The Vergecast - Google adds RCS encryption to Messages / Congress gearing up to fight big tech / Windows 11 leaks

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk to Verge senior editor Tom Warren about leaks of Microsoft's Windows 11 UI and announcements from E3 2021. Verge politics reporter Makena Kelly explains how Republicans and Democrats are gearing up to fight tech monopolies. Verge managing editor Alex Cranz joins the show to talk about Google's updates to Messages and a bunch of gadget news from this week. Further reading: Amazon’s COVID-19 test is now available to consumers Novavax says its COVID-19 vaccine is 90 percent effective Pharma is winning the big business popularity contest Windows 11 leak reveals new UI, Start menu, and more Microsoft Teams’ new front row layout arrives later this year Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella now doubles as the company’s chairman Microsoft announces Xbox TV app and its own xCloud ... Microsoft is bringing next-gen Xbox games to the Xbox One with xCloud Even the Xbox app has stories now The Xbox Series X mini fridge will be available this holiday season Microsoft Flight Simulator is landing on Xbox Series X / S consoles on July 27th The best trailers of E3 2021 Tech antitrust pioneer Lina Khan will officially lead the FTC How Republicans and Democrats are gearing up to fight tech monopolies House lawmakers introduce five bipartisan bills to unwind tech monopolies Senate bill would make it easier to cancel a subscription online after a free trial  Google’s first retail store opens this week Google adds E2E RCS encryption to Messages, emoji mashup suggests, and more for Android Google Workspace and Google Chat are officially available to everybody Honor confirms Google’s apps will return to its phones with new 50 series Beats Studio Buds review: big ambition, imperfect execution Ikea and Sonos announce picture frame speaker, coming July 15th for $199 Watch the debut of Tesla Model S Plaid, the ‘quickest production car ever made’ The Realme GT lays claim to OnePlus’ ‘flagship killer’ mantle Oppo’s rollable concept phone is pure potential lacking polish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Tom Warren, joins us, talk all about the Windows 11 leaks what happened with Microsoft at E3. Then McKenna Kelly joins. Talk about all the antitrust action going on to tech companies right now. Then Alex Cranz joins the show. You talk about Google and a bunch of gadgets that came out. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weak. of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in.

Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to Roachcast, the flagship podcast of the next generation of Windows. The problem with that is that sounds too much like how Microsoft would do its own. branded content. Anyways, what I got today. I'm Neil, I'm your friend. Dieter Bone is here.

I'm the Excel sheet embedded in the Word document embedded in your Microsoft Teams chat. You're real fluid, Deeter. Yeah. Tom Warren is here. Hello. I am here to give you all the latest and greatest on Cortana. Oh, man. It's a real winner of a show from the jump.

Anyway, we've got an all-star lineup. Tom's going to talk about Windows and E3 and what's going on with Xbox with us. McKenna Kelly is going to join. where you're talking about all the antitrust stuff that's going on. There's a lot of antitrust stuff this week. And then Alex Cranes is going to join us for the third segment of show. I'm going to go through all the other gadget news that's going on.

So a lot going on in the Vergecast this week. I want to start where we start with COVID is always one of the biggest stories in the world. Lots of strange COVID news this week. Amazon had developed a COVID-19 test for their own employees in the heart of the pandemic. They were going to release it to consumers. It went up on the Amazon website. We could just order a test from Amazon, which would be a bullet test from big deal. Now it's gone. We assume it'll come back, but it would have been one of those big deals

in the sort of the depths of the pandemic, because testing was hard as for chess listeners. Well, no, access to testing was a big deal. I think it will continue to be a big deal as a pandemic kind of ebbs and the virus becomes more of a seasonal thing. So Amazon having a test that's widely available. Consumers, a big deal. We got to fall up on where it went because it's disappeared. There's now a fourth vaccine, a company called Novavax. Since its vaccine is 90% effective, it's also two shots, but can be stored at room temperature. It's a big deal. That's good news. And then Nicole Wetzman wrote a pretty interesting story this week. Before the pandemic, Big Pharma was one of the most reviled industries in America. And after all the vaccine development, their popularity has really skyrocketed. Pfizer was not as popular as it is now several years ago. So kind of a big shift in how we think about pharma how we think about pharma r and d which is going to have ripple effects as always the verge science team is doing just amazing work so check out the verge.com slash science we've got all that we've got all that

we've got other stuff Nicole and I actually had a long conversation the other day about what she's going to cover as the vaccine is what she's going to cover is the virus stops being the central story and the answer is oh man tech companies have been doing a lot of stuff yeah there's actually a lot of like health tech to cover so uh we're excited about that but check out virtual home slash science that team doing incredible work as always okay speaking of health windows keep them open tom i think my favorite story of the week was like your like two sentence post of cortana on windows 11 insisting that windows 11 doesn't exist it's pretty good yeah that was short i tweeted it but sean delivered the verge goods.

So Windows 11 has leaked? Yeah, it has leaked. It says Windows 11, which is kind of, the last time I was on, we were basically saying it was going to be Windows 11, right? Yeah. No surprise there. What do you think Microsoft's excuse is going to be for going to Windows 11 after they said for a couple years now that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows

and Windows as a service now, we're never going to change, increment the number again? I think the way that they framed it when they first launched it was like, Windows as a service, like officially, in all the marketing speak. But then, like, one of their developer evangelists kind of like went off a build and was like, this is our last version. And kind of everyone ran with that. And I think that that's obviously created the idea that they would never would be Windows 11. And to be honest, Microsoft never really came out and said that that was wrong.

But I feel like they're probably just going to be like, that was something that someone said. Words don't have meaning. Yeah. There's no consequences. We never really said that. I don't even know if they're going to fully address it or whatever because, yeah, like it involves throwing someone under the bus, essentially. But yeah, I think that's the kind of gist of it from the way I see it anyway.

It would be nice if they're honest. They're like, PC sales have exploded, which we weren't expecting. And so we just need to, like, juice the number some. Like, I just wish some company would just be honest. Yeah. I mean, like, from what we've seen from the leak and everything, it's basically a Windows 10x. So they were happy to go with 10X as the branding, you know, a couple of years ago before the pandemic hit. Like, was it October they announced 10X?

And then, you know, the pandemic began. There's the before time. There's the pandemic. And then there's like last week. And those are the only time periods I recognize. Yeah. Yeah. Everything is March.

Yeah. So, yeah, like, they obviously had an idea to go to 10X at one point. And they were happy with that branding. They've obviously thought, you know what, we're going to do some extra work. And let's, you know, let's push the marketing folks have been like, hmm, we could call this 11. And then obviously all the teasers have been happening over the past few weeks and stuff. So, but yeah, it leaked and it looks like it's going to be 11. Okay.

Let's just start with start. See what it did there. Oh, wow. It's good. I'm a professional podcaster. Why does the start menu come up from the middle of the screen? This is the only thing that I've seen in the, like, I watched the little video, you tweeted, I, like, looked at some, and I'm just focused on the fact that you push the start button into the middle of the screen. Yeah, I think because Mac OS, Chrome OS, I think, like, that general thing, I think more broadly is that, like, people using Windows are using ultra-wides now and bigger, wider monitors.

And so having your, like, start menu on the left doesn't actually really make sense on those sort of panels. What I am curious about is whether they move it for everyone, because there is an option to shift it back to the left. So, like, if you install it by default, it does actually move everything to the middle. But this is a leaked early version. So who knows if you already have the menu on the left and are they going to force you into the center? I don't know. I feel like they probably will force you into the center. But there is an option to go back.

But I think, I think it's just, it's the evolution of like Chrome OS has gone that way. obviously macOS has been that way for decades um it kind of makes sense in in a way and i think it's more of a decluttering of windows as well like just i think they're trying to get away from at the moment you can pin so much stuff to your taskbar like you can have all your apps there because no one really wants to touch the start menu because it's kind of you know all these live tiles and it's a bit there's a lot going on there whereas i think they're trying to bring that back like no go to the start menu we've got your recent documents it's actually useful you know like making it a bit more of a useful tool again.

So doing that is, I think, to discourage people from pinning stuff onto the dock, essentially. You know, it gravitates to it being in the center. I gravitate to, they've just given up on live tiles. They've taken that out of the start menu and now lose, like, they're not live tiles anymore, or there's something else, and they live somewhere else. And so now it's recommended files and your apps, that whole dream of mixing your personal information, and glancable information and starting your apps and putting all that together that start with Windows phone is like it's officially dead and gone right no and that's fine

like no one really has liked it for the past couple of years design trends change or whatever but yeah like the start menu is just it's very very ChromeOSy now it's sort of Macy like the launch thing on Mac but nobody ever uses that and that's kind of bad I don't know how if I even think of this as a start menu anymore if I got to be honest with you like I feel like the start menu is cool because it had more. It's a launcher, right? Yeah, it's a launcher, not a start menu. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, yeah, and I think that's obviously intentional. Like you say, like the live tiles, they were, they were super useful for like glanceable information, but then people soon realized how much glanceable information do I actually want. Right. It's like, the weather and the news, like, two obvious points. But beyond that, it's like, now I'm going into the app and like digging through.

I don't really need the glancable information. And they've put that, like, glancable sort of weather, new stuff in the taskbar and Windows 10 currently. And then in Windows 11, they're actually moving into a separate widgets panel. So they've obviously, there's still some of that elements of the stuff that they wanted to do with live tiles. It's just they're bringing back

what they were doing with widgets in Vista instead. Yeah, so like, but it's definitely, it's gone away. It's a launcher now. Yeah, I agree. I don't really see it as like a start menu so much anymore. It's definitely a launcherer. It's a portal for like, quickly getting access to your documents, getting access to search and your in your apps and

your frequent apps and stuff. Yeah. It's like it's so funny to me to think about the journey Microsoft has been on with this one button in Windows. And they're moving it again. And just moving it around. Like it was the revolution for Windows 95. Like this was the thing. They licensed the Rolling Stone song because of the start button to because literally people had no idea what to do when they sat down in a Windows PC and like here's a button it's going to have stuff in it and it has so far expanded then they got rid of it and ate then they realized that was the worst idea that they've ever had they brought it back in this other conception and now it's just it's kind of just going back to where it started in like a pretty real way right like here's a

bunch of stuff that you might want to immediately do they obviously removed it and I put it back in 8.1, but like they still had the live tiles in the face. And then obviously Windows 10 came and just took things way back, but like kind of still kept those live tiles. It was like a really weird, like they didn't fully step back. But now they're like, hey, we're not even fully stepping back. We're just going to kind of get rid of the start menu sort of interface that we've been, we've had for like years now.

And then just put it back to something really simple. And I think that that simple or like a concept is, is broadly what this is. You know, like they're trying to simplify Windows a little bit more, which is what 10x was supposed to be. It was supposed to be like cleaning up Windows, right? Simplifying it and make it run on different hardware.

I think they've obviously seen that why should we do a separate sort of product? Because they've done that before and it's never worked, has it? No. So it's like, let's just do this to Windows. But don't go too hard like where you're, you know, moving everything around. But doing it in a way that it makes sense. Yeah, I mean, God forbid that they clean up the toolbar in the, you know, the file explorer.

What is the story? It's so, there's so much crap there. Yeah, the ribbon is still there. Yeah. File Explorer still looks the same. I don't know whether that's fully going to change. Because so a lot of the stuff that we do see, like, if you look in the system tray, it kind of looks a bit weird with the date, like triple stacked. Yeah. And stuff like that, like that will all change. Like, that's definitely not what it should look like. It's just, it's an early bit. But stuff like the File Explorer, I don't think that's going to change radically. You know, it strikes me about File Explorer.

We have this conversation about the iPad all the time, right? Like, the iPad is like fully abstracted the file system away from you. There's this endless debate that they've kind of re-engage with iOS 15. Like, is this a spatial interface or is it a chronological one? Like, do you understand the core metaphor of this computer? And like, with the iPad, we talk about every time. like the answer's no like apple needs to do better job file explorer to me is the most stubborn no from any computer company ever right it's like it's full of the computer trying to help you in ways

that are absolutely not helpful by exposing all of the controls to you and minimizing just the folder structure of the PC like what I really want is like here's the root level of the hard drive and here are some quick links to where I might want to go. And instead, it's like, here's some recent things. Here's every command you might ever want to do with a file. Here's a dynamically generated list of like things we think you use frequently. Right. And then like, what human has ever looked at this?

I mean, like, I understand how to use this computer. And every time I open this window, my muscle memory will like kick in and I'll do it well. And Microsoft has like looked at that for 10 years. I mean, like, that's cool. If you know what the easy access button is in File Explorer and what it does and what its function is, please tweet at Tom Warren and let him know because I do not. The problem is once they start changing things, that's when people are like, no, don't do that. Because there is, like you say, there's a muscle memory you build up with using this. And whether it's the interface that it should be or not is a different question, but it's the interface that people get used to using.

That's the problem. But I think this is the thing that is always paralyzed Microsoft. They are so aware of the edge cases of all of their software. And they're like, what if we lose one word customer? Yeah. We can never change it. And I just like Microsoft is like their software design is almost defined by how afraid they are irritating some people some of the time.

Yeah. I mean they've described it like in the past as like creating pizza for a billion people, right? With different toppings. Like that's kind of it. Like there's so many different ways to do stuff in Windows. that then if you change one of those ways to a certain path, like, people, people get upset. It's just so funny because, like, what are they going to do? Like, we live in the age of tech monopolies. Like, where are those Windows customers going to go? Like, that's how all of the other companies handle this problem.

They're like, yeah, that sucks. No meaningful choices exist for you. It's true. Like, there is no competition to Windows, really. Yeah. Like, I mean, Android is probably the closest thing that looked remotely like a threat. But obviously, Mac OS is you have to buy the hardware. So that's not the same sort of competition. But yeah, like, from what we've seen in the leak, I don't feel like they've gone far enough. But then I don't want to say that because I don't know how far they're going to go next week and show this is early build and that sort of stuff.

But I think still I don't feel like it's going to go far enough to be, you know, know, I think to warrant the 11. Ooh. Yeah. I mean, that's my big question. And like my easy dunk and it's like, it's a ha-ha, you know, thing. But it's also, I think, really telling is you, you tweeted out that you can still go in there and find like some Windows 95 shit.

Like the control panel is still lurking underneath all this pretty exterior, right? Yeah. And it's like, it's definitely beyond the point where they should get rid of the control panel now. Yeah. You can surface those settings within the main settings. but that is literally just there for legacy and enterprise. So it's like the same reason that Internet Explorer still exists in Windows 10 right now, even though we've had two versions of Edge.

Yeah. Like that's literally why control panel exists. So it's just because there's a bunch of sysadmins that you use a particular tool or control panel applet that plugs into it. And it's like, unfortunately, that's a lot of their customers. Yeah. It's just, I'm just like, what are they going to diggin? And it's all Linux?

Come on. Like, piss them off. like what are you got to lose? It's like the age old debate, isn't it? It's like they're great at like supporting legacy stuff across Windows, Xbox, you know,

back compatibility and that sort of stuff. Like that's one of Microsoft greatest things that you can still run like apps from, you know, Windows 311 on here. You know, like that's that's kind of insane that you can do that.

But it's also like just their worst enemy. Yeah. I mean it's it's very much the character of like, there's no way that, that DNA of Microsoft will not change, right? Like, this is what they need Windows to be. It supports everything everywhere. They have a security model now that kind of demands that you keep updating Windows in this way.

So they have to keep the legacy stuff going because, I mean, like, we also live in the age of ransomware attacks, right? Like, there's lots of reasons to keep going the way they're going. I just think it's very funny that in the age of tech monopolies, Microsoft is like, what if we lose one customer? And it's like, I don't, there's nowhere to go. Like, if you want to play games in your PC, what are you going to do if you're mad that a setting is gone? Yeah, like, they dominate that. They dominate it, but they don't like, they dominate gaming, but they don't really control

it. It's totally out of their hands, you know? Yeah. Like, it's steam. It's steam that really controls it, which is kind of crazy to think about as well. What else are you seeing in 11 and what are you hoping to see? Yeah. So, like, obviously the start menus that is the main thing.

There's a bunch of like out-of-box experience stuff. So, like, when you're setting up a new laptop, that's, like, that's, like, like a lot nicer. Cortano is no longer screaming at you. Oh, thank God. Thank God. Anything like that. It's the niceties

around that. Some stuff's missing that we were expecting as like the store. Obviously the store has been a bit of a pain point really since it's existed, to be honest. And there's rumours that that's going to be totally overhauled. We don't see any evidence of that in this leaked version, but I'm still definitely expecting that to be revealed next week.

and with it, like whatever changes they do to let more apps into the store. So I think that will be a pretty significant change to Windows, to be honest. Because even though you can get these like rival browsers like Chrome, you can go to the web and download them, having them in the store just makes it a lot easier to set up your PC and restore and stuff. So at Windows event June 24th, we'll obviously see more. Yeah. Lots to come. Other Microsoft News this week, they announced.

that Sash Della is now the company's chairman as well as the CEO, which is, it feels like a big deal. He's now fully in charge of Microsoft in the way the Gates was, which is kind of interesting. Like they never gave this to Bomber, right? No. They went like fully independent with, what was his name, John? I'm trying to remember his surname. But anyway, they had an independent chairman. John Thompson.

John Thompson, that's right. Now they obviously have confidence in Adela to be sort of fully in charge of thing, which does show you how much influence you. had on the company since he became the CEO. And it's just how much Microsoft changed, really. Like, I've seen it in both their products and people, really. I think before their accessibility work was impressive, but it was one of those sort of backstories.

Like, they didn't really make it shine. But now they have, like, you know, Xbox Adaptive Controller. They have, like, all these crazy accessibility options in Windows. Like, they've really pulled that to the front because of Nadella. And that's just a small example. But, like, there's obviously a bigger trust with him there. to put him in the chairman role. Yeah.

And it's funny that when he first got that job, he did a log interview with him, where I asked him, why does Microsoft exist? And he had some like answers, but now he's like, he figured it out. Yeah.

So that's exciting. Anyway, Windows event, June 24th. But this week was also E3. Lots of news at E3. No Switch Pro, which is like what we were all expecting, but it didn't happen.

But I think some of the biggest news E3 is around Xbox. They announced that, they're going to make their own streaming stick. They're going to start doing an Xbox app on other smart TV platforms. Is it still called XCloud? XCloud is like, it's in my head. Their game streaming service is called XCloud.

It's not called that. But they're going to do apps on smart TVs that should work with their controllers to let you stream Xbox games to TVs without any hardware. And then they're going to do their own streaming stick, clearly, which will have the Xbox interface and be designed around that, but let you do all the media stuff too. If I had to say, there's a lot of, obviously, exciting games news at E3. Metroid. But if I had to pick the one gigantic thing that will reshape the industry, it's this.

Metroid. It's Metroid will reshape the industry. Obviously. It already has. What can it do? I mean, the Xbox Series X mini for it. It's not going to reshape the industry. It was very cool. But I just think, like, Microsoft decoupling its hardware and software is kind of a huge deal.

Yeah. And it's kind of been, like, this stuff has obviously been. super obvious like Phil Spencer sort of hinted that they were going to do these streaming devices and on the on the TV and that sort of stuff but like for them to say it and it's built upon what they've been doing the last sort of two three years really um which is like this focus of like we don't care about selling consoles anymore at least that's you know that's our vision and it's more they said as they sold fewer consoles and so yeah exactly um and it's like yeah like they've had some serious competition against Sony.

And it's amazing what competition does, right? It makes you do, like, innovative things and different things to your competition. So they've definitely gone a different, completely different route to Sony. Sony's like, we're going to sell you $60, $70 games. Microsoft's like, we're going to sell your subscription and you're going to get it everywhere. And I think we spoke about this last time I was on. It was like a lot of people compare it to the Netflix of gaming and all that sort of stuff. And to get there, you do need to be everywhere.

you do need to be on TVs. You need to have your own streaming devices. You need to cut these deals to make sure you're everywhere. And they obviously had problems trying to get to the iPhone that way. But they're obviously not going to have too many problems with TV manufacturers. They already have a crazy relationship with Samsung. So I can imagine Samsung's going to have some maybe not exclusivity, but they'll definitely be there day one, I'm sure.

You know, it's just turning about the point with the iPhone is they had to figure out how to make this work in the iPhone's web, and almost all of the TV platforms are based on HTML5. So I think that work probably like paid dividends across the board. Because if you look at writing native apps for the TV platforms, almost nobody does it. A, because all they're really doing is delivering video streams. And B, you have to write a Tysan app, an Android app and a web OS. And like, nobody wants to do that. So they've all settled on HTML5 apps as a way to cut across the board.

And I'm very curious if the work they had to do to figure this out on the iPhone and bypass the app stores, paid dividends for them in the TV market. Yeah, I'm sure it has because they didn't actually do all the work themselves. Like, they've actually outsourced a lot of it. I can't remember the exact name of the company, but they're using someone else's stack to sort of bring it on board. So it allows them to sort of focus on the actual server side rather than the sort of platform of getting in there.

But yeah, like, I can imagine this work was ongoing before Apple said, you know, we're not going to let you on the iPhone. so they were ready for that scenario. It obviously just came a little bit later than when it launched an Android. But it's definitely, yeah, there's definitely a big part of it was to go to TVs. They've spoken about going to Facebook gaming

because they obviously sold off mixer to Facebook. But we haven't heard much more about that. But that was another sort of area where they're supposed to be lying up X cloud. They've obviously gone to the web, but the idea was that, you know, you'd have it in these streams and you'd be able to click a button.

Kind of similar to a state. right like where the idea was you'd be on youtube see a person streaming it click play and be playing with them or be playing at the point they were playing at um and i think they were supposed to be doing some stuff with facebook there but we haven't heard much more about that but that's all part of like this broader sort of x cloud it's not called x cloud it's called what is it called i don't even i can't even remember myself that's how it's series xbox live project yeah just pick some of those words and you got it Xbox cloud gaming i think is officially called but yeah it's xx is way cooler. It's so much cooler.

The stupid thing is the underlying technology is called Project X-Cloud, and they still keep saying that. Okay, so I'm just going to call it X-Lad. That's all I needed to know. Okay, so like in three years, is the idea that you will only buy an Xbox console if you have

crappy bandwidth? Is that like the vision here? Like, you'll buy it if you want the very, very, very best graphics, and you care a lot about that, or if you have really shitty bandwidth. Otherwise, why would you bother? You should just stream all your games? Yeah, like, I don't, I don't think that's the vision for three years, no.

I think it's like, it's an add-on, right? It's, like, if you don't own an Xbox and you don't want to own one, then go for it. If you want to pay on mobile, then, yeah, go, you know, get the subscription. It really is, it's to really push game passes, isn't it? Like, it's any sort of entry point. But for the next, you know, three months, even if you want an Xbox, you can't get one. I mean, like, we are hearing the chip shortage is going to last another 12, 18 months. Like, there's also just a very compelling solution to the Xbox Series X problem.

Yeah. Right. Which is like, you can just stream your games. Like, can't get a PS5 or an Xbox. Like, just sign up for GamePass and stream a bunch of next gen games. Maybe they'll look a little bit worse, but you're still getting next gen games. That sounds like a really good idea for like a game streaming service that, like, Google could put together. maybe.

Like, maybe that's, they should think about trying to make a game streaming service with that sort of a. Google announced an AT&T partnership with Stadia. And I was like, what are you doing? Oh, like a kiss of death. It's like a, like a Dementor from Harry Potter.

It sucks your life force out of you. No, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The world has shifted. It used to be that if you had an exclusive Sprit partnership, you were doomed, now it's AT&T. It's like, if AT&T breathes on you, like, petrified, never comes. compete again. Horrible.

All right. Any other E3 news? You want to talk about, Deeter? Yeah, I said Metro right a few times. You know, I'm excited for some of the other games Nintendo's got. I wasn't really expecting a Switch Pro, but whatever. I thought that, I don't, technically was this E3, like the Starfield stuff, the Halo Infinite stuff.

Like, all that seems pretty good. Like, Starfield looks really good. Yeah, like, I think the thing that Starfield was like kind of a teaser of what's the That's not till late next year, but it looks like an interesting concept. But the thing that really stood out for me was Fawzer. The tech demo of that was pretty interesting. I think overall, like just the Xbox E3, they did a really good job, which I was kind of surprised at, because I think they've, for the past of, I don't know,

since the Xbox 360 really, they've been kind of flailing at E3 and behind these exclusive titles that Sony's just been constantly delivering. and I think they finally answered and be like, it's cost them whatever it was, $8 billion or whatever it was for Bethesda. So it's cost them a bunch of money. I will say that I haven't wanted to buy a Series X. Like, it's hard since I haven't been trying very hard,

but I haven't even been trying because at PS5 and it has what I need. But between flight simulator coming next month and that fours a down, I'm like, all right. Yeah, they got some interesting stuff coming. So I think it's kind of all coming. like just could constantly every month for the next six months. Yeah.

If something is cross-platform, I default to buying it on Xbox, basically after this week. Because, like, there'll be a better chance it'll be on their streaming service. It'll just be a little bit more portable. Yeah, it's weird. Like, my PS5 is going to become a PS5 exclusive machine and everything else I think is going to be on Xbox. I think Sony is very happy about that scenario. Yeah, I don't think they care.

They are totally fine. Yeah. But you're going to become the person playing games on an Android phone. We're going to hit you a little Android game controller. You're going to be streaming X-Pats. I've already got to get a Kishi. It's great. I love it.

All right. We've got to take a break. We're going to come back with McKenna Kelly and talk about what's going on with antitrust. Thank you so much, Tom. I'll speak to you guys soon. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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I'm doing good. It's good to be back. Yeah, it's good to have you. A lot of antitrust news this week, including like a secret switcheroo from the Biden administration with Lena Kahn, which is very exciting for five minutes, a bunch of bills from the House. Let's start with Lena Khan, who is just appointed, confirmed to the Federal Trade Commission. That's a big deal. It's a really big deal. So this week, she finally received a floor vote. It was a bipartisan vote, Republicans and Democrats, not going to say all Republicans, but enough to get her confirmed voted for her. And that was early in the morning, about 1130-ish. And then a couple hours later, I was watching this hearing on smart home tech in

competition. And Amy Klobuchar, friend of the pod, she leaked. She basically scooped everyone that Lena was going to be the chairwoman up the FTC and lead the agency. Yeah. And then there was like a mad scramble to be like, what'd she say? Right. And it was like, did she misspeak?

And then all of a sudden, Reuters was reporting. this is confirmed and everyone was like, oh, dang, okay, cool. So she took her oath of office on Tuesday, I believe, and she is currently leading the FTC. That's amazing. So, Lena is somebody also a friend of the pod. She's been on the Veritas before. Probably listeners know this, but quickly, she was a law student at Columbia. She wrote a really influential law review paper about Amazon called Amazon's antitrust paradox. Remarkable for a law student's law review article to be that influential. She ended up, advising the FTC. Then she was on David Cicillini's antitrust subcommittee, wrote a lot of the investigation, then was nominated for this. And now she's the chair of the FTC. Like, she's in charge of overseeing mergers and acquisitions, of making sure the markets are competitive, just a real rocket ship of her career from law school to leading the FTC. And she has not been shy about how she perceives the power of these big companies. Right. It's really remarkable, too. So,

when she was first nominated, everyone had assumed that she was just going to be another Democratic vote on the commission. And it's still really, you know, great for, you know, people who are critics of big tech to have someone on that on the commission like point, you know, just as on its own. But the power that now she has to basically lead these investigations on these companies. And basically, she has the power to instruct staff to do specific rulemakings. She can do these extensive 6B studies that the FTC can't necessarily subpoena companies, but they are able to compel these companies to reveal certain documents and things. So it really is the Biden administration saying by appointing her chair that they are going to take anti-trust and tech extremely seriously over the next four years.

Why do you think they weren't clear that she was going to be the chair? Because I don't think everyone would have voted for her if that was the case. Interesting. During her confirmation hearing in the Senate, she got a lot of bipartisan applause from Republicans and Democrats, right? They were both very excited for her. And it makes sense because over the past couple of years, Republicans have their gripes with big tech.

Democrats have theirs. And Lena, both of them, both of the parties are really leading towards competition as a way of remediating those concerns. And so having someone so progressive and having someone so aggressive. on this front was good for both of them. Now, of course, the aggressive nature of this may be more than both parties might have wanted. So it's really interesting to see such a overwhelming bipartisan vote on Tuesday. And I think I'm thinking specifically like the chairwoman of the FTC before Lena Con was Rebecca Slaughter. And Slaughter used to work in Schumer's office. So maybe Schumer may not have even voted for Khan. And maybe some Republicans wouldn't have either. Wow. So she's in place. The Biden administration hasn't filled a bunch of these roles, but she's in place. That's a big piece of the puzzle. And that is connected to the five bills that were introduced in the House, one of which would really give more resources to the FTC. But let's go through the five. What were the five? Right. So they basically address everything that was uncovered in the 16-month-long investigation that the House Judiciary Committee had. Last year and the year before it. And they vary from something that is, you know, very bipartisan,

something that I could see more center, left, center, right folks voting for. And then also some things that are a little bit more controversial, right? But when they were introduced earlier last Friday, they all had bipartisan co-sponsors, which was really interesting. A Republican and a Democrat introduced each of these bills. So we can start going through what a lot of them do. I'm looking at it now. You mentioned the one that would give, it's called a merger filing fee bill. And basically, a large tech company, for example, or any large company would have to pay more of filing fee in order for the FTC to really investigate whether or not the acquisition or merger is anti-competitive. That has already been passed in the Senate, bipartisanly, under Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley.

And so that seems like a bill that could really get, you know, bipartisan support and really make it, you know, into law over the next four years. But then we get into other things. Another less controversial one is one on interoperability, right? And the ability for me and you to go to Facebook, ask for our data. And if we don't like Facebook, we can take it and go to Google Plus, right? Something like that. I don't know the type of person who would do that. But it makes, you know, it gets the opportunity is there for folks to do that.

But this is like data portability. It's not they're going to force I message and WhatsApp to talk to each other, right? So that I'm not entirely sure. It's still a little, people are still trying to read the language and figure out exactly what all of these do. But let me get into the others. There's another bill that would basically empower. the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to break up big tech companies and force them to sell off parts of their business that create conflicts of interest. So I'm thinking of

Amazon carving off its house brands like Amazon basics or something like that. But the bills go through just basically everything for all these individual companies. That one to me, I think of these five bills as being kind of like a negotiating tactic. Right. If you had one big bill with all the stuff in it, then people would latch on to the worst parts they didn't like, and maybe you wouldn't get the easy stuff. So you break them into five. You pass the filing fees. You pass this data portability interrupting that the company's already kind of working on, right? Like not very controversial, kind of soaps, you know, like, okay, we're increasing the filing fees. These are the five richest companies in the world. They're going to be fine.

Then you, like, move up the spectrum and you get to this one that's like, you can, you can't have a conflict of interest, which just as I've read it and I have read the unfortunate Twitter discourse around it. And the immediate response from the tech companies and their lobbyists are like, wait, people like this stuff. Like this bill might just die on the vine, right? Like, there's enough of an attack against it already where it's like people actually perceive Amazon basics to be good.

The tech companies, a lobbying organization, the Chamber for Progress, made this incredible Twitter, and they're like, this would prevent Microsoft from putting LinkedIn and Word. And I was like, wait, hold up. Like, that's good. Write that law immediately. But there's just like long, there's just like long list of things that you might have to sell or otherwise get rid of, right? Like default apps on the iPhone.

Apple might have to change the way that works. And I think the second you kind of step into the law will change the way the phone works, the controversy will get higher and higher. And the rest of the bills, I think, had the same problem. Yeah, and David Sissolini, the chairman of the committee who helped with all these bills, it confirmed in a press conference this week that Apple, you know, iPhones would not have iMessage on them by default if these bills go through. They would not have, you know, calendar or all of these services that were used to, you know,

when you turn on the iPhone and it has all the Apple services that we use every day or, you know, that also have competitors on the app store too. Yeah, and I just, I mean, God bless him. He went hard. He told us he would, and he did. I just don't know if that's going to be a winning argument. And so that's when I say, like, this feels like a negotiation and they put five chips on the table.

Like, I wonder, you know, you've reported these are going to go into markup soon. They're going to change a little bit. I wonder if you see these bills as being written such that when they get walked back, they're still effective. Right. So, of course, they had to come out swinging on something like this. After such a long investigation. And then after like that huge hearing last year, you know, where they brought in Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and everyone, they really had to go hard on this.

And so it's anticipated that these bills will go to Markup next week, right? That is incredibly fast. That is ridiculous momentum for Congress on something like this, especially something that is that would in theory if all these go through enact like such radical change to the tech industry. And of course, I mean, a lot of these bills, a lot of these bills that get introduced are just to kind of spook companies a little bit. But I do see there's already come out, people have already come out in Congress saying that these bills support big tech companies rather than do anything to dampen competition or help benefit competition. And the House GOP leader, leader McCarthy, already said, like, we're not going to let these go. anywhere. So I think in order to get them through the House and, you know, caucus leaders will either have to rewrite some of the language, really take a step back and see how this affects

the real world, how this affects devices and users before any of them can really move to the floor for a final vote. Okay. We stopped at three of the five bills. What are the last two bills? Right. So I mean, like another one is just blocking companies like Facebook from buying nascent competitors. We've talked about this all the time, like the 2012 acquisition of Instagram. So basically companies would be forbidden from buying companies like that. And how do you understand what is initially, you know, what could be a competitor, what could be not? That's kind of up for grabs.

So that's the second to last one. And then the other one is barring companies from giving their own services preference over rival. So I think the classic example of that is in Google search, Google having its own products at the top of the page, rather than. other companies like Yelp or things like that. Yeah. And again, I think all of those sound great. All of them are going to get significant pushback.

But your point, you've brought up several times now, there is a pretty huge set of Republicans and Democrats who are like, this is what we need to do. We need to push it really hard. And I, you know, the last set of tech regulation proposals that we talked about was 2.30, we've talked about it endlessly. And we're kind of like, both sides want different things. They're just mad. And like, here's a place where they can be mad together, but they actually have different goals. Here, they're upset. And it seems like their goals are aligned. And they're moving forward to achieve the same results in a way that I think the poisonous 230 conversation

has made people think nothing will ever happen. Right. And I think if you talk to policy think tank people in D.C., you talk to lawmakers, you talk to Republicans and Democrats, folks are really more aligned when it comes to antitrust because they do believe, I mean, for Republicans, they're still mad. They're still tweeting about Parlor being kicked off the app store. Parlor's back, but they're still really mad about it, right? And they want to make sure that there's more competition in the market, that Facebook can't, you know, dominate everything, that we can have these more conservative entrance in the market. And competition reform helps that in theory. And then when you think about other concerns that, you know, companies, Democrats have,

having to do with pricing or just like small business concerns or all these kinds of things. They really do align on competition. This is something where Republicans and Democrats can really move forward together. And we saw that this week at the press conference. It is just ridiculous to see somebody like Ken Buck, the ranking member of the House Antitrust Committee at this press conference supporting all of these bills. When the investigation ended last year, he authored his own report. He did not agree with a single thing the Democrats came up with and offered a third way report, right?

So just looking at Ken Buck specifically and his evolution on this and his, you know, his thinking on this changing. I think it really makes the case that these could move forward and more Republicans could probably be swayed to vote for these bills. Kind of the wonky thing at the heart of this and, you know, connected to Lena Kahn and her larvae paper, was the idea of the consumer welfare standard, that we shouldn't look at things unless we can prove that prices go up. These companies all control prices to the cent. They can make or not make profits as they wish. So it was very difficult to use that standard. That's not in here, right? They're not changing that. It was the thing that Ken Buck really didn't want to do. And it seems like they just set that aside. And they went with much more direct approaches

to regulate in the companies, which is really interesting to me. Yeah, definitely. And I think even some Democrats have strayed away from, you know, changing the consumer welfare standard. I think Amy Klobuchar was on Decoder talking about it, too, and I think you asked her about it, and she didn't have a very straightforward answer. She was a politician. It's a very testy subject, and that's one that I see having more problems on both parties, you know, than what was proposed in the bills this week. Yeah, it's just, it's interesting to me as we talk about, you know, bipartisan solutions. Something like, let's change the legal standard. is like up in the clouds, right?

Like it's, let's change the law and like, we'll try a new enforcement way and way of thinking. And you would almost expect that to work better than this set of bills, which is like, I'm reaching into your iPhone and taking the calendar app off of it, right? Which is much,

it's a much more direct government intervention into products and services. And yet, it has just been really surprising to me. That's where everyone has gone. They're like, we're just going to reach into the products and we're going to derank Google's own products and put Yelp at the top. And that's what we want to have happened. So the government is going to basically say this has to happen. Whereas at least the consumer, it was like, it was just so much more

airy. Like we're going to change the way we think about the market, which is like you can just glue any emotion you want onto that. And that's how you bring people together. And that's just not what happened here at all. I think deep down every single congressional representative wants to be a product manager. That's what they want. They've used a calendar app. They're annoyed by the button placement. They think the round wrecks are a little bit off.

They just do it better themselves. Yeah. And none of them know how to fix content moderation. So they're like, we're going to do default apps on something. McKenna, what's next in this complicated process? Right. So next week is the markup. And I think that is when we're really going to hear the problems that other lawmakers have with these bills.

I mean, this organization called the Internet Accountability Project came out with a list this morning of Republicans asking people to call them and tell them to vote for these. They were like Jim Jordan. They're these very, you know, right populist-leaning folks who would rather change all this stuff through 230. So there's some activism building now, even within the parties, to get people to vote for these. But next week, we will see all the gripes people have. we will see amendments sent to these bills to change the language. And then hopefully in the next couple of weeks, we'll see the finalized language. It'll get a vote out.

And maybe we'll see what the Senate comes up with because Klobuchar said she was going to try and introduce companion bills to these in the Senate. So they can have momentum on both sides of Congress. Amazing. I really do think kind of the tech industry's response to this has been, well, nothing ever happens. But like things are going to happen. Everyone was spooked.

They all had these statements and all these examples ready for how the world was going to change with these. It's an unusual amount of momentum for something this radical from Congress for sure. And maybe one day it will be illegal to put LinkedIn to Microsoft Word. I was, I like read that tweet. I was like, is this really the best he got? Everyone's happy about that. All right, Meganna, well, it sounds like we're going to have you back on several times as this keeps going. Thank you for coming on.

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Alex Cranes. Welcome. Hey, glad to be here. Yeah, you've been a real hit these basketballies. All the tweets are coming in. I feel so loved. Like, I love getting all these tweets. Not many people slid into my DMs to complain about putting their task bar and stuff

on the right side of their screen, though, which was very surprising. We really did ignite kind of a long, a long running Twitter battle. I think we convinced one person to move their dock from the side to the bottom. I saw that. If you can improve one person's life, it's all worth. it. Amazing. I felt so good about it. It just really felt helpful. All right. Well, no pressure. Your goal here is to improve one person's life. Don't screw it out. All right. Dieter, lots of gadget news, lots of stuff to go through. But I feel like we're just going to spend most of this segment with you explaining to me what

on earth is going on with RCS encryption in Google. It's actually very simple. What happened with RCS encryption is if you use Android messages and you've got, you know, Google providing, if you're using Android messages, basically, you can get encryption for one-to-one messages if you're using the beta. And starting this week, they started rolling that out to regular people that aren't on the beta. So in the near future, once the rollout is finished, if you are having a one-to-one RCS message, you will be encrypted. You have the option to have those messages be end-to-end encrypted. That's kind of it. They rolled it out kind of quietly, like surprisingly quietly, like stupidly, annoyingly quietly. In real time, Hiroshi Lockheimer is like tweeting out, we've added

RCS. We've added encryption RCS. He's tweeting, like, retweeting photos of his sticky notes from the last time he was on the Verge cast. Yeah. It was like, oh, this is all happening at once. Yeah. There was a bunch of like minor Android updates that came out alongside this emoji mashups and some other earthquake detection of more countries and whatever. Here's my thing. I do not want to be known as the world's foremost RCS stand. I think RCS is fundamentally a compromised product. I'm so sorry, Dieter. With many, many problems. I think that it's broken in so many ways. However, I also think that we live in a fallen universe. Oh, my God. And it's the best we're going to get for cross-device encrypted communication that isn't controlled by a single company, right?

That's just bleak. It's technically Google runs a bunch of stuff, but like technically RCS doesn't need to be controlled by a single company. You know, you can have servers run by any number of carriers. I wish that it could be more independent like signal, but for default on-device communication that is encrypted, RCS is the thing that will work across all devices except iPhones within the next year. And so I'm like official, I like tweeted, like, it's time.

Apple. It's time for you to support RCS. That's actually the thing that you could do that would protect your own customer's privacy because of an iPhone customer tries to use their default messaging app to text an Android customer. They have less privacy than if they had an Android phone and they were texting that Android customer. Yeah. And so I tweeted this, not quite that vociferously. Did Tim Cook like it? No, but you know who did retweet it was the product lead for Android messages, Sanazahari, from Google. And she said she welcomes everyone to participate in RCA. Oh, that's nice. If you're a high-profile Google product manager, that's as spicy as you can get. That's it. You're like, I welcome everyone. Yeah.

Specifically one company that I will not name. Yeah. But they are welcome here. All right. So that's RCS. And then there's other Google messaging news. This is what I mean when I say we have. There's a lot on the list.

So if you have RCS available to you, you know that RCS is available to you because it says that you can enable chat services. Google has another product called Google Chat, which is not RCS, which is Google Chat, that's built into Google Workspace at Gmail. And it is now available to everybody. So if you have a Gmail account, you can go into settings and flip on the new experience of all the new cool Google Workstay stuff, the smart canvas chips and Google chat conversations and Google Chat rooms and Google Meet in your toolbar at the bottom, you can have all the new stuff. It's available to everybody. And that's the news. It was very difficult for me to understand that was the news based on Google's blog post about all this. But it's there. And

hooray, you can go turn it on. Everything is, that's the whole story. There's nothing more complicated about that. Oh, except they're going to change names of rooms to spaces. Don't know why. They're going to evolve rooms into spaces. And they're going to start doing new stuff. And like spaces are going to compete with everything from like old email list serves to discord to slack. Is my understanding. Why don't they just make one product called G-chat? Well, there is a product called Google Chat now, finally. No, G-chat.

Oh, you want G-chat? There was never a product called G-chat. It never existed. I know. I understand. Yeah. It's like that movie. But I have fond memories of it.

Right. It was the best. Why don't they just make that product and put it on phones and inside of these services and then, like, use their dominance to win? because they're afraid of antitrust. Do you think that's it? Yeah, I know. I absolutely think that's it.

I think that's the whole reason they went with this weird federated RCS thing on Android. You can install chat on your Android phone. It'll probably be on deck and like one of the default apps. It's just not the default texting experience. Do you think it's antitrust or carriers?

Yes. Okay. Just checking. You know, I would offer this criticism of Google, and I'm curious what you both think of this right now. We just came out of IO and that, you know,

They have their usual big ideas at I.O. And machine learning is going to drive a car and draw a picture and do all the stuff it's going to do. But Google, from a product perspective, has been in slow motion for a long time. Right? Like, they rename a bunch of stuff. They move stuff around. They, like, welcome partners.

Some of the partners don't show up. And, like, Google makes us ad. That's the true of flock to their ad thing. You know, their hardware division, totally. slow motion. Oh, but they got a store now, Eli, in New York. Yeah, they got it. But I was like, that's actually what made me think of this. Like, they opened their first retail store. And it's like a bunch of stuff that has been out for over a year that all fundamentally works the same as the stuff that was out the year before it. And it's just like, is it antitrust that is like

Google just afraid of doing stuff because someone will yell at them? It's just weird that they're kind of like tread and water. Am I, am I the only one who like perceives this? No, I think you're, You're totally right. They just sort of sit there with this stuff. Just raking in cash and controlling the internet. You know, they control everything. But then there's all these tools that people use. And they're like, no, but don't use that. Or like, use it, but don't use it like the way we want you to, you would normally use something. We're not going to let you do that. You're going to have to like work for it. And it's like, but that's the antithetical to what Google is, which is I never have to work for it. I just get it for free. And I give you all of my data.

So it's just like they're just kind of shrugging. It feels like just a big shrug emoji. And like all of the stuff that I would normally find very interesting and be excited about, they kind of like wreck it when they announce it. Like every single announcement. It's just like sort of like, oh yeah, and we also did this. And we're going to announce it like three weeks later and be really confusing about it. And also I didn't know like I didn't know for six months that Google Hangouts had become Google Meet.

Like, I saw the press release, and I understood it, but I didn't understand it until one day when I was like, I can't find the app on my phone anymore. And I was like, oh, it's a whole new app now. Well, it looks the exact same. Yeah. And everything is a phased rollout, right? So you kind of never know when things are happening. I don't know, you pay more attention to Google than almost anybody I know, given your status is the only person who understands RCS, which you have, whether you want it or not. God damn it.

Is that perception accurate? Are they just, like, doing a lot of things that we don't see? I think the perception's accurate for a bunch of their consumer stuff. I think that one of the things that's going out with this Google workspace stuff is they actually have started making stuff and doing stuff. And that feels weird. And I think it feels weird for Google, too. And so they don't know how to talk about it. Because when they start making something, they're like, here's a new thing.

Words. Words about the thing. But, yeah, I mean, hardware is spent. I don't want to have existential feelings about the pixel for the thousandth time right now. But I don't know, like, this is the year where they're going to have their own processor, and hopefully they'll do something with the camera and it's going to have this wacky new design. This is the year where, like, they really need, they've got a store, a store. I think that they're getting close to put up or shut up time for their hardware efforts.

They bought Fitbit. They're going to have a watch. The watch has got a whole new operating system that is, you know, merged with Tyson in some way. So there's a bunch of consumer stuff where they really need to show that they can be directly relevant. And if they can't, they should just stop and let Samsung just own everything. Huawei was in there for a second where maybe they were going to try and, like, Google is going to have an ecosystem of multiple hardware vendors making great stuff. But they got banned. Honor is back now, which used to be Huawei Division or whatever.

They seem fine. But yeah, in general, I think that Google has not told a. compelling regular user story for a while now. Yeah, you know, you said antitrust and I would actually, to me, it's the flip side of antitrust. Google makes so much money doing exactly what it did yesterday, that it hasn't really had any existential pressure to figure out what it's going to do tomorrow. Right.

Right. Like, they can do nothing in print money from their advertising business. And every time they kind of like stray away from that, like eventually the grownups come by and they're like no no hold on go back to collecting the money right like what are we doing why are we spending money when we could just make money for no and i know this is like very reductive and i know a lot of google people listen to this and like yeah i'm being a little unfair but where's the new stuff like where's the big the next big idea from google that isn't an ai demo that i just keep thinking about two three ios ago they had that

we're going to take the fence out of the photo demo, and it never shipped. We haven't seen it. Last year, they had Google Assistant that's going to make you a dry cleaning appointment. That's sort of half shipping a little bit here and there. Like, it happens. It pops up in the Assistant. It's just like, Alex, you had it pop up for you once recently, didn't you? I think so.

Yeah. Yeah. But that's what I mean by the phased rollout. Like, I don't know if that's out or not. Right. Yeah, you can't get hyped about it because it's like, well, I'll get it four years from now. and I will have forgotten that it was happening. You'll be like, oh, this is a nice, pleasant change of pace.

You guys mentioned the antitrust, and I've put on, like, my little tinfoil hat now. Like, you've completely, like, convinced me. It's primary colored, right? Like, it's in Google colors, but it's tin underneath. But, like, it really does feel like they almost don't want us, because this stuff is successful. Like, as much as we all complain about, like, these rollouts are slow and boring and all this other stuff. Like the pixel phone is is is is still it's not Samsung but it still sells a lot of phones sells a lot more phones than a lot of other companies we talk about yeah but that's like a low

there's like Samsung and then like you know the bar the bottom of the bar chart is just like a blend of colors it adds up to brown or whatever and like Google has the biggest slice of the brown mess the bottom of the bar chart yeah I don't think they're out selling LG and LG he was like this isn't worth it anymore there was a report today that LG exited the smartphone in business so hard that Apple is talking about selling iPhones and LG's stores in Korea. Oh, my God. That's how hard LG was out there. Like, there's literally a vacuum in the store.

Would you like to fill it? So we started the podcast talking about Windows and how Windows is sort of trapped by needing to be backwards compatible, even now, even still. And Google is trapped by its size. It needs, Android is like the most used operating system of the planet, 3 billion plus people, right? Yeah. Everybody uses Google. Everybody uses Chrome.

anything that Google does has bigger repercussions, and they just get spooked by that. And sometimes that's for good reason. But other times it's like it's, I think it's maybe slowing him down. Yeah. I just think it's, we just came off talking to McKenna

with all these, the anti-trust action happening. And you can see it in two ways. One, they don't want to do anything because they'll get yelled at. And two, they don't have to do anything because they're already printing money

is the foremost member of the advertising duopoly on the internet. And so like, why would you do anything if you're going to get yelled at and it won't make you as much money as the money you can just collect by waking up every day? And like, yep, that's why competition is good. Like something has to break that open. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if these bills are going to do it. But it's just, it's, I don't know, Google used to do a lot of things all the time. They used to have gigantic ideas and then like ship them at like big scale. And like, I don't know. Like, yeah. Yeah, but they also like failed at all of

right? Like wave. Glass. Daydream. Daydream. Aww. In Platformer this week, Casey wrote about how Facebook is making a bunch of VR acquisitions. And kind of the thesis, he was riffing off some tweets from our own Alex Heath. Facebook is like buying VR game studios.

So they're going to have this commanding lead by the time this becomes a real market. And I was like, well, yeah, they have no competition. Like, who are they preventing those game studios from working with? It's no one. Like there's not. HTC. Yeah, like it's it's no one. And it's just funny because it could have been Google.

They were like headed in that direction and they just kind of pulled the plug. And like, I don't know. I didn't mean to get that all as essential about Google, but it's, it just, I was just looking at pictures of the store. And I was like, well, I already have all this stuff. You can go and sit in the store in one of the chairs and play stadia, which like maybe the internet's really good there. That's my only reason to think to go. Well, if that store should sell as Google Fiber, then everyone would go to that store. Yeah, I would live there.

Just get like a little coffee in the background. Great. All right, Dieter, there's a lot of just like little gadget needs. You want to go through it? Yeah, I don't know. Like, there's a bunch of stuff. I think the one that caught capture the most attention in the verge is probably IKEA finally shipped their picture frame speaker. But it's like, it's a big fabric thing.

You can put different, you know, fabrics on the top of it. It's a flat speaker. Uh, it seems good. I don't know. Flat speaker on my wall. If I had a home that, was not a New York apartment where I think you guys can actually see my entire apartment from the camera view. I would 100% get that. Like you put that on a wall on like your second,

you know, the landing for your second floor. That'd be great. This is my theory of this Sonos market expansion. They're just counting on people buying bigger homes over time. Yeah. And with every home, you got to buy one more speaker. I long to buy these speakers and have a place to put them. This is a company that is just betting on the American dream more than any other company in tech. Like, everyone will buy a slightly bigger house over time. I love them. You know what's really interesting at Sonos for now?

It's almost impossible to buy their products. Yeah. If you want to buy a Sonos 1, you're like September. Yeah, I waited almost two months for a Sonos 5. Yeah. I think, A, people have been at home. They have bought a lot of the products. And then the chip shortage is like real.

So it's funny that they're like, well, you can't have the one you want. Picture frame. Two picture frames, stereo sound. You can use them as surrounds if you have a sonous soundbar, which is amazing. I cannot wait for us to get these in Tesla. Model S plaid. So I'm curious what you all think about this. I think it's great.

I think they improved a bunch of stuff. I think that the yoke steering wheel is the biggest misstep that I have seen Tesla make in a hot minute. It is, it just seems really bad and really, like, when there was like the center screen on the three and you're like, I don't know, I kind of want something right in front of the steering wheel. But eventually, you know, I think they got away with that. I do not think they're going to get away with this yoke steering wheel. This feels like 80s concept car bad. It's the, it's a steering wheel from Knight Rider. We should just be honest about what this is.

They watched a bunch of episodes of Knight Rider and they're like, what if Kit's steering wheel was in our car? Yeah. And I appreciate and support that method of product development. I think they should have done the woof-wush thing in the front of the car. We'll get there. We'll get there. Slowly. Slowly.

Over time. They put that light on there. I will buy it immediately. How are you going to make this car self-driving without the red whoosh-wush thing? I don't know what it's actually called. I think it's technically called the scanner. Do you remember Night Rider, like all of Kit's sensor ability was in the red thing? That went back and forth.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the future. Welcome to the Vergecast where we talk about 80s TV shows that we remember because we are super old. At the same time, Luminar, we had the CEO of Luminar, Austin Russell, he's 25. He makes me feel very old and unsuccessful. The CEO of Luminar, LiDar Company, he was on Decoder a few months ago. They had an event this week in New York where they were showing off their LiDAR tech and their

self-driving stack and I don't know. So, Andy Hogan's driving on a car. And their dream is that you will be able to identify a self-driving car with Luminar tech because it will have. have like a piece of hardware on it that isn't a big silly spinning dome. Right. Right. And they had some like prototypes of what this might look like in various cars.

What if it was the Knight Rider thing? See, I'm trying to bring all the threads together. Like if he was a little older. Yeah, if only Austin was a little bit older, he would know what I was talking about. Oh my God, not on the top. We got to put it out of the bumper. We got to make a transam. Yeah.

Anyhow, this Yoke thing, I think the reason they're going to get away with it is because this car is so expensive. Yeah. Right? Like it's... That's fair. What I think they're not going to get away with is gear shift on the screen. Mm-hmm. And turn signals on the wheel. Yeah. That's very video game.

But no, but didn't, I think, didn't they get like the pass from the National Transportation Safety Board? Yeah, but I mean, Tesla gets a lot of passes for being Tesla all the time. You know, it's like, I think people are going to buy this car and be like, these buttons are hard to, and when I want to go in reverse, I actually just like want to put the car in reverse. Yeah. Not have the car try to guess when I want to be in reverse and maybe get it wrong.

And like Tesla's autopilot experiences suggest that it is not as good at guessing what you want is it wants to be. And so like I just very few people are going to buy a Model S plaid. Some larger number of people are going to buy a new Model S. And I think that's when we're going to see. Because if you spend like $150,000 on a car or how much the plaid costs, like you're motivated to be like, this is good. Yeah. Does you come down? I think it'll be different.

I think the last thing I want to talk about is there's a bunch of BBK stuff happening. BBK, you may not know or you may know, is the umbrella company of a bunch of smartphone companies. So, Apo, Vivo, RealMe, One Plus. So the Real Me GT, Sam Bifur got to look at it. It is really cool looking, and it's, you know, it's like maybe going to take up the mantle of flagship killer from One Plus. Appo made a rollable phone so it like it stretches out it just rolls out.

The thing it does on the screen when it rolls out is like so chinky. Yeah. So if you're looking at the phone you've got it like I don't know. I think we have a gif with like

a web page on it. It looks like we're just stretching the image. It stretches the image and then it fades out and it pops back up as normal and it's like, oh. That's not what you wanted.

They're not going to ship it because it will only be good for 100,000 cycles, 100,000 opens, which isn't enough. Oh, that's... Well, they're aiming for 200,000, which is, I don't know, 50 opens a day for five years or something. I don't know. Anyway, the last thing and the saddest thing is, One Plus is apparently going to, like, start working more closely with Apo or BBK or just its parent company.

Apo, yeah, it's going to work more closely with Apo. One Plus phones have been, like, basically redesigned Apo phones and vice versa. Nobody ever wanted to admit it. and we kind of just accepted it and thought of it in terms of like GM had a bunch of different brands and technically at Pontiac and a Chevy were different, but you know, kind of they weren't. That's how I've always felt about One Plus. Yeah. And now that's just sort of going back to the mothership a little bit.

Yeah. I mean, I think we're seeing the phone market in general consolidate and shrink. Like it just didn't happen the way people thought it would happen, that there'd be lots of products and brands at different price points and segments. And so it's like natural this is happening. But it's also, A, we were always like, isn't this, aren't you just part of it?

And they insisted it wasn't true. But B, it's like sad because it was, they were the renegade that got to push. They were cool. Yeah. They were fun. And I mean, I may be one of the weird people that actually has fond memories of Apo

because like in 2006, if you wanted to watch some anime or something, you bought from China, you needed a region-free player, and Apo had the best one. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Like, Apo did the best region-free DVD players. So when I was like, oh, they're getting into phones.

I mean, I don't need a region-free phone. Good for you. I totally forgot that they dominated the region-free. I mean, what Alex is really saying is that she was a DVD pirate. I had way too many. like eBay purchases. I don't know half of which were legal.

Yeah. Just great. Yeah. I mean, we've just seen the phone. We're just talking about LG. Like the phone market is just, it's kind of done and people got to find the next big thing. Yeah.

This will help them find the next big thing. Okay. My two things that I want to end on. One, speaking of Apple, Chris Walsh reviewed the Beat Studio Buds, which are fascinating to me. He thinks they're pretty good.

They do not have an H-1 chip in them. Correct. They do not support things like iCloud syncing between devices. Correct. And he's theorizing is Beetz knows that Android is a big market for them. And they made a product that worked well with Android phones. And they didn't need all the H1 stuff, which is, I just think whatever, like Apple spent all that money in Beats, they bought a streaming service, a pile of executives who no longer

work there. They completely retooled the streaming service. And they've got this headphones company that is still successful and throws off money. that they treat like dirt. Like, they do not care about beats at all. It is so funny to me. But good on Apple in this roundabout way for making a product for Android people. It's the thing they rarely do.

That was really nice of them. I wonder why not both, though? Why is it, does it just then become too much of an AirPods pro killer? Like, it's too close in an AirPods Pro feature set. And so they needed to hold something back? I don't know. When one company controls the entire market, they make weird synthetic. decisions about products.

I don't know, man. It's just wacky. Okay, so that's one. You can go read the review. Christopher did like them. They seemed great. And then lastly, you can sign up. There's a web page to sign up for DISH Network's forthcoming 5G wireless service.

So you will recall when Team Mobile Lot sprint, the Trump administration engineered this complicated deal because they knew taking the market from four national wireless carriers to three was bad. Every ounce of evidence in the world says this is bad for consumers. Once again, competition, the real theme of the rich cast. So they were like, we have to still get a fourth one. We can't rely on Sprint to not suck. So we're going to let you buy Sprint, but you got to help DISH stand up a new fourth carrier, which no one has ever believed will happen. But today we got a web page.

Hell yeah. That's all you can do. You can just put your email address on a web page. the network is called Project Genesis. Oh, no. And the first S is a five. Yes. Which is just very good.

The website, by the way, you have to, it's like a concert and a whole bunch of people are holding their fists and hands in the air. And the tagline is, help us democratize wireless access and create the 5G network of the future, which is, which you're going to do by giving them your email address. It's very good. Like, what does that mean? What does democratize wireless access mean? I don't know.

I just think it's very good and also hilarious because when we inevitably move to 6G networks, none of this will be valid anymore. Gen of 6. Gena 6. There we go. Oh, it's so good. Oh, my God, it's so good. Yes.

Okay, so here's my theory. My theory, so we're like, you know, the Virginie, turning 10 this year. And we're like talking a lot about rethinking and redesigning all this stuff. And like a thing that constantly happens to me is our design team has like the one they like and they make sure to show me a bunch of stuff they don't like. Apple executive just do this with Steve Jobs all the time. Yeah, like steer him towards the one they wanted by making the other ones really bad.

My theory with this is the branding consultancy had one they really liked. And they put Gen 5 sis, right, is like the bad one to. knock out to make it seem like they'd explored a lot of things. And then Dish Network was like, ooh, 5G. And they had to pivot and take it seriously, which is why this website is just, just a field for an email address. Didn't Dish also do like the hopper and it was just like a kangaroo? It was the hopper and the Joey. Yeah, somebody there was just like, you know what? It's Charlie Ergen. He's just a whimsical man. When I think of ruthless satellite CEO, Charlie Ergan, I'm like,

Whimsy. That guy likes kangaroos. Kangaroos and fives. You know the underlying Hopper story, do you remember this? CET gave Hopper the CES best of show. Yeah. Yeah. But CET is owned by CBS.

And CBS was suing Dish Network over the hopper. And so CBS made CET's team take away the award over time shifting on the hopper. And like, I don't think CETS ever was. Never recovered. I just like still mad about that. Yeah. But look, I hope Project Gen. Gen.

It's going to be so good. We're talking about it. We cannot overcover the launch of a ground-up wireless network in the United States. Like, it's a big deal. But the idea that it's actually going to happen is also... Are they going to, like, ship people their own towers? No, they've got this... It's like, we thought we were going to wrap up.

Nope. You did. You got 15 minutes on O-Rand coming, baby. They got this idea. Right now, S cell networks run on proprietary software stacks called radio access networks. There's a handful of suppliers, the biggest one of which is Huawei. The reason they're like democratized American 5G, all this marketing, is they're trying to build something called O-Rans, open radio access networks that are interoperable. There are no suppliers for this.

The suppliers that they have chosen are still based in Asia in various ways. Like they haven't actually accomplished their goal, but they think that like Erickson and all these companies can build new kinds of radio hardware. hardware for them. They operate cheaper. And then they just keep saying AWS will be involved in some mysterious way that they've failed to explain. So like, there's a lot going on with this dish network wireless idea. There's a lot of buzzwords. Just a lot of words. I love it. Yeah, not even buzzwords. Just words. Just throwing words at us in the hopes we're distracted. But they're like Amazon. And then like the regulator is like there's a fourth wireless network. And it's like, no, actually what's going to happen as T-Mobile is going to turn off its 3G network and a bunch of DishMobile customers

are not going to have service. All right. That was it. That was the first cast. Thank you to Alex. She pretended to care about O-Rand today. McKenna and Tom, thank you both very much. That was great. We will be back next week. There's a Windows event, so lots going on next week. Also, as McKenna said, markup on these antitrust bells. I think there's a lot of news. Decoder, this past week, Jamie Heinemann, CTO John Deere. I would say the response to the John Deere episode of Decoder is unlike anything that I ever expected. People really care about tractors, it turns out. Next week, Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon.

That was like a deep creator economy conversation. So that's coming up. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Deeter's at Backlon. Tom is at Tom Warren. McKenna is at Kelly McKenna, her name. But backwards, Alex is Alex H. Crank.

Yeah, that was incredible. That's it. Rock and roll. Snip, snip.