The Vergecast - FTC vs Qualcomm, Trump vs Apple, and Oculus vs ZeniMax

Episode Date: January 20, 2017

This week on Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, Ashley, and Dieter take on the topics in the tech world you may have missed out on this week. Trump spoke with Tim Cook about moving production of Apple products to the US; Qualcomm is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission; and both Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg take the stand in the Oculus trade secrets trial. That’s only the first half of the show, so keep listening for more on this week in tech. 3:07 - Trump / Apple 17:03 - FTC / Qualcomm 24:29 - Oculus Trial 32:36 - Paul’s weekly segment “Put this computer in that computer” 34:53 - Smart duvet 38:45 - Andy Rubin / Android 46:47 - Nintendo Switch 52:59 - Smart garden / AirPods Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast, thevergist.com. I'm Mila Patel. The owner of a small vodka company, you may have heard of. You know we're coming up. By the way, Paul's here. Hello. Dieter's in San Francisco. Hi, Dieter.

Hello. Hi, how's it going? Ashley Carman's here. Hello. And her phone case is more aggressive than ever. It's super furry. Can you see this? That was insane.

I don't know, man. I probably have like 10 strains of swine flu on here right now. It's real bad. It's like a very fur, but it's like a furry carpet. Would you call that a carpet? It's like a shagg. It's like a shag rug. It's like a very 70s like aqua blue carpet vibe. I'm going to have a piece on it this weekend. Keep your eyes out. I'm excited. But anyway, what I was going to say, not to your phone case is great. Thank you. The LGG6 is going to happen. Yeah. Right? It's that time. And the whole Cizzer vodka joke is because of the, of the song like a G6.

Oh, wait, please refresh me the lyrics of like a G6. You know, the part I remember is where they say like a G6.

But the chorus is sipping scissor in my ride and I always thought they were saying sipping scissor in my ride

and I assume that there was a branded vodka placement but there isn't but there should be. So LG look,

I don't know how you're doing in phones, LG. I didn't know why I'm addressing you as a person because you're a gigantic corporation. But if anyone LG is listening to this, I think the G6 would be a huge success

if you called me, you license the Cisor Vodka idea. Together we create Cizzer Vodka, and then we get the band Far East movement to re-record like a G6. This would be great because when we do Vergecasts and we talk to, about LG, you'd have to do this little

Dieter style disclaimer. I'm like, oh, by the way, LG used my vodka brand. But like, what is Farris Movement doing now? They can't, have you heard a new Forest Movement song? So they're fine. They're like available. So they re-record like a G6. But instead of saying sipping scissurep, they say

sipping scissor. That ties back in. What's the original line? Sipping Sizurb. They, Cotein. They're drinking codeine in that syrup. And they fly away. For the Verges 10th anniversary, we will get them for you. It's going to happen. And they will do this.

Anyway, this is a Vergecast cut through the night. Any other rando catchphrase I need to say at the top of the show? No, not at the top. I really like saying snip, snip. I'll try to make that into a thing. There were like G6 rumors. There's a reason the G6 as a phone popped up in my life this week. They're bailing on modularity.

Oh, right, that's it. Modular friends. And we're going to talk about modular phones because there was a big R-piece this week. A bunch of Google stuff happened, a bunch of Andy Rubin stuff happened. We'll talk about that later. I think we got to start in the conflict zone. When you are listening to this, the day this comes out, January 20th, we're recording on 19th, but by the time you listen to this, it's 20th in your car or wherever you are. It's inauguration day, Trump day.

So there's a bunch of Trump news in the air. People are getting confirmation hearings. They're very controversial. But I want to focus on the one thing that Trump keeps saying that, like, directly connects to what we do here, which is he keeps insisting that he's going to have Apple to build the iPhone in the United States. So he just did this interview. Pull up the quote here. The quote is a little, it's a little strange because it's Donald Trump. Yeah, so he met with Axios.

It's a new, the people from Politico, left Politico, started a new media company called Axios. He met with them. and he says, Tim Cook has his eyes open to moving production in the United States and that he, and this is hard to parse. So this is what we assume he meant. He, quote, really believes Tim Cook loves this country and I think he'd like to do something major here. So the first part of that sentence is great because it reaffirms that Tim Cook is a patriot and not like a traitor. Right. Cook is probably happy about that.

You know, Trump looked into his eyes and I mean, he's like a fan of like Auburn football. I think he's You know, hardcore American But I think he'd like to do something major here This is definitely not like the first time he said this Yeah How does he keep this promise? Like of all of the promises he's made This is I think the one that

A is most squarely in the tech zone Because it's his whole thing is manufacturing in the United States So all the car companies are gonna manufacture all the cars here But really the move is moving, right? Like Apple's the biggest company in the world. But is he promising this or does he just really want this to happen? Yeah.

Are you getting the, I don't feel like I've been promised by Donald Trump that he'll get the iPhone. He's made some pretty, like, firm statements that are like, Apple's going to do this. In the beginning, during the election season, he was saying, they're going to bring their hardware or whatever his crazy quote was,

about their computers back to America. So Apple's line back, then, and it's actually consistent all the way to now, isn't that the salaries cost are too much, it's actually that there isn't enough sort of mid-level engineers, there aren't enough people with just like vocational training to do like the work. It's not like, it's not straight up just hiring factory workers for really cheap. It's there just aren't enough mid-level engineers and people that have the right proper vocational training to do it. And, and, and, and, and, And actually, Cook, when he met with Trump, and they had that, you know, insane round table where Trump held Peter Thiel's hand awkwardly.

Just every time we've mentioned that, we have to mention the awkward handholding. And the Tim Cook death stare. Yeah. That was the issue that Tim Cook reportedly brought up was vocational training. And it's the issue that Steve Jobs brought up to Obama way back when, right? I can move all the factories here, but we have, I need 30,000 mid-level engineering. engineers, like engineering management personnel to staff them. So it's really hard.

The other thing Apple always says, and this is fair-ish, is that the glass is made by Corning in the United States. A bunch of, like, the internal processors are made around here. There's all kinds of, like, components that are made in America, shipped to China and assembled into the iPhone. I'm just, to me, this is the one where if this administration is going to be so focused on manufacturing in America, which is, I mean, they want to manufacture a wall. Like, literally everything is about building something huge. This is the one place in the tech industry where you can point to it

and say, this is one of the richest companies in the world, certainly the most valuable company in the world. They manufacture billions of things. You should manufacture more of them in America. And right now, not for nothing, Trump is, you know, he's warmer towards Russia and very cool towards China. and Apple does a shit ton of business in China. All of their growth is in China. So, well, I wouldn't call it a problem. Like, is he promising it? But it's all of the lines of his rhetoric point towards the fact that Apple builds all of their stuff in China

and sells an ever-growing percentage of their stuff in China is problems that Apple will run face first into. They're challenges. I don't know, problems. And this is something that I, as a trend, supporter some of his rhetoric about how we're going to make it hard for company to do x like the the stick part of his bring jobs back like the uh is not as exciting to me as the carrot part which would be reducing regulation uh reducing um you just have to like make it easier to start and run and staff a company and there's a lot of red tape but apple has started and run and staffed it's just

most of their staff trained, born first, then trained and educated, and then working in China. Right. And not even for Apple, for Foxcon. Well, when Foxcon is a Taiwanese. Yeah. There's obviously a reason why it's better to, like, if you read the Times piece about the crazy machinations that, like, China makes these, like, weird, like, non-China areas of China and, like, has these, like, like, has these, like, like, like, like weird stamp.

The economic zones, right? Hong Kong is one. Shenzhen is one. Then they have different sets of regulation. And then they have

these like weird custom offices so that like they like pretend to export and then re-import like the actual iPhones to sell them in China. There's like all sorts of weird stuff

that they do to cut through the red tape of China even to produce there. I think there's a lot of red tape that makes it really hard to manufacture in the US. And that one, this is somewhat

unrelated, but the one thing Apple does build here is the Mac Pro. There's a lot of noise around the Mac Pro, right? You are not allowed to say the Mac Pro without saying womp on. To be honest, I think that's fair. I think that's very fair.

The Mac Pro. Womp, womp, wom. And there's a lot of noise about why the Mac isn't getting updated. Who knows what the real reason is, but some of the noise is that they made such a complicated tooling for it that they can't actually update it without doing even more complicated tooling and more complicated design work.

And that's harder than the United States than would be in China. So I think it was Bloomberg Dieter that had that. Yeah, I think you're right. It was they could update the Mac Pro faster if they moved it to China, but they don't want to take the optics hit of moving it, especially in this administration. So I don't want to dwell too much on D. Trump, as I'm calling him. I believe that would be his Xbox username. D. Trump.

D Trump 2020. Is there underscore D underscore D Trump? Yeah, D Trump. I don't want to dwell too much on it. Walt and I talked about Trump at length, uncontrollably, so you can listen to that. There's lots of things. This is just in the news now. And I think it's going to be a story.

I don't think he's going to stop saying it. And I think Apple is going to have to contend with the fact that they make their stuff in China. I think what's up in the air for me is he's going to make it harder for Apple? because they will continue to make stuff in China, or is he going to somehow sweeten the deal? Does he even have the ability to make it so easy to produce in the U.S., the Apple would be like, yes, this is great. Right.

There's a good outcome here, or a potentially good outcome, where the Trump administration decides it's going to invest billions of dollars into mid-level engineering training programs. And this country produces 30,000 mid-level engineers. And then Apple's like, they're here. Well, thank you. And they're like scoop them all up and put them in a factory and they start making iPhones tomorrow. I don't know.

I don't see that happening. But that's what that's the necessary condition. It's not taxes are lower. It's not give us incentives. It's not, right? What both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have said are we could do the stuff here. The employees are not available to us. So where are the employees going to come around?

But ultimately, no matter what, it's going to come down to a cost thing. Yeah. the cost of like training the employees, right? It's cost, but it's also like, it's not strictly the cost because like they don't exist. And the cost of Apple training, all those things are pretty astronomical. So it's, it's not just, well, it costs more to do it here. So they won't do it even if the engineers are here. They just, Apple's claim is that because of the mid-level engineer thing and also, frankly,

because of like the supply chains are just all there. Like the infrastructure is there. They could just pop it up and all the parts are nearby. Yeah. I mean, you can go into a coffee shop in Shenzhen, and they will assemble you an iPhone cloned. Sure. Ben Hopper did this.

I have such a phone in this office, right? You can't do that here. So you're right. All problems ultimately are just cost, right? Like, if I really want that Sizer Vodka ad to happen, I could probably pay Far East movement. And companies have made phones. You're just letting that ride.

Absolutely. Fine. Stips new. Companies have made phone, Motorola made a phone in the. the U.S. Yeah. It didn't work out great for them. You know,

companies do create technology products in the U.S. It's not impossible. It's just typically not the right economic decision for that company. And also possibly they can't get the quality. Right. Without that training. So, but the cost to like just focus on cost,

the cost is a long cost. Right? It's a cost over time. You've got to find a bunch of people who want to be trained for this job. You've got to train them. which presumably takes a significant amount of time. You've got to build a factory and move them all to the area around the factory. It's not we're just going to pay the money and build the factory.

It's a very human cost. And so if Apple as a company commits to that, they're going to want maybe, like you said, not a stick, but a carrot to do it. And the Trump administration is going to have to pay for that. Yeah, I mean, the more interesting question to me is like, does is there is there is there what is the reason that he keeps bringing it up is it because he actually hopes that that this is going to happen that we're going to start building the factories here or is it that he wants to have this rhetoric as a stick for some other you know motivation some

other end he wants to be able to draw a harder deal on like uh repatriation of money from ireland and well you you're not doing the factory that i can keep asking for us. So we're not going to give you quite as good a deal. We'll let you move all your offshore money back to the States, but you got to spend it on training programs and factory development. Like, right, all potential and potentially good outcomes, but they're all outcomes that currently Apple is not organized around. And so like, right, when you're listening to this, the inauguration lap and Donald Trump will be our president, will have been our president, we'll have tense issues. We'll have being our president.

You'll have future perfected our president. We'll have future perfected our president. But I think he's not going to stop saying like the most important product Made by an American company that affects everyone in our culture is this phone Right that's the the the and I you can I'm sure smart people argue with me about that but it's the reason the verge exists and we talk about technology and culture is these phones So he can't look at September will come and the iPhone 10 will come out and it will be the biggest moment across the culture. Like it always is and it's going to be made in China.

And like some reaction. The iPhone 10 now? I'm just calling you the iPhone 10. That's the 10th iPhone. Why? Oh. That's me. By the way, that's not a real thing.

I don't know how I feel about that. Tim Cook didn't call me on a phone and be like, let's talk about SEC football and also it's called the iPhone 10. Although that would be a fun. Tim Cook, you've heard of conversation. I also would say he's created this, this,

he's created this environment where who could possibly expect Apple to move manufacturing to the U.S. within five years, right? He's created this environment that if they do it in the next decade, everybody praises Trump for it. Whether they were going to do it or not.

He's kind of created this narrative of any time a company these days says it's going to invest in a fund for something or it's going to expand or it's going to build something in the U.S. It's all created to Trump. It's created this wild narrative I think I would more credit Trump if enough engineers were educated here.

I wouldn't be applauding him for bringing the iPhone back to the U.S. I would applaud him for educating people to the level that they're able to create an iPhone. I hope that that's the way this goes, right? We put more money into science and engineering education, STEM education. That's a good outcome. But it's the, I just think it's the first place, the big tech industry explosion with Trump will come is not net neutral. Like those things are expected We kind of know the shape of how they'll go

Trump is going to dismantle the FCC Like that's basically what his people have proposed I need to write that piece I've got all the notes to do it I think this one is It's so hard that if he keeps saying it Eventually he's going to be motivated to deliver it Anyway

Let's stick on this government tip Shall we? Okay The FTC Obama's FTC Not when you're listening to this By the way all of Obama's like little, you know,

administrations, all the divisions are definitely doing, like, Mike drops on their way out the door. Like, we're not going to talk about it too much. Like, the FCC, like, Wheeler. FCC chair wheeler is just, like, throwing out last minute bombs and then walking out the door. Yeah.

It's a good move. It's the end of their era. The FCC. Is that respectable? No. Yeah. That's what you do. That's what you do.

What? Why not? You have power. Use it. This is why I want to swallow. government. Oh my gosh. Okay. Continue you, please.

So I think this one's really interesting. We have talked in the show for, I don't know, the entire time it's existed about Qualcomm. The FCC sued Qualcomm and said it's used

its monopoly on LTE chips to force out all of its competitors. Most, and that's, the lawsuit is very complicated, but basically the thrust of it is Qualcomm has most of the patents on LTE,

and they would say to you, Mr. Samsung. If you want to make an LTE phone, it's fine if you use somebody else's modems, but they won't be able to make enough. So you've got to pay us a license and use our chips. And if you don't, if you use somebody else's chips,

you still have to pay us the royalty on the patent for their chip. Okay, so it effectively increases the price of everyone else's chips compared to Qualcomm. And Qualcomm is the only company that makes them at scale, so you have to get chips from Qualcomm. I haven't read deeply on this, but correct me if I'm wrong. I thought the whole point of if you have a patent

that you are required to in most cases, like, license it out at a reasonable rate. Fran, Patent's. We're going to talk about this a lot. It's Fran time. So I can't escape this phrase in my life. Fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory license terms. So if you...

Pranned. If you... We've talked about friend patents on the show. So the entire Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola patent lawsuit landscape was about Franned Pattton. Okay. So Apple sues Samsung and says, you copy the design of the iPhone, Samsung sues Apple back and says, you use these chips. Apple's response is, well, you have to license your patents to us because your chips are part of standards. Our design is not part of standards, so we don't have to license shit to you. That was basically the push and pull of the Apple Samsung patent case. And I once asked Tim Cook at the code conference directly when he was on stage, why the hell is this lawsuit still going and he had no answers until he settled on. We wanted to make the frowned environment

more consistent. And I was like that, that is a bad answer to him. I wrote that later in a post. Okay. Anyway. So this fran not apply here? So fran applies. Okay. FTC says in the first, in the first claim, they set rates higher, not fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory rates. So they set bad rates that were not franned. They weren't friendly. The second part, God, Snow Nurtty, second part is something called patent exhaustion, which is if you make the chip. Which I get all the time. So if you make the chip, I don't know, whoever else makes the chip, Broadcom makes the chip. They have to license the patents to make the chip. And so that's it. That's all the money you get.

And then when they sell it to ZTE, ZTE doesn't have to pay the money. the license because they already one patent royalty was already delivered. Okay. So you exhaust your patents when you collect that first royalty. Qualcomm's move was to say, you can't have our chips unless you sign a royalty agreement with us that says you're going to pay royalties on their chips too. Sounds kind of like extortion. It's a little bit of double dipping because A, Qualcomm made all the chips.

B, they were getting paid twice. So that's the whole complaint. Qualcomm obviously says all this is bullshit. In this complaint, Apple mentioned many times prominently, because they make so many phones, Qualcomm paid Apple. They excused them from these royalty fees if they agreed to never make a YMAX iPhone. So they didn't touch pay Apple as took less money from Apple. Right. But like in the grand scheme of things, Apple had more money than it would otherwise. Yeah. So in order to not make a YMAX iPhone, which is my favorite part. Yeah.

So Paul, you remember Wi-Max? Yeah. We had a bunch of garbage Wimex phones that failed. This is like the smartest deal of all time for Apple. They're like, yeah, we agree not to do this stupid thing. YMX was ahead of its time.

The other interesting thing about the case is the FTC is basically saying, hey, Apple is the specialist special flower in the tech industry and by making special deals with Apple and by changing Apple

the way Apple does things, you have therefore changed the entire industry. So, like, part of their whole case against Qualcomm is Apple is a unique snowflake and whatever Apple does, everybody else is going to do. And because Qualcomm did whatever it needed to do in order to keep its Apple business, it ended up pushing Intel and everybody else out. Yeah. It's only of interest because, A, I think the idea of a gigantic. massive, like, massive battery YMAX iPhone is, like, all of those YMAX phones were huge.

There was never a small one. So I think that's hilarious. And then I also think it was never a given that LTE would just win, right? Like Sprint was way out in 4G first. If Apple was able to make a small YMAX phone, Sprint might have survived instead of being a garbage fire that is like right now. I feel like LTE had like much more, it was part of the, it's called long term. evolution. It was part of the

club. It was part of the club. It was like the thing that was going to happen in Europe. Yeah. But like half of the networks in America were CDMA and half of them were GSM and that had nothing to do with Europe. So it's Trump's America now. Europe is stupid. I don't care what they do.

So now what happens? They go to court? They're going to court. And so this is another thing, right? The one Republican commissioner at the FTC who voted against it says, I think this lawsuit is stupid. The FCC FTC now has a lawsuit in the works that the administration might be against because the Democrats are moving on. So we'll see.

I think it's fascinating. Qualcomm, I didn't know this. Qualcomm makes more money licensing its patents than it does making chips, which is not bad because they invent a bunch of stuff. So that's fine. Well, and they're not in Samsung phones or Apple phones typically. Oh, they're in a ton of it. Oh, Qualcomm is. This is all about the modems.

It's not about the processors. Right. Right, right, right. So they're in a bunch of Apple. Intel is in Apple phones down on the iPhone 7, but only half of them. I think Qualcomm, it's much easier to have a Qualcomm processor and Qualcomm modem, unless you're elsewhere in the world. And elsewhere in the world, LTE penetration is low, which is why Samsung ships Qualcomm processors in the States

and does its own X-Ns processors elsewhere in the world. It's a real thing. Okay. Last government story. And then we're going to do fun stuff after this sad. Then can we play the, I'm just a bill? video. Speaking of Deeter's disclosure,

Deeter's wife works for Oculus, and Oculus is on trial this week. And I own a small vodka company, and I'm angling for a deal from LG around the LGG6. Can I try to set this up a little bit? Ashley, do you have anything you need to disclose? I have a furry phone case.

That could make me biased toward other furry phone cases. You've got a bias towards Muppets. Yeah. That thing looks like a month. Can I set this up from what I think happened? Yeah. Because I don't know all the details.

No one does. That's why we're in court. There's a guy named John Carmack. He made a lot of great video games in his company, Id Software, got bought by a bigger company because that happens with game publishing. Bigger company, terrible names. Zenimax. Zenimax.

Which you possibly would see that logo in the credits of a video game, but you always skip those credits in this. Yeah. Zeni Max sounds like a low rent rapper. What's up? It sounds like they manufacture VHS tapes. Yeah. It's like the sequel to Betamax.

Or like a Betamax knockoff. Yeah. We need to make a character that's like Zenni Mac. Anyway, keep on. John Carmack is, I mean, I've literally written an essay about how much I love John Carmack. He's just the best nerd. He just saw, like, someone was like making like a iPhone port of the Doom and they were doing a shitty job. so he's like, okay, I'll learn how to program iPhones from scratch

and made like this perfect port of doom for iPhone. He's a genius programmer, and he's always trying new things. He started a rocket company. Like, he's just obsessed with solving new problems, and he gets into VR. He's talking with this kid, Palmer Lucky, sharing ideas and resources and possibly intellectual property owned by Zinn-N-N-X. Possibly the code.

to Doom 3 and the trade secrets behind it. But that what... This is what's at issue in the trial. And then eventually, Palmer Lucky hires John Carmack and John Carmack is at Xenomax. Or is at Oculus now? Not at Zinnamax. And then Facebook buys Oculus

for $2 billion. And the thing is, is this whole thing and so Zinnamax is suing Facebook for... 2 billion dollars. It's a lot of money. Literally the purchase price of Oculus. But they've... I feel like what they're actually, they're not suing them for intellectual property. They're suing them

for the mind of John Carmack. It's like John Carmack was really smart and he was here and he was doing stuff for us. And now that you have him, he's really smart for you. And that makes us sad. I think that's part. I mean, so if I lost John Carmack, I'd be mad. So the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Genie Max narrative. I'd be two billion dollars, man, for sure. When you put in that tape, that VHS tape, labeled Zennie Max, the picture of Zennie on the front, and you're expecting an adventure story about guy who gets sucked into a video game, which is absolutely what that movie would be about. What you instead get is a sad tale of woe from Zennemax. It's like, John Carmack saw Palmer Lucky at E3.

He helped him make a version of Doom 3 that ran on the Oculus. Lucky showed it to a bunch of people using our code illegally because that belongs to us. And Carmack helped him make the Rift better using our proprietary trade secrets and information. The Rift wouldn't exist Carmack thoughts Yeah And Carmack worked for that company So technically his work product

belongs to that company If not for Carmack's help The Rift would have never been good Palmer Lucky would have never been able to make Oculus I mean our first demo of Oculus Type technology was Given to us by John Carmack In John Carmack's office

At Cinemax Yep Was it Doom 3? We have this video I don't believe so I don't remember But our first demo of the Rift headset was Palmer Lucky showing up at our trailer at CES. Just like knocking on the door.

You're like, hey, you want to see this thing? It was ridiculous. The first game I played on it was Unreal Tournament. It wasn't 2 and 3. Well. But I was late to the party. Yeah. Anyhow.

Valve was also sharing its stuff at the time. They're just not. Yeah, now they have their own thing. They have their own thing. And they decided not to sue. But it was like a big happy family. We were discovering VR together. It was like a kid on a message board was like, I made this headset.

Can anyone help? and John Carmack was like, why, yes, I do read this message board, right? And like, what's happening now is Xenemax is saying, if not for John Carmack. Stop reading message boards. Stop reading. Oh, sorry. Stop lurking. If not for John Carmack, the Rift would have never existed.

You sold your company to Facebook for $2 billion. And what we deserve out of that is all of it. That's actually the piece that gets me. They're not asking for like $100 million or whatever. value they think of Carmack's time. They're literally asking for the entire purchase price of Oculus. I think that, I don't know, we're not at the trial. Like, I don't know what they're, I think that is so ludicrous, but it's happening. Palmer Lucky hasn't been seen since he got caught paying for, like, Reddit trolls to shitpost about Trump. Apparently was at this trial.

He was, he testified. Zuckerberg testified. Zuckerberg, classic. You know, Zuckerberg's on this kick right now. He's like 12 people monitoring his Facebook page. He's like basically delivering stuff. Everybody's saying Zuckerberg's running for. president. Isn't that true? Zuck's Facebook page right now is like, I've traveled all across this great land. I met a mother who needed health care. I met a young woman in Arkansas

who had just coded her first video game and I thought, we need to, like, that's investing in Hawaii. That's his Facebook persona right now. The Hawaii thing is hilarious. And like, basically the Zuck from the social network showed up at this trial and was like, I don't know, our lawyers are pretty

smart. We're fine. And like, that's his whole vibe. One of the things that came up with the trials that they kind of moved pretty fast. Yeah. Yeah, they saw the thing and they bought it. They moved fast and broke things. Yeah.

Like, ultimately, they could just pay the $2 billion. They'd be like, you just shut up. But they have John Carback. Yeah, they got John Carback. They win. They're good. It's like, you don't get to make another Doom because we have John. Anyhow, lots of stuff happening on the government side.

Although Doom 3, Game of the Year, Polygon.com. That's what I feel about that. in a world where Overwatch exists. Not sure how I feel about that, polygon.com, if you're listening. Stupid mainstream media. I don't hate the mainstream media so bad. I'm going to read this advertisement.

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My glasses are like looking through scotch tape that you like ripped up off the carpet. Well, you should get some of these no glare lenses. is Crizal.com. Paul, every week, you do a segment. We always do this at the exact same time. And we never forget weeks. No, I moved it.

Here's a little inside baseball. I moved it from one part of the rundown to another, so I'd remember it every week. I don't think that's true. I think it always happens right now. Yeah, just like this. Next doc. Who made, what's it called?

What's your segment called? Oh, well, you know, you know, every week, it's called. Put this computer in that computer. NextDoc made a... I don't even know if they shipped it. They made a folio, basically, a little while back, where you plug an Android phone into this empty shell that is a laptop with a keyboard and a screen,

and now you have a computer that's powered by the computer power of your Android phone. Well, at CES, Intel announced this weird... A little credit card PC, right? Yeah, the computer. key card. Intel just wants you to compute in different shapes.

Last year was the stick. Yeah. Yeah. Next year the compute donut. And also they have the Nuck. The NUC is the next unit of computing NUC. It's like basically.

Yeah, the cubes. Like the MacMany shape computers are based on Intel Nuck. Yeah. This is the compute card. The card. Which has like Wi-Fi and the processor and the RAMs.

All the computer stuff built in, but no battery, no screen, no input methods, and it's meant to slide into another device to make a computer out of it. And Next Doc is like, hey, that's what we want to do. So they made a computer with two slots. One slot is for the compute card. I have no idea if they're going to ship this. It's like a tablet that might also have a keyboard. It's all renders right now. But one slot is for the compute card.

The other slot is for this thing that could be ports or could be an extra battery. There's like three different things that you can swap in. So it's based like an old power book. Yeah. Right? Yeah, that's the dream. That was my first laptop. Yeah.

PowerBook 500, right? Mine was the PowerBook Pismo, which was the second G3 power book. I had a Main Street. I'll go head to head on Powerbook code names, bro. Oh, Main Street. Ashley, do you have a gadget segment? What caught your fancy this week? There is like no gadgets this week.

He has a slow. What does the CES just happened? Yeah, everyone showed us their stuff at CES. But at CES, I got to finally, after all of these months, try out the smart duvet. Oh, my God. Wait, how did it go? Actually, I've noticed, you've covered a lot of bedding. I'm very into sleep.

There's a lot of pillows and blankets. I just come in a lot of sleep tech at CES. Just wait. It actually worked. Literally just an air mattress. Wait, what does it mean by it actually? worked. The smart duvet,

it like inflates. So essentially how, what it, wait, it's a duvet or an air mattress? It's a duvet. So what you do. You just said it was,

wait for it. All right. Well, it fills with air. And that's how, so if it's crumpled up, it just inflates. And then you have a bed made,

quote, quote, quote, it's spread out. So it has like, like air pockets around the edges of it. Well,

so they told me that when it launches, it'll have like, yeah, like little air holes so that when you get home, the idea is you do this when you're not home. So then by the time you get home, it's all deflated and you don't even know it's there. Where did? You put the duvet over it, a cover over it. Okay, and you push the button.

It's like, a bed is arrived. And then you like leave and you push the button. You come home and you're like, where's my bed? No, no, no, no, no. Opposite of that. No. You're done sleeping and it's all messy, right? Well, who has time in this 2017 fast-paced life to make your bed?

I got to go to a mid-level engineer training. Exactly. So do you push a button or is an app or? You could do it over an app or there is a literal machine. If it was just like a switch on a compressor, like that doesn't count. And then it inflates. And by inflating, it becomes, it covers your whole bed. And so now your bed is made.

But then you're saying the air goes out of it. Right. So they have slight pinholes that over, like as the day goes on, the air will come out of it. So when you get home, you don't even know that it was an air mattress, essentially. Oh, I get it. It's a blanket that makes itself. Yes. Yes.

But what other is not actually an air mattress? No, I decided. It's a duvet. It's a duvet. It's a smart duvet and it's like, and then it like deflates. Right. But you have a cover over it, so it just looks like your normal blanket. Got it.

Yeah. But what other than the fact that the button is in an app makes this smart? Right. It's basically like a wemo switch. The app is just the way of that. Oh, yeah. Well, the thing is they, hopefully this isn't, like I'm giving away some crazy secrets, but they hinted at future developments that perhaps could make it smarter.

It's watching. Oh, my God. Like, how? How could it be small? Use your graduation, hall. I want us to pivot circuit breaker so that all it does is write about incremental smart devere rumors. Yeah. The same way we used to, like, look at like, you know, FCC drawings and like, oh, the battery

label is here and it's got this one shape on it so we think the phone's going to look like this. I want that but for self-making bed blankets. Yeah. Like this one has a slightly bigger battery in it. Honestly, they sold me on it. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of baller. You leave the house. You press a button on your app and your bed is made. And it has a fastener so it attaches to your top sheet. So all of this

can be crumbled up. Do you have to snap it on? Yeah. I mean the Fastener does seem not so great. That's the next editor of improvement. Smart Duvet updated with better fastener tech. All right. Let's talk about a bunch of Google stuff. We've got to get through this pretty fast, actually.

Andy Rubin. Sorry, Android. Started Danger before that. Speaking of old bad phones, which our last episode was entirely about. Has a new company. Those ones are great. Come on.

The sidekick? It was pretty cool. In its moment, because it flipped. Well, the sidekick was the coolest phone. I cannot believe you just went, eh, the sidekick. It was super eh. Whoa. Let's be real.

Okay, we can talk about this later. I mean, basically when he started Andrew, he tried to build another sidekick, and then I was like, oh, shit, the iPhone, and then, like, changed the whole thing. He has a new company called Essential. They're building a new phone. A bunch of stuff about it leaked to Bloomberg. It appears to be a modular phone of some kind, which is interesting. What Bloomberg seems to know is it's an early prototype.

They seem to want to launch it this year, but they're, like, still in prototype phase. which is those two things don't add up. Supposedly it has an edge-to-edge screen, a ceramic back, and it could be modular because, I don't know, everybody else thought it was a good idea and then walked away from it, but they so want to do it. I guess Motorola is sticking around with it, too. The one thing we don't know for sure is whether or not it runs Android.

It has to run Android. It has to run Android, right? It's just like, of all of the people in this industry who understand that they can't make a new operating system to compete with Android, Andy Rubin has to be that guy. Was the sidekick? He rolled out and was like, it's Windows phone.

Hip Top. Hip Top OS. Yeah. That's what the sidekick ran. Yeah. Think about it. The real great OS. Dude, by the way, this story, by the way, feels like it's custom designed to appeal to me.

Like old phones that I love, but everybody's forgotten about or given up on modular, third party, you know, not straight Google, not straight. Apple and probably doomed. Like, this is right directly in my wheelhouse. Literally, when I read this article, I was like, Dieter is probably freaking out about this. I hope

it works. I just, I don't see his timeline. Like, you got it. Oh, you forgot the best part. It's got AI. Of course it does. It helps you pick what module you want to use. It's like you look like you're taking a picture. Try attaching the camera.

It's great. other Android stuff, Nuget finally rolling out on Galaxy phones and the S7 S7 Edge. I will say they're promising it's coming to the S6 stuff this year also. I'm pleasantly surprised at the number of phones that are already able to support Daydream. Oh, yeah? Like there's a few phones that are getting Nuget that will just support Daydream because they're getting Nuget. That's pretty cool. And that's special.

The headset's on sale. It's 50 bucks. Yeah. And it's so nice. Yeah. It's fuzzy. It's great that Samsung's putting this out. I have a Nexus 7 tablet, and it's like dying.

I should buy another Android tablet. You know, you can go on Amazon, and you can still buy Android tablets on 1.5 or 1.6. It's like, you can sort buy it. You're like, what operating system you want to run? It's not like Android and iOS. It's like Android 1.6, Android 2.0, 2.2, 2.3. It's garbage. most of Samsung's tablets

still running marshmallow or a lollipop. It's like a real real disaster. What Android are you are you going to get? You should buy the Vizio remote

is what you should get. It's like a Vizio TV just to get the tablet. It's like it kind of makes sense. I don't, I only need this thing to like send Netflix to my Chromecast. Did Google? I might as well buy the whole TV

and the tablet and get it all. Did Google give up on tablets? I haven't heard a peep about tablets. Wasn't marshmallow supposed to be all good for tablets, theater? The Google's attempt to make Android good for tablets started with honeycomb, as you recall. The Zoom. The Zoom.

Can I tell you what I'm obsessed with, by the way, with the Samsung Galaxy View, which runs all I pop, but it's basically, have you ever seen this thing, Ash? It's like a 21-inch tablet. Oh, wow. Every time I see one in Best Buy, I'm like, I should buy that. And I don't know why. like it's basically just a small TV. The whole point is it'll run TV apps.

But I'm like, what if I had a huge Android tablet? Like the most enormous Android tablet. Here's what I will say about Android tablets. In order for Android tablet to work, it has to have apps that are good at tablet screen size and almost no Android apps are good at a tablet screen size. However, there is a huge install base of Chromebooks coming that are going to work with Android apps

that can be dynamically resized in Nuget. And if Google is actually successful with the Chromebooks, it could mean the return of an Android tablet because people will finally start making apps that work at that screen size. But what if I had an 18-inch Samsung tablet that ran Android 5 that had a two megapixel camera phone? There's got to be millions of people out there.

It's not like there's no install base for like... It's such a ridiculous product. It's not like there's no install base for like fire tablets. There's a reason to make an Android app for a tablet. Yeah, but nobody pays for apps on them. So there's no reason to develop software for that screen size because if you want to make money on an app on Android, you need the insane volume that you get on phones.

The volume on tablets is not as insane. Yeah. But you think the volume of Chromebooks is that much higher than firetables? I think that it probably is. And even if it's not the usage of Chromebooks in situations where you'd want quality apps is way higher than on fire tablets. On fire tablets, you just, you get it. You open up Amazon video or you open up the Kindle app or you maybe use a web browser. You play like some crappy bejeweled style game that you get for free from Amazon's underground app store.

Right. And then you go on with your day, right? But if the Android stuff on Chromebooks and maybe Chrome tablets, who knows, actually gets used and people want to see more of it, that will probably have a better chance of spurring enough demand to get people to make decent Android apps at that screen size than Android tablets, which, like, honestly, like, they were only successful because they were cheap and they had, like, medium-sized screens. No, and they run Netflix and Netflix kids, which is all people really want. That's why Amazon's tablets are successful. Okay. Because they, you can run Netflix on them, and you can run Amazon, kids stuff on them, and kids just, like, watch tons and tons of stuff.

I'm into this timeline. Yeah. Chromebooks save me and your tablets. What if I said Chromecast tablet? The problem with Chromecast is, are you cast into or you cast them from? This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by Squarespace. And Paul's existential Chromecast dilemma. Whether you're planning to start a business, change careers,

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I love it. I want to do a whole story on the Squarespace tagline people. Yeah. They're just throwing them up on the wall. I love it. All right. We got to talk about the switch. I was wrong. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Dieter's very sad. Oh, my God. Ashley, are you going to buy a Nintendo Switch?

No, but I'm very excited for everyone. Ah. Yeah, it is exciting. I like Mario. Mario is the only game. Mario Sunshine is the only game in my entire life. I have played start to finish. Wow.

So the Mario game, we just need to point this out and move on as quickly as possible. It's an open world game set in a city named New Dogg City. It's just Donkey Kong, right? Yeah, New Dong City. But it's not coming at launch, right? The Mario game's not at launch? No. No, that's the big problem.

I thought the event itself was really, really good. It was super fun to watch. It was super entertaining. It built up hype really, really well. It had really good beats. The event was so good that by the time you got to the end, the thing that was in the back of your mind going, huh?

Should have been the thing that crippled the entire event, which is their launch launch. lineup is The Legend of Zelda, One, two, Switch, and some stuff. And, like, that's not a good launch lineup. No. Also, Paul was right. Paul, how about the graphics? I know you want to talk about the graphics. Well, I do want

I do want, I know everybody to know that I was right. Yeah, you're right. Last week. Neil and Dieter were wrong. I was, I was wrong. And I was right. No, I said if it was priced over such and such, it would be bad and it wasn't. So there you go. I said $400, Paul said $300, I believe. Yeah. Came in a $299.

All right. All right. $300. $200. $2.99, March 3rd. Yeah, I mean, I'm not super mad about this, and I kind of saw it coming, but I just assumed that because they reported that the console output's 1080p. I assumed that Nintendo could make Zelda work a 1080p.

Yeah. But they can't. And it's 900p, 30 frames per second. And it's just like, this is really old hardware in here. Yeah. I mean, it's an iPad. It's basically a, it's a glorified Nvidia Shield, right? Right.

Do we know if it runs Android yet? Everyone, right? The basic assumption, but no one knows. Right. Yeah. It's probably Android underneath somewhere. But you're saying it's basically a tablet. Yeah, it's a tablet.

Like, and it's a tablet with the most famous game developer of all behind it. Because it is a tablet. Also true. That's why it's a tablet. I don't know. Wait, hang on, hang on. Why is it a tablet? But it's not like next year's tablet.

Right. You know, and it's not an iPad Pro. I'm guessing if you ran like straight at benchmarks, like it's probably... But the iPad Pro comes like $900. Yeah, I'm just saying. Right. It's not the best you can get in a tablet. When I want to get the Nintendo Switch 2,

am I going to be able to buy just the upgraded tablet but use the same dock and joycon controllers? Oh, that would be a thing. I mean that's that's what basically both Microsoft and Sony are doing right they're just revving their hardware yeah

hmm just saying what if you just stick another what if they're like screw it by an iPad that's a move all right Paul you have other thoughts here I mean not a lot the biggest news is the price I'm extremely excited for this Mario game

because like I mean I think Super Mario Sunshine is a wonderful game. And then like, I mean, Galaxy's good, but it has some sort of motion gimmicks, right? That, like, you know, are a little off-putting to me. It's not a deal-breaker. And then for the Wii U,

they didn't ever make a real Mario game. They made 3D, they made a bunch of 2D games because those are just cash for Nintendo. That's just so easy for them. And then they made like 3D land or 3D world or whatever it's called, which is like almost a Mario game, but like kind of a half a platform,

like half of a 2D platformer mixed with a 3D exploration. It's not the real Mario experience. Just the way Mario moves and he does the double jumps and the back flips and the wall jumps. Do you're just describing jumps now? Yeah. Well, he can jump on his hats.

He can jump on his hat and move through New Dong City by jumping on his hat. Throws his hat forward and then it spins in place and then you jump on it. Imagine the possibilities. I think Mario 64 I'd love to watch Mario 64 speed runs

and I've played most of the game I've never finished it but it's a really great game but there's something like really primal about that game that takes this physics system basically and it just tries everything it can with this like

can you slide can you jump can you hop onto this thing how can you fast can you move through here and it's just like it's just so pure and delicious video gameness. Can I tell you that I'm worried about Legend of Zelda? Because everybody says it's basically Skyrim, but Zelda. And I don't want Skyrim.

I want Zelda. Like, I need that plot wagon. I like those rails. I like that Zelda lets you go off the rails a little bit. But that whole progression of, you get this item, let you let you get this item, which lets you get this item, which lets you into that dungeon. Like, there's something coming.

about like being directed through the world that I don't know how much they're moving away from it in the new Zelda and I'm a little bit worried that I'm going to play it. I'll be like oh this is just like any other RPG except it's Zelda and that's too much work like I don't I don't want to learn how to like make recipes like that that's some that's some that's some Skyrim shit I don't need that shit like that's my old but I will say don't need it if you're in the market to start a new website grindin with link.com is like a great name or like a skater series? I'm actually concerned about the game for the opposite reason. I would like there to be more Skyrooms in the world and I'm scared it won't be complicated enough and it'll be like Skyrim for babies. Well, only one of you is going to win. It's true. All right, Ashley, we've got to wrap up, but I feel like we have a...

Give me some stuff. What happened to you this week? I mean, this week kind of... I don't know. This week was quiet. Wait, I know what happened involves salad. Oh. Every round and again, it's like increasingly obvious to me that Paul and Ashley spend a lot of time together.

And like code word salad just happened to this podcast. I'm testing a smart garden at home. And I had my first harvest. And I made pesto. And I also made smart garden pesto? I made pesto from my. my basil. That's pretty awesome.

And I also harvested lettuce and created a salad. Nice. And Paul saw it. Yeah, the Pesto looked. I mean, don't look at Pesto in a bag. It's my tip. Oh, yeah, I don't have tubberware because I'm not that much of an adult. So I put everything in zip lock bags.

Would you say it was good? It was a flavorful? Oh, it was great. I felt like I learned so much about plants. It would be great for kids. It's fair. I don't want to tease this, but I know you're writing something cool about AirPods. You wore AirPods a little bit today. I did. I wore them the first time ever.

Okay, when you asked me if I like them, I was like, I like these actually because I was hating on them. And then after literally 25 minutes, my ears started hurting and I couldn't have them in anymore. Really? I don't think it's a fit for me. I have a weird bone or something in there. I mean, the whole thing is like you keep them in all the time, talk to Siri. Yeah, not going to work for me. I look like a cool person. I wish they just had like some padding. I'm sure there's going to be a weird to AirPod accessory market. It's going to be... The gel.

But there is something about Apple is the company with the temerity to believe that everybody has the same ears. I just don't fit Apple's prescription of a human. When they announced the earpods, there was a Johnny Eye video that's like we measured every ear in the world. And I've designed these.

And if your ears had gone, then death will take you and evolution will move us forward. It was like a very dark video. By the way, if we could get Johnny, I have to say death will take you, that would be my ringtone. I don't know. It's dark, I understand. I believe it.

Do you think Apple designs for the literal compromise, or do they design for the evolutionary perfect humans? That's what I'm saying. Like, these are, these work great on X-Men. All right. That's it. That's our show. We'll be back next week. I want to thank my friends.

No-Glar lenses for sponsoring us today. If we're glasses, you know, fingerprints, special scratches, glares, can be concert restructuring and a huge distraction. Just buy the Krizal-N-Glar lenses. Just do it. They're at C-R-I-Z-A-L.com. Start Living Life in the Clear. There's a bunch of other stuff you should listen to.

Walt and I do Control Alt Delete. It comes out on Thursdays. We talked a lot about ads this week. Verge Extras heating up. We're doing a bunch of experiments. So Ashley did one with Caitlin and Lizzie about Tinder. Should listen to that one. Yes.

Ben just did a new one called listening to machines to understand why they break, which really cool. So that's on Verge Extra's feed. Lauren Good, who's often on the show, does too embarrassed to ask. Kara Swisher does recode decode. Peter Kafka does recode media. It's one of my faves. All this is on iTunes. Go listen to them.

Consume no other media. And then rate them highly. That's your assignment for this week. That's the Vergecast. Cut through the night. Rock and roll. Don't forget to vote. Paul.

It's over, man. I know. Thank you.