The Vergecast - Google Pixel Fold review, Microsoft vs FTC, and Congress’ child safety bills

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of the console wars:  02:42 - David Pierce chats with Verge senior editor Tom Warren about the five-day trial between Microsoft and the FTC that will determine the future of its $68.7 billion proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard.  FTC v. Microsoft: all the news from the big Xbox courtroom battle Has Xbox really lost the console wars?  Microsoft exec was ready to ‘go spend Sony out of business’ to strengthen Xbox 35:00 - Policy reporter Makena Kelly joins the show to explain what Congress is trying to do to address child safety online.  Texas bans kids from social media without parental consent New bill would add mandatory age verification to social networks 1:03:07 - The Verge’s Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert discuss our Google Pixel Fold review, and how it stacks up against other foldables and flippables.  Google Pixel Fold review: closing the gap  The Pixel Fold shows how far ahead Samsung’s folding phones are  Motorola Razr Plus review: the right moves Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Console Wars. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here on my back patio, pulling weeds out from between all of the bricks back here. You know, I really admire people who like gardening, and I kind of get why it could be cathartic and good and whatever, and I guess, like, yay, for people who have green thumbs. But, God, I hate this. I've tried putting bleach out here.

I've tried boiling water. I've tried baking soda. I've tried all the weed-be-gone stuff. I just want to, like, carpet-bomb this patio so nothing can ever live back here again. But I understand why that's a bad idea. If you have suggestions, though, or tips on how to make this a less horrible process,

I'm desperate, please. Anyway, in happier news, we have a great show for you today. We're going to talk about the FTC versus Microsoft trial and what it means for the future of video games, plus what we're learning about the PlayStation versus Xbox fight. There's been a lot of really good drama the last few days. Then we're going to talk about the latest attempts at passing legislation to protect kids online and why we haven't really been able to do that in more than two decades.

And after that, we'll talk about the pixel fold, the razor plus, and the folding, flipping future of smartphones. All that's coming in just a sec, but I promise myself I would at least weed this back corner before I get grumpy and quit. And I'm almost done. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to,

but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast.

We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. I did it.

Back corner's done. Only most of the patio to go. But let's get to it. As of right now, as you're hearing this, we're on day four of a supposedly five-day trial between Microsoft and the FTC, which will determine the future of Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Microsoft only has a few weeks left to get this deal done or renegotiated entirely.

The UK has already decided. decided to block the deal. And the last few days at this trial has basically been a parade of gaming executives dishing about the state of the industry. We've learned a ton from this trial. So we grabbed the verges Tom Warren to walk us through it and tell us what's coming next. Hi, Tom. Hello. Thank you for taking a break from like the deep, deep chaos of the last several days to do this with us. I need a break. I need a beer and a holiday and just everything. Okay, so this trial is not over. Like we said at the top, there's more to come. But let's rewind a little bit, because obviously this Microsoft Activision Blizzard thing has been going on for a while. Coming into the

trial, though, I don't want to start it all the way at the beginning, but I do want to go back six days ago. Coming into the trial, what was your sense of sort of the leading theory about what might happen? Obviously, this deal has been litigated elsewhere, which we should get into. There have been lots of questions. There have been sort of pieces of evidence coming out for a long time. was there kind of a running theory as to who was more likely to win this case coming in? Yeah, I think most people probably assume that the FTC will lose, but then most people assumed that the CMA, the competition markets authority in the UK, would approve the deal and they didn't.

Interesting. I think in this case, from following it from January 2022, when they first announced it to now, is like anything can happen. It's the main thing I've learned, anything and everything, because it's such a big acquisition. It's like Microsoft's biggest acquisition, and there's obviously regulators in the US want to crack down on big tech.

So this is like a test case almost for it. And yeah, I think the feeling is still that the FTC could potentially lose the case just because it's quite hard to win a preliminary injunction because you have to prove that there's going to be immediate harm or that this is going to cause anti-competitive effects if Microsoft goes and closes the deal. The reason it's all kind of,

have come about right now is because Microsoft has a cutoff date of July 18th for the terms of the deal of Activision. So there's a sense of a bit of rush there and a sense of some behind the scenes sort of Microsoft perhaps saying to the CMA, we're going to close over you and maybe potentially separate the exports business in the UK and the FTC hearing about that in press reports, panicking and filing the preliminary injunction. But I still feel like it's going to be difficult for them to win it. And on their sort of merits of what they're trying to argue. And I don't think they're, I think from what we've heard as well, did not necessarily make a good case. I think some of their arguments are really sound,

but some of them just aren't. And it's like those ones that aren't are the ones that the judges kind of feels like she's most interested in, like call of duty and stuff. Because obviously that's been a running thing over the past sort of a year or so as well. Yeah. So it seems to me, and I want to get into some of the specific things we found, because I think this case more than most has been full of like really fascinating sort of small details.

But it seems to me that the big story that this trial has turned into and I guess it's kind of two stories but it's also sort of one story is basically PlayStation versus Xbox and on one level it's about the competition between those two things and their respective consoles.

And then on the other level, it's about whether Nintendo is a real competitor to those two as well. So it's kind of who is winning this fight and then who is winning that larger fight and is that larger fight the same as this fight? And this is already against messy. But like, why did this become PlayStation versus Xbox so quickly and so aggressively?

Yeah, I mean, that's obviously emerged sort of with regulatory filings in the UK and some of the EU stuff that we've seen back and forth over the sort of past year as well, that Sony has obviously opposed the deal and has been very vocal about that in their filings. Which it would, right? Just people keep seeming surprised that Sony would be mad about Microsoft buying. Activision, but like, of course it is, right? Yeah, you'd assume so, right? But I think, so the day one sort of how it all went down on day one, was there was this bombshell email from Sony PlayStation Chief Jim Ryan, who apparently said a few days after the deal was announced by Microsoft

that, you know, it's not an Xbox exclusivity play and that he doesn't have to worry about Call of Duty being exclusive and that Microsoft's thinking bigger than that. And he basically said that in an email to a former Sony CEO, who he's obviously friends with and was known for years, who I think he was his previous boss decades ago. But yeah, so he had that sort of impression

that Jim Ryan knew all along that it wasn't about Xbox exclusivity and that Sony was never really worried about that all along. So that's kind of where Microsoft's coming out of it from. Sony's been moaning to regulators, all this sort of stuff. And then on day two, actually, we'll get back to the rest of day one, but on day two, we actually had an exchange, another exchange around that email where it was brought up again.

And then there was like dates where there was some email back and forth. And then basically Microsoft insinuating that Jim Ryan and Sony hadn't complained to regulators until after a specific email on August 26th of 2022. Now that date is kind of important because before then we hadn't heard about Sony being against the deal. There's obviously talk in the press and all that sort of stuff. But apparently Phil Spencer, so the Xbox chief sent a list of games that would be available on PlayStation to Jim Ryan. And it was not an impressive list of games. No, yeah, he wasn't impressed with the games because one of them was Overwatch, but Overwatch 2 wasn't on there.

Even though Overwatch 2 hadn't totally come out of that time, but whatever. But the point was that they didn't include all the games that they would expect to be on there. So that triggered the alarm bells. Just days after that email was sent, Phil Spencer said to the verge that called you, was going to remain on PlayStation a few more years, that kicked off another sort of public thing between them. So obviously the communication had broken.

and down over that 26th of August email and it all went started going public and what Microsoft saying is well Sony didn't have a problem with this deal we were we were sort of working out a deal between us for the six months or more and then they just went rogue and went to regulators and started complaining and saying yeah call it's going to be exclusive even though they knew all along it wouldn't be and all this so that's Microsoft's argument so it has descended into this whole Sony versus Microsoft thing pretty much every day and then the nintendo switch part is kind of interesting, also really annoying to hear every day. It just comes, like every 10 minutes, somebody keeps bringing up the Switch, it seems like.

Yeah, I swear someone's going to just butt in and be like, Switch, just shout it from the audience or something one day. But the core argument of that is that basically the FTC has defined the console market as a high-performance one between Sony and Microsoft, say, Xbox and PlayStation. It excludes the Switch in that argument saying that it's a mobile sort of device, you know, a portable game console, which it is, and that it doesn't compete with Xbox. and PlayStation, which it does. Let's be honest, they all compete with each other. It's just a little bit different. Yeah, I feel like that's one of those where they've spent all this time sort of very carefully litigating whether it does or doesn't.

But I feel like the much more useful thing would just be like, ask 100 people if they're competitive. And I suspect 99 of them at least would say, yeah, of course they're competitive. But all those 99 people will also agree. They're very different. Sure. Those consoles, right? And I think that's what they're kind of trying to lean on to say that they don't compete.

And then there's some Microsoft internal. analysis, which where they just compete against PlayStation. And it's clear that Microsoft and Sony sort of go head to head because the switch, the power of the switch is slightly behind anyway for the sort of games. So that has been a running theme because the FTC has been adamant about proving that, because it is very key because it defines the market. And it means whether Microsoft has nearly 50% of the market in the US, so they're not talking globally, or whether it has, you know, it's in a distant third, according to Phil Spencer, globally.

So it does matter. That is a key point, and it's why they keep hammering it every single time. You'll get through an hour of testimony, and then it'll come up. You get through another round, and there's a constant back and forth throughout this case. I'm sure it will come up again today because InVidio are there talking about cloud gaming. You've got Satya Nadella and Bobby Cotech. So there's definitely going to be some more stuff about the Switch in there. Yeah.

But it seems like Microsoft's, the Switch is so useful to Microsoft because it seems like the biggest thing Microsoft is trying to do here is play this like, Woe is us. We're so tiny. The Xbox is a miserable failure. Everybody hates it. And we're buying this company in order to give ourselves just like a tiny little fighting chance in the gaming wars.

And on the one hand, there are like numbers that support some of that narrative. But on the other hand, like, this is Microsoft. It is one of the largest most successful companies on Earth. Xbox has been around for a long time. They're spending $70 billion, which is not. not what you do with your failing tiny little business. Is that argument working at all? Do you get any sense that Microsoft is successfully painting itself as like the hapless loser

in the gaming industry? Yeah, I don't think that argument really washes, does it? Like, it does in certain circumstances, like, sure, they are probably third in the console market. Like, I think that's clear. They're behind the Switch, behind the PlayStation. But they're also like the Xbox business isn't terrible, right? Like he had Phil Spencer saying, you know, we're distant third.

We haven't able to compete with PlayStation. But then a week before that, in a behind closed door meeting, he's saying the Xbox revenues now are more than they were in a 360 era. And they have all these crazy targets that they're hitting. They're going for PC game pass growth and all the positives that investors want to hear. So where is the middle line, essentially? What's the reality of the situation? I think it's like the Xbox business is healthy, but Microsoft has way bigger targets for it internally. and in that respect it's not competing with PlayStation.

So what they've been trying to say, like Phil Spencer has obviously tried to target buying Zinger. They had some talks with them for mobile. They've also looked at Sega as well, potentially for mobile and console. But ultimately, they're saying that their strategy came around Activision Blizzard for mobile for like Call of Duty mobile

and the sort of candy crush games that King makes. So they're trying to centre it around that. that's our opportunity going forward. So they're trying to say that it's not really make a big difference in consoles, although it probably will because they're going to have control of Call of Duty. And the FTC argues if they have control of

a Call of Duty and Sony argues as well that will they, you know, essentially make it worse on the PlayStation or make it less, you know, even putting it on Game Pass is going to make it more appealing for you to switch to Xbox, right? I think we can all agree that that's probably a thing. Like you might think,

do I want to pay 70 bucks or should I get a part of the site? Should I get an export? So you have to, as someone who likes quality, you might start thinking that way. And then they've had some economic analysis around that. But nothing, nothing that I would say is you could prove it away. You can use analysis models, financial models, all sorts of stuff to sort of stuff. But who knows really what's going to happen.

Right. But the call of duty piece of this does seem important because I think one of my questions coming into this was why is this specific acquisition? the one that's being litigated. And I think this question has come up over and over, right? Because there is this question of, we're arguing about game exclusives. And like everyone on all sides keeps reminding

the judge in this case that every company has exclusives. Gaming exclusives are foundational to how the gaming industry works. Sony has them. Nintendo has them. Microsoft has them. Like this is just how business is done in the gaming industry. So it's like, okay, why are we mad at Microsoft for trying to get itself some exclusives? And it's

that's complicated. And I think it's mostly just because the FTC's only move to be mad about it is when acquisitions like this happens. So it's just sort of picked its moment to have this bigger fight. But then it does seem like there is something potentially unique about Call of Duty, both as like an economic engine and also just like the place it holds in the gaming industry. It's just so specifically important to this industry that it can actually make those changes in a way that other exclusives can't. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. So Call of Duty is obviously massive. And it's also the fact that they deliver a version of Call of Duty pretty much every year as a AAA game that's kind of unheard of in the

industry. I mean, you have like FIFA and Madden and stuff like that. To be fair, it's basically the same game every year most of the time. But it's still a game every year. Yeah, it's very iterative, isn't it? But Call of Duty has narrative-driven story content every year without fail, pretty much. And that is very different of a game to sort of other games, really. in such a way that they do it as well. It's so popular as well. So it is different. I would totally agree there. But it's also the other aspect to all of this is Microsoft owning Call of Duty is their only Activision. They're only a big publisher, right? Like that's Microsoft is obviously a publisher, but they are a platform holder as well. They own exports. So if they own a lot of the content as well, and that's obviously what they're trying to build for GamePass and cloud streaming eventually,

is that the power shifts of it switches. Whereas Sony's been buying up individual streams. studio is not necessarily big publishers. Microsoft's obviously going after the publishers, like Artivision Blizzard is a giant one for them. Like if they, if they have that, they own such a wide range of content that they can, they can license that, they can do it, do what they want with it really. And it really enforces their content library. So Jim Ryan testified yesterday that he doesn't think cloud gaming will be a thing until like 2025, between 2025 and 2035. So he's not thinking it's going to be a thing for a while. But obviously Microsoft thinking, well they were and now they claim they're not

but um that Microsoft is thinking ahead to this cloud era um and obviously in that cloud area you need this content and content is key call of duty is obviously key there if they can deliver that every year from now on and carry on that cadence and get people into game pass and paying for that subscription then the fear from the fTC side is well what happens when they raise prices down the line what happens when it's monopolist behavior when they've got all this content that's the fear it's not necessarily about impacting consoles because it's such a small market, but how does it affect cloud and into the mobile gaming market,

if Microsoft's ever able to stream these games reliably to mobile phones, if Apple lets them in the app store or it's forced to eventually, that opens up a bigger market. Microsoft's looking at building and exports game store as well for mobile. So they obviously have big, broad ambitions for mobile and how that plays into the cloud and stuff. But they've spent a bunch of time during this trial playing those down, Right? Like Phil Spencer and others have kind of come out and said, well, we had these big cloud plans. Now we're walking them back. Apple won't let us. Like is that more of the sort of hapless loser strategy or is there actually something there? Yeah. I mean, so there was some testimony from Sarah Bond on the first day where the FCC brought up that last year they were looking at a separate skew, a dedicated version of XCloud, Xbox Cloud Gaming, which I think we all kind of assumed would happen. It's been interesting over the past year of XCloud. Microsoft kind of kind of.

of went, they announced a bunch of stuff they were going to do this streaming device, Xbox Cloud gaming on the TV, all of your content library in XCloud. And then since the regulators have kind of been involved with this deal, it's all gone quiet. Like that whole library that was supposed to come, supposed to be here by the end of the next year, at the end of last year, we haven't heard anything about it. That streaming console was mysteriously cancelled, even though Microsoft was about to announce it. Like, they were definitely ready to announce it. We saw it, like, sitting above behind Phil Spencer in a video. video, right? Like, it was real. It was there.

You could argue they've had a strategy shift because that's what Sarah Bonn argues, that they looked at the pricing for it, at the usage, and they thought, okay, we can't introduce this now, which is probably fair. I mean, let's be honest. No one really uses cloud. Microsoft says they think most people just use it to try games before they download them, which is probably true. That's likely true. But at the same time is, are they just pausing work on this stuff until regulators are out of the question, and then they can spin it all up again. And at the same time, you've obviously got Sony who hasn't really built a cloud network for PS5, but now they're saying, oh, we're building it and testing it now, and we're going to

bring it to our subscriptions for our subscribers at some point. And they're also creating a handheld that only plays PS5 games that streamed over Wi-Fi and presumably over this cloud service that they're building now. So, like, there's obviously, they're both putting in sort of a lot of work leading to this cloud sort of war, even though everyone's play cloud and they think it sucks now, but it's not going to forever be like that, right? So streamed videos on the internet in the early days was terrible until YouTube came along, pretty upended everything. So even as Microsoft is saying cloud is the future, we think the console market is small and the cloud market is huge. And this is how we get to mobile, all this stuff.

They're also saying outside, out the other side of their mouth, the console market is small and we're not doing anything else. Why are you so worried about it? Right. Like that's the regulatory story while they're saying to investors, there's this bigger thing on the horizon. Yeah, they're saying like the console market is stagnant essentially and they can't compete in it because obviously Sony's got a bunch of exclusives. They don't, so they need to buy up that content for that. But the bigger argument is that they're doing it for mobile. And then if you believe that argument, then they're a really small player in mobile right now.

So who cares? But if you think they're just saying that, that they're going into mobile, I mean, obviously they are because that's a big revenue opportunity. But also you can still pull back some of that console revenue. at the same time as well, right? They're not, surely they don't think that they're not going to sell more exports consoles

if they have a bunch of Activision exclusives, you know, and if they don't have to compete with Sony having a marketing agreement for Call of Duty, like they do until 2025. So, this is always,

it's always in the middle, right? These arguments, so, but I feel like they're definitely still gearing up for that cloud gaming thing. That's not something that they've just suddenly given up on. They've probably slowed it down a bit, the reasons behind that.

You can take it of one of two ways. Was it, regulator pressure or was it, you know, strategy and or was it a mix of both? Probably a mix of both, arguably. But yeah, like they're not going to take the pedal off of that cloud work, that's for sure. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about Pete Hines, who I think was one of the most interesting pieces of testimony from this whole week. He's like a publishing executive at Bethesda, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Which is a big Microsoft publisher. Like, this is the last one that they could have done this for before this one. He says,

said a few things that I thought were really interesting. One was he just, I mean, he just shredded the Redfall game to bits like over and over and over again. He's like, some people might call it a AAA, but I don't know. Yeah. And then he was like, oh, yeah, basically this game sucked, so don't hold it against us. Sorry, everybody. But the other thing he said that I thought was really interesting was talking about, well, A, then he also said that the Indiana Jones game is going to be an Xbox and PC exclusive, which seems like a bad look for Microsoft to try and to prove its point, because that's presumably going to be a big game that a lot of people care about, right?

Definitely. But then he also just talked about how Bethesda came to be a Microsoft company, which I thought was really interesting. And that was when a lot of this kind of debate about how Sony handles third parties and what Sony is doing with its exclusive stuff came up.

What did we learn from his testimony on that front? Yeah, I think we learned that Pete Hines was a bit uncomfortable at having to do Xbox exclusives initially. Although on the stand he wasn't, in the emails and stuff, it paints a picture of him being like, I think a lot of it is when you get acquired by a big company

and they try and integrate you in. Microsoft hasn't really necessarily integrated Bethesda in fully yet. So there's that like us and them mentality still because there's still very run separately and stuff. So I think some of it was like, well, hang on, Microsoft promised Sony that they're going to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. This was like an email and he's like, But that runs opposite to what they said to us.

We were going to make Redfall and Starfield exclusive. Because they obviously came in, we know because one of the Redfall developers said that they yanked the PS5 version of the game. And obviously we know from this testimony that it was also possibly going to be a timed or some sort of exclusivity for PS5 for Starfield. So obviously, most has come in and said, no. You ain't doing PlayStation. It's Xbox now. So I think we learned that he was not necessarily comfortable with that. And he FTC brought up some YouTube interview.

I think it was with GameSpot when they said that they, you know, was going to Starfield was going to be Xbox exclusive and how he was apologising to PS5 players. Right. Which is like, ooh, you know, at the time it was, ooh. But when you read all the emails, it kind of like makes sense. It's that uneasiness of doing exclusives. But then at the same time, when he was on the stand, he then defended exclusives, which was, yeah, what Mike.

would expect him to do, right? For Indiana Jones, for example, that was obviously, that had a contract with Disney for it to be on multiple consoles. And then obviously Microsoft acquired Bethesda, then that changed. And it became Xbox and PC. And he defended it saying, you know, like, essentially it makes it more streamlined for us to develop this game for,

which is true, you know. Sure. You didn't have to worry about multiple consoles, all that sort of stuff. That is true. And he defended it in that sort of way. and he said something to the effect of like we wouldn't be shipping Starfield how many weeks it is

eight weeks or whatever it is if we were also on PlayStation insinue and having those mobile platforms slows down the game development which obviously is true as well so it's obviously he slightly changes mind from the emails but I think some of these emails were just frustration

right at having to explain this stuff to players and gamers but I do think if I'm the FTC lawyers, that's one piece of it where you're like, yes, we got one. Because the case they're trying to make here, essentially, is that Microsoft can say all the right things for as long as it wants until the acquisition closes, and then it can just change its mind about how all of this works. And there's really nothing to prevent it from making all of those changes. Like Phil Spencer, what literally raised his hand and was like, we will keep

Call of Duty on the PlayStation 5. And it's like the number 5 is doing a lot of work in that sentence. but also like they can say this stuff all they want, but there's very little to prevent them from making this change other than if there is sort of an economic benefit to it. And what the Bethesda example seems to prove is that maybe even if there is, there are things that outweigh that economic benefit. So if I'm the FTC, it's like, look, they've done this before. This is the worst case scenario, the thing we're trying to avoid. And I think that's like Microsoft is you happy for the conversation to be all about Court of Duty. Because they can have Phil Spencer stand there on Oaf and say, you know, I swear up, I'll put my hand up,

this is going to be on PlayStation. You don't have to worry about it. But as soon as it veers into like all of Activision games, then it starts to get murky, right? Because they obviously want to pick and choose which ones, like they did with Bifersda, which ones to make exclusive. And then which ones to say, okay, yeah, we have to have that on the PlayStation because in their best interests for revenue, right?

Like they're not going to pull a game. Like they're not going to pull Call the Jew from PlayStation, are they when there's tons of revenue opportunity that is. It's like capitalist suicide to not sell, call of duty to most people. Yeah, that would be a terrible idea. But over the years, when they try and sort of sway people towards game paths with those incentives, and they have all the market, they're not going to give Sony a marketing deal for Call of Duty, are they? You know, in those commercials you see at the end of, like, football games and stuff like that, you're not, it's called me all wet spots now. So that will eventually push people over.

I think is the FTC's argument as well. Let's come back to the cloud and mobile thing really fast, because that seems to be as we kind of look out to the next few years of where this would go. That seems to be kind of the big open question, right? It's like the, is Nintendo a real competitor, is the sort of right now question. But like how big is cloud and how much is Xbox going to matter on mobile in the next, like, 10 years? It's kind of the unknown thing everybody's trying to figure out. And Nvidia ended up playing a surprisingly big role in this in a way that I really didn't know any of the history of, how did it come to be that Nvidia ended up on the stand here at all?

Yeah, so Nvidia was on the stand briefly yesterday, but they've been referenced a bunch throughout the day. So essentially when they first did G4S now, their cloud gaming streaming service. And they had a beta of it and it had a bunch of Activision games on it, including Call of Duty. And they had some sort of weird agreement with Blizzard around those games, apparently.

And they were there on beta. And then Activision were like, now we're going to pull it. So they pulled those games off of there. And that was their stance. Because they obviously were happy to play around with it and be part of this new thing because it was emerging.

I mean, obviously cloud. is still very nascent, but they were also happy to be there early on, but then they were like, hang on a minute. We can make some money here. We should lock this up. It reminds me of like the early days of Netflix when everybody, Netflix is like, we want to stream stuff on the internet. And all the studios were like, whatever, okay, here you go.

Give us $10. We'll call it a day. And then everybody's like, oh, this is actually successful and might be a thing. Like, hold on. Let's have a new conversation. Yeah. It feels like that's what happened here too. Exactly.

Yeah. So they were involved obviously there. And then you had Matt Bouti, the Xbox Games Studios chief, who, who had recommended once they acquired Bethesda to pull their games off of G4s now and that they'd already pulled their own ones, the Microsoft's first party, the Xbox ones, as not to compete with X cloud,

but it was the quote. So obviously they don't want those games on there because they compete with their own streaming servers. And that was the strategy back in, I think that was 2021 in that email. And then obviously you come to this year when regulatory pressure, particularly the CMA,

have obviously blocked it over cloud concerns this deal. and the EU were sort of hinting at cloud concerns as well Microsoft went out and done a bunch of deals with cloud gaming companies like boosteroid and invidia so basically offer them their own Xbox PC games on the service and if the deal closes call of duty and other Activision titles so they've obviously played a key role because they were opposed to the deal initially when the FTC and the CMA and all that were doing you know talking to

invidia they were like yeah we don't want this deal because obviously they've had their games pulled off the service, but then Microsoft swooped in and was like, here's a deal. And then they were like, we love you, Microsoft. Please, whatever we said before to the FTC, it is irrelevant. So obviously, the FTC is trying to say that, you know, like Microsoft has got this deal. But interestingly, the FTC kind of calls these deals like are relevant and the terms of them aren't very good. We don't really know the terms, obviously.

We haven't, you know, we haven't got the deal sort of document in front of us. So it's interesting to see that. but they have argued in a roundabout way that the deals obviously mean people still have to have a Windows license, like the actual companies have to have a Windows server license to serve these games. And they brought sort of Stadier on the stand to say that as well. And obviously, Chief Force Now, we've seen a little bit of testimony around that. Not too much. It was like a nine minute video, but it kind of like half backed the FTC a little bit. And then it was like, Microsoft came in and just said, well, you know, we signed these deals.

And they're like, yeah, it's great. It solves our problems. Literally. So it's like they've had an interesting role to play for sure, but based on the fact that their games were blocked initially by big publishers. Okay, so we have one more day of real testimony, including, like you said, Satchanadella and Bobby Kodick, and then we have closing arguments on Thursday. Any sort of big things you're expecting, big, like unknown open questions left for the next day or so of this? Well, I guess we had Jim Ryan yesterday who basically testified that he spoke to Bobby Kotyk at some. European Commission meetings earlier this year. And he said he just wanted to block the deal and that Bobby was trying to negotiate some sort of call a duty deal if their transaction failed.

So obviously Bobby's pulling to both sides, right? Because business, which was interesting. So I don't know whether Bobby Kotick would be questioned about that, potentially, I'd assume, in some of the deals. But also Sarah Bond mentioned in her testimony that Activision almost forced Microsoft into renegotiating the rate that they give publishers. So it's usually a 70-30 split, right? That's pretty typical. Apple does it. Google, everyone does that split, right, to a certain degree.

And they've actually been negotiating 80-20s with some publishers. And apparently, Activision, to force them to negotiate that split to get Call of Duty optimized for Export Series X at launch when they'd already negotiated with Sony. So they were kind of using it as a beating stick saying, you know, PS5 is going to have an optimized version of Call of Duty. But you won't unless you give us more revenue from every game sale. So that'll be interesting to hear whether that comes up. So I think the Bobby Code testimony could be interesting. Satina della, as much as I love him, is not the most interesting to hear from.

Not a gamer, that man, I don't think. Not a gamer, no. So I'm not entirely sure how his testimony is going to go. But I mean, he's obviously, he's very intelligent and he speaks very well. And he's very aware of the – I mean, he might not be a gamer, but he's very aware of the gaming market. So I think we're going to get some interesting insights into exactly what. he is willing to give the company or the exports division his biggest ever acquisition when apparently they're third place in consoles and struggling and all that sort of stuff.

So I think we'll get some sort of colour around that. But yeah, today is obviously the big day with the big CEOs. But I think we have had the other big days with the fact that Phil Spencer testimony and the Jim Ryan testimony. Jim Ryan's was quite kind of small, but Phil's was quite large and quite a lot of stuff covered in that. So particularly his feelings about Sony's, you know, evil competition, one of the sort of stuff. So I feel like we'll recap on some of that sort of stuff.

And yeah, it could be an interesting day. But I think the biggest testimony we've already had, I think, personally. Makes sense. All right. Well, you got to go get ready for that. And we need to take a break. But thank you, Tom, as always, good luck. I hope this doesn't end at midnight for you. We're all rooting for you. I'm going to be like crying if it does. All right. Thanks, bye. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. Good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash verge. support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. Congress is back in session in the U.S., and one of the issues being most hotly debated right now is child safety online. We have a bunch of new bills in play. There are some big ideas about technically speaking how kids can be protected online.

and as always, there's some fiery talk about who's to blame and what has gone wrong online. The Virges McKenna Kelly has been following all of these efforts and talking to the folks trying to get these new bills passed. And she's here to tell us what's going on and whether any of it might amount to anything. McKenna, hello, welcome back. It's great to be here. We have a bunch to talk about, but I realized in prepping for this, that Kappa, which is this big bill about, this big law about child protection online, is way older than I realized. So I wanted to start with not quite a history lesson, but like, let's look back at Kappa, right?

So the thing was passed in 1999, went into effect in 2000, and has basically governed the way we think about child protection online for 23 years now. It's still everywhere. We still talk about it all the time. Is this a good law? Like, what is the sort of vibe around what Kappa is doing to the internet 23 years later? So, yeah, the wild thing that you bring up about Kappa was. which stands for the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act,

is, yeah, it's been around forever. And most importantly, it's like the only real privacy law on the books. Like, we talk about, you know, having some kind of nationwide privacy framework. Oh, that Kappa is pretty much what we got, other than, you know, some minor things here and there, and then maybe some stronger things at the state level. I don't know if you remember. This is what I say when I try and explain it.

But when I signed up for a Neopets account in, like, 2009, I had to click some box that said, I am over 13 years old. Yep. I think people have had that kind of relationship with the internet, that, or even there were some websites where I had to put in my parents' email before I could have access to it. And they had to, like, say, okay, yeah, they're whatever and they can use this. So that was essentially put in place by Kappa. And that's how online platforms were using it at the time. It's still kind of that way now, but essentially like Facebook does the same thing.

Like you're not supposed to have a Facebook page unless you're like over 13. So it's stayed pretty much the same for like you said, 23 years. And the important thing about Kappa is that when we talk about the companies that we talk about on the site constantly, meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon. So many of them when it comes to being sued or having settlements with the government, it comes from Kappa. multi-million dollar settlements for breaching certain parts of Kappa and doing things that the government deems harmful to children. So Kappa is basically the biggest weapon that the federal government has on data privacy, and it's only, you know, protecting kids under 13. By the way, I love the idea of thinking about laws as what checkboxes do they introduce to the internet. Like that's just a very good way of thinking about privacy laws.

Like what checkboxes do they add and what pop-ups are required as a result? you can kind of sort 25 years of tech legal fighting by checkboxes and pop-ups. But there's been fights and debates over changing Kappa and updating it and having new things over the years. But what I can't tell, I guess, is whether this is like a very sort of prescient and durable law in a way that I think Section 230 has been over time. Like Section 230 has grown to do a lot more work than anyone expected it to, but still kind of does its work, right? or if Kappa is like hopelessly outdated and we should have changed it a long time ago, it's just that this is the kind of law that takes forever to change. Do you have a sense of which one it is?

I think most Democrats, if they don't support stronger child protections that come in a different law, they want Kappa to be updated. Kappa is strong. It's proven. This is the thing that's really important is that it's already proven to be constitutional. It's held up in the courts. It's already been litigated. So Kappa is something that they don't really have to worry about updating it. Whereas when you think about new laws, like the Kids Online Safety Act, things that we'll talk about later,

these could be put up to legal challenges for being unconstitutional. I think when you talk to lawmakers, Kappa is just extremely durable. It is a law that's withstood litigation. It's proved to be constitutional. There's bills out there to update it. I think it's the easiest path forward. But if it's the right move, that's currently what's being debated in Congress. right now. Got it. Okay. So yeah, let's talk about what's happening in Congress right now. You wrote a story,

I think, in May, basically saying there's a lot of energy around child privacy online again. And this seems to happen in waves, kind of based on what's coming in the news and usually like a Facebook scandal of some kind. A lot of people get excited and then it fades as we talk about other things and then it comes back. And right now it is back in like a very big way. What is kind of leading the debate at this particular moment as we talk about child safety again? Right. So when we talk about child safety again, Right. So when we talk about regulating tech, there is a series of things that normally happens. Something bad happens. A tech company does something. Congress freaks out. They talk about it for a little bit until they forget. And another really big bad thing happens and draws them away. Well, you're forgetting the part where Josh Hawley introduces legislation. That's one very important necessary step. That Josh Hawley introduces a bill to allow you to sue for things. That man loves to sue. He loves to sue. So while that new big, bad thing is happening, like I said, the states are still a little bit behind,

and they're still working on what that big tech company did that was bad. And right now we're in this part where the states have already put out so much legislation that has become law, basically childproofing the internet in many, many ways. And Congress is looking at that and being like, oh, crap, we need to do something now. And so there's a handful of bills that have been put out. And the wild thing is, yeah, when I look at this, it's like this is the one thing tech-wise that I can imagine Congress doing this year. It sounds like a very admirable thing to protect children online. But when you do these things, and like we've seen with the state laws, they have a real impact and could, I should say, could have a real impact on civil rights for not just children, right, but for everyone on the internet. Got it.

Okay. So big picture, like you said, there are a bunch of bills. And I want to get into some of the specific ones. But do we agree on kind of big picture what the solutions are to this problem? Like you say childproofing the Internet, right? That's sort of a big, vague term that I think most people kind of agree on. Do we have a sense of what everybody actually wants to do, even sort of in broad strokes here? I think the best answer to that is just protect kids.

What protect kids means is very different. So there are some laws, like the ones that have gone into effect. in Texas and Louisiana. That is just strictly restricting a minor's access to the internet. You cannot create certain accounts with social media platforms without explicit permission from your parents. In some instances, that sounds great for lawmakers. But then you kind of peel back the layers of this and you look at, oh, my gosh, well,

what if a child is in an abusive situation with their parents? What if a queer kid is looking for resources online? They can't sign up for these. websites, they can't go into these forums, they can't receive these resources without basically outing themselves to their parents, which is oftentimes the last thing they want to do. And so that gets at the heart of the problem of these bills and what they end up doing. When we talk about what is the solution, it's a handful of different things that people have proposed. And there's a handful of issues. So the one thing is just like making sure kids aren't accessing really bad

content and they can't see it. We've heard a lot about disordered eating content, basically, you know, pro-ana stuff. Anyone who's on Tumblr in the 2010s has seen this, like pro-ana content, and having social media platforms over-moderate that. And that, yeah, that might sound great at face. Like, I don't want to see pro-ana content. That can be triggering to a lot of people. But then it's like, oh, how does a tech platform actually moderate that? They might just be going ahead and removing all content related to eating disorders, stuff that is actually like resources like we said, or people posting TikToks being like, this is how I overcame this eating disorder. And it could encourage platforms to overmoderate in a way that could be challenged as being

unconstitutional and violating the First Amendment. Yeah. And then it does seem like we've been in this place for a long time where those are the tradeoffs. And that seems to be, at least from my perspective, what has held this up over and over and over again is it's like, okay, This stuff is, like you said, sort of admirable. And in the positive case, everybody kind of agrees this is what we should do, right? We should have better controls for what kids see. Parents should have more. But then it's like there's just edge case after edge case, after edge case, after edge case.

And it seems like that has bogged all of this down. But you've been talking to people about this new run of bills. You talk to Ed Markey, I know, and a couple of other folks, I think. And I'm guessing after, or at least I'm hoping, after all of these other trials, to do this and we've been back and forth through all of this, that maybe we have found some new strategies and nuances that we can figure out here? Like, walk me through kind of what you've heard from these folks this time around. So Senator Ed Markey is a senator from Massachusetts, and he was the original author of Kappa, the bill that we've been talking about that has been

used, you know, hundreds of times. He, for the last couple years, has been putting out something called Kappa 2.0. I spoke to him a couple weeks ago about that and what that bill is. exactly does. Copper 2.0, it says very specifically that companies must get consent before collecting data about users, age 13 to 16, bans targeted ads to children and teens, which are inherently manipulative. And it actually creates an online eraser button. So kids and parents can tell companies to delete the data they've collected about child users. It ultimately, then, creates a digital privacy bill of rights for children and teens in our country.

Sounds great. It does. Compared to a lot of what's being proposed in Congress. And I think when you look at Markey's bill, it is one of the bills that makes fewer changes that would do fewer things. When we look at other bills with the potential to be passed, there's the Kids Online Safety Act that was introduced. That's a bipartisan bill introduced by Senator Marsha Blackburn and Senator Richard Blumenthal. that does a wide variety of things. It touches on the moderation stuff that we talked about before, which the bill could encourage platforms to over-moderate content that the bill decides could be

harmful for kids. Then there's another bill that Senator Brian Schatz put out called the Protecting Kids Online Act. And that starts something that has spooked a lot of people, which is like a nationwide pilot program on age verification. Ah, yes. So making accounts online, you would have to, basically show your ID to show that you are above the above a certain age. And that has spooked a lot of people. What could go wrong? Right. Basically just uploading your ID to platforms that who knows where that data could go.

So that would be a pilot program. The Markey build does not do age verification. It basically follows through on like a lot of what the initial Kappa does, which is if content is looks like it should be for a kid, you just, you know, abide by Kappa from that. It's more of like an assumption rather than a confirmation. And yeah, that spooked folks pretty bad because when we talk about protecting privacy, you don't want to make people offer up even more data to protect kids. You're then requiring even more data from people 25, 35, 45, 45, you know, anybody on the internet. One thing Marky said in that clip you played is the age 16, which feels like I think I've seen this come up in a bunch of these discussions that

13, and actually, I don't know if Kappa did this or not, but there was at some point where 13 was sort of established as like the age at which you were allowed to use the internet. And I think we can have lots of interesting arguments over whether that is too young or too old or whatever. But it seems like more recently, and you've covered this a bunch, there's been a push to make that age 16 instead of 13. Is that murky? Is that somebody else? Like, what's going on here? So the Markey Bill moves it up to 16. I think with the Francis Hagen revelations about how Instagram and Facebook has inflicted, you know, actual real harm on kids, that's kind of had senators and lawmakers thinking about, oh, my gosh, well, you have a ton of kids online with unfettered access to the internet, seeing things that they necessarily, that could be really damaging. And what's changed since Kappa and what's been really pressing for lawmakers is that we're actually undergoing a nationwide mental health crisis for youth.

We can debate like what is actually causing this, but the surgeon general, for example, has put out social media as one of these reasons. And so that, you know, when we talk about a youth mental health crisis, that is everyone under the age of 18. And those kids, lawmakers need the same protections. Got it. Okay. Folks on the other side of this who have been, you know, the civil liberties groups and the internet freedom groups and the sort of free speech maximalists, what do they make of this new round of bills? I mean, it seems like Ed Markey in particular with Kappa 2.0 is trying to do kind of as little as possible in order to make some changes without sort of blowing up the whole thing, which I guess probably goes back to what you're talking about about Kappa being kind of tested and proven and constituted. And it's like, okay, how much can we change that without having to sort of reinvent the wheel and do this all over again?

Is it possible to do that stuff without making this other side angry? Like, what do they make of this new round of things? Experts are really freaked out by this. Okay. For a wide variety of reasons. I spoke to India McKinney from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about these bills. And I got the answer that I think everyone has been thinking about this. is we need a strong, comprehensive data privacy framework for everyone.

A strong, comprehensive federal consumer data privacy bill that is consumer-driven, consumer-focused, that gives power to consumers. That will actually help everybody, including children, and it may sound like it's harder. Like, children's privacy sounds easier because who was going to argue with children's privacy? But as soon as you introduce this new additional component of determining who is a child, that ups the difficulty level. You don't have to do that. You could just go back to doing privacy for everyone and a rising tide lifts all boats. Okay, I have two thoughts on this. And I'm curious what you think. One, this makes me think we're still in this phase of it's just impossible to suit everybody.

That if you say the sort of buzzwords like comprehensive privacy framework, everyone's like, oh, cool, good idea. and then as soon as you drill one level further down, it all falls apart because everything is tradeoffs and nobody agrees. It also makes me think that the one thing India gets wrong there is that the only bipartisan thing in Congress in tech for years. And I don't know if this is still true. I'm curious what you think. But you could say children need to be protected online

and everyone in Congress would agree with you. There's like no other sentence in America that you can say that everyone in Congress agrees with. But on that one, everybody agreed. And it seems to me that's why there's been energy to do this because it is an actually functional bipartisan thing and it's small enough and narrow enough that you can maybe possibly do something about it. Whereas if you say privacy online for everybody, like that becomes the size of the universe and everything explodes. What do you think? Like am I, am I thinking about this the wrong way or is she kind of maybe not

giving it as much credit as it needs? Yeah. When you talk to people, you know, who are digital rights advocates, they are, they want to shoot for the moon. You know, they want to. want what they see as the best solution. Now, if that solution is actually viable, that's, you know, that's the real question. Actually, when I was talking to Markey, I asked him specifically, I said, well, why cop a 2.0? Why not a, you know, a comprehensive data privacy framework? And he basically said that it's so much more difficult and he doesn't imagine it happening anytime soon. The better target for now is to, yes, worry about people who are 25, 35, 45, 55, etc., but know that the politics of getting that done are much more difficult.

In my opinion, in this environment, than protecting kids 16 and under. Because that's always been a special category that has been singled out in the courts, in political life, for special protections while young people's brains develop. So we want a comprehensive bill, but my position is the least that we can do this year is to protect teenagers and children from the pernicious strategies of the big tech companies. I think that's the same sentiment from a lot of Democrats as well, especially because President Biden, the White House, has made it a priority to do something on this front. In the past two State of the Union addresses, Biden has explicitly called for child protections.

We must finally hold social media companies accountable for experimenting or doing running children for profit. There's time to pass by partisan legislation. They see this as, like you were saying, something that Republicans and Democrats can get behind and as something they can maybe do before Biden's term is over. So given all that, what do you think is the most likely outcome this year? We're about to head into a campaign season. So I think like prognosticating basically anything after like six months from now, I think is sort of crazy. But like you said, there is real energy to do this right now. And there is a possibility of doing

something this year? Do you think we're likely to see one of these bills pass? Are we likely to see sort of an amalgam of them come together? What's your sense? Right. When we see lawmakers introduce these bills, they are not going to be the same as they were introduced if they were to be voted on on the floor. That's just what happens. A lot of bills being introduced is a senator putting out their position publicly in language that they can then edit and work with other people to get it done. When we see bills with a lot of energy behind him, Marquis is not being talked about as much, which is why I wanted to talk to him specifically. It's the Kids Online Safety Act, the one that has all these moderation requirements that has a lot of people supporting it. It's bipartisan in nature.

It looks fairly viable. But the funny thing about this is that Blackburn and Blumenthal have been having all of these press conferences with parents and kids who support this bill and support something being done. But at the same time, you have all of these civil liberties groups being like, this is too far, this could have drastic consequences for everyone on the internet. And over the last couple months, COSA has been edited a bit to dampen down these concerns to make certain language changes that would better protect everyone and kids. I imagine that is still ongoing. So when I look at the timeline for this year, we are currently in June. I don't know if listeners know, but Congress doesn't really follow the schoolhouse rock framework where things go through committee. They go to the floor and everyone's so happy and they vote on it.

That doesn't really happen anymore. Bills get attached to certain must-pass vehicles. So there's like a defense authorization that basically authorizes all the money that we give to the defense department and the military every year. People love to stick things on that because they have to pass that. otherwise the military doesn't get funded. And then there's also another option when it comes to appropriating money to make sure all federal employees get paid, that all the federal agencies get paid, and that's normally done in the fall. So I imagine that if they want to get this done and they want to get it done before the end of the year, the best solution would be to spend the next couple working periods, editing down COSA, maybe implementing some Kappa 2.0 language, whatever that happens to be. and then attaching it to some kind of appropriation spill in the fall.

That gets included in, you know, all that stuff. And that's how it gets passed. The final language just won't be clear until it gets dropped in the fall. But I do imagine if they want to get this done, and if this is a priority for Biden, if this is something he wants to run on, it's a kitchen table issue. We have seen Biden focus on kitchen table issues. I'm sure listeners know the ticket master stuff that happened about junk fees recently. Biden is looking at these issues that people see every day and they get pissed about every day

and they want that to be front of mind to Democratic voters and all voters technically. So I see if this is a priority, it'll get done around that time frame. So the real question here is how do we get Taylor Swift really riled up about children's privacy online? Because that's how we get this done. Organize the Swifties. Oh, my goodness. They can do anything they want. You know, and that's kind of the funny thing too because Taylor Swift actually,

got Congress upset enough to do something about Ticketmaster, like talked about a bunch of legislation and basically asked the FTC or in the DOJ to investigate Ticketmaster for an antitrust case to break it up. There's a lot of action there after Taylor Swift said some stuff. I don't know who would be the major figure here. The only person coming in mine is, I'm imagining like, blippy getting really upset about this, perhaps, or Bluey? Maybe there's a Bluey episode where Bluey's like, kids need to be protected. I don't know. I haven't seen Bluey.

I just know kids love it. That was a perfect Bluey impression. That's all I'll tell you. So, okay, so the last thing, and then I'll let you go here is I wonder how we're coming to think about this even like structurally. Because I think part of the question is, is there a middle ground between these questions about, you know, encryption and free speech and privacy and protection, which feels like it's this, that's also the debate about privacy frameworks for everybody.

It's a question of like, does one side or the other, or is there a middle ground? And then there's the question of like, who is responsible for this? And I think one of the things that's been interesting to me about this round of bills is that some are still out there saying the companies that run these platforms ought to be responsible and the way that we held them responsible is by punishing them. And then there are other people out there saying, you know, we need an age verification system that works across the whole internet and that's its own thing.

But that's different from saying like YouTube's job is to fix this, right? or the questions about the online eraser button. That's different from saying each individual platform has to just do it themselves. But that also introduces all other kinds of complexity. So are we still in this kind of spaghetti-throwing phase of trying to figure out how all this works? Or are we going to land on sort of broader ideas about how to even go about making some of this legislation? Does that make sense? Yeah, I want to point out the Ticketmaster thing again.

Because how did Biden move something and have like this meeting at the White House? with Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Airbnb, and everyone celebrating this. Well, it wasn't actually a lot that they agreed to. They basically agreed. They don't get rid of junk fees, but they agreed to show them up front. Nothing gets less expensive. You just aren't surprised by it later. So when we think about this, maybe the most practical and real scenario is that there's

some kind of little change that happens, maybe something updating Kappa a little bit, maybe just moving the age. I don't know what it could be. That could be the end game here. And I love that you brought up enforcement of this. How do you enforce something like this? Because that gets out another really consequential issue to all of this legislation, frankly, because you look at a lot of these bills in the language of these bills. There's a Texas one, for example, that does some similar stuff like COSA where there is additional moderation requirements and kids can't see certain content. everyone agrees that, you know, CSAM gone, should be eradicated from the internet.

But in the law, there is language explicitly calling grooming bad content that needs to not be online. And we've seen with the culture wars over the last however long grooming being used as an excuse to discriminate against queer people, essentially. And I could see interpretations of that, and the interpretation is really important here because the people who are enforcing this, it could be the FTC, it could be the DOJ. But most of these bills allow state attorney generals to enforce this. So imagine a red state like Texas, getting a law that has something about grooming and going after Facebook, Instagram, whoever, for just having queer people on their platforms, or maybe saying that kids cannot see this content.

It just gets into all of these conversations when we look at like drag queen story hours, all of this stuff. Those culture war elements that we see played out, book banning all of this, this is a way to bring all of that to the internet and for it to be enforced by red states. And that's what spooked people a lot. All right. Well, Congress is back in session. This is all moving really fast. I suspect we're going to have more to talk about on this front very soon. But for now, we need to take a break.

And then we are going to get into the Google Pixel Fold review. and finally decide once and for all, whether flippable or foldable phones or neither or both or whatever are the future. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire.

Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies.

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Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. cloud. a. a. slash vergecast. That's clod.a.ai slash vergecast. And check out Claude pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Welcome back. We've had two reviews on the verge.com the last couple of weeks that I think are a really big deal. The Motorola Razor Plus and the Google Pixel Fold. The Razor Plus is a flip phone and the pixel foldable phone and both have a chance to give us a new glimpse into the future of phones. Plus, we're likely to see new flippables and foldables from Samsung this summer. So we've got to figure out what's really the future here. What do we want from these devices? What are they supposed to be? How do they change the way that we think about

our phones? The verges Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert have been using these phones for a while now. So I brought them both in and we're going to get into all of it. Allison, hello. Hello. Dan, hello. So we have a lot of things to talk about. I want to talk about the pixel fold first. I want to have a very long drawn-out fight about flippable phones and foldable phones and which one is the future. So ready. Because I have feelings that I feel more deeply every day. And we're going to talk about them.

This is when hot foldable summer gets real sweaty. It's exactly right. It's about to get real fiery up in here. Let's start with the pixel fold because you both wrote stories about the pixel fold. You've been testing it for a while. This phone is a big deal. A lot of people have been talking about it. And I think I want to start with just like what it is like to figure out.

out how to live life with a foldable phone. Because one of the things I got from both of the stories you guys have written and the stuff you've written about foldable phones over the last couple of years is that these are fundamentally sort of different kinds of devices. It's not like you bought a phone with a bigger screen. Like you bought a different thing when you get a foldable device. So Allison, you go first. Dan is the foldable phone sicko here.

So we'll leave him alone for a second. But tell me about what it's like to live with and review a foldable phone as opposed to some of the other sort of more standard devices you spend most your time with. Yeah. The way I keep thinking of like, and this is sort of falling apart with the thing Motorola just announced, but like a flip style phone, it feels like a foldable plus it's like a regular phone plus a smart watch. The galaxy fold, the pixel fold, those are like a phone plus tablet. So that kind of dictates like what is enjoyable to do with it, what you get out of it. So really the pixel fold, it is a normal phone when you have it closed and it has that like lovely kind of normal phone shape as opposed

to the remote control that is the galaxy fold. So that's where you do your like quick texting notification stuff and then you open it up and in the case of the pixel fold you have kind of like a landscape oriented tablet out of the gate as opposed to the galaxy folder which is more portrait oriented. Okay. So, and that's where you multitask, you play a game, you watch your video, you set it up in a little laptop position and play Elmo so you're a kid will brush their teeth. All kinds of fun to be had. And this kind of gets at like the big sort of philosophical question.

I feel like you're both reckoning within these stories, which is like, what are these things for? And I feel like, Dan, you kind of come at this from the point of view of like, I want to do as much stuff on this as I can. I have more screen, more stuff to do. give me like a computer. I feel like you're the person who is like, I use the iPad as my primary computing device, right? And then, Alison, I feel like you come at this as like, the iPad is like a thing for my kid to hold

and a thing for watching movies, right? Like, it's a bigger screen. And that's like, it is sort of the tablet debate in a nutshell, right? And I feel like what a foldable phone should be is just like fundamentally the tablet debate again, right? And it feels like as we look at the pixel fold, which I think the sort of TLDR of your review, Alison, was basically like good first generation device

missing some stuff. And I want to get into all the stuff that's missing. But it does still feel like it has a very different idea about what a foldable phone is supposed to do than something like the Samsung devices. Yeah, I, Dan, I'm going to steal your line, but you mentioned that like the Samsung phone just feels like a little computer that you have in your pocket. And you can do like an incredible number of things on it. And what I ended up doing with it was sitting on the couch and when you're having that moment of like, oh, I need to put this expense report together. I need to get up and get my computer. You're like, ha, no, I don't have to. I can run four apps on this thing and keep sitting here and do that. And the kind of person who wants to do that is a Samsung foldable person.

The pixel fold is more like, I just found it more approachable. And it's sort of like a friendlier, more like guardrail. device where you can only run two apps side by side and split screen. So that just kind of like cuts down what you're going to do with it like productivity wise. But then there's there's really useful stuff like I'm looking at Google Maps and I'm opening up a restaurant website in Chrome and it's right next to it. I don't have to like tab around. It's good for stuff like that. But the gist of it that I kind of got is like this is nice. I enjoy being able to do these things. I do not care to spend $1,800 on it and carry around like a very heavy phone for these moments. Whereas with the galaxy fold, it sort of felt like, wow, this is, this is a lot.

Like, I am getting a lot of value for $1,800. Yeah, Dan, I feel like the guardrails, Allison is talking about sort of drove you slowly nuts over the course of testing this phone. Yeah. And I think Allison really hit it on the head with the price of the thing. Like, the reason that I want to do so much or try to get so much out of a device like this is one because it's always going to be on my person. But the other is because I'm paying $1,800, or if I'm getting more storage, like almost $2,000 for this phone, which is like a lot of money.

So I want to be able to use it as much as possible. And for me, at least, if you're buying a folding phone like this that turns into a small tablet, the whole appeal is the big screen that fits in your pocket and all the things that you can do on that big screen. And I think it's like a lot of people are looking at the pixel fold and they say, oh, that outside screen, is more usable because it's more normal looking. It looks right because it's like normal proportions and things like that. And yes, I agree to all of those things. It's easier to use the outside screen and it's like more normal looking.

But then when you open the phone and Allison kind of gets into this in her piece, the landscape orientation of the inside screen and the limitation with the software means that you could just do a whole lot less with the inside screen than you can on the Samsung. I think maybe an analogy that might make sense is the pixel fold feels like an iPad in terms of like the guardrails that are sent around you. And like obviously Apple is like kind of changing this on its high end iPads. But if you buy a base model iPad, you're pretty limited with your multitasking abilities. You're limited with what you can do and things like that. It's a big screen for watching things. Like that's what the base iPad is. Yeah. It's a big screen for watching things. And the pixel fold is really great. A big screen for watching things. If you want to watch video on it, you want to play games on it. I think Allison pointed out both of those things as really. excellent use cases. The Z-fold is like a PC in like every single way that can be. It means it's like super powerful. You can run four apps at the same time. You can be in your banking app and pop open a calculator on top of it and run calculations without ever leaving your banking app and you can do all

these things and you can split the screen multiple ways and then you can save that setup so you can always jump back to that setup quickly and then you take out the S-Penn and you can doodle things and like the list goes on and on and on. You can literally plug it into an external screen and run a whole desktop environment off of it, turn it into a PC. And I think Allison is like very correct in saying that like the approachability of that is way lower than the approachability of the pixel phone where it's like, oh, I've got a thing that's twice the size of the screen that's on the outside, and now I can run two apps side by side. And I can watch a video on this bigger screen. And so like introducing people to this concept, I think the pixel fold to Allison's point does a really good job of that.

But it's just like, once you get there and once you figure it out, it doesn't take long to be like, oh, I wanted to do something else, or, oh, I could, like, make more use of this than it's letting me do. And that's the same problem that, like, everyone's had with the iPad for forever is, like, I want to do more with this, and the software's not letting me. Well, and it's $1,800. Like, not to just keep putting a fine point on this, but, like, I would be very into the idea of, like, let's have sort of a sliding scale of power of these devices. And, like, the iPad is actually a good example, right? You can get the souped up ultra-bunkers 12.9-inch iPad Pro and it will cost you $1 million and you essentially know what you're getting, right?

Like you get the iPad Pro, you get the magic keyboard, you get the Apple Pencil and it costs as much as a car. But like you know what you're getting. And then on the flip side, you can spend $329 and get an iPad. And I feel like Samsung is doing the iPad Pro thing and Google is doing the iPad base model thing, but Google forgot to make it cheaper. And I just feel like that to me is where the kind of value prop here falls apart is Google is like, here's less phone for the same money.

And I have a hard time with that. Right. Yeah. And something else that just kind of bothers me is the durability is just a question mark. It's IPX8 rated. So it's like waterproof to like full water immersion, which is really good. But it is a first gen product. You know, repairs.

You can't just waltz into any repair shop on the street. Not that that's a great idea anyway. But yeah, there's more of a process. there's more cost involved. I have a little tiny scratch on the screen protector inside my review unit. And I didn't baby it, but I didn't like put it, you know, next to my car keys. Right. With the screen unfolded.

What does that look like after a year of using it? It's when you come back to like, keep coming back to $1,800, you're like, well, that doesn't seem great. Yeah. So the pixel fold, I would say on the, so like Samsung has had four tries at this, right? We think the next one is coming in August, or in July or August, sometime this summer. Where on that history would you put the pixel fold? Because it seems to be clearly better than the first galaxy fold, which was a mess, yeah, hardware-wise.

Oh, totally. Is it like the Z-fold, the fold two, the fold three, the fold four? Like, where would we put the pixel fold? I would put it at 2.5 or 3. Like there's like, it's a much better first-generation start than Samsung had for very obvious reasons. It doesn't instantly break as soon as you start using it. It doesn't instantly break. You don't look at it wrong in it like, you know, the screen explodes.

But Samsung fixed that pretty quickly. By the Z-Fold 2, which was the next generation, the screen hinge was made much better. They started introducing some things to mitigate dust and water resistance and things like that. Google's already starting at that point. So they have the same, as Allison mentioned, the IPX8 rating as Samsung, which means you can get it wet. You can even submerge it, which is kind of fascinating for a phone that folds with moving parts everything and it has that level of water resistance. And the hinge is very smooth. It's strong enough to hold the phone open like Allison mentioned in like a laptop mode if you want to prop it up

to watch a video or something like that, which Samsung didn't have on its first generation things. So it's clear that Google has been paying attention to what Samsung was doing and learning from it. And that's great. I love to see it. There are areas, though, even in the hardware, I mean, we talked a lot about the software experience, but even in the hardware experience where Samsung is just kind of ahead just because it's had so many years to iterate on this idea. One of them is the screens. Samsung's screens are brighter. They're just brighter.

I don't know what else to put it. And it feels like the Google screens are a generation or two behind because if you look at Samsung's history, the Z Fold 3 to the Z Fold 4, the big change was they made the screens brighter. So it's like, oh, this feels like the Z Fold 3 screens. Is Google just buying parts from Samsung from a year ago? Is that basically what's happening here? I mean, it could be. The pixel fold's been in development for a long time. We've been reporting rumors on this for like two years.

I mean, these things take forever. And so it could be that, like, the panels that they secured were at the Z-fold three-generation level or whatever. Or maybe Samsung is just kind of like hoarding the good stuff for itself, which would not surprise anybody, right? The other thing, and Allison made quite a few points about this in her review, the pixel fold is heavier than the Z-fold. And on paper, it doesn't sound like a lot.

It's 20 grams. But in use, you notice it. and you notice it every time you pick up the phone or put it in your pocket or put in your bag or whatever. Older Z-fold phones were heavier. Samsung made them lighter over time. I believe the Z-Fold 5 specs have now leaked, and it looks like it's going to be 10 grams lighter than the Z-Fold 4.

So, like, Samsung's been doing these, like, very small, iterative chipping away at these problems and making it a better overall experience that Google just hasn't been able to catch up with because it is its first generation. And I think Google will get there, and if they start off this far ahead, like at two and a half generations or three generations in,

and in a year or two, if they stick at it, they can very well keep up or surpass Samsung, because Samsung's been moving very slow with the iteration on the fold devices. So that's kind of where I'm placing it. It's a couple generations behind where it is. It's still a very strong start. Okay.

Alison, let's talk about the weight thing, because that was the thing in your review, I think, of all of the imperfections of the pixel fold. That was the thing that bummed me out the most. Because what you said was, it was so heavy that you found yourself not wanting to use it in one hand. And so you end up sort of sitting down and opening the screen. And to me, the thing that has been compelling all along about the pixel fold is it has a usable outside screen.

Not like the TV remote, like the fold is like we were talking about. But it almost sounds like you found yourself not wanting to use that much better outside screen just because of the actual physical size of the thing, which to me sort of kills the whole appeal. Was it as bad as it sounds? Yeah, I don't want to make too much of it. It's like it'll bother people on different levels, I think. Maybe I'm more sensitive to a heavy phone. But, you know, I just found myself again and again, like you have it in one hand sitting on the couch. And the way it just kind of weighs down on your pinky finger. I was like, I don't like this. I have to keep moving my hand. There's definitely that thing where you find yourself sort of stretching your hand every couple of minutes. You get the divot in between your knuckles. You're like, ugh, is that? little divot there from using this phone too much. And it feels more balance, like you're distributing a weight more when you open it up. So I ended up doing that more in instances why I didn't really need the big screen.

Yeah, I think I would like a phone I could use more comfortably, you know, with the screen folded. And I feel like I'm asking for a lot. Like, I don't want to, you know, be like, oh, a phone that folds in half. It's too heavy. And like, this is an accomplishment. And it's right. It's a wonderful device to use in a lot of ways. For me personally, for $1,800, I don't want to feel like my phone is too heavy when I'm using it for five or ten minutes at a time.

Well, and I think this comes back to, like, Dan, what you're talking about with this sort of philosophy of it all, right? Because I think the way you think about it would be that the goal is to kind of get to the inside screen as much as possible because that's why you bought this thing. That's what it's for. Did the size of kind of holding the thing bother you in the same way, or are you just like, whatever, just let me open up the thing? Who cares? It absolutely did. I think there's like a couple of factors with it.

One, the weight, which I noticed right away. Two, just kind of like, if you look at the really nitty-gritty design differences, the pixel folds flat closed, which is really awesome. There's no gap between the halves, which Samsung hasn't done yet. We expect the Z-fold 5 will based on the leak so far. But for now, the Z-Fold 4 has a little gap. It's also thicker when it's closed. The pixel fold is nice and thin when it's closed.

But the bottom bevel or edge of the pixel fold is not smooth and flat. And that kind of hurts the comfort when you're holding it on your pinky and things like that. The weight is noticeably different. The other difference is the pixel fold has this like kind of noticeable bezel around the screen. So its footprint is larger, which means that it's more that you have to like deal with and wrangle in your hands, especially when it's open. That's mostly noticeable when it's open. and like we talked about landscape versus portrait orientation,

you end up turning the pixel fold into portrait orientation a lot in order to get the best experience. Because Android apps don't expect you to be using a landscape screen. So when they open on the pixel fold, a lot of them will open with black bars on the side or they will stretch weirdly across the screen because it's like a landscape screen that it's trying to switch to. But if you rotate at 90 degrees, the app kind of knows what to do.

It fills the screen vast majority of the time. And it just looks more normal. The layout makes more sense. It's a vertically scrolling app, which is like the vast majority of the apps that we use today, have that kind of vertical scrolling interaction. So portrait kind of makes sense for a lot of things. And when you turn the pixel fold to portrait, not only is that like annoying to do all day long, it's like a big platter that you're holding, whereas the Z fold is much more comfortable

to hold in that orientation and much easier to hold in that orientation just because it's a little bit more compact, even though they both have the exact same size screen on the inside. So did you get to the point where you're using it where you kind of, you're to hold the phone in one hand normally and it's like holding a phone. And then as you're opening it, you're like also kind of turning it 90 degrees in your hand. I do that all the time. It's just like the natural way of interacting with it now. Yeah, like, I mean, I would like basically I would open it. I would unlock it with the fingerprint scanner or whatever. I would open the app I want to use and then I would rotate the phone and hold it and then try and like prop it up on my finger. And like that's how I used it

the vast majority of the time. And then occasionally I'd want to split screen like Alison mention, put maps next to a browser, whatever, or if I was watching a video, I'd rotate it back to landscape. But the majority of my use case is in portrait orientation, because that's what most apps are. Allison, does that match your use, like as you find yourself just sort of using it day to day? Is that what you're doing too? Well, I wasn't as smart. I didn't like rotate it as much, but yeah, when I would open it up, I would find myself, you get the like black bars on other side of Instagram or whatever. It just made me want to open more apps, just to put something there.

Oh, interesting. So you end up just like side by siding apps just because it, yeah, that's what looks better. Yeah. I'm like, well, I might as, I've got this space. I might as well open something else. And then I'm sort of like scrolling two things at wines. And I don't know. I think my mindset is just sort of, I want to be like a little less engaged with my phone

overall or like feel like I'm just more in control. And yeah, just in that kind of scenario with a pixel fold, I was like, this is. I do not need more phone here. Yeah, that's very fair. The last thing we should talk about before we get to flip versus fold and all of my strong feelings, y'all can leave for that part. I'm just going to yell into the microphone for about 45 minutes. But we should talk a little bit about Android because I think my general stance on phones

has always been that Samsung goes about 250% too far with its stuff. It just adds a lot of things you don't need. And one of the reasons I have always defaulted to telling people to buy pixels is that Google's version of Android is just still the best one. out there. That seems less true here. It seems like the pixel fold has some good ideas about larger screens and foldable devices. Android seems to have gotten a lot better. Google's own apps work better. But it seems like both of you are kind of of the opinion that all the crap Samsung has added is actually mostly a good thing. And the actual Android has some catching up to do on how

foldables work. Is that, Alison, is that your take? Yeah, it's, there's kind of a maximalist, like ethos to the to the folding phone and that vibes really well with Samsung, I think. And that's where it makes sense. Samsung never met a feature. It doesn't want to ship. The full Samsung experience can only be had on a folding phone. And there's going to give you everything. It's the ultimate Samsung experience. Yeah. But is Google catching up there, do you think?

Because again, like we were talking about with a sort of slightly more guardraily, less chaotic way, it does seem like there's a middle ground there that I believe in Google for. And it seems like at least with like the maps and some of the other Google apps, it's pushing in a good direction. It just kind of needs, I guess, the rest of Android to catch up, which is the same story of a decade of larger screen devices. But is there, does it feel like progress now, at least? It does. Yeah. And there's a lot. Yeah. The work they put into optimizing a lot of the Google apps for the folding phone is really good. I mean, I, you know, I opened up Google Meet, which we all love. And you fold the phone. and the content just kind of flows into the right place in your meeting.

Like, that is great. I think what they're approaching is a folding device that a lot of people can come to and pick up and just and feel like welcome. And I think I'm going to really like that in a few generations when maybe it's less expensive and doesn't weigh as much as a break. Yeah, that is very fair. Dan, you, even more than Allison, seem to. to appreciate the full Samsung.

In this context, yes. And, like, I don't appreciate experiencing the full Samsung all the time. And when I say the full Samsung, I mean, like, you are running the three apps, and then you put the pop-up app up, and then you pull out your set. Like, I don't recommend people do that. And then Bixby shows up and is like, do you want help with your phone? Yeah. Yeah.

What I appreciate is the ability to do that if I so wanted. If I don't want to go the full Samsung, maybe I want the half Samsung or, like, the three-quarter Samsung for whatever job I need to do. And, like, the pixel just doesn't let you get there. because they put those guardrails in place. That means that you can only do certain things. Like, one thing that kind of blew my mind was, like, no pixel phone allows you to plug into an external display.

You can't mirror the screen. You can't put your video on a bigger screen or whatever over a USBC table. Rumors are saying that, like, the pixel 8 line will change that, but we're not there yet. So those are like kind of like small productivity things, but they all add up. And like they make a difference when you're thinking of like, I could live with a Z-Fold 4 is my only computer.

I couldn't really get there with a pixel fold, at least for my needs and my desires. And again, $1,800, that is like a big ask for something that only does certain things and doesn't do everything I want to do with it. Yeah, I just, I really am so much more hung up on the price with this device than most because just at this price, it is such a self-selecting thing for people who are going to want to do a lot more stuff with this device. Like no one is buying it to just like put it in a case and look at TikTok. Like if that's what you're buying this for, you're insane.

Like don't buy that in this phone. These people are going to want to do more stuff. And I think Google is trying to build a phone that seems like it's going to be way more compelling. Like you were saying, Alison, like in three years at half the price. Whereas Samsung, I feel like might continue to be able to make an interesting case for a device that costs this much just because of all the stuff that it can do for you. And I like, I kind of hope they both stay on that path because they'll

end up in really different, really interesting places in foldables. Yeah, I think like software-wise, the pixel fold is the kind of phone I would recommend to a lot of people. Like my dad, you know, I think he would get a lot out of using all those apps on the big screen, but there's just no way in hell I'm going to tell him to buy an $1,800 phone. Right. So someday. All right.

Let's switch gears just for a minute and talk flip phones because the other phone you just reviewed, Allison, is the Motorola Razor Plus, which is a phone I have been eagerly looking forward to your review of friends. a very long time. And it seems like it's great. It's like the perfect flip phone does not exist yet, but we're getting much closer very quickly. The price is good. The phone is good. It seems like the Razor Plus is like it's a good thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I was kind of waiting for it to betray me a little bit because everything did seem so promising. But yeah, it pretty much delivers. The really notable thing, of course, is the outer screen is that big 3.6 inch, like big, relatively

speaking, small, but big. It's just a full kind of phone on its own. You can run any app you want. Like, speaking of guardrails, Motorola is like, go for it. You have to tap on a little tiny text box that says, like, this app might not look great on this little tiny screen, but you can do it. It's just like you got to live with your choices there. I always like to think that of, I call that the, the hey idiot pop up. Yeah. Where they can't say like, you're stupid and this is a bad idea. They're just like, this is stupid.

Don't do this. Please don't. And Allison's just here being like, whatever. Yeah. I'm like, you don't tell me how to live my life, Motorola. But I think, and you said this with the foldable phone, too, that one of the things that you like about this new kind of device is like control over your experience with devices.

And to me, that's the whole appeal of flip phones, right? is there is something real about this idea that, like, I can close my phone. And even on the smaller screen, you can sort of tap at a text message. I love to the screenshot that you had that it was the keyboard takes up the whole screen on the audio display, which is like a little bit ridiculous, but also kind of works. And it works just well enough that I'm going to, like, respond to my text message and then put my phone down and move on as opposed to just like swiping back to the home screen. Yeah.

And then getting lost in Instagram for three and a half hours. But it does feel like, I think running full apps on. your outer screen is insane and no one should be allowed to do that and you should be thrown in prison for doing that. But the idea of having this sort of not quite phone, like you said, it's a smart watch on the outside and a smartphone on the inside. That really works for me. Dan, I feel like you and I are probably very different on this given that you just spent the whole weekend with your phone plugged into an external monitor. What's your, how do you feel about flip phones as a concern? I think they're really cool. I don't know if they're the right device for me if we're talking just like

flip phones versus foldable. or whatever, I kind of will lean towards the one that gives me the biggest screen possible in my pocket. But I think, to Allison's point, the Razor is the first flip phone that's actually intrigued me. I think I reviewed one of the Z flip models, one of the earlier generations. And that one really annoyed me because the outside screen was so useless. And then in order to do anything with the phone, you had to open it up. And it requires two hands to open it. And then it's just a, you know, S-20 or S-21 at the time. Once you open it, and then there's no novel. novelty about that. Whereas the razor, to Allison's point, you can do things on that outside

screen and you can be more intentional with your actions on the phone and actually respond to the message or check, you know, the upcoming directions or skip a track on your music or whatever it is that you're doing really quickly without getting like sucked into whatever distraction might be there if you're using the full-size screen. All the time, I end up picking my phone with a specific reason. Like, I need to like add something to our shopping list or look up the price or something or whatever, and I pick it up and I get distracted by notification, and then, like, five minutes later, I'm, like, standing there, like, not remembering what I wanted to do on my phone. I feel like that's less likely to happen if you have to be so intentional to open up

the phone, but you can still, you know, have a useful device that's, like, the level of a smartwatch incapability on the outside. And I think that the razor is really interesting on that front. It's also, like, it's about $1,000, which is premium and expensive, but not $2,000, so it's much more approachable. I think it makes a lot of sense. for a lot of people at that level, you know, to be, people already spend that much on most phones now. So it's not like a reach to get this like more intentional compact experience and actually still be useful and still be usable. Totally.

Yeah. And I also, Alison, I appreciate that you keep banging the drum in all these reviews that the fact that you can put it down on a table, flip the screen up and either like look at something or use it as a camera. And this is true of foldables and flippables. But the thing where it's like halfway its own kickstand is awesome. And it sounds so stupid and so small, especially for the way that expensive. But it's great.

And I love it. And I appreciate that you do too. I mean, I take a lot of pictures of my child. Like all of us do. I also take a lot of pictures of your child. I mean, he's pretty cute. No, you can prop it up like that and like and you can stay engaged in what's going on. Like, it's not going to work in every situation.

But it's just nice to have the option. You're like, oh, I can, I don't have to be, like, glued to having my phone in front of me. I can set it here, play with stickers, whatever we're doing. Yeah, it's just nice. It does seem like the big holdup for both the flip phones and the foldable phones is durability, both in terms of, like, real sort of measurable things like the IP ratings and the scratchiness of the internal screens. but also just the sort of feeling that you get using them. And we're all used to carrying slabs of glass in our pocket,

but there is something about these devices. They have the crease. You feel something using the hinges. Like Allison, you talked about that last little push to kind of go from like 160 degrees to 180 degrees open and it feels bad. It's like I wonder if it's just going to take a while both for us and for the technology to get to the point where like I don't have to treat this thing

like it is a very fragile object. Yeah. Yeah, something that people are always asking me about when they see a foldable for the first time, like, oh, so you can open it with one hand. I'm like, no, no, no. That actually feels terrible. Like, I think it will take some adjustment, like, just even in our mindset of, like, what we expect to be able to do with them and what they're actually capable, like, up for right now. I think as a price comes down, that becomes easier to manage as well. I mean, again, $1,800 phone in six months, you don't want to have the hinge breaking or the screen breaking or whatever.

I think that all of the companies can do a lot better with support, not only just like giving you places to go and options if your folding device breaks, but making them in a way that it is easier to repair them when, you know, the inevitable happens. Because we've had Samsung's foldables for about four years now, but there were lots of reports in the early generations of like this. screens just randomly cracking or, you know, failing and things like that. You can look back to lots of user reports about those things. And I think Samsung has slowly been addressing those as the generations moved on, but that requires buying a new $1,800 phone every time. So it's like, it is how iteration works and improvement works, but we're not there where it's just like you can just carelessly, or not carelessly, but like not worry about it as much. It is something that you think about. Like when I go to the beach this summer, probably won't be bringing my foldable

phone to read something on the beach because I'm terrified of getting a grain of sand in there still after four years. So like there's definitely lots of progress that needs to happen on that front, both in how durable the things are, how easy it is to get them fixed, and how repairable the devices are in the long run. Yeah. And the thing that gives me hope on all of those fronts is that both the pixel fold and the Razor Plus represent like real competition in those spaces, kind of for the first time. It's just been sort of Samsung off on its own island. There are a bunch of Chinese manufacturers doing really interesting work, but especially in the U.S., it's just basically been Samsung and nobody. And now it feels like there is at least a good alternative

in both foldables and flippables. And I'm very excited about that fact. I'm also just glad the razor is back. Like, I'm realizing as I talk about this, just saying the razor like brings me joy as a person who grew up in the time the razors were the coolest, like this just makes me happy. The best part about the new razors, David, is that you can launch the old razor experience complete with the keypad and the apps and everything. You can make it on the inside look like a 2003 razor. Yes. Oh, okay.

Well, done. I have to buy one now. That I didn't know this. This changes everything. All right. Well, we need to wrap this up. But before we do, there are three of us. So we get to decide right now majority of rules once and for all.

Flipable phones, foldable phones. Both will exist forever. But only one gets to be the like default phone choice for everyone forever. Which one is it? Alison, you go first. Flip. Dan? I got to go with foldable.

Two to one flip phones win. I love it. I knew I was losing this one. All right, before we go, let's get to the Vergecast hotline. And a reminder, the hotline number is 866 Verge 1-1, or you can always email Vergecast at theverge.com. Ask us all of your deepest, darkest, weirdest, best tech questions. We love them.

Here's one from Rob. Hi, my name is Rob. Call him to see if you guys have some suggestions as to how to be. best play my PC games on my TV. I built a really great computer, but I find that sometimes I just want to sit back on the couch, relax, and play some video games on my TV. I'm hoping you guys have some suggestions on how to do that. Thanks. All right. True story. As soon as this one came in, Liam James, our producer, was like, oh, me, pick me, pick me, I have to do this one. So here we go. Liam, take it away, my friend.

Thanks so much for this question and for calling in. Okay, so I just built a gaming PC. So you have perfect timing. I had to answer this very same question. And it turns out that the answer is the same no matter what your situation. Let's say your gaming PC is in your living room or across the room or in another room. A long HDMI cable is still going to be the best way to go. It is the most reliable, the lowest latency, and obviously those things are really important for gaming.

It's the only thing that's going to not give you headaches. There are some wireless solutions out there. They're expensive. They're flaky. They're unreliable. I can't recommend them. As far as controlling your gaming PC, though, from the couch, you may have heard of Steam's big picture mode.

But if you haven't, it's a great solution. Especially for buying games in Steam, it just lets you navigate your library and pull up games and start them and move around without needing a mouse and a keyboard. Okay. Hope that helps. Good stuff. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today.

Thanks to everyone who came on the show. thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more from everything we talked about, especially the Microsoft and FTC trial. There's a ton going on. Keep up with our story stream at the verge.com. We'll put links to everything in the show notes, but, you know, go to the website. It's a good website. I'm a fan.

If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or really just please, dear God, away to fix my patio, you can always email us at Vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. We love hearing from you. We want all your questions. It's so fun. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio.

The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk more about Microsoft versus FTC. We're going to talk about what's going on at Reddit. We're going to talk about the Mac Pro. We're going to talk about all kinds of stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.