The Vergecast - Galaxy S9 review, Android P, and Google tries to fix the web (live @ SXSW 2018)

Episode Date: March 10, 2018

This week, The Vergecast is down in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest 2018 in front of a live audience. Nilay, Dieter, Casey, and Ashley run through the news and share their expertise about Google���s new plan to make the web faster, using Samsung’s Galaxy S9, and Android P for developer testing. If you wanted to see the show, sorry you missed it! But good news for you, I recorded it so you can listen to it whenever you want. And here’s the articles discussed on the show this week: 00:45 - Google’s latest plan could change how you browse the web 10:03 - Amazon has a fix for Alexa’s creepy laughs 17:16 - Samsung Galaxy S9 review 27:17 - Android P is available for developer testing 32: 57 - Paul’s weekly segment “Shoes — You’ve got em” 35:24 - On Twitter, lies spread faster than the truth 41:02 - Snap confirms layoffs of ‘just over 120’ engineers 45:00 - Barack Obama is reportedly planning Netflix shows 50:59 - Q&A Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Foxmeeting. I don't know if Jim knows that joke. I don't know if the CEO of the company knows it for a year I've been calling our show The Flagship podcast. Jim, now you know, thanks, buddy. I appreciate your support. I'm Eli, this student. Hello. It's Casey.

It's Ashley. Paul will be maybe making an appearance in some form later. You never know. But we should just start with news. Sure. With South by Southwest, there's a lot. going on and I was not joking when I threatened you with Web Standards talk. We're going to start with AMP because Deeter Bone is the only person in the world who understands

Google's AMP project. It's a very huge burden. Also, I know there are people watching on the stream at YouTube, but we're at Southby, South by Southwest Interactive, which is a show for web nerds. It's a conference for like web nerds. I assume these are web nerds. I want you to sound smart at parties later on. So Dieter is just going to be issuing Soundby Nerds.

for the next few minutes being like, web packaging is the future of distribution in a trustless environment. And then you can just say that whenever you want over the weekend. That's really good. I'm in it. Web packaging is a future of distribution

in a trustless environment. There you go. There is. See everybody. All right, Deeter, tell us what is going on in a fan. All right, so everybody hates AMP. Nobody likes it. Well, quickly define what AMP is.

Okay, AMP, it stands for accelerated mobile pages. And it is, the origin story of AMP is two years ago. There was Apple News, there was Facebook, instant articles and we at the verge were doomed because we knew that instead of just publishing to the web, we would have to publish to 50 different things, flipboard and blah, blah, blah, blah, so Google said, well, we can fix that, we're going to make a thing and it's going to be the web, which is debatable, but, and then you'll be able to take that thing and then it will become

another standard. So we all thought of it as like a direct competitor to instant articles and Apple News and all the rest, which it kind of is, but they're very very very. vision was not for it not to be that. And they claim that from the beginning they wanted to like build this thing and then make it a web standard. So what this thing is is when we publish a page, there's a version of it that has a limited set of HTML that can, we basically, when you publish an AMP page, you can say, hey, if somebody else wants to distribute this, cool, you are free to redistribute this page. And it will always be updated, we update it, and you can trust that it came from us. And that means that when you go visit an AMP page,

it can load instantly because Google did this completely insane I-frame hack where when you, there's an AMP link in Google search or Twitter or Bing, it preloads the page in the background so it loads right away. How many of you have Android phones? Some of you. Yeah. So your phones have the Google, you do reminds me this all the time. Yeah. Your phones preload the Verge in the background in the feed. So when you swipe left, there's the Google feed, and all the stories in there are preloaded through AMP.

You don't know it, we don't know it until you read it and then it sends us the analytics signal, which is crazy, right? That's not how anyone thinks the web works. you click a link, it loads, thousands of advertisers track you, and then you see some content. But AMP is like, it's preloading these packages of content underneath everything else and it's built on hacks. So why is it controversial? Because it's Google, and Google's taking over everything.

Everyone assumes they own the entire web. Maybe they do, it's scary. And, you know, also, AMP usually sucks. Like in terms of the experience of using it, because scrolling in an eye frame is really awkward. People aren't very good at designing them because the very first iteration of AMP had really limited set of stuff you could do

so the AMP pages don't look good. They're just weird. And then the URLs are awful because they come from a Google cache often. So it's got weird extra crap in it that you've got to delete if you want to share it. So they claim they have solutions for all of these things and they've spent two years making app

and now they want the rest of the world to make their pages just like AMP, which is like everyone's like, oh, but we hate AMP, it sucks, so we don't want to do that, but they're trying to, like, turn it. And so they're going to take all the stuff that they built that they understand, and they're going to go to the Web Standards Committee, the W3C tag. There's also the WIACG, which is a whole other thing.

Plus, there's the ITF. All right, okay, hold on. And they're going to try and make this a standard. It's going to take forever. All right. So my question is, so let's say that we at the verge decided we love AMP, which, by the way, most publishers do love AMP because it's now the source of the majority of all traffic to our websites.

This is true. So if we decide, all right, we want to do like the Amplified version of the web, like, what would that look like? Is it something we have to do? Does the Web Standards body have to do it? Do we have to redesign the Verge? Like, how does this work? The way it's going to work is for the next, however long it takes the Web Standards bodies, to figure it out, which could be years. People are just going to keep using AMP and be terrified of Google.

And then once they figure it out, there will be a new standard by which you can publish a web page that you allow other people to distribute for you. And then we will just follow that web packaging standard. So it's going to be, if you want to make a web page, instead of just knowing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you'll have to know that stuff, plus like the magic new packaging standard. So it'll be on us to build it. But we have to wait for the process of everybody arguing at each other about the web for two years to shake out.

Sure, but we already published to AMP. So like what's going to be the difference? AMP will be one of several of these things. There's not a name for it yet, but AMP will be Google's implementation. branding. I'm going to call it Hangouts. Oh, God.

Hangouts web. It's going to be great. What's going to happen is it'll become another chat client for Google. Yeah, a new messenger. Fantastic. No, Ample be Google's version of this thing. And it'll be the one that pretty much everyone's going to end up using. So they're going to continue to have, like, quote unquote, captured a bunch of the web still.

Here's just how I told you this is going to be deeply nerdy. No, they're fine. They love it. That guy loves it. What's really funny is a bunch of people, like, I mean, I just said, he did the bad thing was he showed me a tweet of somebody who said I was in the can for Google with this article right before we came on stage. So I'm all like angry about it. I end the article by like calling them an idiot about how they communicate.

Well, so here's like my overall read on it. So Facebook is across the street, I believe. Facebook is a company is, you know, they go all in on whatever they're going to do. Yeah. They make no designs at their goal is to like anything other than to completely suck in the web and have you live on Facebook. Right? Like Facebook is like, are you a developing country? We've just air bombed like 5,000 Facebook phones on your country.

Now you're internet as Facebook. Live videos the future. We're going to pay everybody to live it. Like, Facebook subsumes the internet. They do instant articles. They literally, they just don't pretend that they want to do anything else. Google, everyone is afraid, will subsume the internet. And so the deal with AMP, the reason Casey is saying you get traffic is if you

participate in Google's weird AMP solution, Google will send you traffic, right? you get higher ranked in Google search results, everybody cares about. Google, I don't think they have the ability to just turn the screw all the way. Like, they're holding the knife, they're looking at you. And I'm like, I don't, I just can't be this person today. And they're like, put the knife down.

They're like, web standards, it is. And like, I think that's just the cycle they're always going to be in. Well, sure, but I mean, that's the difference between the web and a walled garden, right? Facebook can control everything because everything happens inside Facebook. Like, at the end of the day,

Apple still exists and make Safari and will have something to say about whatever Google is trying to do with AMP, right? Facebook just doesn't have the same kind of competitor in that way. I mean, Deeter will disagree with me. The web is so close to being Google's garden. It's just so, like, search is really important. Chrome, like, dominates. I know that there's the Safari team in Mobile Swarri's its big kind of counterweight. What about Edge?

Firefox. I got it. Right here. He's an edge. Well, I'm using Chrome. But it's only because Google Docs is pretty bad an edge. Yeah. Anyway, I just like, Google is right at the point where they could take over the web.

Yeah, I don't disagree with that at all. And the web is their revenue platform as well. Yep. Because they own Double Click. They own Open. Like, their ad tech powers everything. When you talk, so they could. I just, they just can't.

Like, there's a part of me that just wants to see what fully evil Google looks like. Ooh. Right? Where it's like Sunder, like, Dark Sundar shows up. And he's like, he's got like red eyes. But, okay, so let me say this, though, because I think we have to say we're being a little self-serving here.

Why does AMP exist? It was because publishers larded all of their webpages with too many ad trackers and too many disgusting widgets. Pages were too slow to load, right? And there were a lot of reasons why this happened. And, you know, by the way, I think we're a lot better than most publishers, but still there needed to be a counterweight.

Like, somebody sort of had to come in and unwind what the rest of us had done to the, the web and Google for them to ensure a future, they have to create a web that, you know, people like our audience here actually want to use. Yeah. That's why they need the search carrot. That's why they have that top stories carousel, which shows just Amp Stories, and they're saying it'll show this other weird future standards someday.

All right. So what happens next? Anyway, what happens next is a bunch of people argue at each other. They yell at Google. They yell at each other. They decide whether they want to make this web packaging thing, which does have other uses beyond, like, instant loading. It will make web pages work offline better.

it'll do a few other things. And then once all the web engineers yell at each other and yell at Google, at the same time, Google and Apple will yell at each other about browsers, but they won't do it publicly because they don't yell each other publicly. Mozilla will have a little piece of that too. And then in two years, maybe we'll have this,

or not, or we'll just end up all using AMP and Google will take over. Those are like the options. Dark Sundar. If you want to send us fan art. Fan art is starting to come in, if you wouldn't like to drop picture of Dark Sundar. I'm available on Twitter, which uses AMP.

All right. It does. It really does. Let's talk about Amazon for one second. Ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Good luck. So I'm like all in with Alexis.

You've got Alexis at your house. Dieter, you are like, you and Lisa have this constant battle between Alexa and Google Assistant. We have both. Yeah. But Ashley, you have none of these things. No, and this story is basically why. So, do you want to walk us through? at Ashden? Yeah, so I mean, literally people on the internet were reporting that Alexa

randomly just started laughing, like out of nowhere. They would just be in their house. This happened to anybody here? See? Okay, well, yeah, there's some footage on Twitter of people literally just like walking into their kitchen and then Alexa just starts laughing. And no one knew at the time why. And I don't know if Amazon's even fully figured out. They've now disabled the command where you can make Alexa laugh. Their explanation is not good. No. Their explanation is like sometimes it heard the command, Alexa laugh. And it's like, what did you change? You changed something, because it wasn't happening before.

No one's walking around muttering things that sound like Alexa laugh. No one's like calling that out in their sleep. Some people were saying it's like when they asked to turn on the light, lights, laugh. Listen, I will say, so I never had the laughing issue, but I had something else, which was I was watching TV, and then Alexa came to life and it delivered an inspirational quote by Jeff Bezos. I know that sounds like a joke. It is not. And all of a sudden it was like, here's a quote for you.

If you want to succeed, you have to work very hard. Jeff Bezos. Did you turn off the TV and get back to work? Yeah, I did. I was like, listen, it worked for Jeff. So, yeah, clearly Alexa can be a little too sensitive at times and it makes things up. But what a perfect story that just kind of crystallizes all of our anxieties about artificial intelligence into a single place. You know, like the, there are so many people out there saying,

oh, you know, everybody's so worried about AI. Everybody needs to relax. It's just machine learning. It can barely do anything. And then it just started to laugh at us in 2018. Like, nobody thought we were going to get there this fast. So, Ashley, you're saying this is the reason you don't have it. What would make you put an Alexa in your house?

Is there anything? I feel like I ask you this question, like, every other week. Yeah, I mean, I just feel like I can't speak in voice commands. I don't know. Whenever I've used smart lights and I have some that would be like, set the light to 10% brightness. And I just don't think that is a command that I would ever use. On and off is fine.

But with smart lights, if I want to change a color or adjust the brightness, like that just for me is not a natural command. So I don't know if I can ever learn that language. I don't know. Am I aging out of this? I don't know. Well, no, you and it's all old dudes who are into it. Like, we're the people who are like,

oh, yes. It's like the terminal. Babies are on the Alexa level. They're like, they can talk to Alexa all day. I mean, I fail at asking the only. Alexa constantly. Like I always ask everything twice and Becky's like, why do you do this? Yeah, no. Like, I'm just going to Google this for you. And the app is always faster for me. I'd rather just use the smart light app. It just works every time. It's done. So we use Alexa through

the Sonos speakers. We have Sonos one, a surround system set up and it is god awful in terms of it's like recognition. You have to ask it three times. And then an Alexa, a random echo, like three rooms over answers for you. And you're like, no, and you got to like go and close the door because it doesn't do the thing. And I realize the reason that Alexa failing is so frustrating is you just have to sit there and experience it.

Right? No, when there's a bug on your screen, you know what you can do? You can look at a tree. But when an audio thing fails or an audio thing has a bug where it laughs at you or there's something creepy happening or God forbid it gets properly hacked, there's no escape from it. It's all linear. It's all happening around you via audio.

And you can't look away from it. You have to have this immersive experience of computer hell, whereas at least when there's a malware or a bad pop-up on a screen, you can look at a tree. Yeah. Or you can, like, throw your Windows PC out of the window. Yeah, right. Yeah.

You can't do that with Alexa. I mean, you can, but you have to wait for it to finish. There's just something really awful about having to, like, ask a robot to do something twice, you know? Like, you already feel like kind of a lazy bum for being like, hey, what's the weather? Like, because you just won't look out your window, you know? But then when it doesn't recognize your voice, like,

oh, here we go again. I guess I'll enunciate really clearly this time. Yeah. Wait, so you have, you have Alex in your sonos. Yeah, I have a standard O.G. Echo, and then I got a Sonos one, which I've been super disappointed with for the reason that Dieter just mentioned,

which is that the recognition is really bad. Also, the Spotify integration, which is the main reason I bought it is super wonky. So, you know, but when it works, I will say this, When I had the original echo, I put it in my bedroom, and I would do like three things with it. I would like ask what the weather was every morning when I got out of the shower. I would use it to set alarms.

And I would like use it to play music, like, you know, when I was in my room. Those are all good things. And like voice control is great for that. But I think voice control actually hasn't gone very far beyond that unless you're one of these super hackers who wants to like set up a smart home routine for yourself, which I just don't. Yeah. I feel like Senos benefited a lot from the HomePod review cycle. because virtually, this is true of mine, it was true of everyone else I read.

It was like, if you want a smart speaker that sounds great, buy a Sonus 1. And then there's like the dark underbelly of the Sonus 1, which is it's not a first class Alexa device. Right. So I don't know you are familiar, everyone of you've seen one.

Literally the integration is there's like an Alexa device sitting on top of a Sonos device and they talk to each other through the cloud, which they're sitting right next to each other. So it's like a little weird. So you talk to Alexa and it goes, and talks to Sonos that sends a play command back to the speaker. And that round trip is just, like, there are robbers on that road,

and they will just stop that from happening. Literally it will. So it's gotten better when I have the dot in my regular Sonos. But when you have like one, I think people just expect it to work like one thing. Yes. And that Sonos is not figured out. Because that's what Sonos said it would do. Sonos wasn't like, buy this if you want a pretty good Alexa.

They were just like, finally all your dreams have been. realized. How long until Amazon just buys them? Bys Sonos? See, I've always bet that Amazon will just create incrementally better speakers over time, and the need for Sonos will disappear. Sonos is an amazing hardware company, but they're living in a software world. And I just don't think their software chaps are ever going to be that good.

So I don't know. I don't know how much Sonos is worth, so maybe Jeff Bezos decides it's worth it to snap it up. But, man, I wouldn't bet against Amazon in a year coming out with something that sounded as good as the home pod that could connect to, you know, the entire ecosystem of streaming music services. If Amazon had an interest in making things that sounded good,

they would have done it by now. I mean, they wouldn't have shipped any of the press. They don't sound, like even the new one that, like, sounds good. Yeah, like, as I'm thinking about it, it's like the best Kindle, like, it still feels like you got it out of a, like, carnival drop-down claw.

You know, it's like... All right, speaking of hardware, We should move on. Let's talk about, is anybody buying, did anybody pre-order Galaxy S-9? Cricket! Oh, wow. There was utter silence,

and one guy like chortled. Wow. Yeah. I want to know why, but none of you have microphones, so I'm just going to guess. Because it looks like the S8. Well, you yelled something out.

What did you say? I worked for Samsung? Oh. Not anymore. Because it looks exactly like the essay. Yeah. We played with a camera on Sugar Breaker Live the other day. Well, let's talk about the AR emoji.

So you, this is like Samsung's like sad copy of an emoji. Well, it's funny because Apple used an emoji to sell the iPhone 10, in addition to like the display and everything else. But this was a big part of their marketing pitch was the animojis on the commercials. And now Samsung's like, we could do it too. And they launched these horrifying Bitmoji-like video avatar things. And of course, I was, I had to change. try it immediately. Like Dan, our reviewer, I was like, give me the phone. And so it scans your face

and then tries to create an avatar of you digitally. And a perk of it was it actually scanned my face and detected my birthmark, which was kind of crazy to me. I was like, wow, okay, like it's actually working, but it's just horrifying. It's scary. Like, no one wants this. And Bitmoji is just so much cuter and better. So stick with Bitmoji, even though they don't move. Well, Snapchat now. You kind of can. A little. Yeah. My favorite thing about Samsung is just like there's always that hint of tone deafness, right? Which, like, comes across in the ARB emoji bit.

My favorite thing about the S-9, oh, is that, you know, they released this phone that is basically just an S8, and the ad campaign said the phone reimagined. That made me so happy. Yeah. It's got a headphone, Jack. And that was the re-imagination process. They're like, we're going to go back in time. But my issue with the S-9 is actually what I ran into the iPhone 8.

So I still have a 6-S. And I need to upgrade, like it's time. And I was like, okay, do I want to spend $1,000 on a phone for an iPhone 10? Kind of a tough sell. And then I looked at the iPhone 8, and I was like, this looks just like my current phone, except it's missing a headphone jack, and it's running the same software. So I just, like, why am I going to spend more money to upgrade to basically the same phone that just works better?

And I feel like the same thing with the S9 now, where it's like same software, pretty much same phone. I feel like that's a hard sell to get people to spend the money to just get what looks like the same phone. We have a story on the site today, actually. This headline is super surprising to me. A study by the Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, the well-known SERP. I bet they're well-known. There's probably a SERP person here.

I'm sorry, sir. You're great. Study finds that people are more loyal to Android than iOS, which... Are they loyal to Android? Or are they locked into Google services? I don't think... I don't know. Is that a distinction without a difference?

I think that people buy Samsung phones. and then they keep buying them and they keep having them. But that is counter to everything that Apple says about the iPhone, which is people are switching it faster and faster rates from Android to iOS.

I think we are just definitely at a point now where whatever's happening with the iPhone is the sales are slowing down, right? They're flattening out. They're still going up.

And Apple is doing things like focusing on their services business or making you AirPods. There's a rumor they're going to make high-end headphones now. And they're trying to build out the universe of things that you buy because you have an iPhone.

And Samsung is like sort of doing that because they've always done that. They're like, also we sell refrigerators and submarines. Like, have good thoughts about us. But they don't have that, I think they don't have that loyalty. There's no reason that somebody with a Samsung phone necessarily goes out and buys

a Samsung TV or like level headphones or whatever else. They got there with the gear smart watch insofar as anybody bought smart watches. No, Verizon just forced you to take one away. No, that's fair. They're like, did you, you bought a Samsung phone? You now own a gear smart one. If you have no choice in this matter.

This is what I mean about when you're a hardware company in a software world, right? Like the genius turned out to be owning the operating system. And then if you were making the hardware for it, you could make money, but you weren't going to be in as good a position as somebody like an Apple or Google. I think isn't the counter this product right here that runs Windows? Right? Like, Mike still makes a bunch of money, but their hardware is not the same. Yeah.

So, okay, on the S-9, I was talking about. talking to Dan about this a lot when we were editing his review. The phone is very, very good. The hardware is great. It's just iterative, but it's good. The camera is slightly better. The aperture thing is a pointless gimmick. But it's cool, whatever.

It's Dan's bad. Harsh. Anyway. Name one thing you like. I feel like we've only hated. It's got a headphone jack. No, the hardware is amazing. The screen is amazing.

It doesn't have a notch. It's incredibly well made. Battery life is decent. It has a fast processor. Everything about the hardware is good. They didn't get the best camera, but whatever. Like a phone is a whole group of things. But because the hardware was basically iterative and basically good at Samsung's very high quality,

that meant that, okay, well, now let's look at the software. And the software is the same as it ever was, which is it's Android with a bunch of Samsung stuff on it. And Samsung every year were like, they did slightly better at not having so much junk on it. But because there wasn't a huge shift in the hardware for us to pay attention to them, like, ooh, look at this whiz-bang new thing. it has become clear more of our attention is able to be directed at the fact that it is inexcusable that there aren't updates. I think actually Google releasing the Android P preview around the time that the S-9, the Galaxy phones come out, is maybe a little bit intentional. It's a reminder that you have to wait for updates.

And I also think that I'm just done giving Samsung excuses for duplicate apps and the general extra cruffiness. If you think the Samsung browser is better, and many people do, and I actually don't disagree entirely, then don't preload Chrome on there. Go full evil if you're going to go full evil. They can't. But they can't, right? Because they have to get to Google Play deal. But at some point, like, I'm done.

Be a phone company and do the thing. Or don't maybe a software company and don't do the thing. I'm tired of like, it's fine. There's some Samsung stuff, but if you're really good at it, you can turn it off. So you're proposing, like, the Galaxy S9 pixel. edition. Yeah, but I mean they tried that. It was a Google Play edition. Yeah. I bought those phones. Yeah. I bought them on this show, I believe. No one else did. And yet it still took Google six months to deliver it.

I just, I don't think that they get the benefit of the doubt in the way that they used to when it comes to software. And like, we haven't even said the word Bixby yet. Yeah. I was waiting. Yeah. We're all going to say it together. Ready? Bixby. Now we've summoned him. I wish if I... He's going to tap him. If I had... I thought this through, just a little bit more, there would have been a dog with shoes. Like, I really did not prepare for that moment.

Can everyone leave and come back tomorrow? Because I'm going to get a dog with shoes. So we played with it on the Sugar Breaker Show. The dog with shoes. We did not play the phone. The Sugar Breaker Show took a wild turn. We are playing, and it is shockingly fine. Dan did not agree with us.

Yeah. But there's a part of it where what it's trying to do is interesting. And then there's a part of it where the execution of that is not interesting or good. But what it's trying to do

is like you talk to your phone. Did everybody see the tweet we sent from Dan's phone? It's like the most nonsense tweet. It's like I think it says I love Paul, good, excellent, Enable. Yeah.

Which it was supposed to say I love Paul and Neli. And Bixby decided my name is Enable, which is good. That's my ready player one name. Great. But the idea that you can just yell at your phone like, hey, open Twitter and send a tweet for me and it like can operate the phone for you is really neat.

Yeah. It's very slow. You should be able to remap that button. And it doesn't actually always work. But the idea is good. I'm trying, man. Why should they get credit for the idea? Because it's the most interesting thing people are doing with the voices is on a phone.

Yeah, but like the home pod, a bunch of people gave Apple credit for the idea without actually judging the thing. thing, which was Syria in the home pot is not that good. Yeah. Like, we should, we should use that same, like, clear-eyed judgment on Bixby. I mean, I don't think anyone's out here, like, I'm the only person who has ever made a case for Bixby. Okay. Except for Dr. Bixby, who

was at Tamsby, and he's like, name it after me. Like, I'm, that was it. That was as much of a defense of Bixby it's ever been mustered. And I said the idea is good and the execution is terrible. We're also accepting fan art for Dr. Bixby, by the way. You want to send this.

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free. That is right, free. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com verge. That's ziprecruiter.com slash verge. You can try for free, zipprecruiter.com slash verge. All right. Do you want to talk about Android P? Sure. Yeah. So it's a preview, developer preview. Don't install it. It's only available on pixels, which means it's not available on any Android tablets because Android tablets are going away. They're getting replaced by ChromeOS tablets. You heard it here first a few episodes ago. So the thing everybody's paying attention to is it has support for notches in the screen.

It's horrible. It's fine. Whatever. The reason they had to put support for notches in is we saw Mobile World Congress a couple weeks ago that literally every Android manufacturer not named Samsung is making a notched phone. And they're all going to be garbage and have bad implementations because they don't know how to do software. And so, like, Google had to do it to, like, save Android from everybody making notch phones. That's the only option they had.

It's just sad. I'm not, I don't have a reaction at other than a deep wave of sadness. But, like, think about just what that meeting must have been. like when the Google Android manager had to go in and tell the design team that they had to make a version of Android to support what was basically an iOS feature? Speaking of iOS, so they moved the clock over to the left, which I have very strong, like, I don't, why? Unforgivable.

I don't get it. Why? These people. Work alongs. What else? I think we haven't really talked about this much because I haven't fully read up on it, But there's a bunch of security stuff that actually matters a lot in P. So we already saw that they are disabling access to the sensors,

like the camera and the microphone when an app is in standby in the background so that you can't listen to you or open up your camera. But they're going to require HTTP for apps that you can communicate over the Internet. They're doing encrypted backups in a different way. You can randomize your Mac address so that people can't track you across different Wi-Fi networks. Apps aren't going to be able to access the device ID. anymore to also fingerprint you and identify you. So there's a bunch of stuff in Android P

that makes it slightly harder for apps to do really skeezy things to track you, which is a huge change. And I hope that it works. Is this Google just slowly locking their version of Android down more and more? For sure. In fact, if you have an app that, so the way apps on Android work is you quote unquote target a version of Android.

So you're like, this is targeted to like 32 or 45 or whatever, like that API number. And if your app is designed for an older version of Android, when a user installs your app or opens it, Android P will throw up a warning saying, yo, this app is old. And then you'll be like, well, I don't want to use that. And then the developer will be sad. And then they'll maybe update their app to target

the new version, is the idea. But again, like, we shouldn't talk about a new version of Android without noting that in a year from now once it's out and it's on whatever the next pixel phone is, that I don't know, 300,000 people will have it, and that's it. And everybody else, like, at most that's who will have it, and everybody else will be on some older version of Android.

I don't have a ton of faith that the stuff they've done in the past couple of years to try and get more companies to update their phones faster is actually going to take. And the reason I don't think that is because Samsung's not updated. Yeah, but Samsung just wants to sell you a new phone. Right. They don't have this other business, you know, like if you buy an app

on the Play Store, Samsung gets none of that revenue, right? The way that Apple gets a cut of the revenue on every little purchase that you make on the iPhone. Right. I think Samsung is like, yeah, our phones, after a while, they suck. You should get a new one. And like, you know, I think Google has a different

idea with the pixel, right? Because they do get a cut of that revenue over time. They can see that. How many people here have pixels? The Samsung... One, two, three. I feel like you're trying to, you're like making an announcement here today, like, do you have some personal news? Do you guys like your pixels?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to switch. No, you're not. It's just I message. It's just I message. I have so much to say.

The security news is interesting to me because Microsoft also announced this week that they had a new security update, I think, for the next version of Windows, that addresses people's concerns about key loggers. in the software. And so I feel like all these companies are responding to everyone being deeply paranoid that we're being spied on by these companies. And then the Alexa Newscoms, and of course that doesn't help things either. But it's just an interesting way that they're dealing with our paranoia.

Yeah, I think for Google in particular, the thing that they, the circle they have to try and square is a bunch of the really good stuff in Android happens in the granular app updates, which they can release whenever they want, unlike Apple, which still has everything in a big, dumb package once a year. And a bunch of other little Google Play services updates. So if you're on a Google Play Android phone, you actually get a bunch of new stuff all the time, but nobody ever pays attention or notices. So in Google's ideal world, they'd be treating Android the way that the Chrome team works. So it's like version 66 and version 67, and it just rolls every six weeks. And that's what they're basically doing with Google Play, but nobody notices, nobody

pays attention. We pay attention to the big version updates. Because those are where the UI changes come. That's where the UI changes come. Even when we write about it, here's Andrew P. And then I think the most popular story that we had in our huge list of Android P. stories were here are the visual changes. And literally it was like, there's support for a notch. And that's

the whole change. The support for notch is the corners on some of the boxes are rounded now. Mateus, like, drank his way in and out. I'm on it. All right. You might notice that Paul Miller is not here. Sadly. Paul. Paul. But every week, Paul

does a second. I hope we're ready for this. We prepared for this. The dog with shoes is not a, I wish I'd but every week Paul does a segment. Yeah, we never forget about it. Here is that thing. Another year gone by,

another South by Southwest that I sadly could not attend. I'm here at an art gallery surrounded by an amazing installation of

televisions, but if it helps you feel better, we can pretend like it's a brand activation for some sort of underwear company, you know, whatever floats your boat. So this week, just like every week, I'm going to do my segment. It's called shoes. You've got them, because everybody wears shoes. And this week we're highlighting very aptly shoes from a brand. That brand is Pizza Hut. And the shoes are called the Pie Topps 2.

Pie Topps have buttons on them. One button orders pizza. The other button pauses your television so that you can go get the pizza when it arrives. It's basically an all-in-one package shoes for your feet and for ordering pizza and for pausing the TV

what more could you ask for I hope you have a wonderful time at South by Southwest love the brands you're with is what I always say this has been Paul Miller signing off

it's a boy I will say that no one showed us that before we were no It was all news to me. I wasn't prepared for how disturbing it would be. Right? It was dark.

Are those real shoes? Yeah, those are real shoes. Our producer, Andrew Marino, earlier, he was like, I'm trying to get them. He's, like, working on it. We'll have the shoes. They're probably here. It has to be. Yeah.

Someone find the pizza at people and bring us the shoes. All right, Casey. Yeah. Every week. Every week. No, I'm just listed here, Twitter and Snapchat. Yeah. I feel like you and Ashley are the people I come to to explain to me what the hell is going on with Twitter and Snapchat.

Sure. Well, there was this interesting story that I thought would be fun to talk about today. Our colleague Angela Chen published that yesterday there was a new study that came out where researchers had access to the entire Twitter fire hose of tweets. They analyzed millions of tweets. And what they found was that fake news spreads way faster than the truth. And by the way, the problem isn't bots, which we've written plenty about, but it's humans. And so what they found was that if you share a true political article on Twitter, that article is unlikely to reach more than 100 people. But for the top 1% of fake news that gets spread on Twitter, it reaches more than 100,000 people.

So, you know, there's this old line that a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can get his boots on. and this is sort of the empirical proof that at least on Twitter that is the case. So I read a nuance of this study, which is that lies are more interesting. So it was actually, it was claims that have been fact-checked is false, spread farther than claims that have been fact-checked as true,

because the lies are more fabulous. Right, which is so freaky, because when you think about what gets you to share something on social media, generally it's because you found something really novel, right? but when you are unconstrained by the truth, you can think of the most novel things in the world. Like, hey, aliens landed in our backyard. And so that kind of thing can just spread really quickly.

So when you think about, you know, if you work at Twitter, you work at Facebook, and you want to try to improve the integrity of the stuff that gets shared on your platforms, what do you do? Because people are never going to want to stop sharing these novel things. In fact, it's the thing that drives them to share in the first place, but it turns out that makes these networks really susceptible to all kinds of falsehood. So I think it's a really important thing to think about as we sort of head into like 2018 midterm elections.

Were you shocked by this? This seems like obvious. Yeah. Yeah. There's like, you remember that there's like an old like SNL like weekend update segment or they'd be like from the medical journal, duh? Right? I just like say the most obvious thing in the world. So on one hand, yes. My understanding is when people went out and talked to researchers, they said, yes, we sort of suspected this,

but we've never had data this good. And this study was really well designed. And Twitter, by the way, I'd give them credit for this, worked really closely with the researchers, gave them access they don't give to everyone. It actually is trying to understand the nature of how these things work. So we now have a lot of data, and hopefully if your Twitter, you maybe have some ideas about how you're going to defend against this in the coming months and years. And this is why the trending boxes have been such an issue, right?

Is because trending you would hope would be very reliable, truthful stories. But in reality, it's like a popularity contest and the popular stories. are the fake ones. Right. And you know, that you can create, you know, 10,000 Twitter accounts and I'll get them tweeting the same hashtag, and all of a sudden you have a globally trending story, even if it's just, you know, two dudes in Russia.

Sweet. Yeah. Ash, you like recently cleaned out your Twitter, right? You cleaned out your archives and like started over. Oh yeah, I deleted it. Oh, why did you got? Twitter stuff, but I deleted all my old tweets. Why is that?

Um, it's not because I ever think I tweeted something like bad. I've always been a normal good human. But I promise. I just deleted it because I felt it was time. I just, I haven't been able to scroll back to my original archives from literally 10 years ago in forever. So I was like, you know what? White it clean. See ya.

Did you download. Did you download my archive. So I have it if I ever really feel like reliving freshman year of college. Right. Has it, has like anything about the experience? Because I've been thinking about doing it, but I'm not really sure. It was just weird at first because it's your brand. So when you go to your page, you're like, oh, my God, who am I?

And then when you tweet a few times, you're like, oh, yeah, that's me. We're back. You, I mean, your whole show is about emerging behaviors on platforms. We're doing an episode about unfollowing, which is a little bit different, but some of the reasoning actually has to do with a little bit of this. Do you think there's been a big change in how people are using Twitter with all this? I mean, like, Jack Dorsey's out there being like, I don't know how we're going to fix it, but I will fix it.

Like, do you perceive a change in how people use it or how you use it? Not, I'm always shocked when normal humans use it. Like, Caitlin and I always talk about, like, Kim Kardashian uses Twitter all the time, and we're like, Kim, why? Girl, get off Twitter. Like, it's not, what are you doing there? But, no, I mean, I think we're all, everyone here in this room is aware of the issues, the platform space. I don't think, no, I don't think things have changed, though. Yeah, I mean, I always just look at, there was, I was a tweet yesterday or like Michael B. Jordan bought some girl a retainer because she broke her retainer.

He took his shirt off in Black Panther. Like, it's a great little three-tweet story. Like, the algorithm creates those moments, I think, with increasing frequency now. Is that, like, do you think of that as, like, being a good thing? Or is that bounced out by, like, Russian bots? I mean, I was never one of those people who had, like, a very intense Twitter community, but I know a lot of people who have, and they, like, miss those days of, oh, it was just a bunch of friends connecting about our really niche interests.

And now it's like you can't log on without facing something horrible. But yeah, I think those days maybe are gone a little bit. And I don't love like chicken nuggets guy or whatever he was. All right. Then my next question for the two of you is Snapchat. And Ashley, I want to start with you as well. Like I feel like I have just stopped considering Snapchat. It's like on my home screen, which is pretty precious real estate.

And I never open it. Same with Kylie Jenner. She hates Snapchat. She felt sad about it. She doesn't hate Snapchat. She misses Snap, I think. Yeah. Is that over as well?

Casey's like, Casey's a wearing to go. Casey, you do the thing. So I don't think it's over. And in fact, after they did their redesign, which a bunch of very vocal people screamed and yelled about, their downloads went up, which is often an effect of redesigns like this. I think Snapchat is still a really good messaging app.

And I think it continues to not get enough credit for deleting people's messaging. messages by default. There are so many good reasons to just like have fun offhanded chats with people that aren't stored forever on a Facebook server. And Snapchat still does that. And so my question for them is sort of, you know, where can they take that and can they build a real business around it? The other side of Snapchat is Discover publishers putting stories. I've never basically seen a good one or one that I liked. You know, granted a lot of it is maybe aimed a little younger than I am. But that continues to just be kind of a non-starter for me. But as a messaging app, it's really fast. It's

lightweight, it's fun, they have something there, they have, what, 180 million daily users, like there, there is something there. So I haven't ruled them out. My concerns about them have more to do with, like, their corporate structure and the fact that they can't get an executive to stick around for longer than a year, like more than I don't like the design. I think the teens love Snapchat still. Like, they're totally all, that is how they talk to each other, Snapchat. So they got that. Yeah. Do you think the Instagram's ruthlessly ripping them off? is that having any effect at all. Like, that's what killed it for me.

Definitely. I stopped, I started watching stories on Instagram and I stopped watching on Snapchat. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think it like, basically, anyone older than like 24 or 25 immediately started putting all their stories on Instagram

because that's where all their friends were for the most part. And Instagram did a really good job of copying it. It was a lot more kind of fun to use, I think, in some ways. And it just absolutely killed Snapchat's international growth because there were many, many people who had never seen stories before. So, yeah, it definitely put Snapchat in a time, tough spot. And Snapchat always been neglecting Android anyway, things like that, and it came back to kind of bite them there. Yeah, because they just screenshot the video camera, right? Like, they're

still doing that on Android phones, which is not, it's like deeply impolite. It's like, we know you have a phone with a camera, but what if we don't give a shit about that? Yeah, I don't know. Like, what do you make of the layoffs? Because they're laying off 120 people in their engineering division. But so out of how many do they have? It was about 10% of their employees, is what I have. heard. I will say that was surprising. You know, there was an earlier round of layoffs that affected people kind of more in human resources roles and other kind of non-essential stuff. You know, my question is, what were those 100 engineers working on? That's sort of be the most interesting question, right? Companies are generally very loath to get rid of engineers because they're hard to attract in the

first place. I'm sure Snapchat's saving a lot of money by laying off 100 engineers. And apparently Evan Spiegel had sent out a memo last year saying that he really wanted to break even in 2018. So, you know, maybe they are going to try to cut it down to the bone. But, you know, in a certain way, you can see that as a smart move. Like, I've criticized Snapchat a lot for the fact that they lost, like, more than $400 million in their first quarter as a public company, right? That's like, it's like really hard to lose $400 million on disappearing messages. And they did. So this is a good step, I guess. It's just weird that they're not, it didn't hit sales or their media division or whoever's in charge of Discover

or, like, that's where the revenue is for them, but it's not their product. Right. Again, I don't think we really know what these 100 engineers were doing. So if you know, if you know, please DM me. I'm very curious. All right.

And then I also have on the list, Ashley, you were very excited about this earlier, Barack Obama reportedly talking to Netflix. I mean, I just am fully here for a Barack Obama Netflix show. Like, please. Yeah, no, Netflix says that they're in talks with Barack and Michelle about a possible show. And Netflix also says that they're really going to try to get more into original content, which makes sense because Disney is coming in.

They're going to have their own platform with Disney, Marvel, everything, pretty much. Like, Netflix kind of needs to get on it. So, okay, Netflix said that they're going to, they're expecting to have a total of like 700 original series in 2018. And it was, that includes 80 movies. every time, every time I open Netflix there's just like a million new shows I've never heard of and like I assume they're all good I don't know, I assume a bunch of...

They're not, altered carbon is not good. Altered carbon, fair. But ugly, delicious is really good. There's like a bunch of... Queer eye is amazing. Queer eye is amazing except for the one episode with the cop. That was terrifying.

Yeah, I know you're finding out. I need to watch a show now. Yeah, you really do. But it's got to the point where, like, I used to like Netflix because I would feel like I'm participating in a cultural moment, and I'm experiencing a thing. I know a bunch of other people are experiencing, but we're all going to watch this show together.

But now it's just like, oh, there's just a million things here. And I don't know, like, I'm assuming their strategy is you don't need a cable subscription anymore because there's always something on Netflix that's pretty good. But I think they're basically there now. So I don't know if there's a next thing for them, if they're going to like try and like get stuff into theaters again because that hasn't been going super well for them or what. The blockbusters. Like when I was watching the Oscars this last weekend, like Icarus won.

And I was so excited because they're like, oh, this is a Netflix documentary. So I immediately could go on Netflix and watch this Oscar winner, which for me was a huge thing. And you don't get that with the other big blockwesters that are from traditional studios. Well, you did a whole episode on password sharing last season and why did you push that button. And I feel like the new cable bundle is just you and six friends sign up for six services. Everyone here, I would assume, is sharing passwords. This is a startup.

You guys are at Southby. I encourage you to get drunk tonight and propose this startup where people just manage password sharing. The Samsung guy is like into it. He's like, and it's like, we're just going to share our passwords because it's really expensive to sign up for all these services. Yeah. It is actually much cheaper.

I did the math recently. It is much cheaper for me to have every single channel on my cable bundle and just use those apps than it would be for me to sign up for Sling TV and Hulu and Netflix and whatever. I mean, I sign up for them also. I also have a title subscription. I'm not a good example. But if I just use the cable apps that I have,

I actually get more stuff, and it's way cheaper. But I think some people just have Netflix, and that's all the thing. I think a very large number of people just have Netflix. Do you think they're going to... The only reason I can access cable is because my parents don't pay for it. Thanks, guys.

I don't know, okay, so do you think Netflix is missing a culture of... I mean, they're not going to lose this Obama deal to Amazon or whatever. No, I think that it's too important to them. Yeah, it's an incredible business. Like, what a story. I don't know. It's a really fascinating company to watch, but yeah, I think they're in a very good position.

I think if you want to identify some long-term threat to them, it really is Amazon because Amazon gives you all of this really good TV programming, and it's not even their core business, right? Like, they essentially use TV to subsidize everything else. And so if you're Netflix, like that, that's probably a little scary. But that's exactly the reason why Reed Hastings is going to spend billions and billions of dollars on original content. Because he's going to make sure that Netflix feels radically better than whatever is on Amazon Prime. Yeah.

There's a really good variety story by a reporter named Yanko Ruckers, who we really like. And he went to Netflix. He saw their testing. But there was a nugget in there that thought was really interesting. That Netflix makes deals with TV companies to put Netflix buttons on remotes, which we always think of as like bloatware, that button drives more Netflix viewing than almost anything else.

Wow. So that deal, so people, like, 70% of Netflix launches are that button on TVs, which is, like, incredible. I don't think anyone's pushing the sling TV button. They're just hitting the Netflix button. They're hitting the crackle button. I have a Roku with a crackle button.

I feel like I should, like, frame it. Like, here lies another Sony idea. Like one of those, like, memory sticks next to it, just like line them up. This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Mattress Firm. It has one question for all the I'm going to listen to a podcast

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And then we're going to do some questions. There are some microphones floating around. I'm terrified of all of you. Yeah. This is your moment. But if you don't take it, then I won't be... There we go. There is one.

Do you think there's a future for title? For... For... For... For Spotify. Oh, title. Man. So there's a lot of people who do.

I... I don't think it sounds better. I was like, people are going to yell at me. The tweets are coming. I don't think any human being can actually hear uncompressed music that way. I think what you do get is you get more dynamic range. So it's like louder.

I think louder things generally sound better. Like when you go to the store and you listen to speakers, the one that sounds loudest is when you're going to buy, just like the brightest TV is one you're going to buy. So I think title like occasionally sounds louder. I don't think it sounds better in any meaningful way. I talk to a bunch of the other streaming services all the time about this. It's the one question everybody has about Spotify.

If Spotify had flipped the uncompressed button and just stream uncompressed music, title might just be dead, right? Because everyone would have the bigger catalog. And every other streaming service says, we don't think people can hear it. We do the AB test all the time. Nobody can hear it.

That's titles, that and exclusives, are their differentiators. They don't have this burgeoning hardware ecosystem that both Apple and Spotify are building. There are some jobless things for Spotify hardware the other day, which to me is a nightmare of, ecosystem lock-in, but whatever they're doing it.

Title is just, they're just access to some music. And as long as that music is better or more interesting than other music, then what they have is a content business. They don't have this ecosystem. So Apple Music. What? What's your primary music service? Apple Music.

Yeah, so Spotify. Spotify. There you go. You were going to say something, Ash. You were looking at me expectantly. No, I was reflecting on a previous conversation I've had. I'm like spoiling every single episode of Why? I'm trying not to

chime in too much because this is literally just, I don't want to spoil it. You should watch the tape and every time Ashley blinks, you're like, oh, we're ruining we're ruining another episode of this show. Casey, what were you? I think of title is like a local record store where they have some cool stuff that you

probably can't get anywhere else, but it's like a small business. It can't grow. There's a certain number of people who are, I will say, like the most frustrating musical thing in my entire life is I love the song No Church in the Wild from Watch the Throne

and it's not on Spotify or Apple Music you can only get it on title or I guess YouTube and I would love it if I could get that on a streaming service but I'm not going to pay title $10 a month so I can listen to No Church in the Wild but you could just buy the record on Apple Music and it would be well integrated

into your library this is why I use Apple Music sure and like I have the MP3 like I did buy that record at some point But, you know, ultimately, I think all of us just kind of pick, like, a single listening home, and you want as much of your stuff to be there. Like, you go there because it's easy. If you have to switch between five apps, like, depending on your mood, that's a terrible experience. So I, um, I, my primary listening thing is Spotify, but I also use a combination of Google Play music and Apple Music depending on what phone I'm using at the time.

So you're the one Google Play Music. Yeah, I am that one. Well, I have a, it's free because I have a YouTube Red subscription. Yeah, I used to be. I had a Google Play subscription and then I got YouTube Red, but now I think. think of it the exact opposite way. But I use the other service when I want to listen to music at work because I want to listen to something like ambient and chill.

But if I do that, Spotify just wrecks all my other recommendations. Yeah. Like I'll go in the car and I'll want to listen to, I don't know, rock and roll. And I can't. I'm just listening to Weird Electronica. Like they're very bad at separating out my moods in a way that the, so I just like those services are for like mood music and then Spotify's for actually listening. Yeah.

Apple music respects the fact that I own some of my music, which is literally the only reason I use it. Also, I now own a very strange Chinese iPod with an SD card in it, which was remanufactured and they actually printed the back different to reflect its new capacity, and I'm going to live that iPod life.

Do you have any other? How are you doing? I love The Verge, just wanted to tell you all. Thanks, man. I read it every day almost. So I wanted to ask, just kind of referring to the beginning with the Google AMP stuff,

so don't you think it's worth giving Google some credit because without them they're spurring these conversations kind of like giving, I mean, in two years, at least they're, you know, in my opinion, I think they're giving, they're adding this innovation like they've done with Google Fi, Google Fiber. So that's just, just want to hear what you all think about that. Because you were saying they're taking over the internet, but I think they're, you know, making it better in some ways.

No, I think that's totally fair. I just worry about giving Google too much credit just because they're, they are so big and they're so influential that you, like, it's better to. to have a default of skepticism with some of these companies. But I think their fundamental argument that if we hadn't done AMP and made it sort of Googly from the jump and not waited for the stand, and didn't wait for the standard body,

so we hadn't done that. We would be living in an absolute nightmare in the web would be virtually dead right now. Because it was, like, Nilai wrote the article, the mobile web sucks, and he was not wrong. And so everything was gonna be really slow. And so there's a bunch of stuff that they absolutely deserve credit for,

and AMP is on that list. And it makes, you know, you know, humanity better, that there's a free and open web, and Google's one of the biggest corporate proponents of a free and open web. I'm not sure I want to give them credit for Google Fiber, because I didn't really stick with that. There's just a lot of stuff where you give Google credit for starting the idea, and being like, that's great, and then it just trickles to a close.

Someone just said Reader. Right, like, well, Reader didn't trick. Reader was like, Google's... Brutely murdered? They're like, you really like this, and now it's gone. But their entire messaging strategy is one of these things. Fiber is another one of these things, where they weren't going to be businesses that rivaled Google Search, so they just sort of let them languish and die.

If they just had a little bit more of that ruthlessness, they could have grown them into businesses that want in their category. I just think those categories on balance are small, right? They're small compared to Google. So they split up the company in the alphabet, they're like, we organize this, we got Waymo and Nest, and they're like, well, Nest is small. now it's just part of Google again, right? Like, they keep kind of like shuffling these things around.

And I just wish they would finish a thought from time to time, right? I think they get credit for a lot of these ideas. Even their hardware stuff, right? Like the pixel buds are not great. The home max is medium, I would say. Like, it's a solid medium. The pixel phones didn't ship for a while. The 2XL had the screen.

Like, they need to finish these thoughts in a much more aggressive way. I think they're terrified to finish. some of these thoughts because finishing some of these thoughts is going to get them in trouble with like anti-monopoly regulations. Yeah. That's like for a lot of stuff, I think the answer is they don't want to piss off their partners and they don't want to get accused to being a monopoly. And like if they were like to fully finish like Project FI, their carrier service, for example,

they would they would so piss off Verizon and AT&T and I don't know, Vodafone and whomever that it would hurt their business. I think frankly that's their problem in messaging is they could have done the thing, but they're not doing the thing because they want carriers to continue to sell Android phones. Yeah. We had some more over here.

With all the security features in Android P, do you think that's going to mitigate the fragmentation issue that they have with Android? I think that Android P is not going to completely solve Android fragmentation. I think nothing probably will ever. The thing that has solved

Android fragmentation insofar as it's possible is Google Play Services and that they issue updates that way. but short of Google doing something much more extreme than they have shown a willingness to do, we're going to continue to have a fragmentation problem. But I think that the fragmentation problem is way, way, way smaller than it used to be.

Yeah, I was going to say, it's amazing how just all the events unfolding in the world every day, I've never been less concerned about Android fragmentation. I mean, also Samsung just sells all the phones. Okay, we have time, I think, for one more. the Samsung guy wants to announce to these sorry, you're the company.

Let's go back there, sorry. We'll get two more. Okay, we'll do this one in this gentleman over here. Okay, speaking of events in the world, when we talk about choosing between Samsung and iPhone, usually we think about that's what we can do in a free market.

But what if all of the sudden there was a trade war and our choice between a Korean product and an American product would start to matter. And that would be a ridiculous thing to say, week ago, but not today. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I will tell you that the one, why'd you push that button pitch that I were, the only one that I've ever rejected was Ashley pitching me.

We are now going to pitch it for season three, just say. Was why'd you buy an iPhone? Ooh. Which is the trolleiest thing. Wait, I want to hear this pitch. Why'd you buy an iPhone? Why don't know why you bought iPhone? I, these products are just too, like, the real trade war is with China, right? The phones are made in China. Like, it's, it's a, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's, not an American product. There's a company in America that makes iPhones that designs them, but the supply chain for that product is completely worldwide, and it's manufactured and built

by a huge set of Chinese companies. I don't know. Isn't there some weird thing with the way that the laws work where Apple technically buys the iPhone from Foxcon? Yeah. So this is in the Qualcomm case, which I still just desperately want to understand because it's so confusing. And I think it's mostly so their executives can just like issue shade to each other in the press. But Foxcon makes the phones and Apple buys the phones from Foxcon. They buy them at a wholesale rate. So like at the end of the day, you have to decide what that origin of that product is. And I don't think that's simple.

And I think this trade war stuff is really interesting. It was weird. We were doing Circle Breaker Live and we're like playing with gadgets and like screwing with stuff. And our YouTube chat was about trade policy, which is not. what you would expect on a YouTube chat on a gadget show. So I think there's just a lot of interest in what is going to happen to these companies. But I also think they're just going to easily navigate around whatever particular tariffs because the raw materials are not actually coming to the United States. It's the Finnish products. And I think that, I don't think Trump

has many things. I don't think he wants to go up against finished products that feel American. I am actually at a conversation with a phone company a little while ago. And they had mentioned to me the prospect of a Korean war and how that would affect phone companies with OLEDs just because you can only get them pretty much from Korea. So what happens when, I mean, obviously in a hypothetical

if these companies didn't have access to that. And it's something that actually I need to look into. But you know, that's something we should think about as well maybe. Like is Apple going to stockpile? Well, so there's an oversupply of OLEDs. All the Android phones have chins and a notch because they're LCDs and they're

driving. Basically doomed. Hold on to your, buy as many phones as you can right now. There's a store down the street. All right, one more. I've been picking on you the whole time. This is your, it's your shot. When is Apple going to buy Sonos? Oh, Apple going to buy Sonos.

I mean, I think Apple thinks they made a really great speaker. They're very, very proud of that speaker. What they don't have, they need to ship Airplay 2 so they can do the multi-room stuff. And then they need to make a really hard set of decisions around how big their audio ecosystem is going to be? Are they going to make a soundbar? Are they going to make a little one for your bathroom? Are they going to make that whole range of headphones? And if they do

that, then I think their hardware business starts to look different because every iPhone user is going to buy like $500 more Apple stuff that connects into their iPhone ecosystem. I think a better question isn't... That's a fucking nightmare, by the way. I just want to be very clear about that. The better question isn't when is Apple going to buy Sonos? The better question is when is Apple going to remember that they own the beats headphone company and sell it off. Yeah. I don't know. Has anybody seen Jimmy Ivy?

Can anybody locate that man? Okay, that's it. Thank you guys so much for coming. It's wild to me that we have like wines for the show. It's a wild to me that anybody listens to it at all. I will tell you that Verge produces a much better podcast called Why Did You Push That Button? It is a far higher quality than the show. Ashley hosted, along with Caitlin Tiffany.

They're on at 4 p.m. today, talking about ghosting. They've got some great guests. Who are your guests? We have someone, an in-house sociologist from Bumble, and the lead engineering manager of iOS from OKCupid.

Wow. So come back at 4 for that. Karras Fischer and Maria Shriver are on today as well. There's more programming at this house a week. And there's also an open bar where we were not serving my brand of vodka. But thank you all for coming. I miss anything else?

Promocode. That's it. Thank you so much. much asses everybody.