The Vergecast - Galaxy Note 7s don’t explode, they sizzle

Episode Date: October 14, 2016

This week on Vergecast, we have the exclusive interview with our tech and transportation reporter Jordan Golson, who has been reporting nonstop on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 debacle. Nilay, Lauren, and Paul welcome Jordan to the show to talk about the recent events regarding Samsung, as well as what it means for competitors and the tech ecosystem. 02:42 - Samsung recall 22:48 - Masterclass ad 27:07 - Google Pixel 36:44 - iOS10 37:12 - Samsung vs. Apple 50:15 - Graphicstock ad 51:24 - Ashley’s weekly segment “A Genuine Gadget Connection” 55:26 - Amazon Unlimited Music and the various tech ecosystems Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello. You want to start? Just go for it. Just get in there. Please, let Lauren start it. All right, you start it. Go ahead, Lauren. Hello.

Is that your impression of my hello? Hello. Hello. I don't know. What else do you say? I don't know. How do other people start podcasts? Greetings, fellow travelers.

Greetings, fellow travelers. This is the Vergecast. A podcast from The Verge. Where we cover technology and feelings. or feelings about technology, whether that technology literally burns us, causing us to have the feeling of great pain. Your pain is a feeling as we're discovered.

Yeah, pain is a real feeling. Anyway, I'm Neil Appalel. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Lauren Good is here in studio, which is always a delight. Hello. It's the worst. And I believe first ever appearance on the Vergecast,

Jordan Golson is here. Hello. This is just awful. How did the world? word hello become a troll. Cesar vodka, cut through the night. Oh yeah, Jordan. I've been waiting a year to say that.

Cut through the night. Jordan is here. That's a, in case you didn't know, that's a vodka brand that I made up. That one day I will own. Actually, I had breakfasts for the front of mine this morning, and he spent a lot of time trying to convince me to build a still in my backyard. Like, more time than you would expect. It wasn't like, hey, you should, you know, I have this great idea.

We should start a still. Ha, ha, move on the next topic. He's walking you through it. It was like a detailed. He's like, I think you should buy a pre-made kit. I don't think you should weld copper on your own, but here's what you would do. I mean, it was detailed. Yeah, I think I'm going to do it.

If you are a still manufacturer, get at me. If I was drinking scissor vodka, I'd think to myself, I bet this was made from a pre-made kit. I don't think, Neil, I did any welding to achieve this vodka. I hate these pre-made kit vodkas. Yesterday, we shot a video, a review video at a brewery in downtown Manhattan, and Will Joel and I, I guess we have someone on staff named Billy Joel, decided that the verge should start a brewery.

Yeah. And we'd call it Virgin Weissen or something like that. That's good. Virgin Weissen. Virgin Weisen. And the Steins would be shaped like V's with a little handle on the side. Well, you know, we are...

You're going to add that to the merch plan. Yeah, we are refreshing the brand. There's supposed to be a merch store. Ross Miller, if you're listening to this, know that I'm waiting for that merch store. If you're not Ross Miller, go ahead and tweet at him. He's at Ono Roscoe. ask where your t-shirt is, because that's his responsibility.

Say, where's the merch? Where's the merch? We need a button that lets you auto-tweet while you listen to the podcast. At Ono Rosco, where's the merch? That's good. Ross, I'm not sorry. Give me a t-shirt. Anyway, tons going on, but really just one thing going on.

It was not, I would say it's not a huge week of news. I was looking over everything that happened this week. Really, just the one story jumped out, and that's why Jordan is here. Jordan has been heroically owning this beat for a few weeks now. If you read the site, you know Jordan usually is one of our transportation reporters. He writes a lot about the future of transportation and cars and fun things. But a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 blew up on a plane. So Jordan got the story.

Jordan, I'm going to dish some of your backstory. Jordan used to write from Mac Rumors and Valleywag. So tech reporter extraordinaire. And then just decided that he would own the note story. Jordan, you want to walk us through what happened? because it's pretty bad. Yeah. So, you know, if you go way back, the phone, the Note 7 was released, and then they started

catching fire, and they were recalled, okay, that's all well and good. Everyone's familiar with that. Then they issued new phones that they said were not broken, and it turned out they were broken. And a couple weeks after they started getting released, this guy was getting on his Southwest Airlines flight and said, he told me, because I spoke to him on the phone, then that they were giving their pre-flight safety briefing. And they said, okay, everyone with the Galaxy Note 7,

please turn off your phone. And he said, oh, geez, you know, this is silly, this is ridiculous. You know, mine's the recalled one. It's safe. Turns it off, puts it in his pocket, and it catches fire in his pocket. Which can be alarming when you're on an airplane and your electronics is catching fire. So that was not good. And then how did you get in touch with him?

And so what happened was USA Today and some local news stations in Louisville, Kentucky, said, oh, you know, Samsung phone catches fire on Southwest Airlines flight. And we were sort of, oh, geez, I wonder what this was. It must have been an old one that didn't replace. And I found the Louisville, I believe it's the Courier Journal, is their local daily newspaper. And they had an article with the guy's wife. I believe his name is Brian Green. And his wife said, oh, by the way, this was a replacement phone. And they had buried it in the seventh or eighth paragraph, because They didn't really realize the significance of this. And I saw it and was like, holy shit, this is huge news.

And managed to track down the guy. I started Googling him. And I found the company that he works for. And then I tracked down his email address and emailed him. And I said, hey, can you call me? Which I was a little concerned about because his phone had just caught fire. So how was he going to call me? That's a real problem.

That's legit. I was like, well, I'll try anyway. And luckily, he had gone from the airport to the AT&T store to buy another phone, which was an iPhone 7. Of course. Nice. And he called me on it and he's like, yeah, my phone just caught fire. And he was, he was half thrilled to be alive and half really irritated at Samsung. Aside from the fact that fire is dangerous and explosions and heat are dangerous to humans.

Yeah. The smoke from this, like in a confined space, is also pretty scary. There's this video of somebody passing out. Like this is like the first video we have of one of these exploding, this lady, walks into the living room holding a smoking note seven sets it down finally i don't know why she held this for so long starts to walk away and then like passes out on the couch is it toxic a smoke i'm guessing it's it's bad smoke you know it's a battery overheating it's this nasty electrical smoke you don't want to breathe it's like the chemicals from the battery right are what's

smoking yeah the bad chemicals the bad chemicals the bad chemicals the battery uh angela chan one of our sound supporters the whole video on youtube that you should watch about why these Badders explode. Basically, they're little bombs. And we released their energy slowly to power our screens, which is great, except for the bomb part. When you release it fast. Yeah. Right. Anyhow, so, Jordan, that was the first one, and we said, oh, no, this is batter. It's replacement.

And then, if you were reading the site over the past week, to me, this is like an old-school move that we made where we just did 100 updates. We just wrote 100 stories about every little iterative development. We don't do that as much anymore. There was a time when that was like our stock and trade. Like I think of that as like classic aughts blogging. Right. It happened again. Here's another headline and we fire them off in the ether.

We don't, you know, it doesn't work anymore. It doesn't feel great anymore always just because of how we distribute things on Twitter and Facebook. You don't read that blog role. But for this story, it just seemed to make perfect sense. Like there's a build here and every one of these things that goes off again is actually its own story because it compounds the original story. So Jordan, Jordan, you wrote one of these stories. Like, you literally pulled over in your car on a New Mexico highway to write one of the, I mean, you just went at it all weekend. You want to walk us through all the ones that you did.

So it's starting back, and I'm going back here because there are so many stories. I'm clicking through all of them. But basically, the first day, there were two stories. There was this plane, or Note 7 catches fire on a plane. And that was bad. And then the one just after that was the consumer product safety commission, which is the U.S. federal regulator that oversees recalls and dangerous products and things like that, announced that they were opening an investigation, which was about five hours later, which is a pretty good turnaround for them. And so that was the two the first day. And then we said, okay, well, maybe this story has run its course and they'll look into it,

and it won't be a replacement phone. And that's sort of what I hoped it was, because if all these replacement phones are catching fire, that's no good. And it was already recalled at this point. Yeah. Because the recall happened September 2nd, right? Like very early September. So this is all post-recall.

Right. So we should zoom out. So the big news of the week is that there was the original recall in September. And then they expanded the recall program this week to cover even the replacement phones. And then Samsung and the carriers are like, just bring all the phones back. Samsung is giving people $100 credit on their cell bill. If they get another Samsung phone. you get $25 if you get to another brand, which is just the worst.

And Note 7 production is halted. I mean, the note is dead, right? There were two batches of notes. There's the original batch, which had a Samsung battery in it, ironically, and they caught fire. And then they said, okay, these phones are bad. We're going to recall them. And then they said, okay, now we have new Note 7s that are replacement Note 7s with batteries from a different company. And they said, over and over again, these are fine, they're totally safe, we're completely confident that these are safe.

the problem is fixed. And then those phones started catching fire. Right. And so you covered, I would say, six of those. And now... Yeah, there were five or six. And then I think they said there were 23 total, because not everybody ran to the verge.

I don't know why they didn't come tell me. Several people did. So we had one the next day that I think was from a local news outlet. And then I had two people email me. One was a guy in Virginia who emailed me and said, at 545 this morning, my phone caught fire on my nightstand here are pictures of it. Wow. And so basically he woke up, flipped out, took pictures of it, and then emailed us, which was great.

So if you have something crazy, technological happen, email the verge. Absolutely. And then we had another person, the same thing. Actually, no, I had a woman. She tracked me down on Facebook. And I don't know how she found me on Facebook. If she went to the verge and then clicked on me or if my link got shared, I don't know. But she messaged me on Facebook.

And so I messaged her back. and she said, oh, call this number, we can explain it. And it had caught fire on their table while they were having lunch at a restaurant outside in Texas. It was just sitting on the table and burst into flames. And they were very upset, too. What kind of sense are you getting from these people you've been speaking to about their exploding notes? Like, are people really frustrated? Do you think people are going to trust Samsung again?

The word I would use is betrayed. Wow. Samsung said, and all of these people, so, you know, if you're buying a note, and has not been out very long. And all of the folks that I talked to were very much early adopters. They were very enthusiastic about this phone. They thought it was great. They read our reviews.

And, okay, the first one comes out. They had a problem. We'll recall it. Okay, that's annoying, but it's okay. Now they got this new phone. Samsung, they say Samsung lied. Samsung betrayed us. Whatever you want to say.

Most folks are really unhappy. One person I talked to said, I'm just going to get an S7 and it'll be fine. And the other couple folks I talked to were like, forget it. Do I just go buy an iPhone now? I'm done. Well, I want to talk about this a later. I mean, the pixels out in the world. I mean, I think that's like a, that's a thing.

It's going to be a huge problem for Samsung. But let's stay on just a note for a little bit longer because this story just seems to have gotten away from Samsung. And the more that it is revealed, it's not that the story got away from Samsung. It's that the situation got away from Samsung. So they don't know why the second, they don't really know why the first one was, exploding, they assumed it was a bad battery, they switched it from their own supplier, a Samsung subsidiary, to another company.

Those phones started going. There was a report in the New York Times that basically said or claimed that Samsung internally is unable to replicate this problem, so they don't really know what's wrong with the phones. They still don't know. And maybe they were too quick to blame the batteries. Right. Which means there could be something with like, what would it be? the quick charging.

Right, so there's like a million things, right? Who knows? Like, we are left to like irresponsibly speculate. I saw a rumor that people thought that the charge of the firmware was charging the battery at too high a voltage. Yeah. This is a conspiracy theory. And so, oh, it's not a battery problem at all. It's a firmware problem.

That's interesting. I mean, who knows? I saw it. It's too late now. I saw it. It's just too late now. The same Angela who did this great video on our YouTube or Facebook, our Facebook. YouTube.

That you should check out. That's right everywhere. Yeah, check that out. But she had written a report, I mean, back last month and quoted, you know, battery experts and one who suggested that things can get dicey when the anode touches the cathode and the battery and they're supposed to be separators there. And if the manufacturer isn't handling the separator properly, then something bad could happen. Like there's all kinds of like scientific possible.

I saw random x-ray photo of battery that's like the pins are bent. Like, literally everyone is assuming everything. Like, maybe they put in USBC wrong. Well, but that's the thing is like, if this is so mysterious, and we've had a couple notable happenings of battery explosions, the hoverboards. Yeah. And the note seven. And then, like, before that, like, the biggest one I can remember is, like, the

Sony batteries. Yeah, the Sony batteries. Like, years ago. So, like, we use millions of devices all the time that have batteries in them, and they don't explode very often. Yeah. So should we just... up with a pet peeve here.

Yes, please. They're not really exploding. Okay. When you think of exploding, you think Kabloy. Right. But it's more of like a sizzle. Right.

And the phone itself gets really hot and it sort of expands and bad things and smoke pours out. But it's not like a pipe bomb where stuff goes everywhere. Yeah. So, you know, calling it exploding is a bit of a misnomer. I think you just name Samsung's next phone line for them,

which is the Samsung sizzler. Oh, yeah. There you go. I was going to go kabloy. The Samsung's blue. It comes in really red and cablooey. It looks like there's a lot of pressure inside, though. I can't believe I just laughed at the end.

The battery expands a little bit. And if you've seen batteries that fail, it sort of bubbles up and it expands a bit, like, you know, bread that's rising or something. I don't even know. Yeah, but they get really hot. The one in the plane burned through the carpet and down to the metal of the plane. Yeah, they get super hot. Which is insane.

So Samsung doesn't know what's wrong. They also, Jordan, I'm interested in your take on this. It seems like they mishandled all of the language run. what to do, when to do it. I got an email from somebody that was like, I try to return my note, here's their email I got from Samsung, the email was gibberish.

I got what Samsung was trying to communicate, which was go to this website and push this button, we'll send you a box, you can send your phone back. But it was like 400 pages of what appeared to have gone through at least two rounds of translation, like machine translation. So Samsung is not communicating with its customers correctly.

They didn't do the official recall. Like they didn't use the word recall for a long time. They said they were exchanging it. Now it's an official recall. They didn't stop making the phones. Now they've stopped making the phones. And as far as I can tell, they haven't done a lot of like big like announcements, right? They're sort of trickling this information out.

One thing that's missing, I think, they haven't said I'm sorry. Yeah. It's ridiculous. We're really sorry this happened. You know, it's all, you know, oh, we're taking the matter seriously and we're investigating and blah, blah, blah. but, you know, they haven't had, you know, where's the CEO coming out and saying, we made a mistake, I'm very sorry. Well, Jordan, love means never having to say you're sorry.

And clearly, Samsung loves its customers. Well, I have an iPhone, and I think Tim Cook loves me. So what's your, I mean, you've been on the beat. You've talked to a bunch of people with the phones. At one point over the weekend, Jordan and I were just, like, messaging back forth. It was actually hard to get a hold of Samsung, which not to get all inside baseball, but if there's one, if you're a company and there's one reporter who's just kicking your ass every 30 minutes for two days, you should probably talk to that reporter, but we couldn't get a hold of Samsung at all. Like, they're just nowhere. What's your sense now, the situation, Jordan?

I mean, they're, because the recall is in place and they've worked with the CPSC, which is the regulator, to come out with the recall, I think that procedure is in place. and they've been pretty clear about, okay, go back to wherever you bought the phone, bring it back, they'll give you a credit. Because unlike Apple, which has Apple stores everywhere, if you have a problem with your iPhone, you can go into the Apple store and speak with an Apple employee about it.

But if you have a Samsung phone, you can't do that. You can go to their website and you can, you know, go to Twitter or whatever, but if you have a problem with your phone, you go back to AT&T, your Best Buy, or Verizon, or whoever, and you say, hey, I've got a problem. So I think part of that is Samsung's issue. just with communicating with customer.

Because like you said, when people did communicate with Samsung, it didn't make any sense. They were getting conflicting orders or what they were supposed to do on Tuesday was not what they were supposed to do on Thursday. And it was this mishmash of confusion. Yeah. I mean, just to game it out. I mean, it's interesting to think about, I mean, again, who knows why the thing broke, but let's say it was faulty batteries. Apple's just as much at risk of getting a shipment of faulty batteries as anybody. 10 years ago, Powerbooks exploded

because they had faulty batteries in them. Just a thing. If this was the iPhone, A, I think the level of crazy would be ratcheted up way higher because it's Apple. Oh, nuts. But you just think about,

and Walt brings this up on Control Waltz all the time, you think about antenna gate, Apple, like, held a press conference. They said, we don't think there's a problem, but we're sorry, everybody gets a free case. You're holding it wrong. You're holding it wrong. Here's a bunch of videos of us holding other phones

Like, you know, they did all the work. Here's the chamber where we test, whatever. And then next year they quietly redesign the antenna because it was probably not that great. But whatever, they did it, right? And they had these stores. So, like, you could just go in and give the phone back. There was, like, all of this attention to detail and attention to communication from that company. I mean, but that's tough for almost any company that's not Apple because who's the face of Samsung?

Right. For you. I don't know. Who is the person on stage who should say. That one guy makes fun of Bresas? You're holding your note seven wrong. Yeah. I mean, they've tried to have some faces.

It's just really hard. I mean, that part is hard for them, but they could just appoint a face of the company. Right. Like, here's the person who's constantly on the local news. Yeah, who's the head of Samsung of America? I mean, we should know. I feel bad for not. I could say any name right now.

Right. Steve Johnson. Get out there. Get to work, Steve. All the Steve Johnson's in the world. Really disappointed in Steve Johnson. He's mad. But you could just have anybody be on the local news or talk to us.

Gregory Lee. I feel so bad for not knowing that, but the president and CEO of Samsung Electronics, North America. Oh, but it's not electronics. Electronics is a TV sign. Is Gregory Lee. He should be apologizing, too. I know Nick DeCarlo was doing their marketing for a long time, right?

This is great, right? See, the fact that we don't know who this is. That's the problem. We should all know, because we should have all talked to them about seven times by now. Yeah. Why wasn't he on the NBC Nightly News? And, like, even if people, not to call to me if people out, But even the people who represent Samsung on social media channels went totally radio silent.

Right? Like, they went into a bunker mentality when they really needed to do was start communicating more. So now we get to Lauren's big question, which I think is a hugely important question. Is anyone going to come back around? I mean, I think the most dangerous thing for Samsung's brand is that flight attendants across the country are opening flights with, if you have a Galaxy phone, turn it off, throw it away. It's dangerous for the plane. Right.

And that's Samsung had to send a note, I think, a carrier in Australia, I believe it was, saying Galaxy phones, Galaxy S7 phones are fine. It's the note that's bad. Like the whole brand is tainted. I feel like it's two-pronged. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this Jordan, but there's the aspect of, Samsung needs to say, hey, we figured out exactly what was wrong and we'll never do it again so that it's logical to buy another Samsung phone.

But then the other thing is, if they make a desirable device, I think people are going to buy. The thing about hoverboards, people wanted to buy hoverboards, no matter how many people told them it would explode. Like, people just... I don't know. Do you think people are people still buying hoverboards? Yeah, they're out there. It's pretty... It was a fad, for sure.

The hoverboard thing, there's a difference. The difference was, like, the hoverboards that blew up were the, like, unregulated, unsafety-tested Chinese hoverboards. that came in with faulty batteries and not enough protection around the batteries. And it was like fairly all, maybe it wasn't exactly right, but it was like fairly intuitive. That I paid too little for my money.

I paid too little for this product, and it rolls on the ground, and if it gets bumped, it might blow up. This is like a very expensive phone. Like, it's a $800 phone. So I don't think there's an intuitive connection to anything other than Samsung blew it. Do you guys think that Samsung will ever be able to use

the name note again? No. That's got to be over. That's done, right? And that includes the tablet, I guess, then, right. Because they have a note tablet. Basically, anything that has a stylus, they've put under the note brands. I know.

What do you think? Will they put out a note eight? How long before they can put out a note eight? It's a year. Is it two years? It's a year. Well, I think, so when does the S8 presumably come out, April or something? February.

Isn't that usually when they come out? One comes out traditionally at NWC, and that is, The note. That's not the note. The note is usually around August. Right. So when's the S-8? Yeah.

And then the S-8 would probably be around MMWC. The S-7 came out in March. Okay. So, yeah, they would announce it at MWC and then launch it with the next month. Right. So they go radio silent. We're really sorry. The S-8 comes out then.

If they come out between now and then and give a TikTok, here's exactly what happened. We figured out what went wrong. This is what happened. and here's what we did to fix it. I think the brand is okay. Samsung phones are okay. I think that assumes that the rest of the market remains static, right? I think this is the big problem.

And first I'm going to read an ad, and then we're going to talk about the big problem, which I believe is known as the Google Pixel. This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Masterclass. Masterclass makes the world's greatest courses by bringing you the world's greatest instructor. They're dedicated to finding the best in the world. visionaries, rule breakers, leaders, and champions, and turning their wisdom into a legacy that the

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Go to masterclass.com. Report back to us. Let us know what it's like having Aaron Sorken write your online submitted screenwriting exercises. Can I just read this quote from Herzog? Read your Herzog question. That's my favorite thing that the Verge is ever published of all times. Yes. Oh, yes. You're right. It's about Pokemon Go. He asks the interviewer, Emily Yoshida, do they bite each other's hands? Do they punch each other? And then Emily said no. And then what was his fight? He had a great follow-up, too.

Oh, he says, physically, do they fight? No. Do they bite each other's hands? Do they punch each other? That's great. Yeah. Do the Pokemon bite each other? Yeah. Then if not, what is the point? There must be real people if it's a real encounter with someone else. Yes, it's true. Anyway, that's Master Aaron Sorkin is my favorite. That's Masterclass. Thanks for sponsoring this, The Vergecast. Can I give my favorite Aaron Sorkin on writing quote? Do it.

It was from all things D a couple years ago. And he said, writing does not look to a casual observer like writing. Instead, it looks a lot like watching ESPN. Ooh. And I find that to be true. When I interviewed Sorkin around the Steve Jobs movie, every time I asked him a question he didn't like, he just reached over and grabbed my shoulder.

That's it? Would he answer? Yeah. But he would answer things like, that's not important. And I was like, wow. I'm going to try that. It was remarkably effective. I conducted an interview like that recently. Yeah. But we're not going to get into it.

Well, we'll talk about it later. When it runs, we'll talk about it. But every time, I'd be like, so this movie has nothing to do with Steve Jobs, and he would just like touch my shoulder and be like, shut your mouth. It was just incredible. Anyhow, let's talk about the danger. We should do a verge cast where we just try to talk like we're sorking-esque characters the entire time. We're super witty and runoff sentences into one another.

Walk and talks. Yes. We should do an entire walk-and-talking. Yes. Okay. I'm into it. Done and done. I feel like we got to submit the script to a masterclass.

Physically and mentally incapable of being a part of a sork and die-haw. Like we'd be walking down the hall. Like, let me go sit down and think about something to say. I'll catch up with you guys. Ross Miller. Ross Miller is the one human being who can talk fast enough to pull that off. There you go. Anyway, the looming danger.

So, as Jordan was saying, Samsung, just let it calm down, let it breathe. They could come back. We fix the phone. Here's the Galaxy S8. Everyone makes your explodey phone jokes. But what hell else are you going to buy? You could call it the looming safety. The looming safety.

Safety on the horizon. A phone. That doesn't blow up. Yeah. Galaxy safety. If only you could buy another phone that didn't blow up. If only one of those existed. But here's the thing.

So, yes, there's the iPhone. Fine. But Samsung is the only manufacturer in the Android ecosystem that collects profits from doing the work of making and selling phones. So if they,

those people are probably still going to buy Android phones are in that ecosystem. I don't think they're going to go buy an LG phone. I don't think they're going to buy a Sony phone. Why not? Why would they buy the new LG, the V20?

The V20 looks nice. We all know what they're going to buy. Right. I think the software update stuff for the Android is, I think people buy galaxy phones either buy them because they're cheap, they buy them because they're discounted, or they buy them because they know. They want the high-end phone, particularly the note is one of the highest on phones you can buy, period. I don't think any of the other manufacturers support their phones as well as Samsung did.

So you could either wait, wait it out. And there was like a crazy article on Mashable. The writer was like, I'm keeping my note. It's a great phone. Chances are it won't hurt me. Oh, God. It's incredible. So those people.

But let's get to it. There's the pixel. And the pixel, you know, you can get on the wait list like I have to. But you can like pre-order it now. It'll be out in Verizon store soon. It's Google's phone. It's a high-end Android phone. It's supported.

It's going to be marketed. I don't think Google has any desire to like, wait for Samsung to fix itself. They don't have any reason to. They don't have any moral imperative to help Samsung, especially not anymore. How does Samsung come back in a world where Google has just gone full out with the pixel? Can they come back?

I just have to say, I think this timing is incredibly auspicious for Google, because my very first impressions of the pixel, only having used it briefly, and I wasn't at the event, but I followed the event when it was unveiled, is like, yeah, this is a good first truly Google-made phone. By the way, they kept saying Google's first phone, but in reality, Google has been making phones with hardware partners for a while now, but this was the first one that was like branded the Google phone, right? And I thought, yeah, it's got a good camera. That's great. It's a little thick. You know, it's not waterproof. It's a good phone. It's good. That's where I put it. It looks like it's a good phone. That's not my final review. By the way,

you're going to have to go to Theverge.com to check out the final review when we run it. So many caveats, Lauren. Well, I'm just saying, I hope I'm not breaking any embargoes here. This is based on a very brief experience having used it and held it. And I just think that's how it would have been perceived. Like everyone would said, oh, Google's getting into hardware, and that's great. And here's a really good phone that Google made. But now it's like a serious contender because of this note stuff. And I think the only way, you know, and people are saying, oh, like it's like full stack Android.

It's like full stack Google. Like software, hardware integrated, cool. And I think the only way to like really best that is to make like another really kick-ass Android phone. The stakes are that much higher. And I just don't think Samsung has the software chops to compete. I mean, they bought Viv, the company started by the team that originally did Siri. Like, they're in a world where they're now competing against Apple and Google with their own smart assistants. How?

I was literally about to say, Samsung can't win this fight by making a smart assistant. And then I remember the V. They bought a smart assistant. Which, by the way, looked really good. Like the Vib people were clearly doing good stuff. But when you push the button on the Samsung phone, are you going to get VIV? Are you going to get Google Assistant? And does that mean also that you have to have VIV living in other hardware around your house?

Like the one thing that Google and Apple are doing it, and Amazon is doing, is like they're putting it in these little entry points all around your life. Right. So VIV won't know anything beyond what you do with it on the phone unless you – maybe Viv can be in my dishwasher and my fridge. I'm sorry, Neil, I interrupted you earlier and I didn't mean to. If this were a movie, just I need to throw this out because I'm going to forget it otherwise. If this was a movie, would you have any trouble believing that Google had sabotaged Samsung because it's that convenient for them? Google isn't organized enough to sabotage anyone. I mean, that's basically like my take.

Like, I would, if this was a movie, Google would have put out this phone like three years ago. Like, if this was a movie, then this phone would be, right? This is Google realizing it has to get serious. I don't think that, I just don't think they weren't organized enough. The note starts catching fire half weeks before the pixel comes out. It's the most convenient timing ever. Yeah. One phone to implode as another one's coming out.

But it could also be like a Mighty Duck situation where the Hawks had banks on their team and he was actually not supposed to be on the Hawks. He was in a different district. So like the Hawks or the bad guys that they, got in trouble for breaking the rules. If Samsung's the bad guy, they got in trouble for juicing their batteries wrong, I don't know.

So now the good guys reap the rewards of the bad guy breaking the rules. Yeah. I mean, I just think, well, I want to talk about Lauren's piece, about IMessage too, right? Like, if I was in the market for a phone right now, I would almost certainly buy a pixel.

I mean, I'm always in the market for a phone, and I buy every phone, so I'm buying pixel. But you understand what I'm saying. Hypothetically, if I only bought one phone a year, I mean, Paul's, it's week nine of Paul just leaving the dongle plugged into his iPhone 7, which is crazy. Speaking of, I got to send back my 6. Oh, because you're on like Next or whatever? No, I get that T-Mobile thing, so I have to send them my phone.

I keep on for giddy. T-Mobile Blaze Exchange, whatever they call it? It's like whatever they call it. Uncarrier 84. Yeah, it doesn't matter. I don't have a great time, but I understand, like, if you want something new and different. I tweeted a picture of the Belkin dongle. today because it just looks ridiculous.

I was like, you have to admit, this looks ridiculous. And so many angry fanboys defensively tweeted back in me. Like, Apple's vision is wireless. I'm like, you know, they put wired headphones in the box, man. But anyway, so here's the thing. The big thing with the iPhone is we have to make the tradeoffs in the design to get it to be waterproof and put the bigger camera. Like, I still don't buy it because it turns out Apple designs the phone.

So they could make the phone bigger. That's a choice. They just chose not to make that decision. I don't think any of the trade-offs in the iPhone are worth the inconvenience, at least in the way that I use the phone for that thing. And just evaluating my usage of the phone, I don't use any of Apple's apps except for iMessage. So, Lauren, you wrote a big piece about that's your last lock-in. Yeah, I had this moment on the plane when I was flying out here in New York where I realized I'd been thinking about it and noodling that for a while. And then I heard, like, Dieter, your voice in my head saying, put it on the site, which is really effective.

It's P-I-O-T-S, by the way, for those of you who haven't heard, put it on a Zipe before. You want to know what it's like to have your boss yell at you an acronym. Not to be confused with pain in the ass. Paul said it, not me. But, like, you know, when you're on a flight and you're just held captive and you're like, all right, I guess I should do some work. So I wrote this essay, and it turns out people have a lot of feelings about it. It's kind of, like, hundreds of comments, and people really tweeted some really thoughtful stuff back in me.

No, truly, though, very thoughtful. And it seemed like, you know, so my, my, the premise was I've thought over the past week a lot about whether or not I'm going to buy the pixel phone. Personally, I was a little bit disappointed at how much it costs because I had just been on like, I had just almost bought a Nexus 5X ice blue off of eBay. And a couple of people on staff talked me, talked me down from it and said, no, no, no, wait for whatever Google comes up with next because it's going to come up soon. And then, you know, it's like the $649 phone are up. And I thought, oh, I should just buy the 5X off eBay now. So we'll just point about the price. But then I really started thinking about why I'm not sure I'm going to buy the pixel phone right away.

And I realized it came down to messaging. I realized every single app I use, whether it's Gmail, my calendar app, Spotify, all my health and fitness apps, Slack, all the things I use in a daily basis. They're all available on Android. I like Android. It's not an inconvenience to use it except for iMessage, which works across my desktop and my iPhone and my whole family's on it. And everybody I talk to you every day is on it. We go to cover events, we create group threads on it. And like it's just, I message it, at least in the U.S. is such a lock-in for me.

Some of the comments I got back were people from other countries talking about their most popular, you know, preference, their preferences for messaging apps. And so I admit that the article is pretty U.S.-centric, the one that I wrote. Or people were like just agreeing with me and saying, yeah, I just, I'm totally, I'm locked in. And do you send anything with lasers anymore? Sent with lasers, no. Like, the best thing about sent with lasers is every now and case he tweets something hilarious, and he puts sent with lasers after it. But, like, I've not used a bunch of that stuff as much as I thought I would.

Yeah, it's fun. It's like there. Yeah. Right? I mean, I think that, like, as with all of Apple's nascent ecosystems, it will just take a minute for everybody to, like, figure out what it's really for. Right. So I really like iOS 10.

I mean, it's fine. I've noticed people just complain about how buggy it is, which is not normal. But, like, I get tons of tweets for people like, this is so much bugger than it used to be. Tom Warren has pointed out to me how buggy it is. Ezra Klein from Vox tweeted, I think it was this morning. He's like, who at Apple decided that unlocking a phone was too hard and it should be made worse? I still am swiping to open sometimes, admittedly. Admittedly, I've been doing it for weeks. Well, so that's actually a pretty good segue into the other big Jordan Goulson story of the week, which is Jordan went to the Supreme Court this week. It spans all over the place.

It's a good time. It's a good reporter Jordan Goulson. Anywhere there's Samsung. Not a good week for Samsung. Wait, I have a question. How are you in Colorado and then filing a story from New Mexico and then at the Supreme Court? I fly out of Albuquerque. So I drive from my home in Durango to Albuquerque.

And so on my drive to Albuquerque before, on my way to D.C., A story broke. And I said, well, I've got cell access. I'll just pull over and just write it. Okay. I didn't realize you flew out of Albuquerque. You know, Jordan, erratic travel patterns. If I didn't know better, maybe you're the man, Google's paying to destroy salesman.

Agent of chaos, Jordan Goldson. You didn't see that in my ethics statement? Yeah. I was, you know, on the Google. It's fun. Jordan pulled over on the side of the road in New Mexico, lit a note on fire, took a picture of it, put it on the website. But anyway, you were in D.C.

Apple versus Samsung, for a long time, Vergecast, Verge audience people, was a huge part of the story of this site when we launched. We covered the hell out of it. We had Matt McKeary, who is still a wonderful person, but Matt was on our staff. He was a patent lawyer on the Verge staff just to be a full-time consultant for the story.

And now it's like five years later, and it wandered its way up to the Supreme Court Jordan, tell us about that a little bit. So it started out with this, you know, huge lawsuit arguing about patents and phones and phones that are ancient at this point. And so it kept getting appealed and appealed and appealed. And a teeny tiny sliver of that case is what finally made it to the Supreme Court. And it's like the obscureest of obscure parts of the case, which I think is fantastic.

What is it? And so what they're arguing about it is Apple won its lawsuit against Samsung. And the jury said, okay, you have to pay. $400 million or whatever it was to, Samsung has to pay $400 million to Apple. And Samsung said, no, no, no, wait, that profit that you just awarded them is for the entire phone.

And we only infringed a little bit of the phone. Yeah. And so we should only have to pay a little bit of profit because it was this, you know, home button or the front screen when the chips and the display and all that stuff, we didn't infringe and we made profit off those

and we should get to keep it. And that was their argument. Right. So there are design patents, which are just like generally hard to explain, but it was the rounded shape of the phone. It's the location of the home button, and I believe it was the size. The bezel. And not to get too wonky, but it's, those are ornamental features that are protected over time that are like patented ornamental features. They're not functional

patents, like slide to unlock as a utility patent. So this would be like pattening a handbag design. Yeah, and then there's look and feel. Then there's another one that's like trade dress, which is like the shape of the Coke bottle. Right? And that, so like a design patent, you get it and it's, you get to exclude everybody for the market for using it, but then once it expires, then people can use it unless that design has become so associated with your brand that it is effectively operates as a trademark. So there's like all of these things in the air and all that is in the case, right, Jordan, is just the three design patents on basically the exterior design of the iPhone, whatever. Yes, it's these three patents, and what they're arguing about, so a design patent suit has not made it to the Supreme Court in about 100 years. And so to design patent people and patent lawyers, this is a very big thing. And to try and explain it in about 20 seconds is really hard. But basically, you have to pay your profits on the article of manufacture is what the law says.

And Samsung is arguing that the article of manufacture could be a single thing like the display. and the rest of the phone is separate. And Apple is saying, no, no, no, you buy the phone. You don't buy the display and then add it to something else. It's all one thing. And so we will see what the Supreme Court decides. They talked a lot about Samsung used in their brief that they filed before the arguments. They said it was like a cup holder in a car.

And if you infringed on a patent, on a design patent on a cup holder, you wouldn't expect that you would get all the profits from the entire car. That would be crazy. And so they went back and forth and they talked. talked about, like, well, you know, people might buy a phone simply for its design, and that's why they buy it. And so maybe you should get all the profit. But at the same time, the chips and the wires and all that stuff, there's something to that, too. So they'll sort of come down in the middle somewhere, I imagine. Yeah, that seemed to be the, I mean, there was a long conversation

about whether the Volkswagen Beetle, like, whether the iPhone is an iconic, is a design as the Volkswagen Beetle, I suspect people listening to this are like, it's a rectangle. Because particularly now, the phones are like indistinguishable from one another. But Apple statement was like not connected to the reality of the case. Apple statement was like every court that has ever looked

at this says Samsung is a copier. And it's like that's not what we're talking about anymore. Like Samsung kind of agrees that they lost. It's just whether they should pay all. So just not a good week for Samsung. Not a good week for Samsung. And just one note, I really thought Chief Justice John Roberts, he said,

yes, the Volkswagen Beetle is iconic. but if it cost 10 times more or got one mile per gallon or broke down all the time, it doesn't matter what it looks like. People would not have bought it. And so that was his argument for, you know, why, yeah, it looks, the looks are important, but the insides are important as well. And then there was another comment about that, which said, yeah, but you could buy a different car that didn't look as iconic that also didn't break down.

So, you know, it's going to be such a difficult thing for them to figure out. And I'm really interested to see what it comes down. but I'm kind of a legal wonk. Yeah. I mean, I am too. This is so exciting for me, but the case at this point has almost nothing to do with consumer technology.

Zero. It's just about money. Oh, it's just, yeah, it's about money. They lost and how much they have to pay. And it's years later, and they were riding such a high because they got smacked for copying Apple too hard. They started not copying Apple.

They put out their flagship phone and it started burning. I don't think the cup holder analogy really holds up either. It's really more like the windshield of a car. You can display, like you need a display on the phone. But it's not the display. It's just like the design of a thing, right? Like I think the reason the cup, actually take the windshield.

Like the windshield has a function. Right. So you could patent, I don't know, the coating on the windshield that doesn't let it shatter as easily as some other windshield or something else or like blocks glare. But those are utility patents. But like the specific rate. of the windshield or its curve would be more of a design

patent in this world. Right. So it's just like... Or maybe the layout of the buttons on the center console. Yeah. If you laid them out in a certain way that was really iconic. Uh-huh. Yeah. And, you know, if BMW the way they lay out their buttons, if someone else copied that, and they were like, oh, geez, that looks really similar,

that'd be the same thing. But even so, you wouldn't award all the profits that they make on a $50,000 car based on those buttons. Because you wouldn't assume that your buying it for that specific functional or specific design. You would or would not assume. I don't think anybody buys a car based on the, like, I love this rake of a windshield.

Right. I'm going to buy this copycat version of it. And that's one of the things they talked about. They said you'd have to bring in experts to analyze the phone and talk to people who bought it and figure out why did you buy it? And because, you know, it could be that that design was 5% of the reason that people bought it or 10% of the reason or 100% of the reason. And you'd have to have experts come in.

And that's a crazy, complicated question. But one of the justices said, well, antitrust is really complicated. And we let juries figure that out. So why can't we have them figure this out? And so it's crazy complicated for such a narrow question. Because, Neely, you and I were talking earlier about how patent, especially patent lawsuits in general, never make it to a jury. Never. And that's what this argument is about, is specifically about jury things.

They all get settled. Yeah. So what are they even arguing about? And it's basically because Apple didn't want to, right? They wanted the win. The public win. They wanted the big public. The jury went away and deliberated and said, Samsung copied us.

And they got it. And now they're just, they want the win at the Supreme Court. You can just feel it. So this is not concluded yet. Do you think Steve Jobs would have been, so it's been argued and then the decision will come out, maybe December or next year sometime. But so, you know, remember the famous quote about Steve Jobs said he would, thermonuclear war.

you know, do you think he would have been happy to see this day? We made it to the Supreme Court. We're going to get our win, or is it too obscure a thing? I mean, I think at this point, I think honestly he would have had bigger problems to solve, right? Like, he focused on, like, putting out the TV product. Like, the mobile market, he beat everybody. It's moved on. All of the competitors have fallen off the face of the earth.

I mean, in that time, I remember, what, they sued Motorola and Judge Richard Posner in, what is it? the Seventh Circuit in Illinois was like, this is ridiculous, get out of my court, and, like, threw it out. He was like, this is nonsense. Go settle it. Go settle it. He was like, just, you're all making phones. Like, no one gives a shit.

Like, get out. And his decision didn't say it in quite so many words, but that was the thrust of it. Was like, this is nonsense. What you're doing is nonsense. You're both huge, sophisticated businesses, figure it out, get out. In other places, it didn't go that way. So, I don't know, it's just like, it's one of those things where bad week for Samsung, just like every possible dimension.

But what struck me about it was Slide to Unlock was the original Apple patent, right? I did a whole video at MWC in like 2012 where I just went and looked at how every other company had a designer around Slide to Unlock. And they all built a different system because they weren't allowed to use it. And now Apple just like walked away from an iOS 10

and everyone's like, this sucks. Because it kind of sucks. And Apple still made it worse. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, do you, you're still sliding. I'm still sliding. I don't slide ever accidentally.

The problem is that I'm always listening to like an audiobook. Yeah, and then like maybe someone wants to talk to me or something. So I have to pause the audiobook. So if I put my thumb with my fingerprint on the phone to wake it up, it unlocks it. So I'm trying to train myself to hit the side button to just wake it up. Or I flick the screen, like an Apple Watch gesture, to wake it. the screen up. Oh, I haven't, I forgot that it's like... Yeah, it does that now. Which Motorola has been doing for like three generations of phones. Because otherwise, if I unlock my phone, I go to like to my most use the app or the home screen and then I have to like pull up the controls and then pause. Yeah. Which is made... I have not found out iOS 10 confusing. But I think it's interesting on this whole shape thing. Every time I see the pixel ad that, you know, it starts out as a search bar and expand. into a phone, I still think it's the iPhone.

And like, I know it's not the iPhone. But like, even if you don't think that they're copying the iPhone directly, there's something about that ad that's like, you know and love this shape. What if Google made this shape? Yeah, and I think that's a good piece of Apple's argument, right? They infringed our iconic design and they sold phones because of it. The question is, like Jordan's saying, what percentage of the purchase decision was driven by that versus they copied, you know, literally every, Samsung copied literally every icon on the iPhone.

And that was part of the case. Like, this thing is so complicated and so wonky. Do you remember from the original iPhone launch when Steve put up the slide and it had all the phones and they all had keyboards? Yeah. And then, oh, here's our phone. It doesn't have a keyboard anymore. And now you look and no phone has a keyboard. And it's like, look, we can see the progression here.

But whether or not it's worth $400 million. Which, by the way, to both of these companies, is nothing. Drop a bucket. Like, Samsung sells products that cost more than $400 million. Like, they sell nuclear reactors. Like, just, you'll be fine. Like, pay the money. Like, the idea that Samsung has some big vested interest in the design patent law of the United States is nonsense.

And I got to imagine that they're just trying to get the win too. I got to imagine that Samsung tried to settle over and over and over and over and over. And like you said, Apple's like, nope. I don't think Apple was an agent. We want guilty, you know, your liable judgments. Okay. I'm going to read one more ad. Then we're going to, Ashley has Ashley's gadget corner.

She does every week. What she does every week without fail. We're liable. And then we have a tiny lightning round and then we're done. This episode of the Vergecast also brought to you by Graphics Stock. Graphic Stock is a subscription-based stock media company that gives you unlimited access to over 300,000 premium photos, illustrations, vectors, and design elements that everyone can afford. You get great value with the unlimited download model. They actually have the largest unlimited download library of graphics, photos, vectors, and images available to the creative community.

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What lasts forever in this long time. Anyway, exclusive to Vergecast listeners, sign up for a 7-day free trial today. Graphicstock.com slash Vergecast for free. Roll the tape. A love letter to a knockoff Louis Vuitton flip phone. Dear, knockoff Louis Vuitton flip phone, I've been looking for you. I don't know if I'll ever find you in the U.S., but I want to believe. I want to imagine that one day I could take your gold-plated body out to the clubs in Brooklyn and show you off.

I know everyone would be jealous. I want to flip you open during a tense exchange with a friend and walk off pretending like I got a phone call. My friend would wish she had a flip phone for effect too. But I don't totally get you. You have so many buttons that maybe don't have a purpose? Like those four buttons with the Louis Vuitton-esque images printed on them. What do they do? Are they just for show?

I'd be okay with it if they were. I know the center LV button takes me back to a central menu, but everything else makes no sense. You confuse me, knock off Louis Vuitton flip phone. A YouTube video attempts to explain you to me, but the person using you only speaks Russian, and I don't speak Russian. I found you on Instagram through a Los Angeles-based creative studio.

I know, typical. You weren't tagged, and I didn't know if you were an art piece. I googled you. I saw your photo on some Russian websites. Normally, that's scare me off, but I'm reluctantly intrigued. I can't explain it. Honestly, knock off Louis Vuitton flip phone, flip phone, I think you're what I've been needing and wanting. You're mini, so you fit my bag or

on a keychain attached to my clutch. You're gold and therefore luxurious. You appropriate a legitimate fashion brand, which makes you both confident and sophisticated. You're simple. You don't load Instagram or Snapchat. I mean, I don't think you turn on. But if you did, you definitely don't have apps. I could just send messages in the club and call my friends on you. Seriously, knock off Louis Vuitton flip phone, we'd make a great pair. Thinking about you, Ashley. Is there anything more satisfying than snapping shut a Star Trek phone after a call? I know.

What are we doing in our lives? I miss it. I mean, Ashley wants a flip phone bad. She talks to me about it at least once a week. It's becoming a real problem. It's a circuit breaker room grinds to a halt. Paul, do you want to plug your newest sugar breaker venture, emotional tech support? Oh, yeah. Ashley and I, Ashley, who you just heard in your ears, as you do every week.

It's for her normal segments. For the segment that she does every week. We did a Facebook Live called Emotional Tech Support, which I think we should turn into a full-time podcast. Let's be real. We should do something. What happened during this thing? Basically, there's like an 844-4-4-emotion is a phone number that people could call during the show. And then they could tell me about their, tell Ashley,

and I about their gadget problems and then we would answer them not practically but emotionally and engage with because I just get I get so frustrated sometimes with technology it just doesn't work how I want it to work and nobody's really going to fix it for me and it's never going to get better but sometimes I just want someone to hear me out so I try to provide that to people well I'm insistent that we do it again so go find that on Facebook listen to it we We might put it on the Verge Extras thing as a podcast. Yeah. That's an idea we have.

Yeah. I'm into this. I really like taking over Verge extras as just weird experiments. That's what's for. So a tiny little lightning around thing. I just Snapchat at that whole thing. One thing more to talk about. That was a long snap.

I guess snaps are like, what are 30 seconds? It was really like 10 seconds, but I just got the end of it. But you're a multi-channel media brand. That's right. Everywhere that you are. Off platform publishing. Whether you're listening to this podcast, you're reading the website or just creep in on Lauren Snapchat.

The version is there. One more thing to talk about. Just real quick, Amazon launched a music service this week. It's cheaper. It's $8 a month instead of, what, 10 for everybody else. And if you have an echo, it's like $4, but it only works on one echo at a time. Can I make a confession? Yeah.

I already had a music service. No, this is their new one. They did. Well, they have Amazon Prime Music. They had Prime Music, which is part of your Prime subscription. And then they would offer you a certain amount of... storage for saving your music files. Oh, like the old-fashioned purchasing songs.

Yeah, but it was like a web service. Like, you had to go to like the web dashboard to listen to it for the most part. And Prime Music also sucked. You'd play it through Alexa. Right, when you were like, like Helen Rosner, who's the executive better eater, she was tweeting me here this week. She's like, whenever I asked my Alexa to play music, it just plays Christmas songs at me. Because Prime Music's library was so bad.

Oh, man. But she like, I'd like, play Frank Sinatra. It would just play Sinatra's Christmas It's sooner But now it's a real music service The whole catalog It does the whole thing Okay

I'm sorry for about reading up on this I mean it doesn't matter My question is would you sign up For Amazon service I don't have an Alexa Yeah And I already have Spotify And Apple music subscriptions

Yeah So definitely not But Amazon did Just make Twitch Prime which like I was a Twitch subscriber and now and I'm a prime subscriber and now for free I yeah you can watch Twitch ad free but also you get to subscribe to one person a month which means you get to like give them more money like your favorite streamer you give more money and you get a

cool new icon next to your name and Twitch I think it's cool that Amazon buying Twitch has done such a good job with Twitch really and not destroying Twitch Just by keeping it what it is? Which just seems rare. Yeah, they kept it what it was and they like have emphasized and improved it. And it did not at all get destroyed by YouTube gaming. And in fact, I think they're going to start doing where you streamers can upload videos instead of just capture from their streams. So I think it's just a great success story of I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but Amazon did not mess up Twitch.

That's a good story. And now they're just giving any prime subscriber more better Twitch. All right. Are you going to buy Amazon music? The Twitch is better than an Echo. I'm going to try it, but I don't know. I'm pretty, I pay for, we're split household. I pay for Spotify.

My significant other pays for YouTube. Well, YouTube Red slash Google Play. I guess if you pay $10 for one, you get the other. I pay for that too. I don't pay for Apple Music. But I'm, like, pretty invested in Spotify at this point. and they just introduce the daily mixes, so you don't just have Discover Weekly now,

and they do a pretty good job of that. And I don't know, it would have to be pretty compelling. I'm definitely not going to pay for the $4 a month, Echo only. I just don't see the point when I can shout at Alexa right now and have Spotify. Do you use Echo a lot? Yeah, I use it a lot.

It's in the kitchen. We moved it from the, it was originally in the living room, and it didn't make sense there. I moved to the kitchen. And honestly, the thing I do with it 90% of the time, is set timers for cooking. Great. Set so many timers.

Pretty much if you go down the app for me, it's like, September for seven minutes, September for 18 minutes. Saying that out loud is somehow so much faster than. Yeah. And music. Music's the other thing. Well, but like good on Amazon for making it easy enough to use Spotify with their hardware product that.

Well, because they didn't have this other product, right? Right. What's going to happen now? Do you guys listen to music with your echo? Because to me the speaker's terrible, so I never use it. Yeah, it's not great, but I do. The kitchen's like two feet big. So really, you know, it's just kind of like you just need it right there.

I don't know. We also have a sonos in the kitchen. But Amazon to say the integration is coming. It's coming. Like that's going to be awesome. Like play music in my whole house. Then all the sono slides up. I mean, I don't know.

I think Amazon having music service is it's like table stakes. But it's not going to do anything. Right? It's like, you can make. Yeah, that's not what was holding me back from the Amazon lifestyle. Yeah. What was totally Mac from the Amazon lifestyle is the only hardware product they make that I like is the Echo. Like, I don't want to use the rest of their services.

You don't want the Fire TV stick? I don't know. What about Kindle? Yeah, I mean, I guess I use a Kindle. Or is that separate? It doesn't feel like in Amazon, I don't know, I don't know. It's not like. It's just that's where your books are.

That's it. Yeah, it's just this like single purpose device. Like it doesn't, I don't know. It's good. It's the best one, you know, that's the one everybody has. But it doesn't feel as invasive ecosystem-wise as everything else. Yeah. Everything else is about ecosystem lock-in.

Actually, I was saying the Warner earlier this week, I think the story of 2017 is going to be ecosystem lock-in. It's going to be consumers rebelling against the fact that to get the most out of anything, they have to buy everything from a single vendor. And I think that's just going to be – I think people are going to realize that it's really inconvenient and really bad. Well, you know what the sub-story of that is? Is ecosystem lock-in but by acquiring a bunch of sites or services or brands and keeping them the way they are? Just like Paul is saying about Twitch, like I just started using Audible, and that's an Amazon brand. But I mean, I guess you'd sort of know it from looking at it, but it's kind of separate. And like Facebook pretty much kept Instagram separate.

And, you know, I think it's going to be about sort of trying to keep things authentic feeling for users. Yeah. Even as the company tries to just suck you in to all their services. Yeah, but nothing about Instagram forces you to use Facebook. Right. I think the bad lock-in is I want to try a different product. but I can't leave because of iMessage. Or Microsoft bought Sunrise and now I have to use Outlook.

Like, I think those are the hostile pieces. Those are definitely the hostile ways. And then the good lock-in is we bought Twitch, now they don't worry about money, and they're just like rolling out features. Right. And those are kind of the, there are different ways to go.

And it's typically the companies that are like weaker in the market that don't lock you in as hard. So, like, I think that's why Amazon will happily let you set Spotify as the default because they're not going to just compete by it. They're not going to hamstring the echo. The F and Echo. The F and Echo. They're not going to hamstring the echo by tying it to Amazon music.

They'd rather just win with the Echo. And then later on, once they've won, they can push Amazon. This is why I'm so sad. I think Amazon may because, yeah, maybe because they're a bit of underdog in some of these markets. But Amazon just seems to do it right. And I really wish they were good at phones. So do they, man. I don't know what to tell me.

I also like how you have this warm, sort of fuzzy feel towards Amazon when they're such, like, incredible competitors and, you know, undercut everybody. Well, I spend most of my time in Audible. Amazon bought that a long time ago and never messed it up. I've been buying a lot more stuff on Amazon. I finally got over my fear of ordering things online. There you go. And then they bought Twitch and they didn't mess it up.

They're like a very developer-friendly company, like as far as like their tech talks and stuff. So I feel like I have that angle on them too. But yeah, maybe it's just I'm not afraid of them the way. I am afraid of a Google or Apple that, like, oh, if they trick me into using this, I might be I messaged. I might be trapped. Interesting. Yeah.

I mean, I don't think it's sorry now. Like, it's just building, right? But if, and these are all hypotheticals, but if the AI thing happens and Google stuff is way better, people are going to realize they're locked into the iOS ecosystem. That probably won't happen. But the headphone thing is another example. It's super silly. but once people have to buy new headphones for this phone

so you don't have a don't have a don't permanently plugged in their stuff they're not as the headphones. You know, the new anecdote from this week was someone's like, I was like, oh, what's that? And I was like, oh, this is the dongle for headphones. Oh, right, so you can use wireless.

Oh, the tongue was like some type of antenna. Yeah. Oh, that's really funny. Because before. If that could double as an antenna and get you better service, that would be awesome. Jordan, don't even put the idea out there because next phone, there's going to be some terrible

dangling antenna. Well, that's what's coming back is like the extendable antenna. Yeah, you pull up on the thing before you make a call. You pull it up and snap it open and dial away. No, but like the Bluetooth headphones, that's what, I don't mean the wired ones. The Bluetooth headphones, the fact that to get the best Bluetooth experience on the iPhone,

you have to buy beats headphones. That's just another little example of lock-in. Like, it's all over the industry. Don't get me wrong. I just think it's going to come to some sort of head because people are going to understand that it's happening to them and they're going to not like it.

I think the lock-in is coming because Apple was so successful with it and everyone else, Google or whoever, is like, I need a piece of that action. I just, I don't know. The echo to me is why does Amazon really need a music streaming service? They don't really need one.

But they know that they had this piece of harder that people like. They could get that money away to Spotify or they could collect it themselves. Wait, wait, I have an idea. Do you think Amazon is going to start making its own music the way it makes its own content for video streaming?

And if so, what would the Amazon band be called? Oh, the prime. They would just call it the prime. The primos? The primos. Paul's thinking. I'm trying to think of the, so Amazon's technique with TV shows is find a well-loved existing property or a well-love existing director.

And so they would take, they'd make a supergroup out of like members, that used to be part of other big supergroups. It'd be like Fergie and Harry Styles. Well, this is the worst idea of it. Wow. And it would be called like the Jeff Bezos Funk Project. Yes, with Fergie and Harry Styles. And it would sell like crazy.

Well, it wanted to sell like crazy. Free with your Amazon Prime. Free with your Amazon Prime. Fergie now just comes free with Amazon Prime. She just comes to your house. She's like, Alexa, drop a beat. And she starts saying it. If you order anything from Amazon Prime now, Fergie brings it to you.

Here are your cough drops, Mr. Patel. Writing a bro. Oh, someone, I was just talking to somebody in our studio who said they were in Seattle over the weekend on vacation, and they drove by the Amazon campus and just saw them testing the delivery drones. Oh, really? Which is amazing. Oh, cool. What were they delivering?

I don't think she got... Puppies? I don't think she, like, ran up to them. I think she just saw them testing it. It was puppies. But let's go to the... It was actually Fergie. Starbucks.

They were keeping it off. Drop a bee. All right. That, fortunately, unfortunately. On that note. On that, on that very strange

and somewhat disturbing note of Fergie flying from the sky singing to you. No. Turn that thing off. All right. It's all. The Galaxy Note 7.

This is really gone. It was such a good podcast, too. Okay, that was it. That was the whole show. I want to thank Masterclass once again for sponsoring today's episode. Masterclass makes the world's greatest courses.

by bringing the world's greatest instructors. Aaron Sorkin, teaching Masterclass in Screenwriting. There's 35 lessons over six hours of videos. There's interactive assignments. It'll help you learn the crafted screenwriting, write your on screenplays. Aaron covers the rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script sell. For an exclusive clip of Aaron Sorkin discussing how he writes dialogue,

go to Masterclass.com slash The Verge. That's masterclass.com forward slash The Verge. Listen that. Thanks, Masterclass. There's also tons of stuff to listen to all over the verge. Lauren Good, hosts a show. show called? Too Embarrassed to Ask.

What happened this week on Too Abarrass to Ask? We talked all about exploding batteries. There you go. Yep. But no, really check it out. iTunes.com, re-code.net for it's too embarrassed to ask. It's everywhere.

It's on our Snapchat right now. What's Tech happens on Tuesday with Chris Plant. Actually, this week was really cool because Chris wasn't there. Caitlin Tiffany, who's a genius on our staff, guested, had Ashley Carmen on as a guest. They talked about how gifts are taking over photo apps, which is really interesting. and really fun to listen to, actually. And then Walt and I do control out to delete on Thursdays, which is pretty fun.

This week we also talked about Explanative Batteries. But then some other stuff. Walt just read things to Siri all, like the whole show, and it's like, it's not fucking working. It's great. It's a classic Walt podcast. And then Karas Fischer does recode decode.

And Peter Cofka does recode Media. All which are wonderful. So go on iTunes, find all that stuff. Listen to it or don't, but just make sure you rate it highly because that's important to us. Go to Twitter. We're at Verge on Snapchat. or Virge on Instagram, everywhere we want to be.

I am at Reckless on Twitter. Paul is at Future Paul. Lauren Good is Lauren Good. Jordan. Golson. J.L. Golson on Twitter. Jordan Golson. Samsung reporter extraordinaire this week of The Verge. We're going to let you get back to cars soon one of these days, man.

Yo, can't wait. But Follow Jordan. He's been doing just great work on the story, which I don't think he's over yet. Anyway, that was it. That was a Vergecast. It happened to us and to you, and together we experienced it. Rock and Roll. It was amazing.

Rock and roll. Paul, Paul. Rock Scotch.