsistent in every platform. Oh, it's completely different. Yeah. I use it over a Chromecast because I find that that works back.

The Apple TV one, it literally makes it impossible to figure out how to get into full screen. Yeah. Do you know how you getting full screen on the Apple TV Sunday ticket app? Whisper. Yeah, you just yell at it. Siri, please. You just beg it. Come on.

Come on. No, you press the pause button on the remote. Yeah. Why? Why, why, why? Don't do that. But then I get a text from Deere this week. He's like, another reason to buy a PS4 Pro Sunday ticket app is the best on the PS4.

That's crazy town. Stealing. Let's all go back to steering. Let's go back to stealing. Is it, I mean, I'm the lawyer, but I'm just asking. Is it legal if I pay for Sunday ticket and steal it? That's always the vibe. That's a vibe I have.

I pay for Game Pass. I deserve it. I'm going to read this ad, and then we're going to talk about the Surface Studio, which Tom reviewed, and we should talk about that PS4 Pro stuff. And I've got a weekly segment. Oh, you've got a weekly site. So I'll do this, that, and then the other thing. This advertisement, right here, we'll come in a company called Eero.

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I think it's great. That sounds like you're saying euro. Euro. Also, my house is in Europe and we pay for everything in euros. No, I have three Eros. They're great. I love them. It's neat to look at the network on my phone.

This has been me talking about the Eros that I have. It's weird. We don't usually do this with that. I own this product and I like it. There you go. You can get free overnight shipping if you visit Eero. and checkout, you select overnight shipping and then enter the code Vergecast to make

that shipping free. That's pretty great. Go to Eero.com, buy some Eero, select overnight shipping, enter the code, Vergecast. I tried to update the firmware of my router the other day, and you like download a zip file. And then you upload it

to your router, and then you just pray, it doesn't break it. Yeah, I mean, that's some, like, Android ROM shit right there. Yeah, it was, right? It's like, it felt like, hacking. I didn't go through with it. All right, so let's wrap up on a couple things.

Yeah. Tom reviewed the Surface Studio, and he made an all-your-base belong to us. Joke in the headline. Really? Which really slipped by us there, Tom. Sneaky, sneaky, Tom. I don't know if he made it. Okay, fine. A beautiful invader of Apple's base?

Come on. That's not an all-your-base belong to us. He likes it. It's really good. It's wildly expensive, but It seems like it's bar none the best monitor you can get. It just happens to be attached to a computer that like the MacBook Pro is kind of so-so. Is this just the state of the world right now? Yes.

Like all the innovation is in mobile processors that we never use for their full potential and then everyone is stuck with like middling desktop processors. Yeah. What are you going to do with that? I've been telling everybody the frigging Moors Law is dead. And people are in denial and they pretend like it's not dead. in this thing and this thing and this thing but yeah you can make a ton more cores

but software doesn't necessarily use not all things are parallel or parallelizable. That's the Paul Miller story. Not all things are parallel parallelable. Parallelible. Parallelible. It's a great book. Parallelible. That's Paul's Prograf. It's a real

problem. They just can't, I don't know. I just feel like everybody's in denial. But he likes it. Yeah. The dial is a cool thing. He brought in a graphic artist to like try it out with him and there's like beautiful pictures of Tom that he drew. You've got a great video, an amazing video that you should definitely look at. Like video team's been on point with these review videos lately.

It seems like it's legit fun to use. Yeah, I mean that's the thing. Like phones became rectangles, right? Remember this show used to be about phone design. Every week we'd be like, look at this. This phone has flames on the hood. Like it was crazy. And now they're all kind of the same black rectangle.

Keyboards were. Yeah. But PC innovation's like having a little bit. Would you, this dial, I can't tell if it would really bother me. Like, I feel like, like, I don't even like touch screens. I feel like it bothers me to put anything on my screen. Obviously, if you're drawing in your screen, you're already kind of interacting with your screen. But would you want to put a dial on your screen?

I don't think it's like putting it on the screen so much is when you put it down, it's your entire work surface. So it's just another control on your work surface. And because it's your work surface is the. computer. It can show you contextual information. Think about that

little iTunes modal float over all other things. I guess that's not really a problem anymore. There used to be like music player apps that would float over everything. And you would just have

crazy visualizers in the corner of your screen and all the time. Yeah. I think the idea is that when you put it down, your whole world becomes that surface.

So it's not like there's a screen and then you've got all these controls. It's you're down. And so now you've got like a knob to like really turn up

the saturation But like Tom points out There's not a lot of apps that support it yet And to get that support It's the same thing as the touch bar or 3D touch or whatever It's like they've got a little chicken and egg problem Not everybody has this thing So why would you make your app support it

And if you are supporting it Would you rather have touchbar Or surface dial? Dile hands down the dial Deeter Well hmm I mean I think probably the touch bar Because I would just use it more

This is a tough one. We just broke Deeter. You just went into like Westworld mode. I don't know. I've gotten literally six phone calls during this podcast. I'm really popular. I'm going to have to put my phone on airplane mode in a minute. I want to say the dial is cooler and I'd want the dial, but I also use laptops.

And so I like build a dial into a laptop. I don't know. That would be weird. Can I tell a story about Deeter and I attending a briefing together? Please. So we go to the MacBook event. We're sitting down with, you know, the Apple executives are showing us the thing after the event. And they're, Deter's like trying to have a very serious conversation.

And I just kept DJing like a maniac with a touch bar. It was super fun. And I was like, I'm beat matching. Wic-Wi-Wi-Wi-Wi-K. Like, this is great. And the Apple executives, they're like trying to not be annoyed. Deeter's just openly annoyed. And they keep seeing things like, see how useful it is and how great it is?

And I was like, I'm playing four Justin Bieber songs at the same time. he finally like, Deere's like, that's enough. And they're like, the touch mar is super useful. That's a real moment for us. But so far, that's the only thing I've enjoyed doing on a touch bar. Dial, it's dial for sure. Who doesn't want a big old, you know, knob to like turn? Always want a jog wheel on my desk.

What are you going to do with it? Remember what every Sony product had a jog wheel? That was their only idea. I'm going to scrub, Dieter. I've got to scrub. They're like a cell phone. What if we put a wheel on that cell phone? I would love to be at the meeting, the Sony meeting, where they're like, every product will have a jog wheel from now on.

Fine. It doesn't matter. Whatever it does is fine. I was at a meeting with a tech company that shall not be named and the executive was making a point. He's like, remember, you know, the history of smartphones? You kind of start with the razor and I literally like stood up. It's like, no, you don't. We need to talk about the

Scion. It really matters. The razor's not even a smartphone. I know. Wow. Paul, you want to do your segment? Everyone, Paul, does a segment. Yeah, it's called Rally Around the Family.

Tell me that you're about to talk about a pocket full of shells. No, this breadbasket will charge your phone while you over. overload on carbs. That's good. It's a bread basket. Oh, yeah. It's literally a basket designed for holding bread. Yeah.

And then below, at the base of the bread basket, is a charger. It's like USB plugs for charging USB devices. And my favorite thing about this is that the PR kind of implies that when you plug your phone into the bread basket to charge it. By the way, this is like a prototype made by sister Schubert. Why not? Probably not for vast distinction. It kind of implies that when you plug your phone into the bread basket, that your phone's energy is what's keeping the bread warm.

Because the basket also warms the bread. That's not right. That's not how the energy should flow. Wait, do you put your phone in the basket? It's called the basket of warmth. uses the very electronic devices that create distractions at dinner time to keep freshly baked sister Schubert's dinner rolls warm. So there's like a USB shelf and then there's a shelf for the phones to go on?

No, the phones just stay on the table. Maybe plugging the phone in turns on the heater. Or maybe it's got a, maybe, maybe the breadbasket is built with discarded Galaxy Note seven batteries. See, that's right. That was going there. There you go. By the way, on a plane this week coming back from a wedding, flight people came on. All galaxy note devices are banned from flight.

Straight up, all of them. Old ones, new ones, future ones. We're done. Yeah, it's over. They're never putting out another note. Yeah. All galaxy note devices. What about the S note?

Do you want to talk about the PS4 Pro? We're running so far over. I will just say, I can't believe I didn't buy a PlayStation before now. but it turns out that 4K and HGR is buggy and it doesn't work with a bunch of TVs and we need to wait for a more update. But oh my God, why did I stick around with the Xbox for as long as I did? Wow. I was a complete idiot. Remote play is amazing. It even works on my dinky 12-inch MacBook. Keep an eye for those for more issues if you have a 4K HDR TV for it to get cleaned up.

And as soon as it does spend all of your money on a PlayStation 4 because I love it. I'm ready for a full upgrade. That was a weird one when a score in that review. I don't do a lot of reviews, so I'm really insecure about reviewing things. Scoring that review is like, I think it's really great. Yeah. But it's weird to give things big numbers. Seven.

It's like a Sony PlayStation product. It's a regular thing. You can't buy it at a GameStop. You can't give it. Why not? So my Xbox 1S can sit in my cabinet with the cabinet door closed and not overheat. PlayStation 4? Absolutely not. I had to set it behind my TV because it just got way, it was going to burn my apartment down. So there's that. I'm ready. There's a story today. Best Buy stock is rallying because all kinds of people are buying home theater stuff again.

Oh, really? I'm ready. I'm ready to throw it all out and start again. Didn't you just buy a TV? Like a big, like two years ago? I mean, that for me, that's like a long. You tweeted like last month that you bought a TV. It was like, no, no, I bought a garbage TV for like, our weekend place. He bought us outside TV. Oh. I bought a TV for outside. You didn't buy a TV. You bought another TV for another home.

Yes. I bought it. I'm sorry. No, no, no. That's like, that's like on the side. That's like I didn't eat dinner. I had a snack. I had a little TV snack.

All right? Did you eat yet? No, I haven't eaten yet. All right? I had some nuts and some cheese. But I'm about to go with the steakhouse. All right. I know you think you want a TV, but I'm just going to remind you that there's no more plasma TVs and the world is better off for it.

And you're going to be so angry and depressed that I just said that phrase that you're going to, it'll put you off the whole idea of buying a TV. No, I want an OLED, man. I'm all in. I got a friend with an OLED. I keep on looking at it. I keep on trying to walk out of his house with it, but it's really big. OLED is the first, like, TV demo at Best Buy in years that's been like, whoa. Yeah.

It's like, oh, there's those TVs? And there's those TV. Yeah, but what about my garbage curved Samsung, huh? That thing's great. See, that's a little snack TV. What if I let, do I want to try it? It's like an amuse-bush. How would she use? I don't know.

I spent $475. I don't care. It doesn't matter. It's literally for watching football outside. I agree. I agree. You did good job. You should come visit.

I would love to. It has an operating system for some reason because that's what you want. Every now and again, just prompts you to update it. Unclear what features I am receiving or why. You know, I, I, It has a built-in virus scanner. I'm not shitting you. Most of these TVs run Linux of some form.

Some of them run WebOS. There are hardly any TVs that are jailbroken. Right, because they all have slightly different builds. There's no one TV to target. Right. You can't just put an operating system on them. Yeah. But why?

Why do it just be a screen, man? They're all computers, especially the 4K ones. They've got enough power to upscale 1080p to 4K, like they're computers. Actually, slightly more powerful than that's. Pro. It's a better GPU than a MacBook. Anyway, that's a hard MacBook Pro burn. Anyway, I'm going to read one more ad. We're going to get out of here. This episode of Vergecast brought to you by Squarespace. What a surprise. When you're a landing page, beautiful gallery, professional blog, online store, all of it's part of your Squarespace website. It's easy. You can create a website with Squarespace. It's easy. You can create a website with Squarespace. It's easy. You can create a website with Squarespace. It's a simple, intuitive, you add and arrange your content features just a click of a mouse, tap of a pad. However, you select things with your computing device. You can do that with Squarespace very easily. You get a free custom domain. makes adding a domain to your site simple. If you sign up for a year, you receive a free custom domain for free for a year. Look at that. Simple. There's beautiful templates. He's on a

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one of the team is always online to assist you. So, sorry, free trial today at Squarespace.com and enter offer code for urge to get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace, set your website apart. That's our show. Does anything else talk about? There's so much more, but we're going to, we're going to go away. We're going to go away. Yeah. Oh, we didn't talk about the NAS Classic. Paul, do you give me two thoughts about the NAS Classic. You can't have one. They did a great job. Thought number two that I feel like everybody's forgetting is that NES games are hard and you'll be sad if you try to play. When I was a kid, I had one of those like 50 and one pirate NES cartridges.

Do you ever know that these? These are great. There's a street in Chicago called Devon. It's where all the Indian shops are, were. And there was a pirate electronic store on Devon Street. So my parents would make me go there to buy like Indian groceries and Texas. styles, whatever parents do. I don't know.

I was like eight. And I would go to the pirate electronic store where you could buy the pal to NTSC converter VCR and all this crazy stuff. And it was like this thing that I always wanted. It costs like $80. It was like way out of my league.

And it was 50 NES games pirated onto a single cartridge. I knew there was a lot of like unauthorized cartridges back in the day. Yeah. And so I, after sufficient years of begging, parents like got me this cartridge.

You got it? Got it. How is it? And I had all the NES games, and they were all so hard. I was like, this is garbage. Yeah. That's all I could think about what I think of this thing. Yeah, man.

It was like the prize. I got so mad at Ninja Gaden. Ninja Gaten, too, actually. I, like, broke our entertainment center. I, like, chucked a Nintendo controller and literally, like, dented shit all the time. I was a controller chucker. The other Nintendo thing I just have to point out is there's a company making a Legend of Zelda Escape the Room, which is basically you and six other people will go

in a place, and then you solve Zelda puzzles in real life. Do you actually push boulders around? Participants working teams of six to solve a mystery in a huge area all within a time set limit. A huge area means definitely boulders. There's going to be Gorons, Zoras, and Kokiris. This is going to be amazing. Does anyone get to fire a bow and arrow? I hope so.

Do you have to be good at the flute? Dude, I'm getting a hook shot. I'm getting a hook shot and I'm getting a hook shot. include one flounders flying around that room cannot wait well that sounds like a video that we should make noted brush up on your flute skills yeah it's love in time anyhow that's our show thank you for sticking with us and it's a crazy one follow us paul is at future paul on twitter i'm at reckless deeter's at packlon you can follow the verge on twitter on snapchat instagram blown up for the verge bigest tech brand on instagram do you know that we are yeah biggest one good for us so keep doing that

Casey Newton's at Casey Newton. Casey Newton. We're going to have, I'm just buckle up. We're going to have a lot more about Facebook and policy and all this stuff as this administration comes in. That's where we live. That's who we are. We are, in fact, the verge.

Anyway, also go to iTunes. Check out other podcasts. Ashley Carman actually hosted What's Tech this week, talking about Snapchat Spectacles. It's a fun episode. Brian Bishop was on it. He actually has them. He tried them on.

That's also a great video. Brian's really good in that video. I host Control Out Delete with Walt. We also talked about the MacBook. If you want to get into that this week, it was a pretty fun episode. Lauren Good, who many of you know, host To Embarrass to Ask on the Recode side.

Karras Wisher, host Recode Decode, and Peter Kafka, host Recode Media, which is really fun one this week. It's this music blogger, old school music blogger, named Bob Left sets. And our minute 23, just burns Farhad Manju to the ground,

which is a choice. Anyway, that's it. That's our show. Rock and roll. Parallelible.