The Vergecast - Google gets fined, Macbook Pro benchmarks, and Roku CEO Anthony Wood

Episode Date: July 20, 2018

We’ve got a super stuffed episode of The Vergecast this week. First, the biggest news in tech right now is the European Commission’s ruling that Google has been unfairly using Android to push Google search on users, giving it an unfair advantage. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul sit down and discuss the implications. In the second half of the show, Dieter discusses some of the new MacBook Pro benchmarks that claim the processors may throttle performance due to cooling issues. Nilay got an exclusive interview with Roku CEO Anthony Wood, so we’ve included that in this episode as well. Also, our culture coverage continues this week with another roundup by Megan Farokhmanesh and Bijan Stephen. There’s even a whole lot more in between that — like Paul’s newly sponsored segment “Fold the phone” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 01:46 - Verizon is shutting down its original video app Go90 06:26 - Six questions you were afraid to ask about Google’s EU antitrust case 25:09 - Google may put its Fuchsia OS on smart home devices within three years 34:25 - This week in culture with Megan and Bijan 39:42 - Test suggests 2018 MacBook Pro can’t keep up with Intel Core i9 chip’s thermal demands 53:15 - Roku CEO Anthony Wood interview 1:17:33 - Paul’s weekly segment “Fold the phone” 1:20:39 - Galaxy Note 9 leak suggests it looks a lot like the Note 8 1:22:12 - Walmart reportedly plans to launch Netflix competitor under its Vudu brand later this year Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge Network, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, a subsidiary network of the Vox Media. That's the beginning of the show. I'm Nelai. I am your friend. I want to be clear about that. Paul. Hi, Paul. Deeter.

I could be your friend, but there's no guarantee. Okay, when you have good cop, bad cop, what's the tertiary cop? The third cop. Third cop. Third cop. Moop. Which way? Wild cop.

Not like moo cow, moo like Japanese, not just, never mind. Mu cop? Yeah, moo. All right. It is a week. Here's what's going to happen on this broadcast. We have a ton of news. Deeter has an emotional roller coaster to go on with the MacCath pro.

We've got this week in culture with Megan Frochmanesh and Bijan Steven, bringing that one back, super excited. I interviewed Anthony Wood, the CEO of Roku. That interview was wild. That interview literally began in a way that I just was not. What was not expecting? He claimed that he runs the flagship podcast. He was like, hello, welcome the Vergecast. Did he keep undercutting you on price?

Yeah, because like $17. About what? No, he'll hear it later on the show, but he laid out exactly how Roku makes money in like a very calm way. He's obviously a very good CEO. He's like, here's what Roku does. And it was just very clear that Roku is not a hardware business. They are an advertising business. But we'll get to that in the show.

So that's, and I asked him about Dolby Vision and Dolby Apples, of course. Of course you did. Paul Segment is sponsored once again. We're going to try that. Still sucks. For a second time. So let's just get into it. Biggest news.

We miss this on the 4th of July. Go 90 is dead. People have been asking me to talk about it. But Verizon's Go 90, the streaming service that asked you to go sideways. This is now permanently horizontal. It's fallen sideways. into the grave. Some of my favorite shows are going off the air.

Relationship status. Confess. Well, we have to be nice because there's an SPNation show. Snatchers. The Espionation show is very good. I'm sure it is. Foul play, which you should go and go 90 while you can and watch SB Nation's foul play. It is very good.

Well, no, but Verizon said that they're giving the IP back for all the shows back to the creators. They're not just shutting it down. Like, all the stuff that was made for it, they're like, yeah, do whatever you want with it. We don't care anymore. Just like a total capitulation. I just don't, here's what I want the, so it's dead. I think Verizon's future is like a media tech business, the way AT&T bought Time Warner. Verizon bought AOL.

Yeah. Yahoo. So like they made different purchases. There was a great story and the information about whether that's going to keep going, whether Tim Armstrong, who is Paul and I's old boss at AOL, whether he's going to try to spin AOL, Yahoo, Oath, back out of Verizon, which would be incredible. So, yeah, I just, I just want to, here's my real problem. Okay, here's a pitch.

I don't have a go-to bad streaming service anymore. Bring back dial-up. Like a new hip internet service that's dial-up for people who feel over-connected, over-stimulated. Yeah. You know, it's like a hipster internet, the new AOL. I feel like that's a good name for like a New York restaurant, Flipphones and Dial-up. So we do have a good, go-to bad streaming service to make fun.

But the problem is with Go 90, you were punching up, right? You were attacking Verizon when you attacked Go 90, and that felt good. But nobody feels good making fun of Crackle. No, but Crackle Sony. You can make fun of Crackle. Also, Crackle's dead. Screw you, Crackle. I'm pretty sure Crackle's Sony.

No, Crackle's still around, man. Is Crackle still around? Crackle's official name, by the way, is Sony Crackle. As long as Sony is manufacturing the most adorable robot dog in the universe, I do not approve. Subsidized by Crackle. I really hope Crackle shuts down because my headline will be, oh, snap, crackle popped. It's giving away the gold eater.

So this was supposed to be like a two-minute joke. It's turned into a five-minute disaster with a fun. I'm ready to move on anytime. There's actually a lot to talk about in the show this week. And I personally find Facebook policy news exhausting and depressing. But I want to tell you, so we're just not going to do it. But I want to tell you, go listen to Kara Swisher interview Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode. It's 90 minutes long, Zuckerberg puts his foot in his mouth several times, including suggesting that Holocaust deniers are maybe just innocently mistaken, which is very strange and wrong.

But it's Kara at her best, Zuckerberg at a medium. A medium. Medium Zuck. Medium Zuck. I know we don't have time to really get into it, but I'm going to say one thing. after I disclose my wife works for Oculus, which is invented Facebook, as you listen to this interview

and listen to Zuck try and, like, justify his decisions, in the back of your mind, just if you studied philosophy, just think, oh, he's a rule, he follows a rule-based ethic. He's, he's a Kantian.

He's trying to find the categorical imperative. Just think about Kant's ethics as you're listening to Mark Zuckerberg and think about how he's doing it right and how he's doing it wrong. What I thought about was, this would be a lot better Zuckerberg would just accept the fact that he's a dictator as opposed to trying to be like a friend.

But do you want him to be the dictator? Well, at least I would know how it worked. You know, like he's going to make decisions and it'll be arbitrary and capricious because he's a dictator. But if we all supplicate ourselves to him, enough. And we're like, I also smoked brisket, Lord Zuck. Sing songs about our glorious Zuckerberg. Yeah. And he'll be nice to us as opposed to this thing he's doing where he's like, I'm just your buddy, Zuck.

Neil, I heard he's always been nice to us. All right. Listen to that. I can't, honestly. And if you were interested in what's going on on Facebook, Casey's newsletter, the interface is excellent. You can read that every day. There's just so much for this episode of the Vergecast.

We're just going to set it aside. So go listen to Rico decode, Kara and Zuck. Read the interface from Casey. Tweet it, Casey. He likes your tweets. You can get all that stuff there. Okay. Let's start with the biggest news of the,

week in our zone, which is Google and Android in the European Union. So the European Union fined Google $5 billion. It's the largest fine in EU history for illegally bundling Chrome and search into Android for a period of years. For it's three points. Bundling of Chrome and search, it is preventing other manufacturers from forking Android. So you can obviously Android's open source. If you want to make an open source fork of Android, you are prevented. Google will contractually not let you use Android. So if you want to be an Android manufacturer... You mean use the name Android? No, no, no. If you want to get the... Or you use Play Store. If you want to use a Play Store, you cannot ship even a single forked Android device. So they

pull you into their ecosystem. And then the third thing, which honestly to me is like in this world that we live in is like, sure. Google made payments to certain large manufacturers and network operators to bundle Google search apps on handsets in favor of our search engines, which is like, yeah, of course they did. Why would they need to pay if they're forcing everybody? Because if you sell a tithes in a handset, right? Yeah. And you set Google as the default you paid.

Like there's a million little wack-a-do things. Oh, so this includes like Apple? Well, no, Apple sets it as a default, and I think Apple makes payments to Google for setting it the default. So it's unclear. Just a certain large manufacturers. And it's like, there's like four of them. Right. So probably those four. Okay. So let's pull this apart. So I read a bunch of the, the EU issued a bunch of documents. I read a bunch of documents. Basically, their argument is that Android's business model is fundamentally unfair. And that Google, by pulling lots and lots of core features and updated APIs out of Android and into Play Services, obviously brought the app developers

along there, and then they uncompetitively tied the use of Android to the use of the Play Store. So if you want to ship an Android phone and get the Play Store, which is where the apps are, which is where the thing you want, you are now bound to this other contract, which makes you use search and Chrome by default. I think it's the specific contractual language the EU called out was within one swipe of the home screen, you've got to see Google stuff. We have actually known this for a long time, right? This is not a surprise. The way that Google uses the Play Store and Play Services to drive Android, I think we have actually talked about on the show is a good idea, like a lot. Well, it's a good idea insofar as it's the easiest avenue that Google has to

get updates, security updates, and other, like, little updates out to phones without waiting for, you know, carriers and OEMs to push out full-on operating system updates. And it's also a really good system insofar as it lets them update apps without waiting for, like, a yearly cycle, the way that Apple does with iOS in a lot of ways for its core apps. And so there's that. So that is good. I would say that I am not necessarily pro, like, put everything into. the Google Play Services thing because the more of the core of what you expect your phone to do coming from a Google thing instead of from an Android thing, it does mean that AOSP phones and forks of Android don't get the benefit of that stuff. So I don't know, there was a whole kerfuffle when

they got rid of the like aOSP browser and went to like Chrome as the default renderer. And that basically was the right thing to do because it meant they didn't have to ship two web browsers. But it's still like it's a good thing that they do it from a bunch of technical reasons. it just so happens that it also makes Android more of a Google product than it is just a product from HTC or Samsung or Amazon or whatever. But I would take you back to 2009 when wave after wave of Android phone with a garbage skin would come out. And we would laugh at how bad all of that work was. And part of it is Google pushing manufacturers to stop doing that stuff. Part of it is honestly the market.

Every time we review a phone, we're like, it's as close to stock Android as you can get without buying a pixel. It's the thing that the market has wanted. So Google's saying we're just going to foreclose some of this crazy, wide open development on Android has actually been the positive consumer outcomes. Yeah, what is the consumer harm that they're alleging? So the consumer harm they're alleging is exactly what you'd expect. It's the market for search engines.

and default browsers on Android is extremely limited. So consumers don't have a choice to buy a phone that has Bing preloaded because Google restricts that from happening. I'm not sure that anybody wants to buy a phone with being preloaded, but... I have argued specifically that that's consumer hostile. Yeah. But that market is foreclosed. So Google just won't let that exist. You can't buy a phone with a different browser preloaded.

Those are the two. And the mechanism is if you want to use Android and you want to get the Play Store, which is the only reason you want to use Android to ship a phone because you want the apps, you have to do these other two things. So the market for the other two things is close down. Now the underneath all of that is Google doesn't charge any money for Android. They don't charge any money for the Play Store. They make all their money from search. So if they don't have those apps on the phone as default, they are not going to make money giving away Android and Play Store for free. So, like, that led Sunnar Pichai yesterday.

The, you know, the EU ruling came out. Within 90 days, Google has to pay the fine. They have to stop bundling these things. Sunar Pichai says, well, this might change the business model of Android. We might have to start charging for Android to recoup that investment. That, to me, seems like a totally idle threat for this specific reason. Well, I mean, I don't know. Microsoft charged licensees for Windows mobile a bunch.

Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So they might do it. They might charge $5, $10, $20. I don't know what Windows mobile license costs, but all that costs went to the manufacturer, then they pass it on to the consumer. And if they decided they needed to do that for whatever reason, I do, like, connecting manufacturers have to pay for Android

to this ruling is a little bit fuzzy to me. But whatever, like, who are people like, well, I want the free one. I don't want to pay for Android. What are they going to go to? Tyson? Like, they could, they could, there is a world in which they could charge manufacturers to license Android and put it on phones, and it wouldn't necessarily hurt them because there's no other choice anymore. That seems like a lot, I mean, it's a good, I don't know if it's a valid threat, but it's a real good threat from Google's perspective.

Because if you, if Google's like, oh, oh, we're not allowed to do this stuff, okay, it's $100 to license Android. So here's why I think it's particularly not a valid threat. What is anybody? That's way more damaging, but like Google's within its right to do that, right? Sure. Google's within its right to do things that are way more damaging to consumers than this stuff. Well, maybe. Because it's not like the E went away.

They're not like, well, our work here is done. I mean, you have a whole industry of manufacturers who are billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in to Android. Yeah. And if Google vastly changed how it supported Android or it's like, hey, we decided we're going to stop developing it. We're just done. Like that would ruin a lot of companies. Yeah, it would also ruin Google, right? I mean, that search revenue for mobile is no joke.

Right? That's the business. So they need Android out there. They need Chrome out there. They need search out there. I'm sure they're going to start making other kinds of deals where they'll just pay. the manufacturers to put. I thought they got in trouble for making payments

to certain large manufacturers. I think those payments were conditioned on other terms. But like if it's just a free market and they just pay more than Microsoft, it's not like Microsoft is like, yeah, we'll spend some of that Hot Bing revenue. They'll cut their revenue. I think the real opportunity here

is inside of the forks. So now you've got Samsung in the position where it can just fork Android and make another thing, even though it has sizing. You've got LG in a position where it can fork Android and make another thing. It sounds like Amazon's going to could get Play Store on the fire tablets, right? No. That to me is a big question is, are those forks going to get access to the Play Store?

Like that, it's not clear to me that the EU is demanding that they do that. Right. The specific, go ahead, dude, they're. They're leaving, like, the remedy up to Google. They're like, here's the stuff you shouldn't be doing. Do something else. And let us know in 90 days what your plan is. But they're not saying you're, like, with Microsoft, they're like,

all right, Microsoft, you must have a ballot when you must randomly show different browsers at the, you know, first time someone logs into Windows and let them choose. And, you know, they like specifically told Microsoft what to do. The EU here is saying, hey, yeah, you can't demand that people include Chrome and search if they want the Play Store. And you can't do these other things. So stop doing that. Tell us what you're going to do instead. And so that doesn't necessarily mean they're going, like one of the remedies is going to be, you have to let the Play Store show. up on, you know, fire TVs. Yeah, I don't think that's what's going to happen. But I do think

because Amazon, Amazon's like putters along with Fireless, you know, it's like not a, they make basically kids tablets with it, right? Now they have this opportunity to say, hey, HTC, not a lot going on over there. Would you like to make a wireless device? HTC can make their phones and they can make a range of devices running Fireless that runs Amazon store and that could turn into something else. Just to clarify, because I was confused on this, the specific restriction that Google was saying, if you do any forked device, you can't do any play device. Any play device. So you can't ship even a single product running a forked version of Android if you want the Play Store. And that was sensibly to minimize fragmentation.

And Google brought up fragmentation to the EU, which is just another one of those moments where like just the nerdiest tech blog shit is now being talked about at the highest levels of government. But they're like, Android fragmentation is a problem. And the EU said, we don't believe Android fragmentation is credible, which is true. What is the law? I kind of feel like I need to read this. But like, what kind of laws do they have in the EU? Is it just it feels unfair to us? I mean, I'm not a European lawyer.

Very arbitrary. I'm a bad American lawyer. But I mean, like, they're anti-composition laws. They went and measured consumer harm and they went and measured harm in the marketplace and Google said, we're preventing this other thing and this outweighs that harm you see over there.

And then they made a determination of credibility. You can read it. It's going to make reference to a lot of laws you've never heard of because you don't live in Europe. Right? But it tracks with what you would expect. And I think a big piece of this,

like Trump tweeted about it today. The European Union is attracting us today. But a big piece of it is like this is America's home team in the United States like Google and Facebook and Apple. Like they're the home team. So regulating them feels like their argument is if you take away this regularly, you won't get this. Like you like this, right? Google and Europe, like Europe has always looked at these big tech companies as like, what are you doing? Like this isn't competitive.

We don't want this to happen. We want French search engines and German search engines. And so I think they're looking at that kind of market dynamic where Google has come into their country through the mechanism of the Internet and they've dominated the field and there's not space for their own countries to develop that economy. And I think that's super interesting. So they just get to take $5 billion from an American company. Google's going to make $5 billion in six days. It's true, though. That's six days of their revenue.

I don't know. It's a lot of money to just be able to take. I'm obviously speaking a little bit. The idea is that you punish them and then they won't do it again and other actors won't do it. Why can't they pass a law that says Google can't or sorry, arbitrary companies, I'm not thinking of anybody in particular, can't force other companies. But they did. Then they Google broke the law. They had specific laws that would have applied to these.

Yes. It's not like they just swept. The European Union is not like a swift. decisive body. Right? Like it is a very ponderous slow. We've issued a joint resolution that will now be taken up by the Council of Elders. The Council of Elders has issued a secondary resolution that will be passed down to the Council of Loers.

The lowers have decided to play cricket for five days. It's like a very ponderous body. This is four or five years in the making. So like the idea that this is just like a capricious decision is like out of that content. context. Like, this went on long enough that at the beginning of it, Microsoft was like pushing for it and lobbying for it. And now, now they've gotten to the point where, like, they've made nice with Google about some patent, some other patent disputes. And so they're like, they're staying out of it now. It went from, like, a thing that Microsoft was pushing hard for to, like, it went on long enough to the like, yeah, you know, we figured it on our own. You guys, you guys do your thing. Yeah, if you're slower than a patent dispute, it's like, you're slow. Like, you're not, you're just, you're just, you're just. You're not, you're just. You're just. It's not moving fast. The best outcome is like Google pays money, whatever, they'll make it back in six days. And then you're going to see the sort of ecosystem of Android vendors start to do more interesting things because they're no longer locked into doing what Google wants them to do. It's a good outcome. The bad outcome, I think, is then they will stop doing what Google wants them to do. And their history of decision making is not excellent. And so you're going to. get a lot more blooping sounds as to fold on a wide variety of smart devices that aren't necessarily as secure as like a play device.

So it's going to break. Bing everywhere. If you're Microsoft, this is your opportunity. If you're Amazon, this is your opportunity. But I think creating, fine aside, creating the opportunity for these companies to compete again is not a bad thing, right? It's the mechanism of how you create that opportunity. Like the market wasn't creating that mechanism because Google had.

the market. So this is the remedy to open the market. Because Google built the market. Well, I mean, sort of. They made an operating system and they gave it away for free. And people are just being big whiners about it. They sort of gave it for free. They could always use Tyson. What was it? Migo. What was that other wild fish? Oh man, Migo. Right. This is this is revenge for Migo. Look, Finland's not only you, but this is revenge for Migo. That's what it is. That's all this is. Okay, two questions. Yeah. Yeah. Can you name one person who works at the EU who is not actually in charge? I could say any name I wanted to right now.

I know. I know. Spends forgblung. I'll just say this is an unaccountable body. No, it's not. If you were in Europe, you would know these things. I don't know. We have Europeans on our team.

You can slack them right now. I'll do that after the podcast. We'll see. We'll see whom they know. Who is your local EU representative? Second question. If I wrote a surprisingly popular new operating system and I wrote a relatively liberal license for it that allows you to do anything for it, but with some certain conditions that I made up arbitrarily, like if you do weird things with this, you can't use the vanilla version.

So here's the thing. If you start there, I think you're fine. The thing Google did was they changed it. So they began moving. Entrapment. They began, right. So they had this huge network effect of Android users. They were dominant.

You have to ship Android to get market share. Again, if you're in the EU, you're looking at Finland. You're like, there's a burning platform over there. Right? Like, oh, shit. What's all that smoke in the sky? Oh, it's me go. Oh, it's all of Finland.

And so you have to use Android to get the thing. And then Google makes the switch in large part in response to people like us complaining about fragmentation and security updates, they make the switch to say if you want Android, you have to use play. And you have to use play services. You know, Ars Technica calls foul because, you know, it's against the spirit of open source. And like there's been lots of great Ars Technica articles about it. that's really the outcome for them.

But they switched the license term, and they started moving all of their API development, all of their innovation into play services. And so that means they took the market and they turned it to their advantage as opposed to entering the market and saying this is the deal. But the other thing to really remember here is this isn't really about Android. This is about Android insofar as they feel like Google used Android to prop up its search monopoly. So they did this thing, they did this stuff to Android, and they're not happy about it. But they see that it was, they did it to prop up search. The reason that Chrome is like the thing here is Chrome is a avenue to search. And so this is as much about Bing and Duck Duck Go and whatever as it is about, you know, Migo or Tyson or whatever else.

All of Finland. They're trying to get Finland into you. This is how they're doing it. Like, we avenged you. Join our customs protocol. There's other things in Finland. She goes to all I'm a duck-duck-go user. Are you?

Yeah. I just feel like it's very rebellious of me. And apparently, EU approves. Oh, my God. All right. One more Google thing, and then we got a break. Big Bloomberg report today about fuchsia. It's OS under development.

We've kind of known about this, right? I mean, it's been out. Dieter came on Cirker Live when we were doing Circuit Breaker Live and literally did like a conspiracy theory yarn board about fuchsia. Yeah. Dieter, can you walk me through this? So, very good report over at Bloomberg, and it seems like it mostly came from the engineers that are working at it.

And, like, actual Google executives who would, like, greenlight stuff and decide what they're going to do with this are very noncommittal about it. And whether they're noncommittal because they're lying or they're not committal because they're actually noncommittal as an open question. But it seems like the engineers are like, look, we're making this thing. It's great. It could be used for anything. It could be used for everything.

It could power phones and TVs and gadgets. and smart home things and like this should this should replace Android and Chrome OS and everything else. And then the executives are like, yeah, I don't know. We got some ideas. We got some. We'll see. And then the killer line at the end of it is, I mean, it's going to take three to five

years for this to happen if it does happen. But then the killer line at the end of it is one person who has spoken to fuchsia staff described the effort as simply, quote, it's a senior engineer retention project. Wow. So there's a bunch of really cool, smart people who wanted to do something cool and smart. Android, I don't know, maybe this is not fair anymore, but it has a reputation for being kind of rickety, being kind of like deep down on its bones, not really modern and cool. And this has built an entirely different kernel. So like theoretically could be a very interesting new operating system.

Paul, you wrote this in the newsletter. And so everybody in the community, like, wants to pin all their hopes and dreams on what this thing will be. and so they you know it's just very hard to suss out what it's going to be because I don't it doesn't seem to me like there's like a secret high level Illuminati plan for fuchsia I think it's some people wanted to make a thing they got they got nothing else to do they might bail if they can't do it

it seems like a good idea to try and make a new cool operating system on a good modern kernel and you know good architecture etc etc so you know what go ahead go ahead folks go do that and a bunch of people are working on it and you know if they're working on it just to make something cool If they're working on it is like the goal to completely replace Android someday, I think it's very difficult to separate out people's like hopes and dreams that they can just like project onto this thing from what any actual long-term plans are.

And since this is Google, there may not be any actual long-term plans because Google does weird random crap all the time. I think there's the two interesting things from me with Fuchs. They are do seem to be and they have like a lot of like former webOS type people trying to like reinvent what a computer interface would be like and make it story-based. And it's really hard to tell if any of that will pan out at all. But that's really fun experimentation. I think the most really applicable thing that I think Fuchsia could offer that is very hard for Linux is because it's kind of a micro kernel, a lot of the driver's hardware support is out of the kernel. And for supporting

new hardware, it's a lot cheaper and safer with this kind of design. Theoretically, if it works out and they can build it to be as powerful as Linux and other ways, being able to, like a big problem with getting a new device to run Android or ChromeOS. It's whatever hardware you've put in that box, you need good Linux drivers. and writing good Linux drivers involves basically working with the Linux kernel, and it's messy, and it's difficult, and it's expensive and time-consuming. And that's where, like, security vulnerabilities show up. So you have a potential for a lot more, I feel like more rapid iteration

and more rapid adoption of new hardware if an operating system like this was on the market. That's, to me, I feel like the biggest upside of fuchsia. I just, how many times in my life can I be asked to be excited about a new operating system? Every day. I mean, potentially. But hang on, that's not fair at all. Once the last time you've been asked to be excited about a new operating system? Like, at most things are coming along at a clip like, no, no, wait, hold on.

I'm not saying it's happened recently. I'm saying five years ago it was like every day and we had to like manage all of our hopes and dreams and expectations about Windows phone, MAMO, which turned into Migo. Yeah. Right? The new BlackBerry OS is here. And we know all of the problems with these things. And this fuchsia piece didn't answer the most important question,

which is, will Android apps run on this operating system? Right. Like, will it have a Gmail app? Is, like, not yet known? And, like, that's the stuff that actually makes this stuff successful or not. If it turns into Google's smart devices, like, operating system, great. That's cool. But I think the idea that Google's going to re-architect or replay it.

Android with Fuchsia is like staring at the same problems that stare at you know Apple's gonna replace replace OS7 with Copeland in like 1998 like it's the same set of problems and we know what those transitions look like maybe I'm just being crusty if you're a teenager listening to this please by all means be extremely excited about new operating system you got about 10 years of that in your life and then you can like be a crank like me I mean Copeland is one of the The greatest moments in my life of following technology is when, I mean, I was sad. I thought Apple was going to buy BOS and that was going to be the next thing.

And then they bought Steve Jobs' next. Yeah. And then they're like, yo, we're going to redo our operating system. And it's going to be bonkers. It was bonkers. It was constantly bonkers. Yeah. What?

You're going to put stoplights in the closed buttons? Well, you can make that like whoosh animation. Yeah. Like those icons, they're so large. They're like photographs. I don't know. I have such a fond of memory of that, like, moment of, like, seeing everything that was very familiar to me, like, change. And I always want to see it again.

Yeah, I just, so that's Windows phone, right? Like, what I'm getting at is Windows phone, like, had this new idea about how you should use a phone, like, a deeply new idea. and many of those ideas were great, and many of those ideas are in every other phone now. They were just subsumed in other operating systems in a way that I think is very healthy. But the thing of Windows phone was not successful. Right.

And I think that's the thing about few. My caution is up. Yeah. I see what you're saying. Right. I was going to say they weren't replacing a successful phone with Windows phone, but they did screw up their desktop

by trying to do that too. their desktop. So yeah, it's dangerous. I will say this. Nest was like fully rolled into Google this week. Yeah. The CEO of Nest was ushered out the door. Rishi Chandra, who runs Google Home, now oversees the whole Ness team. It's all part of the same group. This is a sort of thing where if you want to see a bunch of new Nest devices, you've got a new kind of operating system that's like ready to go that isn't as heavy as Android. One, it's not ready to go. I don't think. And two, they've already got an operating system to do that. It's called Android Things.

Is it really? Yes. The new smart displays that are due out this summer run it that we saw at CES. Oh, write those. That's really cool. Where are those? They're due this summer. All right.

All right. It's time for an ad. Then we're going to run This Weeking Culture with Megan and Bijan. It's going to blow your mind. Then we're going to come back. We've got to talk about these MacBooks. It's a real serious situation. Okay, we do.

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Keep the blades coming for a few bucks more a month and add in shampoo, toothpaste, anything else, for the bathroom. Check it all out at dollar shaveclub.com slash verge. That is dollar shaveclub. Dot com slash verge. All right. Check it out. Here's Megan and Bijan this week in culture. Hi, I'm Megan Prokmanash, a reporter with The Verge. And I'm Bejohn, a culture writer at the Verge. Welcome to the top headlines in culture. We have a very strange theme this week. Yeah, it's not about bullying, but it's not about bullying. I'm kidding. That's not really what I mean. It's really about groups of people getting together and demanding collective action. for good and bad ways.

So first up, we have a piece by Megan. The headline is ArenaNet firings cast a chilling shadow across the game industry. And the deck is, you're just waiting for the wrong tweet to end your life now. So tell me about it. Yeah, so this has been kind of an ongoing story. ArenaNet who makes Guildwars. They fired two of their employees after a spat, let's say, with a streamer on Twitter. So in this case, we're talking more about the general impact it's had on the industry,

as well as the people who currently work at ArenaNet. So there's been a lot of discussion since about social media policies. In this case, ArenaNet didn't have a very clear or strong social media policy, according to multiple people I've spoken with. And so there were no clear guidelines on how people should be acting online. It was kind of just be nice to people. And that's not really a good measure or guideline in 2018 on Twitter. Post-Gamergate, in a way. Exactly.

So not only is this having an impact on people who work in ArenaNet, I mean, we've seen reactions from developers across the industry. A lot of developers are now rehauling their social media policies. And this is great because they're talking about their devs about how to deal with harassment or with the expectations. are, and that's something that needs to be clarified. Right. You know, they can be better. They could be better. You know who is being better, though, is Hollywood.

So Sandra O is the first Asian woman nominated for a lead actress Emmy, which is progress in a way, although I can't believe it's taken this long to get there. Hollywood has been around for how long, but Sandra O. was nominated for her role in Killing Eve is beautiful. You should go watch Killing Eve if you haven't already. But yeah, it's kind of fucked up. But it's taken this long for a person of Asian descent to make it to Hollywood, one of Hollywood's biggest stages. I mean, when you think about it, it's not like there are that many Asian actors who are given the chance to be in these roles.

Like, you think about like the Iron Fist controversy, for example, them casting a white dude in this story that's traditionally been very exploitative. Or you think about Scarlett Johansson, Ghost in the Shell, who's playing the role of a Japanese woman. Yeah, and there was a little controversy about her recently, right? She has not learned her lesson. She has not learned her lesson. She, a couple weeks ago was announced that she was going to play a trans man, but she stepped back for the role. Scarlett Johansson decided after a sustained backlash to drop out and give the part to someone else, which I think is a really great sign.

Yeah. I mean, credit where credit is due, even if it was not as great as her initial response, I appreciate that she's kind of righted, of course. So let's do a speed round. Yeah. First up, a piece from our boss, T.C., a big gamer. The headline is, seeing Ubisoft banned jerks in Rainbow Six is now my favorite part of the game. That's an A-plus. A plus response there.

Very proud of Ubisoft for that one. The background is Ubisoft decided to start banning people for saying racist things in chat. And the bans are global so everyone can see you get banned for saying something really shitty. Bravo. That sounds like a great plan of me.

So headline, another hastily planned YouTube event ends in failure. Oh man. You just wrote this one. This is about, what's that guy's name? Fuzzy Tube. Fuzi Tube. What happens?

Is that like a disaster? Is this another YouTube disaster like TanaCon? Yes. So this guy has $10 million followers. He's a pretty big deal. He's known for doing like prank videos and quote-unquote social experiments. So he tried to play it in concert in seven days. It ended with a bomb threat.

He was promising Drake to be there. Did Drake say anything? That's the thing. There's no evidence that Drake was ever going to be there. Drake has never responded to this man and may not even know who he is. Who can relate? All right. What's next?

Oh, this is good. The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one. That is the saddest thing I think I've heard all day. It's pretty sad. Please tell me more that will cheer me up. Yeah, it's by our very good colleague, Patricia Hernandez. She found a bunch of Twitch streamers who had been just streaming to literally know people. It ends on a happy note.

I mean, you should read the whole piece. It's a great feature. But the happy note is the one person or one person got one viewer who stuck with them. And now they're engaged. Oh, it's a rom-com. It's a rom-com. It was a rom-com the whole time. So, congrats to Twitch and everybody involved.

Up next, we have Nathan Phillyen stars as Nathan Drake in what might be film's only good video game adaptation. This is the role Nathan Philling was born to play. I know, okay, I mean, Firefly, great, Serenity, great. Whatever, man, he's a sci-fi guy, but he looks like Nathan Drake. And that's all that matters when it comes to acting. And they have the same first name. See, it's perfect. Oh, man, I watched a short film.

It's so bad. It's not bad, it's good, but it's also bad because they needed more money to make it. And I think Hollywood should get on that right now. I'm sure they're taking notes right now. So that is it from us. For more culture news, you can, of course, check out The Verge. come visit the culture section. And you can find us on Twitter.

I'm Megan underscore Nicolette. And I'm Bijan Steven at B-I-J-A-N-S-Evon. Make sure to tweet nice things at us. We're very kind online. And we're very soft. So please, very nice things. I love those two. We're all firecrackers.

But soft. Soft firecrackers. Our culture team sits right in front of me in the office. And they're just all day, it's laughs. It's true. Why didn't have so many more jokes? Because of technology. We're like, my don't work.

And they're like, we're watching movies. It's a whole different game. All right, Dieter, my man. You steal it emotionally? Yeah, so, okay. We have the 15-inch core I-9 maxed-out review unit of the new MacBook Pro from Apple. Just like the top of the line, it's $6,700. So I've been playing with it.

Viren Pavik, our director out here, has been putting stress tests on it. and we're getting ready to, you know, write and publish a processor episode, womp, womp, and a review. And so we were going to, today is Thursday. We shot yesterday, Wednesday on Tuesday. Guy named Dave Lee, Dave 2D on YouTube published a video that basically said, yeah, this thing gets stupid hot. And so there's thermal throttling and they slow the processors down to slower than what their, you know, low rated frequency is supposed to be, 2.9. because they can't handle the heat. And that's ridiculous and bad.

There's another YouTube video before that, and then since then, it's turned into a pretty big kerfuffle, technical term, about whether or not these Macs have the right thermal signature inside, and if they can actually handle the new Intel chips that are inside them. We are still working on our review. I will tell you that I'm having a hard time replicating these thermal results, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong.

In fact, Dave 2D is very well respected, knows the shit. So I have no reason to think he screwed that benchmark up. I just haven't been able to get it on my end. And there's also like other benchmarking stuff going on because unless you're in a lab, benchmarking is going to be, you know, variable and weird. And you're going to get strange outlier results all the time and you never really know. And so it's complicated. And so a bunch of people are running benchmarks.

We're watching what everybody else is doing. We're trying to run our own. We reached out to Cinebench to be like, hey, is this thing accurate? And they're like, you know, we don't. I think, I forget the exact quote. But it was basically like, we're not really optimized for these new MacBooks on this benchmarking test. So that's the relatively short version.

Big question. I can give you some of our results. Have you put your laptop in a freezer? Yeah, that's the other thing that he did is he, you know, it was too hot. So he put it in a freezer and it ran way faster and way better in a freezer. which to be clear like again I am not saying that there's not a problem here and I'm not trying to like solely defend Apple here but you want your processor to throttle itself if it gets too hot you just that is what you want it to do because otherwise it will degrade the processor or break it and so it makes sense that if you put it in a freezer the thing will be able to run hotter because it's in a freezer and so like you would expect it to be able to run better and faster in a freezer than not so there's this that. But that doesn't mean that it's not running too hot on the other side. The horrible takeaway would be if this laptop, thanks to throttling in the same temperature room, is running

slower than the last gen top of the line. That seems to be what some people are finding in their tests, that it is running slower than last year's MacBook because of this heat issue. I'm having a really tough time coming to like a solid conclusion here that I can feel comfortable calling a review. So that's why I'm, if I seem like I'm being a little skittish here, it's because the worst, the worst result you can get in any science experiments isn't it succeeded or it failed. The worst result is inconclusive. This data doesn't tell me anything. And I feel like in our testing, that's kind of where we are. Because number one, you know, we're finding on Premiere Pro, which isn't really optimized for the Mac, and it is always slower on the Mac that it is in Windows,

we're only seeing like a, we were only seeing like a 10% bump over a two-year-old MacBook Pro, which seems terrible, but then we ran a way more intensive test that was like much harder on it. And then it got up to like a 50% bump. Final Cut Pro 10, like 50% speed improvement over older laptops, like time after time after time. But then, you know, you sit there and you watch the Intel Power gadget and like watch the processor temperature go up and watch the frequency kind of start getting spiky and weird. And you're just staring at it. And you're like, is this out of bounds? Is this completely normal?

Is this not normal at all? And it's just, it's super hard to really know without doing a bunch of, bunch of stuff over and over again. As far as I understand, the newest generation of Intel processors, like in the high end,

have like a kind of like a, a burst mode. Yep. Like they have a high peak clock speed, but they can't, none of them can sustain it. Right. Are you talking about turbo boost or beyond that?

I think it's like extra turbo. Nitro. More turbo. Give me that, Noss. Well, so here's the big question for me. And, Deeter, I said this to you the other day when we, like, Deeter, we're on the phone at midnight. Deere, was like, this whole, this whole thing is upside down, because all this stuff was breaking. It is shocking.

The one thing Apple is better at than almost anybody is managing thermals. Like, they are very, very good at it. And they're, I mean, they are. Because they don't put it. anything inside of the computer. They literally put themselves in a quote unquote thermal corner with a Mac Pro. And the

most recent generations of the MacBook Pro have had a sort of a reputation of not being super great for thermals relative to big, thick windows machines. They have been historically very good at thermals, but there has been a troubling trend. And the problem

is getting clear judgment on that is super hard because people like, well, Apple only cares about making thin stuff. And then you end up in forums and you just watch people sniping at each other. And so, I don't know, I am not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt of being awesome at thermals with pro devices in the past year or two. Here's what I believe in my heart. I'm sorry I'm a filibustering. Give me my, you are filibustering. Yeah, yeah. Well, how about the two people of force, sir? The Mac Pro, I cannot believe I'm defending this thing, was a genius thermal device if they had predicted

the rise of GPUs. Who could have known? So I'll put it out there. It was a very well-designed device for an alternate reality that didn't come that as. Well, actually, that's what I believe in my heart. What I believe deep in my heart is that this MacBook Pro, and the one, since this generation with the touchbar and everything, was designed with the belief that Intel would deliver 10 nanometer chips that would have a lower heat signature, and then these things would be,

amazing. But then Intel didn't, and then Apple was stuck in a weird box where they have to decide, are they going to go with the hot chips or not? And if we go at the hot chips, will this laptop be able to handle them? And so then the question becomes, if that's true, the question becomes, is, you know, it's Intel's fault for not delivering the chips and making, you know, too hot chips, sure. But should Apple have redesigned this laptop to accommodate the thermals before shipping it? The answer clearly is probably yes, but, you know, I don't know. Like, in my, heart, I think that what they shipped this year is not what they believe they were going to ship two years ago. Two years ago, I think they believe that they were going to be shipping this thing with a brand new generation of Intel chips.

Yeah. That's what I think. I'm beating a dead horse with this. But this is, again, just Apple's, like, yes, it is really nice that MacBook Pros are thin. But some people need a very powerful computer that is also portable. Yeah. And so it sucks if you're Apple that you have to make a computer that's a little thicker. and now you're sad, and all the design team is just crying.

But some pros need to do things. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm giving Apple the benefit. You have to imagine they test these things. They have a bunch of benchmarks on their web page, which presumably are based in some real testing that occurred, not just Johnny I being like, I don't like how long that bar is. Please make it shorter. Right? Like, presumably that was real testing.

Presumably they did thermal testing. This isn't, these are not the things that Apple cheaps out on. Right. So the benefit of that I'm willing to give them is there are some edge cases that you just simply can't predict that the second you release it to people that will immediately come out and something will happen. But at the same time, you've got to give yourself more headroom in these pro products. Who's going to find those edge cases faster anybody? It's a bunch of pros with wacky workflows. So it's like, why don't you just give yourself the space for that to happen?

And I don't understand. And then on top of it, a bunch of stuff with a keyboard happened this week. Oh, my God. Where an Apple support document came out that confirmed the membrane is to protect it from dust. I fixed it as like spraying it with paint. And they're like, yep, it's to protect it from dust. And it's like, why don't you just tell us or even just whisper it? Like, to, you know, a trusted person who's going to say it's, right?

Like, why are you playing all these games of this laptop where you literally, like, don't know what's true and not about the laptop based on what Apple is telling you? That's, like, a huge mistake if you're selling a pro, a $6,500 computer that they have to depend on. And I do want to, I've been thinking about this a little bit because I feel like I've complained a lot about Apple's products lately. But it is scary to buy a non-apple laptop because you go. on the forums, you go in comments, you look around, and tons of people have random things break on their laptop. And with a typical PC laptop, you're even in a worse scenario than you are with Apple because there's no genius bar.

But yeah, if Apple loses that edge of being thought of as like the obvious choice if you want something that you can assume will be reliable for a few years, that's not good. Yeah, especially at this level of expense. So we'll see. Dieter, you're going to keep testing it. Hopefully Apple says something soon. If you're listening to this, like, we're still planning on publishing next week. We'll see if it gets pushed back. And I'm not promising to provide, like, the definitive benchmark answer.

Because I don't own a lab. We're going to do real serious testing. We have been. We're going to continue to do it. But we base our review off of, like, the entire experience, not just, like, the length of a bar on a benchmark graph. So I don't want to raise expectations too much. But I do want to, like, start to get a,

a sense of how real this thermal problem is. And I, yeah, it's inconclusive from my personal test. There's a bunch of people that are pretty unhappy about it. I tweeted this. I'm just going to repeat it because I'm so proud of myself. Because there's logic gates inside of chips, I really want this to be called gate gate. Teeter. And we're going to move on. Here's what I'm hoping for from your review. I'm hoping that you're like, yes, the processor throttles itself to almost Unusable levels constantly, but that is more than made up for by the addition of True Tone to the touchbar. We actually have only, we've only turned True Tone on to, like, prove, show that it works. You can't see it on the touchbar.

Like, it's impossible. Like, maybe you can see it on the screen, but then we turn it off immediately because Viren's a video editor and needs accurate color. Yeah, it's real. What if you just want a word process on the 60? There are people out there. That's right. They're going to do it. They're never going to hit them.

throttle. They're going to be great. All right. Roku this week announced new wireless speakers. They're a little bit strange. They only work with Roku TVs. So you like bring them in your house, you push the button, it finds a TV automatically sinks through TV. That's cool. They don't even work with like Roku boxes? No, just the TVs. Because the TVs are on the software. And then Roku is very proud that they've solved some like latency issue because they've got the software on the TV, they've got the software on the TV. They've got the software of the speakers. But if you plug something into the back of the TV, like a game console where they can't. manage latency, they'll just turn off and you'll play your games through the TV speakers.

Why is this an unsolved problem? That's what they said. So I tweeted this seem insane. Roku got a hold of me and said, we want to talk to you about the speakers in the future of Roku. Honestly, they also told me the product team was looking into the input situation. So I didn't bring it up with the CEO because I doubt the CEO was like, yes, I did make it horrible. We talked about a whole bunch of other stuff.

Check it out. Anthony Wood, he was great. So I'm just going to read the ZipRecruiter ad real quick, and then we're going to do our interview with Anthony Wood. Here we go. This episode, the Vergecast brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's hard to find qualified candidates. It takes a long time. It takes too many applicants when you have a job open.

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through the site within the first day. With results like that, it's no one of the ZipRecruiter is one of the highest rated hiring sites in America. And right now, Vergecast listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address, ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. That is ZipRecruiter.com slash Verge, V-E-R-G-E. ZipRecruiter, it is the smartest way to hire. So we're here with Andy Wood, the CEO of Roku. Thank you for joining us, Anthony.

Thanks for having me on. So you guys announce some new speakers. I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the future of Roku. But real quick, I think most people think of Roku is still kind of like a startup, like an insurgent, but you've been there for a while. Roku's been there for a while. You're a public company now.

Tell us a little bit about the journey, like where the company is now. Yeah, well, we're the leading streaming platform in the U.S., you know, with almost 21 million active users, you know, quickly a little bit about Roku, we build a purpose-built operating system or distribution platform for television, you know, via the internet. We distribute that platform by licensing to TV companies. And actually, you know, at this point, in Q1, one in four smart TVs sold in the U.S. ran the Roku operating system. So that's been very successful for us, and it's still growing. You know, we sell a leading streaming player lineup. And that's how we distribute our operating system. But, you know,

what people probably, many people don't really realize is we make all almost a lot of all of our gross profit, our, you know, our money from advertising and content distribution. So we're really a service and advertising business at heart. And, you know, if you just look at the history, we, we ship the first Netflix player in 2008. And since then, we just had steady, continual growth as we've had more content, you know, we've lowered prices. And as, you know, more and more people cut the cord and switched streaming to watch TV, we went public almost a year ago. Things are going great. So that's actually really surprising that you make most of your money on content distribution

advertising. You know, I ask people for questions on Twitter. I was actually one of the most popular questions is, can I just pay a fee to turn off the ads? But it sounds like that's a big piece of your business puzzle. Well, I mean, we have the most streaming content of any streaming platform and there's every conceivable business model is available. All right. So, you know, if you want to watch Netflix, there's no ads on Netflix.

You know, you can pay a little bit extra and have no ads. So Amazon Prime, there's no ads. But other content, there are ads. You know, YouTube, news, the Rokea channel. And then there's transactional like Tvod where you pay to watch a movie, you rent a movie. So it just depends on the customer, you know, if they want to watch ads or if they don't want to watch ads, how much they want to pay. You know, all those options are available. But for your revenue, when you say content distribution and ads, who pays you for content distribution?

What does that deal look like? Well, when you're a content distribution platform in a television business, you make money distributing content. You know, you provide, we provide a lot of services or our content partners, things to help them build subscriber bases, promote their content, you know, let customers know about what's available to watch. And all those activities, we do get paid for. So, you know, it's kind of an exchange of value. We help content distributors find customers and sign up customers and promote their content. And we get paid for that. In terms of advertising, one of the ways, you know, we get paid from content partners is we get a share of their ad inventories.

We take all that ad inventory, that video advertiser. and we aggregate it, and then we sell targeted ads. You know, there's a large number of Americans now that you can only reach on Roku. So if you're a TV advertiser and, you know, you want to reach consumers while they're in the living room watching TV, those consumers are shifting to streaming. And as they shift to streaming, advertisers are following them. So building out a big next generation TV ad platform is an important part of work for business. That's really interesting.

Honestly, I don't think most people listening to the Vurchaster or buying a Roku product really understand that that's where your revenue comes from. Is that why, is that why you're able to to keep your hardware costs so little? I mean, you have, you have devices at like $19. Is that part of the puzzle? You just want to get them out there? Yeah, exactly. That's right. I mean, we don't really make money. We don't certainly don't make enough money to support our engineering organization and our operations by, you know, the cost of money to run the Roku service. We don't, that's not paid for by the hardware. That's paid for by our ad and content business. Super interesting. So you're expanding, speaking the hardware business, you're expanding that.

That's actually how we ended up on the show today. You put out a line of speakers. And I'm very interested in what Roku is doing with this new line of TECOR. So you've got speakers that connect only to the Roku TVs over Roku Connect. Just tell me about them. What's the play there? What's the idea there? Right. Well, I'm going to say, we've got speakers only connects Roku TVs.

I prefer to think of it as we have Roku TVs that every Rookie TV owner now has access to an awesome audio option that they want it. So, you know, every piece of hardware we sell is in the service of building our installed base so that, you know, so that we can execute on our business model, which is to make money through advertising and content distribution. So speakers are no different. For us, one of our big goals as a company is to be the best TV platform. And we are, you know, we went from over the last handful of years, we went from 0% market share to, like I said, Q1 this year, 1 in 4 smart TVs sold.

The US ran our platform, our software, our operating system. And we think that there's a lot of room for innovation in TVs. So we spent a lot of time thinking about how can we make the TV experience better for our customers. And when you start thinking about that problem, one of the big issues consumers have is audio. Like, you know, movies have, you know, big screen movies and TV shows are mixed with great audio. But most TV, all TVs probably can't actually reproduce the audio. I mean, as TVs get thinner and thinner, the physics are just hard for speakers. The speakers and the TVs get smaller and it's hard for them to reproduce good audio.

You know, it's one of the reasons, so TV audio doesn't sound that great compared to, say, a movie theater. And it doesn't, it's often hard to even understand what people are saying because part of the dialogue, range for males is cut off by most TV speakers. But adding a sound bar or a home theater system, certainly to a TV is complicated and hard for most people. So most people don't do it. And so one of the things, some of the problems we're trying to solve is make it super simple to connect better audio to your TV. It should be, you know, should be as simple as just plugging in a couple speakers and they auto-connect to your TV and you don't do anything differently with your remote control, except now that you have better sound at your TV. And so that's the reason we're releasing the

Roku TV wireless speakers is we're trying to make the Roku TV the best TV it can be. We're trying to drive innovation there. And that will cause more people who want to use Roku TVs, and that will cause, you know, us to be able to sell more ads, frankly, in the long run. So that's why we're doing it. We're trying to make TVs better. And we're not trying to make money selling speakers. Yeah.

You know, one of the main questions I got, you people see speakers. They first question, and this is a bunch of people asked me on Twitter. Are you going to add Spotify support? You know, you guys are a TV platform. I'm sure you haven't thought about a Spotify app. But once you add speakers to the mix, people want to just play music through them. Is that something you're thinking about? Absolutely.

I mean, Spotify specifically is not currently on our platform, but it used to be. And I can't talk about the future, but we would love to have Spotify back on Roku, and you can assume that we're actively working on that. But in general, the way we think about speakers for TV are that the primary function is to work just, I'm watching TV. I want it to sound great. I want it to be easier to understand what people say. I want the better dynamic range.

I want better bass. I want it to sound good. So that's the first thing. But people do listen to a lot of music using their TV. It's, you know, music apps on Roku, which we do have a lot, everything from Pandora to IHeart Radio to, you know, Sirius XM, YouTube, YouTube, I mean, there's lots of music apps on Roku, and people do use them to watch, to listen to music. And so, and especially with speakers, you know, better speakers connects at your TV,

that'll probably even be more common. So we have built features into the products to make it easier to listen to music. So, for example, it has Bluetooth. I mean, it's a simple feature, but it has Bluetooth. So you can listen to, you know, any music that's on your phone using Bluetooth. We also bundle a new kind of voice remote we call the Roku Touch, which is a battery-powered remote, kind of a puck-sized small remote that you can put on, say, your kitchen counter.

And if you want to listen to music, you can press the button and say, you know, play country music. Yeah, this is the first step. Are you envisioning a larger line of home products? I mean, are you envisioning a full wireless speaker ecosystem, you know, an atmos system? Are you thinking that big? Well, the way we think about it is we want to be sort of the understanding. underlying fabric that connects everything, all the audio stuff, especially to your TV. So we announced

the CES a protocol called Roku Connect, which is a wireless protocol for connecting audio devices in your home, including to your TV. And that's the protocol that our new WROC TV wireless speakers use. They use this Roku Connect protocol to, you know, to connect automatically to the TV. But we also showed other features of CES like connecting multi-room audio, being able to start listening to audio on my TV and then walk into the kitchen or a different room and continue listening to the TV show, you know, in that other room. through wireless audio streaming. So we definitely envision that TVs will evolve to have what we call home media networks

and that, you know, we want to, through protocols like Roku Connect, we want to tie everything together. So, I mean, that's great. I'll be honest with you. That is, it's an ecosystem. And everyone is racing to put that ecosystem in your home, right? I mean, you have, I would call them frenemies, right? Like, Amazon Prime videos on the Roku box, but they want to sell fire TVs.

They've always got Alexa devices. They do a full home audio. integration, Google Play movies, Google obviously makes Google Play Home, they make the Chromecast. How do you compete with those ecosystem vendors who are obviously important providers of video on your platform, but are also making competitive devices and ecosystems? Well, in terms of audio and voice, I mean, we're looking for ways to work with those companies' products. And our strength really is that there's a lot of rookie TVs being sold every day and a lot of households that have rookie TVs. And so starting with the TV and making it easy to expect,

van from there. And then once you've done that, you know, connecting with other devices in your home makes perfect sense. But we're not, we're not necessarily looking to do that, you know, a exclusion of other devices you might have in your home. Our goal is to be an open platform work as many companies as possible. But there's a lot we can do, you know, within our ecosystem and to make it. And again, our goal is to make the Roku TV the best TV there is. In terms of Google and Amazon, I mean, just generally, we've been competing with them for a long time. Like you said, they're friend of me's. You know, actually, if you just look at smart TVs, for example, Google started shipping Android TVs before we started shipping Roki TV, but they have very small markets here.

We've got almost the entire market for licensed OSs. You know, Amazon has TVs, but Roki TVs sell extremely well versus those TVs. And I think it's because, you know, those companies have taken Android and ported to the TV, which is fundamentally a phone operating system. And we built a TV operating system from the ground up, and it just gives a better experience on TVs, lower costs, better value, we have more content. So we've been competing with them for a long time, and we've been competing very effectively. So I want to ask you, you keep talking about the Roku TV, which is an interesting conceptual model, because there isn't a Roku TV.

You have a bunch of partners to make TVs, some very well-reviewed TVs. I think everyone who thinks about TVs will just tell you to go buy one of the TCL Roku TVs. They're great. But they're not your TVs. Are you thinking that you're going to make your own TV, or are you happy with the partner relationship? or it seems like your business is giving the software to other vendors, but when you say the Roku TV, it's actually a long line of products from a variety of people. Right. Yeah, that's absolutely right. We're not going to make TVs.

We're going to continue with our licensing program. You know, when I say Roku TV, that's what we call it. And that's what we call our reference design. Maybe that's confusing. I mean, when I use it the way you might say Android, you know, the way Google. So do they ship your reference design? Do you do all the work and they get all the glory? Or are they doing customizations on top?

of it. You know, we work with, I think, over 10 different TV brands at this point with hundreds of TV models and they do a lot of work. But yes, we are a TV company. We design TV. So we design the hardware. We design the software is a reference design. So we turned over to the TV OEM or the factory or the brand. And then they actually productized it. But we'll help them with that. You know, we help them bring up the TV factories. We help them, you know, with whatever they need help with. So we're sort of their support organization. so we provide the reference design, the software, and support, they build the TVs, they sell them. Once they're sold, and then in retail, we also provide retail support. So we help with retail marketing. And then once the customer buys a TV, then we take over all the software updates. So we provide, you know, regular reoccurring software updates, adding new features to all the Roku TVs. And so all the Rookie TVs in the field do run the same software version. There's no real customization other than hardware customization.

Yeah, and that is a model that, you know, we've seen many platform vendors. try to enact and it has proven harder in most cases than it seems like it's working for you. What's made it successful for you that you can actually hold everybody to the same software version on the same cadence? We do it for that. That's the trick. It's not a bad answer. Well, it's the same.

It's the Microsoft strategy, right? Like all Windows PCs run basically the same operating system version because Microsoft does the updates. That's true. I guess I'm thinking in mobile where you see the fragmentation. Right. So in the mobile world, you know, Android generally doesn't do this. software updates, which is why there's a lot of fragmentation. So TVs, to me, it seems like buying the smart TV is the future.

Like most people are going to buy a smart TV. They're going to get whatever OS, like you said, a lot of them are getting Roku OSs is. But they're going to get that OS. It's going to have most of the apps they need. The desire to buy a standalone box is dropping. Do you see the market turning in favor of smart TVs versus boxes, or do you think the boxes are going to continue to be a strong market? We think both are going to continue to be a strong market for a long time.

I mean, you know, if I have to choose, which I don't, I don't choose, but if I could say, okay, if I could choose for a customer where they're going to buy a Roku TV or Roku streaming player, you know, a box or a stick, we would pick TVs because, you know, TVs is a more complete solution for the customer where we have, you know, more touch points with the customer. And the TVs are growing faster than players, but players is still growing well nicely. And it's, we saw, you know, a lot of players every year. And especially as we start expanding into more internet, internet. international countries, players will continue to be important. And, you know, we sell a lot of streaming players to people that want to upgrade their smart TV. You know, maybe they've got a Samsung smart TV, which might have a great picture, but doesn't have the channel that they want to watch. And so they get a, they get a rookie streaming player to go with it. Yeah. I got a lot of questions about international expansion. So the first one was there's something going on to Mexico where the court said, these boxes are being used for piracy. You appealed recently. They said, nope, can't sell

them there. What's the status in Mexico? Mexico is, there was a lower court ruling that was brought by Cablevision, a Mexican cable company that said that Roku players cannot be sold in Mexico. They can still be used and we have lots of users in Mexico. But this court ruling said we can't sell players in Mexico, which we believe is a complete violation of Mexican law. And so we're obviously fighting that and expect to have that ruling overturned at some point. You know, cable vision sort of made the case, which I would say is a pretext, that Roku players should be banned because they're, They're used a lot for piracy. But it turns out actually that Roku players, I mean, all open platforms have pirate content on them. But pirate content on Roku players is actually very low. I mean, worldwide, if you look at sort of the usage on a Roku player worldwide, 99.5% of the streaming hours can be attributed to channels that are probably not pirate channels. And there's about half a percent that might be pirate channels. And then if you look in Mexico, it's higher.

It's 8% of the content could possibly be pirate. And 92% is probably not pirated. But that's actually very low for Mexico. Piracy is very popular in Mexico. And it's lower than other competing platforms like Android, for example. So we think that actually we're one of the best citizens when it comes to piracy, and it's just a pretext. It's a cable company in Mexico doesn't like streaming as a competition and is using any method they can't.

We think we'll prevail eventually in that. Other countries, a lot of people ask me about India. Are you thinking about pushing into India? Do you have a timeline there? We don't have any timeline. We know we haven't announced India as a country we're going into yet. But I mean, what I will say is that streaming is a global activity, and it's something that we think is worldwide.

And that's our we aspire to be a worldwide platform company. Yeah. So you guys are also moving into some original content. It's the thing you're starting to do. You've got your own channel. You're obviously competing with huge players, massive investments in content. You know, Netflix spends billions of dollars.

Amazon sends billions of dollars. Apple, I think, is. allocated a billion dollars towards content. How do you think about that, just that investment and where you want it to go over time? Right. So we actually are not producing original content. So I'll explain what the Roku channel is, but we don't have any current plans to produce original content for the reasons you just said. It's a multi-billion dollar business, you know, game. And also, we're an open platform for distributing other people's content. So we, you know, we are a content distribution platform. We have lots of originals on Roku by Netflix and Amazon and

Hulu and others. Now, the Roku channel is a channel that's our own and operated channel, but its goal is to provide another outlet to distribute content on Roku. So, content on the Roku channel comes from two primary sources. One is the biggest source is actually companies that already have channels on Roku, but syndicate that content into the Roku channel so it gets to provide, you know, it's just another way to attract viewers to watch their content. And then we also have studios that own content that distribute directly. onto the Roku channel. Viewing on the Roku channel is generally incremental.

So if a company has their own channel, plus they have something in the Roku channel, the Roku channel is generally incremental. So for us, it's all about how can we make it easier for consumers to find content, especially free and supported content? That's what we're doing with the Roku channel. It's not competitive with our channel partners.

It's just another outlet for them to distribute their content. So do you have a team of curators, editors, programming professionals who are picking and choosing, or it's, hey, do you want some incremental views on the show? Put it over here. There is an editorial team, but it's moving increasingly to algorithms, to, you know, a lot of recommendations.

Okay. So you're not, like, aggressively programming it and promoting things. You're saying, put stuff here in the Roku channel will promote it inside of the channel and potentially on the main interface? Yeah, inside the channel. So, I mean, we promote the Roku channel to drive the users to it. And then once they're in the Roku channel, you know, it's increasingly moving to recommendations based on your personal preferences on what's popular.

And so it's just another outlet for content owners to, merchandise and promote their content. Yeah. Okay, I have one last big question, and then I want to do a little lightning around of some of these Twitter questions. The last big question is just about the design of the interface, quite honestly. You did mention that, you know, your competitors are repurposing mobile operating systems. Some of them are real flashy because they have, you know, they're putting a lot of horsepower on their boxes, and then they're running these full OSs with these graphics layers. Yours is still very simple, and it's pretty direct. I think a lot of people appreciate it,

But do you think about the big redesign that you need a flashier, more interactive TV experience with, you know, that enables different kinds of viewing experiences? Or are you kind of dead ahead, we're going to get you to watching what you watch and get out of the way? Well, there's two. I've got two answers with that question. The first is that we put a lot of effort into making a super simple UI, and we're continually working on the UI and testing different concepts. And you're right. Sometimes we'll get like, we'll get dinged for like, oh, our UI is not flashy or we haven't updated it. We do update it. People just don't notice because we do. trying hard to not, you know, to not make it jarring. And the result of that is we have an incredibly simple UI that gets awesome MPS scores. I think we have the best, you know, the best ratings of any of our competitors. People confuse like Flashy with great, simple, easy to use. And it's hard, you know, it's a challenge actually to stay focused on continuing to build a simple UI the customers like to use. And so that's what we do. So it's purposeful. It's not like we're, you know, didn't notice that competitors sometimes have flashier UIs.

We just think that they're flashier not in a good way. And then the second answer to the question is, and also, well, just to add to that last one, and it's an app-based interface. So it's primarily about exposing apps like Netflix and the Roku channel and Hulu. Now, there are 5,000 apps on Roku and growing, and that's too many for consumers to go digging around, looking for shows to watch in.

And so we do think the future is a different UI, which is more content-focused, more recommendation, focused. And we have that UI. It's called the Roku Channel. So the Roku Channel is our sort of sandbox for building a next generation, you know, content first user interface. And someday, you know, when we think it's ready and good enough and has enough content and it'll probably, you know, become the home screen. But that's not going to happen right away. I mean, and do all your channel partners, are they ready for that future where you're sort of disaggregating their interface and putting their content remixing it into a new UI.

We'll always have apps. And even if we, even, you know, if the Roku channel became more of the home screen, I don't mean literally it would become as is the home screen. I mean that the recommendation engine would become part of the home screen. But there would still be, there would still be apps. You know, we're never going to, at least we don't have any plans, they're not allowed partners to have apps if that's what they want to do. Well, no, I'm just looking at, again, some of your competitors, you know, Apple has the TV app,

but Netflix isn't in it because they want you, they want you to be in their interface. Like, do you foresee that same kind of. challenge coming up. Oh yeah, sure, absolutely. So the big guys like Netflix are going to want to have their own apps and their own user interface. But once you get past, you know, Netflix and a few others, you can actually get more viewing for your content if you, you know, let someone like Roku do the merchandising of your content for you. I mean, that's what we do for a living. So we're better at it than most of our app partner. So there is this dynamic where I think some apps that sort of the mid-tier and long tail will have to choose between sort of writing their app or an app

or actually getting more viewing by being part of, you know, someone else's content for STY. Yeah. But we'll always allow both options. Okay. I want to do this light, but I have one more kind of bigger question here. What you don't have right now is integration with one of the bigger voice assistants.

So, you know, obviously Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple's got Siri. Are you going to have to do that? Or can you build an entertainment, you know, TV-focused voice assistant that lives away from those things? Well, our belief is that, you know, voice assistants are great for the products they're in. We don't think voice is the primary.

navigation for television. What voice is great for is when you know what you want. Like you know you want to listen to the Beatles, then voice is great. You know, you can say, play the Beatles. But if you want to browse around, look for a movie to watch or a TV show and you don't know what you want to watch, then voice is not helpful. So for TV, we think voices is, you know, for things like search, it's useful. So that's why we have voice remotes with voice input.

And, you know, we announced the CES where we're coming out with our own voice assistant focused on media playback. So, you know, hey Roku, search for movies, starring Tom Cruise. Those kinds of features will come to our platform. And then for music, voice is important. So, you know, like I said, we just announced the Roku touch voice remote. And you can say, you know, play country music and it'll play country music. Okay, here's three of the most popular questions.

You support Dolby Vision on the TVs, but you don't support Dolby Vision on the boxes. Our viewers refer to it as all of the lights. They want all the lights to light up. Are you going to add Dolby Vision to the boxes? Dolly Vision. We don't announce future products. Okay. The absolute most popular question, are you ever going to let people order a remote with custom shortcut buttons? I'm not kidding. By far, the most popular question.

I'm sure you're not kidding. I was just laughing because we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could do that. We were thinking like could we put e-ink displays on the buttons? But anyway, we don't talk about future products. We do have the Roku Touch I was telling you about before, has three preset buttons that you can program to do whatever you want. So that's pretty close. Okay, and then last one, this is my favorite one. What is your, Anthony Wood, what is your personal home theater setup?

You know, I had a pretty complicated home theater setup like 15 years ago, and I just threw it out because it was too complicated. I got tired of trying to use it. So right now, I don't have one, but I'm going to get some Roku TV wireless speakers. I'm really looking forward because they sound awesome. That was a layout. That was a layoff. That was a pure layout. All right.

You don't have like a seven, you don't have like a crazy TV guy, 7.4.12? No. So right now you're listening to TV speakers and you're going to get your... Yeah, no, I decided it was just too hard. I got tired of the remotes. It was just too much work. Yeah. No wonder you put out speakers are solving your own problems.

The true story of innovation exists. Finally, I've got a good home theater system. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the Vodcast. Really appreciate it. I'm excited to get these speakers and try them out. I'm excited. I mean, I'm a Roku customer. I'm excited to watch the ecosystem expand.

And it's been really great talking to you. All right. All right, Paul. You. Every week, my man. What's it called? It's always called. Fold the phone.

Who is Fold the phone sponsored by? Well, I'm glad you asked. Fold the phone is a professional segment of the Vergecast, and it's brought you by Darn Tough Vermont Sox. They're back. If iPod Sox were made by Darn Tough, they'd probably still be a thing. That's pretty good.

Is the ad copy that I have been given by Darnock. That shows you the deep cuts that these people are aware. Made in the USA and unconditionally guaranteed for life. Use promo code Verge at checkout for 20% off your first order at darn tough. com. Very good. All right. Fold the phone.

Fold the phone. It just occurred to me that darn tough is actually a pun. Like darn. Just now I realized it. Darning wool? Yeah. That's pretty good. Continue.

My God. Samsung will reportedly launch a foldable phone next year. So this is a Wall Street Journal report. Seven-inch display can bend in half to transform it into a wallet shape. We have been seeing folding phone rumors and patents for like my whole life. Yeah. And I just want, I'm just ready. I think it's a really, really good time for a weird form factor just to do something, do something bonkers.

Yeah. What's that? ZTE has that kind of folding phone, and it's cool. Yeah. I think Samsung could do something fun. I feel it could be like a hot. What we need is like a razor moment. We haven't had a phone that's like so bonkers to look at.

Well, I feel like Samsung, they've been curving the display. Uh-huh. And where they haven't gotten is just curving it all the way over that edge, right? So the ZTE phone is like two screens and you fold them and they got a border. Right. Samsung is like, they just fold it and it unfolds into a flat sheet that's a single screen. I'm like, I'm here for that. So the screen goes all the way around to the back and then you look, because that's the big thing is actual flexible display technology.

None of them can do like a crease, like a piece of paper. So it would go around. It would be a radius. But like they're already kind of doing a radius. So you can see it. As near as I can tell from like some of the renders and guesses at what Andromeda was going to be is that there would be two screens. two screens that would, but they would both float down. This is the Microsoft career thing?

Yeah, the Microsoft one. Yeah. And so the hinge would be, there'd be no black border between them because they'd technically be two screens, but they'd be so close to each other when you unfold it because the screens would bend in on the inside, if that makes sense. But this sounds like it's a single screen, which is better if they could do it. And it's been, like you said, just years that we've been waiting for one of these things to actually appear.

And it's going to run Fire OS. with YouTube. The whole, the dream is alive. That's super exciting. There's also S9. There's a little bit of extra phone news. There's S9 leaks. Galaxy Note 9 leaks.

S9 exists. Note 9 is leaking out. So there's, we're coming up. You know, it's midsummer. It's kind of the doldrums. But we're coming up on that period. That's exciting. We reviewed the Vivo next with the fingerprint set.

I mean. The pop out camera? Yeah. I'm so here for the weird hardware moment to be back. The dream phone. But yeah, I just think you need something that you can't tell, you can tell that it's not just like every device. Something bonkers, which I guess Vivo next. All right.

And then two last things. One, I want to remind people that Go 90 is dead. It's important to me. Comcast got out of the way They withdrew their bid for Fox So Disney is going to buy Fox Bring those X-Men right into the MCU I just

For the low price of Billions of dollars 60-some billion dollars Google couldn't earn that in 12 days Yeah He nailed it Oh, Beth I did the bell

That's going to be a thing like these companies are getting bigger and they're going to war with streaming services so you're going to see Disney build that streaming service for those assets. At the same time... Because they get Hulu. Or they get controlling interesting Hulu.

It seems like it, yeah. At the same time, Walmart, this is my favorite little. Walmart is going to try to turn Voodoo into a Netflix competitor for $8 a month. I use Voodoo because it's HD streams are higher quality than almost any of those

HD streams. And they have Marvel movies in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, which no one else does. So I'm like a Voodoo fan. They're cheap. They're good. High quality.

I think I might be the only one. But I, it's like I'm in that moment where like I have a secret and I would prefer if they didn't try to turn it into like a bigger company. Like just leave this thing I like alone. But we'll see. But you can see all these companies. The race to like build the content service is here.

Who did you guys bet on? I think one of the interesting things was with the, they were talking, AT&T, somebody from. AT&T was talking with that whole controversy of like they're going to ruin HBO. The idea that there's, in the long run, there's going to be maybe six, maybe four. It feels like Netflix is a shoe in. It'll be Netflix. Whatever AT&T's Warner Time, HBO thing ends up being called DirecTV something,

Hulu, I think, is either in or they're going to like completely implode. I don't know why I think that, but there's enough stuff happening with mergers and acquisitions and mechanations at the top level, and all of them have such a stake in Hulu. I just worry that, like, someone is going to get a hold of Hulu and just screw it up. But that's on the list. And then, you know, crackle.

YouTube. Yeah. Like, it's in that conversation, right? Like, I think that's sort of a, I don't know how that will break. But I think what we're seeing now is there's, you know, Anthony Wood was saying the Roku channel, on Roku is the sandbox for them to develop a content recommendation UI for the home screen. So eventually on some timeline, the Roku home screen will recommend content to you,

as opposed to just showing you a list of apps. I think everyone is headed in that direction where you turn on your TV, and it's showing you stuff it wants you to watch. And that it's like who owns that interface is really the ultimate question. And then that becomes another kind of bundle where now you're just paying Roku 12 bucks a month to get a channel guide. And, like, you see everyone's kind of weaving in and out of that. We're just reassembling a cable bundle. Like, who's going to own that in the end?

And the answer is the combination of Disney, AT&T, and Time Warner. Tim Armstrong will somehow be involved. Timmy. All right. Take the Oaf. I'd be so proud of him he spends Oath back out of Verizon. And he, like, sells it to, like, Sprint. Like, he just keeps doing it.

All right. That's it for this week. We ran a little long. Thank you for sticking with us. to Megan and Bijan for this week in internet culture. We'll have them back. We're continuing to experiment with these segments, so let us know what you think. Go listen to Converge with Casey Newton.

Another great episode this week. Doing great in the charts. Tell Casey love him. We didn't talk about Facebook this week. But again, Casey has a great newsletter called The Interface. If you want to get into that. And Mark Zuckerberg was on Recode Decode with Karras Swisher. Go listen to that. Recode Media with Peter Kafka is also excellent in the Vox Media Podcast Network.

You can tweet at us. I'm Reckless, Paul, Future Paul, Dieter's at Backlon. please tweet Dieter your MacBook benchmarks. Just whatever MacBook you got. Whatever year, whatever generation, he would like to see your benchmarks. He's at Backlon. That is it for us.

Thank you so much. Rock and roll. Paul. Promocode.