The Vergecast - Foxxconn's empty innovation centers and a blackhole photo revealed

Episode Date: April 11, 2019

Loren Grush discusses the first image of a black hole, Nilay discusses Foxconn's broken dreams, Dieter discusses gadgets, and Paul discusses Microsoft's Chromium Edge browser. Long show but stick with us, there's a lot to know here. Stories discussed this week: - See the first image ever taken of a supermassive black hole - Ikea and Sonos made the ultimate speaker lamp - Foxconn’s ‘innovation centers’ are a bunch of empty buildings in Wisconsin - Turns out Amazon buying Eero wasn’t the startup success story we thought - New Zealand privacy commissioner says Facebook is run by ‘morally bankrupt’ liars - T-Mobile relaunches Layer3 TV service as TVision Home - Netflix confirms it killed AirPlay support, won't let you beam shows to … - YouTube TV raises monthly price to $50, but adds Discovery channels ... - Google patches ads into Android TV home screens without warning … - LG G8 ThinQ review: many gimmicks, not enough progress - Samsung's Galaxy A80 is an automated notchless slider with a ... - Hidden Google Play info suggests 'midyear' release for Pixel 3 devices ... - Microsoft's Chromium Edge browser is now officially available to test … - Microsoft reveals all the Google things it removed in its Chromium … Vote for Vergecast in the Webby's! as well as The Verge's Why'd You Push That Button? and our wonderful YouTube channel Verge Science also, we'd love our listeners and reader to fill out theverge.com/survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Lauren Gresh, talks to us about the first ever image of a black hole. We dive into what's going on with Foxcon. We talk about net neutrality, the streaming wars. I give T-Mobile a score on the Go-90 scale of doing streaming services, and much, much more. That's a Vergecast coming up right now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

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We'd love to win. won this award before. We would love to win it again. Thank you so much for everybody's already voted. Also vote for Verge Science doing very well. Vote for why did you push that button. We would love, love, love, love, love your votes. Okay. So there's a lot of news to talk about this week. A lot of tech news, very grounded, very, you know, there's details. But there's like bigger news in the universe. Yeah. Literally news of the universe, which is the first ever image of a black hole was taken by our scientists on Earth. So we can look at one. When it comes Space. Who do we talk to? We talked to Lauren Grush.

Lauren is out at a space conference right now. Amazing. Very Lauren. So I called her. We talked to her for five minutes to explain what's going on to this black hole, how they got the image. Check this out. Hello. Lauren Grush. How are you? I'm good. You're on the road. Yes. I am in Colorado Springs for an event called the Space Symposium. That is literally the most on-brand thing I've ever heard from you, Lauren. That's good. So you're with a bunch of space people, and there's huge space news this week. And I want to talk to you about it. There is. The first ever photo of a black hole.

Right. It's an image of a black hole. Up until now, all the beautiful and sane pictures that you've seen of black holes have just been artistic rendering or illustrations. They're not actually pictures of a black hole because, as many know, black holes are much too dense and light can't even escape from them. So difficult to actually get a picture when you can't see it. So how do they, this seems like a massive technological undertaking to capture. capture this image. How did it happen? Right. So the Blackholme Day image, it's really far from Earth.

Even though it's, I think it's supposed to be 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun. It's so far away that it looks about the size of a small ballwood on the moon. So capturing it from Earth is really difficult. So this collaboration of scientists created this program called the Event Horizon Telescope, which basically uses eight observatories on five different continents. all over the world to come together and gather data from this black hole. And then that basically makes like a virtual telescope as big as the Earth. And we need all of that power to be able to see this massive object that's so far away. How do you make a virtual telescope as big as the Earth?

Do they all work in real time together? Are they capturing data asynchronously? Like, how does it work? Right. So they're capturing data. They captured data for one week in April of 2017. And then the rest of the work had to do with supercomputers and algorithms. So it would basically be taking all of the data that they captured from the black hole and then putting it together into a computer, filling in the gaps, you know, where we don't have telescopes and then constructing this image of the black hole that was released today. And I do want to say, it's not technically an image of the black hole because I said, right, like I said, light cannot escape.

So we did not get an image of the black hole itself. What we did get was an image of the black hole itself. the silhouette of the black hole surrounded by all of this gas and dust that is thought to swirl around these objects, that stuff gets heated up and it gets really hot and it's a lot of radiation. And so that's what the telescopes were measuring was this intense heat from all this plasma around the black hole. So you're basically seeing the black hole's silhouette in reality.

So that's if you, I'm going to try to describe a photo on a radio show. Just go with me on this. So when you look at the picture, it's like a black hole. blurry ring of fire, basically. And you're saying that, like, orange ring is other stuff that's just, like, very dense, causing out of friction, a lot of radiation that's soon to be sucked into the black hole. Yeah, it's all the stuff that's swirling around the black hole, slowly going towards it. And then at the edge, the reason why it's called the Event Horizon Telescope is because you get to

the edge of the black hole, the place called the Event Horizon, and that's the place of no escape, Right. Once you reach that spot, you're screwed. For lack of a better term, you're going under the black hole. And that's what all of this thrilling stuff is slowly kind of going into the black hole itself. So if we learned anything new, I saw one really interesting picture that was like a simulation. This thing actually like verifies a lot of like simulations and theories that we have. But have we learned anything new? So I think it's going to take some time to really grasp what we're understanding here. But one thing is that they really wanted to know about how gravity behaves at the event horizon, which is that really strange place. Because based on what Einstein's theory said, you know, super dense objects like the black hole can actually warp space and time around them.

So scientists are kind of curious to know how that looks around the black hole. And so getting a picture of it can help us learn more about that. And then also they're kind of curious about how these, I mean, this isn't just a black hole. It's a super massive black hole. It is much bigger than your average black hole. They're the kinds that are at the center of galaxies, right? We have one at the center of our galaxy. And so they want to know how it it's so good.

And so taking pictures of it could maybe help them better understand just how these black holes grow so massive and so dim. Are we going to see more and more photos now? I guess images, photos, images. Let's call it an image. It's not really a photo. So, yeah, I would say images probably. better term. I don't know. You know, I'm all about using words that people understand. So whatever. No, but, so they actually tried to image two black holes. One is Sagittarius A, which is at the center of our galaxy.

But that is still being processed. And it's a, it's a little bit smaller than the one that they just released today. But yeah, we could be getting that image soon, too. So there's still more to come. And is the telescope, I mean, the telescope is like a virtual idea of a telescope, right? It's like an accumulation of all these other telescopes. So that's still operating? Are they still out there doing stuff? I mean, these are regular observatories that are just observing all the time. They basically just had, you know, a week with all eight of them.

Yeah, with all eight in April 2017. So they basically just have to coordinate, you know, at the same time. They've got to get on the G-Cal and say, let's look at a little bit of all. In the end of the day, everything comes down to, like, meeting scheduling. Exactly. But here's something that people in the VergeCast might enjoy. The amount of data that they are taking each night is one petabyte of data per night. And I think what is that?

Like a trillion gigabytes or something, a million gigabytes, something like that. It's a lot. So they had to have a lot of really good data storage to do this. Yeah, I think they couldn't transmit online so they were flying hard drives around the world so they could make this picture. Yeah, basically. At the end of the day, you're still flying hard drives around the world. Well, Lauren, I'll let you get back to the Space Symposium. Thank you for taking a minute to come talk to us about this.

Super exciting. Yeah, always available to talk about space. We're back. I got to say, Lauren is so excited about space. It's so much fun. We should have her talk about space to us, maybe like every day. I'm halfway through watching the TEDx talk that predicted this amazing discovery. And I was not aware that our telescopes are not powerful enough to see an orange on the moon.

Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't that just intuitively, it seems like the moon is very close. You know what I mean? I really thought we were better than that. You really thought that that's what, that's like the metric, moon oranges. Moon oranges. Like most people are like, you can resolve a car in a country far away and we're more like, how many moon oranges does this telescope have? Can I tell you my favorite stat? Zero. From the press conference? Yes.

The image is only obviously a few hundred kilobytes. but they have to collect the image, it's five petabytes of data. So they had to do that in lots of steps. And the first they had to get the data to everybody. So they couldn't send it over the internet. So they put them on planes. And so they needed half a ton of hard drives. Oh my God.

And they just like moved. They had to like move all this data on hard drives. Jason Snell wrote a post about the half ton of hard drives. He references quote from a computer scientist called Andrew S. Tenenbaum, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon. full of tapes hurtling down the highway. I mean, not to like be a total killjoy, but like, you know, because we obviously, this is not primarily a space-focused podcast.

But there's this aspect, like when people say the words big data, like 99% of the time, they are gleaning information from your purchases at Target on your credit card and targeting ads at you. But the other very small percentage of the time is scientists, using. almost the exactly same tools to do really cool. Yeah, like take a picture of black hole that looks like the eyesworn. Yeah. It's out there.

It's just looking at you. All right. So there's that black hole. What I will refer to as the good one. Okay. The exciting one. And then there's the black hole happening in my home state of Wisconsin. Which is the Foxconn project.

Wait, wait, wait. I thought that it was official policy. It's official policy of the Vergecast that we only refer to, your home state is Wisconsin Valley. So there's this really weird thing that happens is you get older, you use social networks, sometimes your ex-girlfriends tweet at you. So this is a real thing that happened today. So my high school girlfriend, I shared this story.

Josh Reza spent 10 days in Wisconsin, and I was like, someone should tell Foxxon that Verge reporters know what AI, 8K and 5G are. And my high school girlfriend tweeted at me and said, also a valley, because nothing about this thing. It's located in a valley. Which is true. It's just a very flat part of Wisconsin. Anyway, so we sent Josh Jezza to my hometown to look at what Foxxon is doing.

They had built all these innovation centers around the state. I'm putting innovation centers in quotes during the elections. They bought all these buildings. So Josh spent 10 days just driving around Wisconsin. He drove to Green Bay. He drove to O'Claire. He drove to Milwaukee. He drove to Racine.

He drove to Mount Pleasant. And nobody in any of those cities had any idea what's going on with Aaron Rogers and the Packers coaching staff. It's not great. That's not a win either, but that's not the story we're talking about. Oh, I'm sorry. I just heard Wisconsin disaster, I just assume. It's not, many confusing things are happening in Wisconsin. But Josh went to these buildings.

He went to the big Foxcon headquarters in Milwaukee. I just want to read this quote. They bought this building and they announced it by saying, Milwaukee is where we will transition our AI 8K plus 5G vision into reality. So whatever is going down in Milwaukee. So he went to the headquarters. Most of the building is actually being sublet to another company that's renovating its office around the corner. So most of those employees were like, yeah, there's like five or ten fox gun people here.

He looked in the conference room It's my favorite little reporting detail He saw an Ethernet cable Like coiled up on a conference room table And he saw the whiteboards And no one ever, for the few days He looked into the windows The Ethernet cable never moved

And no one ever used the whiteboards And like no one never did anything Some Foxcon people like walked out of the building And he would ask them And one of them literally screamed I'm sorry and ran away Oh So like nothing is happening

in Milwaukee. Why aren't they building these buildings if they're not doing anything? They're just buying buildings. They're buying buildings and saying these are innovation centers and then they're empty. Yes. So the prevailing theory is that during the previous election, Foxcon was unpopular in Wisconsin. You might note that Scott Walker was voted out of office because he signed the Foxconn deal. So to build public support, they made this huge, this series of announcements. about building innovation centers and all the places where they were polling badly. So the reporting that Josh did was they made all these announcements.

Let's go see what's happening. There's the big factory site. We've talked about it a lot. Shruti did the great reply all episode. She talked to us on the show. We're pretty clear on what's going on to factory. They're pushing dirt around in circles and not building TVs. What about all these innovation centers?

What's going on there? So that was Josh's like the core of Josh's story. Visit them. So one in Milwaukee basically no one there. Goes to O'Clair, looks in the window, literally a concrete floor with, like, a toolbox on a box. And he talked to some folks, and the sources are telling him, no contracts have inside and no one has been paid. So this is literally an empty building. He visited the other one, which was basically a bunch of commercial spaces, like an ice cream store.

And they were like, he was like, so Foxcon's your landlord? And the answer was like, we think so. We've never talked to them. But they'd hung up signs at Foxcon Innovation Center. He wants a Green Bay, same deal. So Foxhahn nowhere to be seen. Then he goes back to where the factory is supposed to be in Mount Pleasant. He goes to, there's this, they announce for the second time that they're going to build a factory.

So they now announce this factory like three times. Because, you know, for a minute they had unannounced it. They said they were going to build this ecosystem and they've scaled it back. So there's this rumor that Foxhont is going to show up at the board meeting after they've reannounced the factory. And so everyone gets excited. Everyone goes. Josh goes, Foxcon does not show up. The residents of Mount Pleasant have become very smart and they're asking questions like,

why would you build an LCD factory when there's an overabundance of LCD supply in the world and like TVs are transitioning to OLED? And the poor like Mount Pleasant Town officials are like, that's a question for Foxcon. The Foxcon isn't there. Then they give the same presentation they've given before, but minus the slides with dates. and they tell literally the same jokes. Oh, no. So as Josh is reporting, it sounds like, he's like, I don't know what this story is.

Like, nothing is happening here. It's like the story is that this is a Cohen Brothers movie. Like, this is just like the silliest thing in the world. And then everyone is filling in these gaps. It's like void of information. So Josh hears all these theories while he's there. It's a scheme to get visas for Chinese workers. It's a plot to acquire intellectual property from the university to buy up real estate and become a landlord.

which is the worst way to buy real estate and become a landlord. It's to get access to Lake Michigan's water. A farmer told him it's a plot to get investor visas using commercial bonds. An excuse for the Koch brothers to pipe freshwater over the subcontinental divide. For the military to make a secret screen fact. The people of Wisconsin are just filling the void of information with just... My favorite one is like it's a plot to buy all the ginseng in America. It's all grown in Wisconsin.

Because Foxcon doesn't get the crazy subsidy if they don't actually make a factory, right? So they need to steal water or something to get any use out of all this weirdness. There's like the big subsidy package, and you can argue about whether it's a subsidy or a tax break, but the government is providing Foxxon with a huge amount of incentives and infrastructure support. So it breaks down in like three different ways. There's hire a bunch of people and like do capital expenditures, build a factory. and we'll get some tax breaks and subsidize the cost of those workers, right? Right.

They missed their target. They didn't get any of that in 2018. They missed their target by 82 people, which is hilarious because they're Foxcon. They could just hire 82 people to sit in a circle and they would have gotten it and they couldn't do it. So they missed that one. Then there's the local governments taking out loans to build roads, to do pipes, to do infrastructure. Mount Pleasant, that literally the place where I'm from, had its credit rating lowered because the Moody's does not think it's going to receive that loan returned because Foxxon has to show up and start paying taxes. And then there's like the state was already planning to widen the interstate again near my house.

And so they accelerated the project to widen the interstate, which is like a $1.5 billion project to support Foxconn. So there's the actual like tax benefit deal stuff and then there's the race to spend money because they think Foxhound is going to show up. And so it breaks down in two ways. Then I talked to a smart dude in Wisconsin who's like very closely watching this stuff. And he's like these tax credits make no sense because they're tax credits for new jobs. Right. So the state waived a bunch of taxes on Foxhont. It's not collecting any sales tax on the construction equipment.

and whatever, all the stuff. So if you're going to subsidize every job by some amount of money, some hundreds of thousands of dollars, you're expecting to make it back through the income taxes of the new workers, right? Like, that's how the state would make that money back. But if a person in Wisconsin just changes their job and stops working at Miller Coors and goes to work for Foxcon, the state doesn't see more income taxes. So either Foxxon is going to give everybody that's like massive raise or it's got an important. 13,000 new workers for the state to get its like tax benefits back.

So all this is good is super complicated. But then at the end of the day, it's also like they're not doing anything. Like the buildings are all empty. So like that to me is like the biggest problem is no one knows what Foxxon is doing. And they keep saying it's an AI 8K 5G ecosystem, which like at this point every time they say people just start laughing. And then on top of that, here's my favorite little detail. the foundation they built in Mount Pleasant is a compressed gravel foundation.

So they put a bunch of gravel, they compressed it. And the LCD manufacturing experts that Josh talks to say that is not stable enough. To build an LCD screen, it needs to be a different kind of foundation. So there's less vibration in the factory. And compressed gravel won't do it for you. So even the thing they've already built, the little building they've done does not support the notion that they will actually manufacture LCD screens there. All of which is to say no one in Wisconsin knows what's going on.

They're all kind of just like laughing about it. And Foxxon owns a bunch of empty buildings. And every time I thought our headlines should be Foxcon refused to comment because that was like basically their attitude towards us besides sending these statements. At one point, Josh walked into a Foxxon office and the receptionist told him, we're aware of you. Yeah. Yes.

That's very helpful. Anyway, it's a mess. I hope they do something. there have been some promises that more contracts will come out soon. But I just think, again, it's my hometown. I'm very protective of it. I think Foxx-on owes everybody some answers about what they're actually going to do. Before this becomes this like decade-long joke, which it's hurtling towards.

And they've just got these empty buildings. One theory Josh heard was that these are all just going to be Wiiworks. That the ecosystem is just people who are so inspired by the notion of 5G that they'll just like rent some space and start a startup. And that'll be the ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, you say AI, AK plus 5G to me, and I'm motivated to run out and boost the economy. It's all I want. That's just so silly. Josh has this line in here.

Like, how do you prove that Foxcon won't build a research facility, like a research campus bigger than MIT in the middle of Wisconsin, except by pointing out that Foxconn executives themselves often hint it doesn't make sense? Like, you have to prove a negative. Yeah. And I think the people of Wisconsin would like this bet to pay off. So they're not motivated to be like this is trash, but I don't think they're going to build a research facility that's bigger than MIT in the middle. I just don't. I've been there. It just doesn't seem likely.

Anyway, that's Foxconn. I'm still thinking about every day. If you know what AI-AK plus 5G means, we'll tell Foxconn. They would love to hear from you. But also let me know, because I'm dying to figure it out. All right. That's one broken dream. This section is actually labeled broken dreams in our rundown.

Deeter, you want to talk about the other broken dream? There's so many broken dreams to choose from. Which one do you want? Oh, yeah. Yeah, okay. Eero. So Mashable got the story. They had documents.

We have also seen these documents that Amazon bought ERO for a grand total of $97 million, which wasn't really enough to, you know, pay off the stock at the value for options for employees. So employees basically got nothing out of it, although they did get jobs. You know, so that's actually really good. Everybody got hired. There's probably, you know, a little bit of the executives got, you know, a little bit of extra. The executive was like took home millions. Yeah.

So it's a little bit extra, you know, millions. But the truth of it is like the thing that, you know, I'm the one who said that this acquisition is disappointing. And I think that it's not disappointing because, like, bad Amazon. It's disappointing because it would be nice if one of these little companies could make it on their own. And it's very clear that ERO is not doing that. They had a load of debt. They had a plan to maybe make a, like a home security system. And then they had to bail on it because Google started releasing stuff with Nest.

And so they were just sort of, like, not doing well. And if Amazon hadn't bought them, somebody else would have had to or it might have gone belly up. Yeah. So not great for the employees. You know, I don't know enough about what was going on to say definitively, like, there was mismanagement here. But I can say definitively that I have no idea how a company at ERO's scale makes it right now. Sonos seems to be doing fine. I think they're a little bit bigger. But if you're trying to, like, I don't know, escape velocity is the right word, but you're trying to get good making a clever small piece of hardware, good. good luck to you. Yeah. Well, Sonos has lots of products, right? Yeah. And they address like two different markets.

So there's the consumer market and then there's the like the professional market where they sell a bunch of expensive stuff and like the home automation market. Right. So they have like at least a few different places where they put stuff in. They put out a lamp with IKEA this week. Yes. Which is a delight. Actually, like, so the.

There's the wall speaker, like, nightstand looking thing. And then there's the speaker lamp. And I can't, I just can't hear anybody talk about this thing without hearing outcast anymore. Speaker box. That's where you're at? I just hear them saying speaker box over and over and over again. That's great. That's very good.

My favorite thing about the Sonos lamps is that they are, it's Sonos tech in like IKEA design. but because it's Sonos Tech, you can put them in Sonas configurations. So if you have like a play bar, you can use the lamps as the two rear speakers in your home theater, which seems terrific. Like that's, I want to live in the world where I'm like, my surround speakers are actually lamps. It's just a thing I set up using commonly available technology that I purchased at IKEA. Like that's, isn't that what you always wanted? That's what I've always wanted. I mean, I do have, oh, God, maybe I should do this.

I do have Sonos set up with ones that surround, and one of them is like in a perfect spot for a lamp. Yeah. So like I do kind of want to swap it out. Get those lamps. Anyway, so Eero, she just like totally got distracted by speaker lamps. The speaker lamp is $179. It's going to be available at IKEA later this summer. It won't sound quite as good as a Sonos one from what we are told or what we're made to understand, but whatever.

And then a little one is like, it's a lamp. The little one is 99 bucks. But I think the comparison I'm making is Sonos now has products that range from 99. $9 all the way up to like, you know, the $800, $900 set, like play bar. Like they have a lot of stuff. You can buy packages on Sonos to like, you know, thousands of dollars of surround stuff. You can put one every room in your house. ERO is like invisible technology.

They only had the one product. Well, like I said, too. They had the beacon in the main unit. Yeah. But it's one thing. They can try to upsell you on ERO pro, which I had, which is fine. but like it doesn't like sonos like use it every day and if you buy a bigger house you're like I want another one.

Eero you use it every day but you don't think about it in the in the software subscription part of it I think was difficult. The cost of building the hardware are hard. There's the Mashore report so they had tried to pivot into like a home security or they tried to launch a new product like a home security thing and that failed and I think that crushed them. But at the end of the day like it's weird that like companies of that scale can't exist. Right? And they collapse and crater and like roll into bigger companies. And I think we just

keep talking about it over and over and over again. Like Google can put out Google Wi-Fi and just eat whatever loss. But like an independent company just can't. Yeah. Like Eero just couldn't compete with that necessarily. Well, so, Dela, you've been talking a lot about this lately with regard to like Facebook Watch. Disclosure. My wife works for Facebook, etc. Facebook Watch is bad, right? Yeah. But because it's Facebook and they have huge scale, presumably millions or hundreds of millions of people have, like, clicked that button and watched a video on Facebook watch. Google Wi-Fi is fine.

It's a good product. But if it wasn't, Google could just continue to just eat that. They've got such scale. They could just put it on Google.com. They'll sell a bunch of them, right? Yeah. And when you search for a mesh Wi-Fi routers, Google put it for itself at the top of those search results, which they do.

So Slack in those systems, they could just afford to make bad products and nobody notices. And so if you're trying to make a good product, it has to be. it has to be a perfect product and you have to succeed at all sorts of things and you have to have a certain amount of growth. But it seems like somewhere around the $100 to $200 million range of the value of your company, you're just hosed. Yeah. I mean, the sort of like accidental success of bad products from the big companies, we should just do a story. So like Apple News, Tim Cook is like, it's the biggest newsreader app in the world. It's a bad product. Like it's just like kind of not good.

Yeah. But it's there. So they get to say, like, and the flipboard people are like, F you. We made a good one of these a long time ago. And you just like rolled in with your PDF reader, right? Facebook Watch, another one, just by accident. Like Mark Zuckerberg, when they, you know, they're rolling out paying for news. They're going to like do this thing.

And he's like, we've seen the same, you know, we've seen this great success with Facebook. In his statement, we've seen this great success with Facebook watch. And it's like, dude, a billion people use your app. Success for you is not, you know, a hundred million people accidentally clicking on some stuff. Like, that's success for any other company. But for you, that's like, oh, we kind of suck. We only 100 million people screwed up today. Like, no one did this intentionally.

So I wish we had a better way to measure what real success is for these giants. But anyway, I love Eero. Like, I have an Eero. I think they were a good company. They were fun to talk to. They were very sincere about what they were doing. It's a little sad that they couldn't make it work. But I'm happy that Amazon is going to keep the servers lit up, that the product will be supported.

They don't- Sticking for now to the privacy policy. Yeah, I just hope they don't kill it, right? Like, they don't just let it, like, sort of like, fade into obscurity. Like, you know, my nightmare is actually that Apple would buy them. Because Apple is a-d nightmare. Because Apple is very good at acquiring companies and just letting them, like, flounder for a while. Yeah.

for beats, for example, the $3.2 billion purchase of the world's largest headphone company, where Apple is like, you know, we actually don't like you and we've made our own headphones over here. Like, that's ridiculous. So I'm happy Amazon, like, I'm just, I'm not, I don't know, Amazon in particular, whatever, but I'm happy a big company, like, swoop them up and save them and blah, blah, blah. I am more concerned that when you search for Wi-Fi routers on Amazon.com, you're going to see Eero stuff before everything else. Amazon's choice.

Yeah, like that stuff is weird. I just feel, I feel bad because there's a part of me. I wanted Eero because Eero in my mind was like, they're the ones that solved it. They deserve for me to buy it from them. And Ero was like $100, I'm generalizing, but it felt like Eero was about $100 more than Google, which was like $100 more than Netgear.

And wire cutter recommended neck gear. so I just went with them to get here because I was lazy. And so I just felt like Eero, by being niche, had to make a product that was more expensive, ultimately. And so while they were, you know, Casey kind of touches on something, he had a piece about like Snapchat's recent launch event or news event. Snapchat is out here doing all the innovation. And they're losing tons of money. And Facebook's out here being profitable with Snap. chat's ideas, you know?

Well, it's kind of like, you know, if you're the, if you're collecting the monopoly profits, you can be a little bit slower and crappier than your competitor. And you can lose money. It's usually, I think it's like around a $50 difference for Google Wi-Fi and Eero. We can't get into the Google Pixel phones to later in the show. All right. Anyway, the truth about ERO is out. I will say that we had that number very early.

We chase that story and congratulations to Nashville for getting it before. us because we were on the case. But I'm glad the company survives. There's just this sense that there shouldn't only be six companies. Why are there only six companies? Continuing on in this vein.

Look, on the bright side, net neutrality is saved because the House had to vote. It's just this first section. It started with a black hole and we just kept going in. No, it's true. Today, big news. the House voted on something called the Save the Internet Act.

It's basically net neutrality, put it back under Title II. Right now, the Senate, run by Mitch McConnell, has said we won't take it up. It is likely that they will be forced to because there actually is a public outcry for it. A bunch of Republicans have said they would actually vote for this thing. Donald Trump, his aides, have said out loud, we are going to veto this. Yeah. So it's a long fight. But I think points to A, the fact that I think tech policy is going to be a big part of both Democratic primary, which is wide open right now and the forthcoming election.

I think that's great. I think it's great that we're about to have a big tech policy fight. It also points to just the amount of like fuzzy data that's in the world about the state of broadband in America. So White House put out all these numbers, about all this investment and this fiber stuff. And we had Carl Bode, who's a very, very smart right of piece for us unpacking those numbers. You should go read it. But basically, it depends on what you measure. So a lot of the numbers are citing about increased investments actually happened while net neutrality

was on the books. Right. And things have flattened to tail off since, which makes sense. Like something changed and this flood of investment was made and then it tailed off. So I think there's a big argument about, like, are we building the networks appropriately? Is there enough fiber on the ground? Paul, you brought that up last week? Like, do we have it, are we doing enough to actually build these networks the way we want?

And then on top of that, you have literally every big telco spending their money on streaming services and content instead of their networks. Like, that's happening. Like, you know who's putting out Game of Thrones this weekend? AT&T. That's an insane sentence. Mm-hmm. Just like a fundamentally insane sentence. If you call 1,800 AT&T right now, they will tell you who lives and who dies.

It's so weird. The AT&T hit show, Game of Thrones. That is just an objectively bonkered sentence. So you... Okay, okay, okay. Here's a mild argument against net neutrality, right? Paul, we've only ever had mild arguments about net neutrality. Okay, well, I'm not going to swear, is what.

I'm saying. Okay. But you could imagine a world where networks that if they thought they could make more money with their network, if they thought they could make more money by building more fiber, that they would work on that. But they don't see, they see limits on how they're allowed to use infrastructure. So they're gun-shy with infrastructure and they're going towards content and content, no rules.

just right. Everyone just wants to go to where there's no rules. That's why we work in content. Right. Right. The trio of anarchists right here are just doing a great job. It's a classic thing that's pointed out on Red all the time because Red is always pushing you.

Like every time you show up on Reddit, Reddit's like, guess what's happening in the government right now? And let's defend net neutrality. And it's like, Reddit, you are a platform that is, it's basically like a hierarchical moderation structure. Like, Reddit is all about moderation, you know? There's the local moderation and then there's the broader moderation and there's voting and also blocking.

There's all sorts of stuff. And so Reddit is super into net neutrality, no, no blocking, no filtering, because they're a content company and they don't, but they want to be able to have those rights, right? And so I just, it seems obvious that you would go towards content if you're scared that you will not be able to use infrastructure however you want. Sure, but right now there are no rules for the, right? Netanyahuil is gone. So the argument from Ajit Pye, the FCC, from the Republicans, up and down from Verizon,

was take the shackles of Title II away and you will see investments skyrocket because we will be able to, we'll be able to do paid prioritization. A two-sided market, will charge Netflix and we'll charge you, will make double the money, and none of that happened, right? And I think that's the key. That's what I'm saying. This math is fuzzy. It's worth unpacking.

It's the heart of, I think, the policy debate is whether removing the restrictions actually increased investment in these networks, increased competition for the consumer and access. The difference, and I really do think this is fundamentally right now a mild disagreement between us. Because the difference in the sort of the content moderation policy debate that is also happening is you as a consumer, technically, if not in reality, have access to more competing services at that layer of the internet. Right? So you have very little competition for access, like broadband access. You have one or two choices at your home.

You have like our four providers and wireless. And so it's hard if Comcast decides to start throttling you, disclosure of Comcast investor, it about the whole thing. You've heard it before. There's a relationship between Boxmeeting and Comcast, I assure you. They don't like me. That's part of the relationship. But you've heard, like, if Comcast decides to start throttling Xbox Live until Microsoft pays up,

your recourse is quite limited. But if you don't like what Reddit is doing, you might be able to go somewhere else much more easily. Now, is that true, I think, is the heart of the debate and content moderation? Is it true that if enough consumers don't like Twitter, they're all going to go to some other service and that service will be viable? Is it true that if you don't like YouTube, if you're a career, We keep hearing from creators. Julie wrote a great story for us last week during Creators Week. Creators are mad at YouTube.

Well, where can they go? Right. So I think that conversation actually transcends the sort of layer approach to the internet, where you have the access layer and the application layer. We've always assumed the application layer was full of competition and shouldn't be regulated at all. And now I think the whole content moderation debate is, actually, there's not very much competition here. There isn't very much competition for Google search. There isn't very much competition for Facebook.

And when they did have competition, they bought it. And when they do have competition, they ruthlessly steal from Snapchat until Snapchat dies. Is that real? Like, should we approach that with a stronger regulatory eye? And you're seeing it play out around the world. At the end of the day, though, I think all of us are kind of like, wouldn't it be better if there were just more companies? And we had more choices and consumers are actually making real decisions, which is why I say vote Patel, break in a month, 2020. I just come back to it.

I think there's a horrifying specter of regulation that looms over all of these industries. Like, why would I start a social network when I have no guarantee that the Europe, the continent, won't say everything I'm doing happens to be illegal tomorrow? You know, why would I start a upstart social network? Casey gave me this great phrase called the splinternet. Like, that's what's about to happen. So, like, this is true. This is just on my list. New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner just out and said Facebook is run by morally bankrupt liars.

Like, they're just going to regulate Facebook. Australia effectively banned live streaming because you're liable for the content of the live stream now, if you're a service writer. Every layer of the network. If you're the ISP, if you're the edge cloud provider, if you're Facebook, everyone is liable for the content of live streams if you've been notified about it. That effectively means they have to turn it off, right? But you just can't have it anymore. There's this white paper in the UK about how to build a new regulatory apparatus for social networks. Casey's written a lot about it.

You should check it out. But effectively, the legal systems, I think we always know this. Virtual systems know this instinctively. The technology outruns the law, right? Like, constantly. And that's like one argument for don't regulate at all. You're going to slow down the technology because you're slow and down. dumb lawyers, but I think here you're seeing the technology catch way up and say, hey,

these networks are actually where our citizens are like living and working. And we have dominion over how you moderate that. Let's regulate speech. This will go great. Well, it's really hard. I mean, that's like it's really, really, really hard. That's the answer. Stupid. But we do. But we do it. No, we do it all the time. There's a reason. And there's a reason the U.S. Constitution made a real smart play saying that the Congress shall make no law abridging free speech. But I just want to point out, there's 200 plus years of First Amendment jurisprudence against that shaping what that means.

And so far, none of that has applied to the Internet. Also, other countries do not have that rule. So, like, there's a real question about whether Facebook's conception of what isn't allowed speech should just be exported to Europe, should just be exported to Australia. Like, those people have a little bit of sovereignty, one hopes, and they should be able to, right? They should be able to, so I think you're going to see this, like, regional breakup of the internet. I kind of think it's good.

Like, the more I think about it, I'm like, yeah, we should have, like, five different approaches and see which one works best. Instead of just letting Mark Zuckerberg be the ruler of the internet and have him decide what's going to happen in India and what's going to happen in Brazil and what's going to happen in Scotland. Like that's, that is actually a weirder outcome than saying these like localities should make their own rules. This is my, ever since I read Mark Zuckerberg's like, please regulate this thing. I'm in a, I'm starting to feel like, you know what, these big corporations and these big government types deserve each other. Like they all want to like be king of everything.

So just let them all fight it out. and be just work at being king of everything. And meanwhile, I'm going to be over here, hoddling with Bitcoin, trying to come up with decentralized, open source protocols to replace literally every service from every one of these companies because they're garbage and governments are garbage.

I'm ready for it, Paul. I wish you luck. Unstoppable internet usage. But I think where we agree fundamentally is that the government and corporation should be in conflict with each other. And that means the government has to be able to do stuff, not just Mark Zuckerberg.

That's like that's my, I think Facebook should be more afraid of the government because right now most people are afraid of Facebook. Anyway, I just want to point out once again, the Privacy Commissioner of New Zealand said Facebook is run by morally bankrupt liars. All right. We got heavy. We're going to come out of this black hole. We're going to take a break.

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your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork. All right, we're back. Now we're going to tell jokes about streaming services. Okay. So T-Mobile bought this company called Layer 3. And they did this a few years ago. We were like, ooh, what is what is T-Mobile doing with Layer 3? What a weird company for them to buy. It's sort of like an infrastructure, but they do have a couple of consumer services. And, man, I bet T-Mobile's going to do something really interesting. And they're going to launch a really fascinating video service. And today we're recording on Wednesday.

They did launch a video service. Yep. They didn't launch an interesting one, though. They just launched a cable box. It's called T-Vision Home. Let's get it right. T-Vision TV in case you didn't get it. It is

It costs $90 a month So they literally went 90 They went 90 From the jump they went 90 So T-Vision home You need a box They say in the future You will be able to stream it

You have to be a T-Mobile subscriber To get that $90 a month deal But you need their box in your house That's just a thing you need It's the standard cable bundle just the standard set of $150. And cheddar. They have cheddar on there.

So happy for cheddar, which is everywhere. And then you can buy HBO and all this other stuff. The $90 a month does not include, it's not inclusive of like taxes and fees. So that taxes and fees can be up to 20% is what T-Mobile is saying. I want to point out, T-Mobile's entire thing is that they're the uncarrier and their cost is just the cost.

Right? They're all about no taxes and fees. It's just here's the number you pay it, except for their cable company that they launched. So I'm going to go ahead and say T-Vision Home on the Go-90 scale of Doom streaming services is already at an 80. Oh, for sure. I do not think what people want is a cable. Also, you need to have broadband service at your house for this, right? Yeah.

So T-Mobile doesn't provide broadband service, so you would have to call. your actual cable company to get... Why would I get this instead of cable? Why would I get this instead of PlayStation View or Sling TV or YouTube TV? Because you love Timor. Let me tell you, Dieter. Let me tell you why. Because I have spoken...

One of the great moments of my professional career was when I started back at the verge, we thought it would be funny if I wrote secretly under a pseudonym Al Plumlee. and I, as Al Plumlier, talked on the phone with Layer 3 in April of 2016, Layer 3 has its own network. Wait, did you tell them your name was Al Plumlier? No, I told them I was, I explained the whole joke. It was a really fun way to start an interview with a cable company. They have their own, this is one of those.

interesting on the edge of net neutrality sort of issues. Sorry to bring it back to the black hole. You're at the event horizon, Paul. Part of how they decided to improve just regular internet TV, right, is that, yes, it's like cable, and it is a cable box, but their service primarily goes over their own infrastructure, their own backbone. so it's not being routed over strictly the open internet. So that is one potential advantage.

Other than that, I don't remember. But they're not doing that to your house. When you sign up for T-Vision home, it's not like John Ledger shows up with like a bundle of fiber over its shoulder to plug you in. It just comes over the internet. So what are they doing? Well, I mean, they've got their own backbone. I mean, famously, one of the famous other situations like this is Riot built its own backbone to improve.

of latency for League of Legends, right? So the idea is that if you have your own backbone, like the internet is just a protocol of packets, you know, like it's a choose your own adventure for a packet. And it's hard to tell how they'll get there beforehand. If you have your own backbone, there's just a direct route.

And so you lose less packets, so you have less latency, you have less buffering problems. Yeah. You could still have problems with your local ISP, but you have fewer problems with the overall internet. It's just the premise as told to Al Plumlee in 2016. It's a fine premise.

I'm just going to say that streaming video on the internet, a little bit more of a solved problem than needing to buy your own backbone if you're T-Mobile. But maybe not. Who knows? But at the end of the day, I don't think that the future of streaming services is $90 a month for a cable box.

Right? That's what we're trying to get. Cable's a garbage idea and it's dumb. It's just like, so again, on the Go-90 scale of Doom streaming services, currently T-Vision Home, sitting in 80, look, maybe in three months they're going to release their app for phones. It's going to, like, you know, they're going to make use of their 5G network and they've got this backbone and the video quality, like maybe. Maybe they can crawl their way back to a 70, perhaps. AI. Yeah, they're going to use AI.

They're going to stream 8K over their 5G connection using the layer three backbone. available only in southeastern Wisconsin to start maybe I'm just saying today at where we stand 80. 80 on the scale the go 90 scale

all right yeah next Netflix this is my favorite this one's so petty it's such a it's such a delightfully petty like problem in the streaming wars over the weekend Netflix disabled airplay to the Apple TV they wouldn't say

why and then Sean Hollister pushed him into saying why. So you can no longer Airplay from the Netflix app on like an iPad or a phone to an Apple TV. Right. And all they said was for technical reasons. Yep. So I had like what I thought was like a good one.

I like guessed. I was like, you know, Airplay 2 doesn't support 4K. You got to go to the class, blah, blah, blah. No, it's, they said they can't certify all the new TVs that have Airplay 2. Yeah. Because Apple put Airplay 2 on Samsung TVs and Vizio TVs. and all this other stuff. Netflix is dead serious about that certification thing, by the way.

I am currently reviewing the Anchor capsule 2, a Pico projector, or not PICO, but micro projector. And I adore it. But I haven't managed to get Netflix working on it because it's not Netflix certified. And so there's all these, like, insanely hacky siloed workarounds to get Netflix. It won't even let me Chromecast to it. Like, that fails out. And I think it's because they, like, they see what it's getting chromecasted to.

and they're like, yeah, I don't know what that is. Screw that. Yeah. So, like, you can say many things about whether Netflix is being petty or if it's a made-up reason or whatever. But, like, Netflix is, in fact, serious about wanting to know, wanting to certify the TVs that it streams to. Yeah. I don't know that they need to be that, I don't know, like, dogmatic, rigorous about it, but they definitely are. But let me offer you a fact, a counterfact, if you will.

You know what app is in all of those TVs? Netflix. Yes. Like every TV that Apple has put Airplay on has a Netflix app on it. The issue is not the certification. The issue is that Airplay 2 does not send back a device ID. Right. So Netflix can't confirm.

Right. And so until they get a device ID back from Airplay 2, they won't say, yep, you can stream to this. This is the pettiest thing in the world. Do you think they need that device ID just to confirm? that it's the kind of the TV supports HDR or not? Or do you think they need that device ID because it helps them form a profile of who you are and what

kind of TV you own? Oh, I think it's both. Yeah. I think it's absolutely both. Anyway, the pettiest outcome of the streaming wars is that Apple launched a competitive thing to Netflix and Netflix responded by literally finding broken taillight

of Airplay 2 and being like, we've stopped you and now you're going to jail. Like, amazing. ideally what you want is for them to for Apple and Netflix to work it out so that you can continue airplane to Netflix. Yeah. That would be good. But I suspect they will not. No.

That's just my guess. The YouTube TV raised its monthly price to $50 a month because it turns out TV is expensive. They added a bunch of like Discovery network channels, I think, in order to like, and that's like one of the reasons the cost has gone up. I subscribe to YouTube TV right away when it had that $35 a month price. It's been creeping up since then. I don't think it's worth it for me for 50.

I don't watch that much TV. I really don't. All these prices are just creeping back towards the cable bundle. I mean, that's just like the ultimate thing is like everyone would rather have a little bit of money so they'll like give you the thing in the bundle and then you'll pay one big fee instead of everyone trying to get 10 bucks a month from you. Yeah.

Remember that conversation like a hundred years ago? I just remember talking to my buddy on the phone and we were talking like what before HBO go came out it's like why can't you just all all I want is HBO why can't you just pay for HBO yeah but look at us now turns out now you actually wanted everything the whole time you can still put up in antenna there's like a there's a whole world out there no one does it get yourself a amazon fire tv recast one of the one of the silliest product that's actually makes me feel better they they bought ero like if they're out there just like distracting themselves with making over-the-air tuners.

They're going to let the Eero team do whatever they want. This one drove me insane. So, I don't know if you know this. There was this, like, bad bug in Android TV where, like, Google photos basically was sharing data. Like, you can see other people's Google photos. So they disabled this thing. Yeah.

Which also means my, like, assistant can't cast to my Android. I have a Sony Android TV. It's beautiful OLED TV. Love it. Yeah. Love the way it looks. Hey, every piece of this software is infuriating. So in the morning we would wake up and say, hey, play some music.

It was set is like the default destination. So you wake up, say play some music. TV lights up, play some music. This was great. Can't do it anymore. The assistant just fails out and says, try again when you're ready. Which is infuriating. Like, first of all, like, this is not my problem.

It puts it on you. My problem is not that I am not ready to listen to music. the problem is that you have no idea what's going on. So, like, the worst error message ever. Assistant runs locally on the TV, right? So, like, how do you debug it? So, like, you pick up the Sony remote, you push the assistant button, you know, like, hey, play some music.

The TV says, sorry, I can't do that right now. Try again when you're ready. Because the connection between Assistant and cast broke when this Google photo thing's happened, and they disabled everything. Yeah. They did a self-netflix. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this is, like, a ridiculous problem. that assistant just like can't cast music to itself on the TV. They still haven't fixed the Google Photosbug. You know they rolled out instead? Ads channel on the main interface of Android TV. It's just like a sponsored channel with a sponsored garbage in it. Yeah, that's what you wanted?

It's, is, just fixing. Is Android TV an officially supported Google TV? Because how would I know? Yeah, I don't know. I mean. Like Google doesn't make it. an Android TV product, right? No, they, Sony is there...

Sony TV and the Nvidia Shield. There's a handful of other TVs. And this weird, like a pico projector I reviewed. Yeah, but like Sony is their big vendor. Nebula capsule that I'm reviewing right now. It's great. Nice. No, I mean, it's like a, it's a real Google product.

It's, there are product managers. They're very nice. I just, but you can tell. It's like the Android TV team broke something and then they disabled the thing and now the Google Assistant team doesn't know about it. So the Google Assistant is just passive-aggressively telling me to try again when I'm ready. This happens every morning. It's happened every morning for weeks.

It's the worst. Anyway, so there's ads on my Android TV now. I think that's horrible. The one thing I can say about Apple and the Apple TV in their entire strategy is they're not incentivized to put ads in front of my face all the time. I am very worried that when they put out the Oprah show and their Jennifer Annison show and all this other stuff, that the ad, they're going to start flooding that interface with their own content.

You see that I'm still out of my mind with how weird that Apple TV event was. You see just today Oprah's documentary that she sort of announced she'd be doing, she's doing it with Prince Harry. They could have brought Prince Harry to Copertino and they didn't. Like Oprah was great. I want to see Harry too. Come on. I mean, why not?

She's Oprah. She's better if she wants. And then I'm going to put it on the home screen and Apple TV. And then my Google assistant's going to be like, try again when you're right. So annoying. Speaking of Apple, Steve Trotton Smith, Giam Rambo, both kind of breaking the news this week that it looks like iTunes is about to be broken up in a bunch of separate apps. Yep.

So a movies app, a podcast app, a music app, instead of this monolithic desktop iTunes. That's all well and good. A long time coming. Here's the terrifying thing. they're going to use marzipan to do it. Yeah. And that is bad. I don't want to tell you.

Well, it's, it's, I have hope. I do. Good. I believe that it's bad today, that the apps are currently available on the Mac as Marspan apps are terrible. But I think Apple knows it. And I think they're going to fix it. And I think that there's going to be a,

a magical new way to take your app and make it work across, you know, your communication. that has its dumb non-touchscreen and your computer that has its amazing touchscreen. I think that all the multitasking problems on the iPad are going to be fixed. I think that Marsapen apps and the Mac are going to be great. I think there's going to be one single thing that works across all the devices. I think that that's never been a problem before, right once run anywhere. It's always worked perfectly.

I like this. So I'm hopeful that breaking up iTunes. The funny thing about breaking up iTunes is I don't, what I actually think is going to happen is they're not going to break up iTunes at all. it's going to sit there like the QuickTime app just doing stuff and you just won't you'll never open it again

except that there's no other way to sync the iPhone yep right so like you will still if you want to back up locally they're going to have to let you do that and it's just going to it's going to pop up randomly like when I want to play a wave file

or an MP3 file just all of a sudden iTunes will be there and I'll have forgotten that it was there it's going to be like the jump scare of computing on a Mac. And I'm here for it. I can't wait. I mean, back to the, a little bit of black hole thinking. One of the huge barriers to entry of like to compete with the platform companies, like not even Amazon can compete very effectively with the platform companies. And one of those

things is a UI framework. You know, Apple has its eyes. iOS and MacOS UI frameworks. Google has its Android and Flutter UI frameworks. And there's, it's like, it's hardly anybody else can manage it. There are like two kind of, there's a few different open source, like ones that, like most Linux apps use like QT or GTK. There are not a lot of full featured UI kits because it's a very difficult thing to do. Yeah. I, uh, dude, I, I, I hear your hope. I feel it in my heart. I'm also just kind of generally looking at the state of Apple software. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I'm just putting it out there. Just, that's a thing I know about. Like, I've looked at Apple news. It's, uh, I'm very excited for Apple to finally, uh, accomplish the dream of, uh, right once run anywhere with a beautiful UI. But we'll see.

Yeah. Oh, dude, you want to talk to? There's a lot of phones. Walk me through all these phones. Okay, so Vlad just reviewed the Huawei P30 Pro, which will not become available in the U.S. It has a remarkable camera. The camera on the P30 Pro uses a periscope system, so there's a mirror and a prism, and it runs it through a bunch of lenses sideways through the phone, which means they get a 5X zoom that actually works. And then they use a hybrid system to compare it with, combine it with like the regular lenses so you can get up to a 10x zoom that actually is pretty good.

But the most insane thing is it's low light photography. is bonkers. It is instant and it is better than pixel night sight in a lot of cases. Should you be sad about not being able to buy this phone in the U.S.? Yeah, it's still running Emu-E-MUI, Huawei's thing and that's that great. And the pixels may be a little bit more reliable at its photography like day and day out. But the thing that it makes me think of, and actually also the Samsung A80, which has an amazing slide-up thing. You slide up the back and the cameras whip around. It's so good. Is there any innovation happening in phones that isn't like around the cameras?

Like I thought there'd be a bunch of screen stuff with the notches, but we figured that out in a little less than a year. And now like anybody can make any size notch that they want. Processors are doing what processors does. I think Qualcomm is, you know, not doing as well as it should. Intel is nowhere. Apple is doing amazing work. But like, if all the action on phones is just the camera, like, that's cool. And like, I love seeing that we're starting to see some real movement again. We saw it with Google and algorithmic photography. Now we're just seeing a whole bunch of manufacturers do wacky stuff.

So it's nice that there's, like, Apple and hardware, wacky stuff from manufacturing and Google with algorithms. Like that sort of three-part competition is super, super energizing. but I do kind of wish there was some other battlefield on phones to talk about that wasn't just sort of, you know, they'll have more RAM next year. I think that is if you went to India or China, you would see form factor innovation. So we get like bits and pieces of it. Right. Right.

Like we see the Samsung 80, but it's no one out here is going to buy it because Verizon won't push it. Right. But if you're there and everyone buys a phone full price and everyone gets a new phone every 10 months or whatever the stat in India is, which is crazy. And every phone costs $400. And switching is easy because it's all Android. Yeah. Right? So like it's very easy to just like switch phones when you're just running the same operating system.

You're seeing this massive innovation, like form factor in size and battery life. That stuff is cool. And we're, I think we're just seeing glimpses of it. And we're like, well, in order to switch, like, I. I have to make an operating system choice. B, I have to go into a closet and have emotions about I message until I die. I probably have to get a new smart watch. You know, Google is going to surveil me now.

Like, that stuff is a lot heavier. And I think in all these other places, you're just seeing, the form factor innovation in phones right now is wild. Like, it's legitimately wild. I mean, it's April. The galaxy fold comes out this month. But I think here it's like, it's all cameras. The United States, the only thing you can compete on his cameras.

Yeah, I mean, LG is making a good old college try with audio quality. They're still putting their DAC in, you know, their headphone jack. And Cameron just did a really nice review of the LGG8. Thank you. Thank you. Next. Thank you next. Yeah.

And like, it's like a completely forgettable phone, right? Yeah. So I would like to see some of that innovation come here. But I don't know, like is it, do you really think it's that it's iPhone lock-in? Because the iPhone has a larger market. share in the U.S. and it does elsewhere? That's like the long and the short of it. That's dire. It's iPhone locking and carrier. It's the same as ever. Like in 2007 when Paul and I were at Engadgett, like every couple months, like the reason Engadget mobile existed was because every couple

months like NTT Docomo in Japan would release 45 new phones. Right. And we'd be like, this has to go somewhere. Like honestly, like we can't, that can't be the whole homepage of Engadgett. And then for about two years, the entire homepage of Engadgett was phones. Like, HEC would release 45 phones. But it's happening again, right? Like, we have good friends who run NDTV gadgets in India. And, like, they're always telling me, like, we, there's a new phone out in India, like, every day. Like, legitimately every, like, Panasonic has a reasonable phone business in India.

Yeah. That's crazy. But, like, T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon won't carry those phones, won't promote those phones. They sign these exclusive contracts. I mean, everything is in the black. of net neutrality. That's where I'm at right now. Because we have these controlled networks and we don't have a lot of competition on the

network side and it's like you can't move phones between networks as easily as everywhere else in the world. You're not seeing this like handset ecosystem. There's only one solution. The FCC should give all spectrum back to the people and then we can create open source decentralized network.

Yeah, and then I'm going to come to your house with my microwave and destroy your life. I don't know. That's like a little dangerous, but sure, maybe. Maybe that's the answer. One last phone feel. Chris Welch just reviewed the G7, Moto G7, G7, play, all that stuff. They're fine. But cheap phones are pretty good now.

That's a long-running thing. And so the heat on the pixel 3A has been getting higher lately on the rumor mill, which makes me think maybe they're going to announce it at Google I.O., which would be fine. But, man, unless that thing is dirt cheap, like you can go out and get a very good opo phone for, you know, three, 400 bucks. You can go out and get, like, a very good Nokia phone for on that price. Google needs to do something pretty amazing with the Pixel 3A to have it compete at that low end because that low end has got a ton of amazing stuff.

And if they charge more than, I don't know, 500 bucks for it, it's dead on arrival. There's no way. Do you think that'll be an Android 1 phone? Nah, it'll be a full Google experience phone. Yeah. It's just, Google, how many times are going to do some version of a cheap Android phone? Android plan. You know what I mean? Like they've tried it three or four times. Yeah. Like the reason I when you said Android 1 is I had to like wreck my brain to remember precisely what Android 1

means these days because it seems to change every couple of years. Yeah. Like Android 1 is actually not stock Android. Like carriers and manufacturers can do stuff to Android 1 now. Like that's different than it used to be. Unless I'm getting it wrong and there's another Android program that it's like it's legitimately changed every couple of years. Yeah. I mean I think the Pixel 3 in general has been a disappointment. I'm just put it out there. Although we saw some stat that the majority of Pixel 3 owners are Conquest from Samsung. Yeah.

They're Samsung Switchers. And I think in that sense it's probably doing fine. Well, I mean, what they really want is Conquest from iPhone. So not totally fine. Truly. All right. We're going to take a break. Come back.

Paul's going to do a thing. We're going to wrap this thing up. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know that. the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But WhatNot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back.

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a.ai slash vergecast. All right back. Paul. Every week. Always. What's it called? I do a thing. It's called.

The penultimate dongle is what it's called, Nila. I can't believe you forgot. Nothing is more tailored to my interest than the second to last dongle. That's right. Okay, so Vlad wrote up

a USBC audio dongle that is, according to Vlad, who I would trust on this sort of thing, the best USBC audio dongle. It's the Hid is Sonata HD. Got a funky looking cord. It's got a funky looking cord, which is, you know, to be honest,

I mean, that's one really, important aspect of any dongle like this. Like if your phone is going to end up in your pocket, you're going to put a lot of pressure and you're going to end up flexing this cable and especially at the, it's got two ends to fail. You know, so it's got a lot of potential for failure. So it needs to be built robustly. But apparently it sounds good. It's reasonably priced. But it got me thinking what will be like, I was like, huh, I wonder if this will be the last dongle I'd ever need. And I was like, well, no, probably not. Like I might, you know, before, before. Before. Before. wireless headphones are truly solved, I'm probably going to lose this, you know. Yeah. So maybe this is

the penultimate dongle. And then I was wondering, what will be, like, will there be a time in my life where I will be at Best Buy purchasing, it'll be called like Best Buy New Age Amazon or something, and I'll be purchasing the last dongle that I'll ever need in my life? Or is this just a fact of nature And the last dongle I will purchase will just because I will die the next day. Well, that's very dark. Also true. I'm going to say, we promised you got got goth Paul and you got goth ball. That's where we started.

It's where we're going to end. But no, think about this. Let me put this into your mind. One day, we're going to buy dongles for the next interconnect to step us down to USBC. Yeah. We have all these USBC accessories and we're going to be annoyed because we have to buy a thing. And we're going to be like USBX was supposed to solve it.

But why won't they just put a USBC port on this laptop? Maybe that'll happen someday. We're not anywhere closer to it four years after the first MacBook. But it's coming. It's going to maybe one day, right? So no, Paul. There will never be an ultimate dog. Well, I was just wondering.

I'm an optimistic goth. I was hoping. Except for the fact that mortality will come for us all. then yes, there will come a day that you purchase your last dongle. It'll just be related to a larger natural process. Not the evolution. Then your plant food. Exactly.

Then you get sucked into a black hole. But then you can, spoilers speak to your daughter with books. What? Interstellar. Oh, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a deep cut of a spoiler.

Wow. Oh, interstellar, that niche. Indie film. Speak to your daughter with books is not what most people think about within her. But it is true. I do stand behind the bookshelf from time to time and just rattle books in my daughter. While you cry. Speaking of the Black Hole, Jonathan Nolan now has a deal with Amazon to make shows for Amazon.

Oh, that's good. There you go. All right, Paul. I'm coming to you for web browser news because I feel like this one is close to your interests. It is. Microsoft took out their own engine from Edge. They rebuilt it on Chromium. They've released,

they're releasing Canary builds every day now, which is crazy. They're like, they're in the game. What do you think? Right. Is this good? Bad for the web. Good for the web. I mean, I can't, I can't decide.

I really can't decide. I mean, there's this aspect that it may, it means more web browsers are the exact same thing now, because Microsoft has a web browser that is the exact, same thing as Chrome as far as like rendering and stuff like that. But it was really interesting, what really stood out to me, like, so I, for instance, I use Brave, right? So Brave is a very similar premise to Microsoft's Edge.

It runs, it's chromium under the hood, but then you've got, you know, a different browser because you have different priorities. And I don't know all of, I assume that my priorities do not line up with Microsoft's priorities. And therefore, I can't think of why I would want. want to use Edge. But I could imagine someone who's very into the Microsoft ecosystem, like, one nice thing is that you're going to have Edge on Mac.

That's coming soon. That's pretty exciting. But what was really cool is Microsoft just published a list of all of the things that aren't in their browser that are in Chrome. It's like 50 things long. It starts, they could have sorted this like alphabetically or something because it starts off the first thing they removed is safe browsing. Yes.

It's incredible. It means something amazing that Google does. But there are so many things. Like form fill. Like I'm guessing, you know, that was recently a security vulnerability. It turns out of filling forms. There was like a, it was a security vulnerability in multiple browsers. So I don't know.

Is Microsoft doing its own form filling? I'm assuming. But there are so many things Google does. And it's just, it's interesting. Because when you use Chrome, it's a very minimal-looking browser and you feel like you are mostly getting the web. But I know, like, the reason I'm using Brave right now is because I was using Firefox and I really liked Firefox. But there were certain websites, specifically, the websites made by Google. Like Gmail, I think Gmail takes about four times as long.

This is anecdotal. But it feels like it's about four times as long to load Gmail on, on, um, Firefox than it does on a Chrome derived browser. And there's just a lot of, there's a lot of special sauce. This is, Google is delivering an operating system very obviously with every install of Chrome. And so the fact that there are more people that are using the obviously very good

chromium browser engine without Google's whole operating system along for the ride, I think is good, good for the web. but there is the aspect that chromium is becoming the only target as far as from a perspective of a web developer. Is that good? I mean, like, I have so many feelings right now, but I'm just going to bottle them up inside. Dieter, do you want to just read the URL for your piece? What is the web? Do you want to just end this by just slowly typing out the URL for what is the...

A classic Deeterbone piece. You can read on the verge. What does it make you feel? It makes me feel sad and happy at the same time. I am sad for the web. I do think that there should be multiple rendering engines out there because that ensures that websites are being coded to be accessible to multiple platforms so that anybody can make a web browser if they want to.

And it ensures that you're not going to end up in a, IE6 situation where like it only works on Microsoft's product. That doesn't, you know, like, that's not the situation we're quite in yet. You could still, you know, used multiple browsers. And even if everything goes to blink, that doesn't, not going to be as dire as were before, but it's still very sad. I'm happy because I hope that this means that Windows will be faster and better with a good web browser that works better on websites. I'm very curious to see just how deep into Windows this new chromium engine gets because there's a world in which Windows is basically ChromeOS with a bunch of Microsoft stuff on top of it, right? Like, they could use this rendering

engine to build a whole bunch of it if they wanted to. We're not at a place where PWAs are running on this yet. It's still too early. We don't know what it's going to mean for electron apps on Windows, although they will get some benefits because they are. Microsoft is working harder to make sure they optimize Windows to run the Chromion engine in a battery. efficient manner. There's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen to Windows that it's actually good for Windows because Windows will run better. But I overall, on the whole, I'm not happy about what this is going to do for the web. So there's so many things. It's like, why are we ending the show with the thing that we have the most feelings about that is also the nerdiest and hardest

to unpack? Like, net neutrality was easy. It's like, Nilai and Paul disagree. When he yell for five minutes, we've moved on. This is like, all of us have a tangled complex web of emotions. The electron thing is that, like, that's why they did it, right? I mean, that's like our understanding is that more and more applications are being delivered as a set of web technologies, they're getting it wrapped up, they get run in a binary on your computer locally, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, that's a problem for all the desktop platforms. The idea of Windows in the future, basically being ChromeOS, but Microsoft, is actually

not that bad. It's, like, kind of cool, right? because it means applications will be more widely deployed cross-platform. Oh, my God. You're going to make me talk about progressive web apps now, aren't you? No. Because that's a one thing. Microsoft is trying to get PWA's to stop to work to happen so that it stops the March of Electron.

And their flagship product for that is Twitter, which until today, if you tapped your touchpad in the wrong way, and by the wrong way I mean at all, it would highlight the whole damn app. And they just fixed it today. Okay. Things are not going well. But then I will say there's, there is, in fact, another major, like, internet defining rendering engine in the world, which is mobile safari. Yes. Right? It's just like it's there.

It's not like Apple's given up on it. They haven't shifted it to chromium. That's the same safari that runs on the Mac. So, like, there is some competition going on. I think Microsoft. Yeah. From a company that totally has a great history of supporting the web and making sure the web is a really good user experience so that you're not tempted to download stuff from their app store. they make 30%. Yeah.

I love that idea of that kind of competition. I will just tell you that Apple's attempt to get you to not read news on the web is a PDF reader that costs $10 a month. Like, they're not good at it. They might get better, but it's like the reality is against you. What were you going to say, Paul? My loose characterization of basically the three browsers that exist. Chrome is the web.

Firefox agrees. Firefox and Google do not seem to be in beefs over what the next standards are going to be. But Firefox, they as a company, have less money to spend on meeting those standards. So there's a sense where Firefox is behind Chrome just because of the dollars invested. And then Apple disagrees on the web standards on what they are. And I think especially progressive web apps have been a big one. I think that's one reason probably why they're not a solved problem. Like if you see, if the three browser vendors actually agree on something,

like take WebAssembly, for example, it can be out of the gate, you know, pretty quickly. But if Apple is against something, it really, it really gets messed up. It seems, but PWAs are slowly coming to iOS, right? It's like a thing. They are. Yeah. But the Apple has a slight little. some slight restrictions on them that make them non-universal.

Which, by the way, some of those restrictions turned out to be a really good idea because it turned out that the ability to look at, say, like a sensor or, you know, your rotation that Chrome used to give you an Android was enough for advertisers to fingerprint you, even though they couldn't get access to your, you know, device ID anymore. You know, the number of ways that advertisers are pushing to fingerprint you and identify you is out of control. And so Apple's actually fighting a really good fight there. And Google's doing okay.

But like the Apple got rid of like the do not track setting because it actually was counterproductive because it didn't actually stop anything. No one respected it. And they were using other methods to fingerprint you. And so it gave you a false sense of security that you weren't being tracked. So like this setting is useless goodbye. Which was the right thing to do. Yeah.

It would be great if there were more than three companies. I'm just going to put that idea back out into the world. It would be cool if there were more than three companies. But what I'm saying is that there's barely enough money in the browser biz to make three browsers. Yeah. Right. Look, we need to find some sort of adjacent monopoly where we can collect monopoly rents and use them to fund our own web browser. And if anybody has any ideas, I've got a great idea for a vodka company.

I've been tossing around for a while. Oh, my God. I just think that we, what we're going to start a vodka company, and we'll take all the profits from the vodka company and use it to fund a great browser. Would you say that we're going to, we're going to slice off some of the market? We're going to cut through the night. We're going to start a great browser. That's my plan. There is a sense where I think we try to do too much with the web.

Like, there's the internet, which is great, and a lot of great stuff has been built on that. And then there's the web. And the web is our one shared platform. But I think it would be nice to have more shared platforms. Like in a sense, like, Electron kind of became that. Like, it's the shared platform for desktop apps. It happens to be built on basically specifying a very specific type of web, you know, and add a little bit of node to it. But you know what I mean?

Like, we try to do everything with the web. But, like, maybe there could be another platform that would be... You know, cross-platform, that's the thing. We tried to do all things that applications do on the web, and that requires a lot stretching the web to the point where it is so hard to make a web browser that, and those web browsers are so powerful that they can fingerprint you based on the GPU utilization

when the parallax effect happens or something like that, you know? Yeah. Like it's so complicated of a protocol that, in a sense, can't be open anymore. So I'm going to just put forth, Gofer from the University of Minnesota. That's one. Exactly where I'm going. This is our pitch. We're going to start a vodka company and we're going to retake the internet with Gofer.

I'm sure the University of Minnesota, Deeter, you can probably make a call. Yeah. Just say, can we have this? You're not using it. Gofer, by way, failed because it was. Although I never graduated from the University of Minnesota, so. Honorary, Emeritus. Make him give you a title.

You should go to graduation this year. Just like wear the robes and show up. Gofer, by the way, failed, I believe, because it was patent and cumberd. And the other one was not. Patent and Cumberd, and also they wanted to have you have micropayments. They wanted you to need to pay to, you know, go do stuff. An idea that has come back around. See, this could be the future.

Yeah. Mark Andreessen, remember how you killed Gofer? We're back with a vodka company idiot and I think you're going to love. All right. That's it. That's the first guy. There was a bunch of piddly Google news, but whatever. We're way over time.

You don't want me to yell about Google Assistant not supporting multiple accounts, so we're going to move on. That'll be next week's Vergecast, everyone. Thank you for listening. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Deeter's at Backlon. Paul's at Future Paul.

Thank you so much to Lauren Grush for setting us up with the black hole jokes for days. Please read Verge Science. Please vote for Verge Science in the Webby Awards. Vote for why did you push that button. Vote for the Vergecast. We'd love it so, so much. we'll see you next week rock and roll Paul

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