The Vergecast - HBO Max might get maimed, Apple might remove the headphone jack from the iPad

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss this week in tech news — including what's happening with HBO Max, Apple iPad rumors, some handheld gaming updates, and this week in EVs. Further reading: Apple might remove the headphone jack from its next entry-level iPad Apple might delay iPadOS 16 launch Apple says Mac sales are getting hit hard by supply constraints  OnePlus 10T review: call it a comeback OnePlus’ 10T launch was a weird return to in-person events The Pixel 6A is getting an immediate update to make sure it’s moddable Logitech announces a new dedicated cloud gaming handheld device Nintendo reports Switch sales dip as chip shortage continues to bite The Orion looks like if Kirby swallowed your Switch    The megamerger killed Batgirl HBO Max might get maimed  A TikTok Music app could challenge Spotify and Apple Roku has a problem — its buttons aren’t printing enough money Lucid Motors will barely make any EVs this year as it slashes production goals again Tesla is the latest company to be drawn into the Elon Musk-Twitter legal mess Forget those Tesla crashes: GM says you can trust its autonomous vehicles GM’s Super Cruise will cover 400,000 miles of roads in North America, doubling coverage Twitter v. Elon Musk trial date set to start October 17th Google Meet meets Duo Meet, with Meet in Duo but Duo isn’t going into Meet A mysterious battery-powered Google device appears in FCC filings Sony InZone M9 review: impressive but flawed Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, the slow-motion car crash that is stage manager on the iPad, we'll try to read between the lines of Warner Bros. and Discovery's earnings call, and of course, the gadget news of the week. That's coming up right after this. 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 companies. in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms 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 report. for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom and this is am mom a community for athletes game changers and moms of all kinds dropping may 14th tap in with us hello and welcome to the verge cast the flagship podcast of the streaming wars it's another day in the streaming wars war never changes I'm here before I'm a friend Eli Alex Kranz is here I've been like oh shit war's hard man I'm just thinking of all the lines from the various metal care games I've played and thinking that's too esoteric even for this show.

Yeah. David Pierce is here. Hi. I'm on vacation. And what I have discovered this week is that all you have to watch is hotel cable television. And it's just long order SVU, modern family in the office. And frankly, it's fine. I don't need anything else.

That's great. I mean, I'm sold. David, where are you currently? I am currently in a phone booth on the fifth floor of a we work in South Beach, Miami. It's 40,000 degrees outside. The beach is literally right. there. Yeah. I'm only here because I love you too and all of the Vergecast listeners. So it's, I'm happy to be here. Well, also, we think, this is true, we think that while we're recording,

Discovery is going to kill HBO Max. Like, that might happen during the court. And David has to be here for that. We have to emotionally process that together. Yeah. But you're in Miami. You did like the Wednesday episode on the beach. Are you like super into crypto now? Are you? Oh, yeah. So a fun fact is you get off the airplane in Miami and they just instantly hand you, like, like 65 Bitcoin, and it's great. And then you're worth a lot of money. And then by the time you're out of the airport, you've lost half your money. It's just like a fun sort of game. And then at the end of your vacation. It's circular economy. It's like Dave and Busters in Miami, basically, but with Bitcoin. Welcome to the W. This cucumber water is $400. That's real. I've

been there. That's how that felt for me. Yeah. All right. So we think the HBO Max news is coming, because Discovery has earnings. Yes. So we'll see what happens. Yes. Well, that's coming. It's funny because you're going to listen to this tomorrow. You're already going to know. Yeah. Just hold on to this moment. You're in your car right now. Just close your eyes while you're driving and just be like, these three people I'm listening to don't know what's going to happen, but I do. What's the future like? Yeah. What's it like? Email us. What was it like in this moment when you knew the future? We'll see. We are going to commit, if things go as sideways as we think, we'll have like an emergency pod tomorrow. Alex and I are very excited about it. But for now, let's talk about some news. We've got some Apple stuff to talk about. One Plus held an event in New York, which is super weird because everybody at the event already had the device, which is just a weird moment. I got a lightning around. There's a bunch of car stuff.

Let's start with Apple. So there's like a bunch of like iPad stuff going on. So earlier this week, Mark German at Bloomberg had a report saying iPad OS 16 is going to get delayed. And it's kind of like we all know why. It's David. Because stage manager is horrible. And they should probably not do it. Like I don't know how long it takes to just delete whatever.

Like, like, Credfegri is like, I don't know, Command Delete, like, it never happened. It's Command A, then Delete. I don't know why that delays launch, but it sounds like they're really rethinking it because it's a mess. It's very bad. I mean, and I think the challenge is like Apple kind of needs this to work, right? Like, in its like relentless effort to make the iPad and the Mac more alike in how they work to the point where they can share apps and systems and all that stuff, like this stuff

has to work. And this is one way for them to get past everybody yelling about it. about freeform multitasking on the iPad, which I'm just giving up on because it's never going to happen. And Apple's just going to keep having new versions of bad ideas about how to not give us the multitasking we're actually asking for. But, like, Apple's not going to get a ton of chances at this because it also needs developers to buy into this stuff. And there's this long history of, like, if developers don't give it a chance, it's never

going to get a chance, and it's never going to work. And it's never going to go anywhere. And I'm not convinced anybody is going to do the work to get on Stage Manager while Stage Manager is still this bad. But there's a flip side to this, which is now they've so tightly coupled all of their operating systems and told developers,

hey, your iPad app is also a Mac app. Catalyst exists. There's 500 ways to make your apps work on all these things, that if you actually fragment the releases, you're making it harder for developers in another way. Like, it's a real tradeoff

that's kind of like vicious, right? Like, you're a developer, you want to make an app that works across all of Apple's platforms. They've got a way for you to do that. And then the iPad version just has to hold because Apple has an updated iPad. And there's not like a lot there, but there's stuff like the home app. Yeah. Where it's going to support Matter. And they're like doing a whole reboot. There's all this

under the hood stuff that gets changed in these OSs now. Because Apple has usually committed to updating them all at once, developers are like reliant on that. And now there's a delay because they want developers to buy into a good version of multitasking. But it's not a good version. Yeah, I think this is like one of those moments where Apple's version of simplicity masks and underlying complexity and they're caught up in it now. Yeah. Well, and Apple is so unusually good at like creating a moment around that software launch that is like it makes developers race to hit that moment and get their apps ready because a lot of people are going to be upgrading and looking for new stuff. It's when new devices come out. So there's like a lot of people on new gadgets looking for stuff.

And then it's like like it seems like every year for the last couple of years, there's been like that one feature that isn't. ready and comes out a few months later. And then by the time it comes out, we're all kind of like, oh, yeah, I forgot about that. And it feels like this now, like, maybe Destin's stage manager to be one of those things, which, like, might possibly be good news for Apple if it has finally realized that stage manager is bad and they'd like to secretly hide it behind everything else. But I kind of agree that this is like, it does. It fragments a thing that it has been really good for Apple for a long time that it has not

been fragmented. We'll see. On the other hand, stage manager is such a disaster. Like, they really should. The other choice they have is to release iPadOS without Stage Manager or anything and then add it back in a Dot Update, which it has been doing for years. Yeah. Like, the last few versions of iOS have launched without features and they've just added them over the course of a year. There's also, like, the suggestion that maybe this delay isn't necessarily because Stage Manager sucks, although that's probably why.

But because they want to have another, like an October event and do a bunch of iPad and make it like an iPad October. event. And then part of that is like, and stage manager, fully formed. So it could be like building a moment. It's just, it's weird, man. It's weird. I don't think you can reboot stage manager in a month. Yeah, no, I don't think so either. Short of doing commande delete. I don't think you can pick stage manager in a month. David, just like standing in the crowd glaring at Tim. Liam is reminding us that last year they changed Safari on the Mac to have those horrible tabs. and they undid it by the time it came out. They give you the little, the choice, a toggle.

Well, yeah. But that's like, that's a solvable thing. Yeah. They were like, okay, you don't want the bad thing. We'll add a toggle that lets you pick the normal way or the bad way. And we'll just see what everybody picks. Like, we believe and everyone's like, no, I'm going to do the normal way. That's literally what stage manager is.

It's a toggle that lets you pick the bad way. But I think they want people to use it. They can't market how fancy it is if then you turn it, if you like flip the toggle and you're like, oh, screen bad. How will they market it? Like, if they somehow improve it, how do you market it? How do you just market piles? Like, how is that a thing?

Right? Like, I know people who are like iPad multitasking wizards, just swipe in and pinch in and slide it over. And it's like, I don't even, I don't do that many things at once. I don't know what you're doing. I'm just like thinking of the commercial. And it's like, what, a teenager. And they're getting ready to do, they're doing some drawing on their iPad.

And then they're like, hold on. I got to move this. And they start to swipe it. And they're like, oh, no, no, I'm not just going to swipe it in some other multitasking way. Swipe it to the pile. And then mom calls them for dinner. And they're like, snap, walk away. And then the text shows up on screen and like, you know, Apple font.

And it's like piles. Call me an iPad. It's great. I don't know why they have an ad agency. They just call me. You got this. The thing about October. So October, right, traditionally they do two fall events.

October is Macs and iPads. We've got a leak. We don't know how. accurate it is. The next entry-level iPad will look a lot like the iPad Air. It's a case leak. You know, it's one of those like, are we going to talk about it or cover it? And I think we have to because of our historic obsession with headphone jacks, my historic obsession with headphone jacks. Look, I got one trick. It's my brand. All right? It's like disclosing the Comcast as an investor in box media in headphone jacks. That's who I am. It seems like they're going to take the headphone jack

out of the cheap one, which I'm just going to tell you, every parent in America is not going to lose their mind. Yes. Because the $3.29.00 iPad is like the thing that allows many meals to happen for parents around the world. Like you buy the cheap iPad and you put Disney Plus on it. And then maybe YouTube kids, because you're just a gambler. Like, will my child be a serial killer when they grow up?

Let's find out what YouTube kids has to say. And then you just like get through your life. And taking away the headphone jack means that you've introduced Bluetooth to toddlers. which is not great. And I understand people have already been tweeting me. You can have a dongle. You could do a thing. They're kid Bluetooth headphones.

You want to just simplify all of that. Can you imagine explaining dongles to a three-year-old who just wants to watch, like, cocoa melon? Can you imagine, like, teaching a three-year-old about dongles? I mean, I know my four-year-old would love the word dongle. Yeah. So that's just another problem that you're going to have. I just, I don't understand it. Like, they keep them on the Mac.

They know people want them on the Mac. They're not going to take them away. The thing isn't running out of room. Yeah. Right? Like, that's the argument on the phone is they wanted all the space back to add the Taptic engine or whatever they needed to add. iPads are big.

Like, what are they? I don't get it. This is like the one where it's, you're really, you're really going sideways on trying to sell wire. Like, I don't know. You want to make accessory money? Make kid Apple headphones. People will buy them.

Or make $20 dongles that connect two kid headphones. It looked like a little animal, like a little mouse. There you go. A little tiger. That's Amazon's tact. Apple's not going to make anything.

It looks like a little tiger. Are you kidding me? Daniel Tiger branded AirPods are going to be enormous. I just don't know, like, they took him off the iPad Pro, and it was like, fine. Like, this thing's really expensive. If you come back to the stage manager, right, on the software side, they keep pushing this thing towards the Mac. On the hardware side, they keep pushing it towards the iPhone.

Yep. And it's like, Macs are really good because they have. a lot of, like the Mac has tons of ports. Remember what everyone cheered when you were like, we added a good keyboard and an SD card slot? Yes. Don't you want to feel that way again?

You can, whatever you want. I don't think they want to because like when a small child will fling the iPad and shatter it and replace the glass, they cheer about that because that's a nice little revenue bump they get when they have to repair that. It like making them more or making them less repairable is,

a very compelling business strategy that Apple has repeatedly said as part of their thing. I will say I'm super skeptical of these leaks. And this is like, this is the kind of thing that we see a million of all the time. And it's basically, it's like the things that case makers use to make their cases. And a lot of it is sometimes they have previous knowledge. Sometimes they're just making educated guesses. Sometimes like they know less than we do about what is going to be in the next devices. So this is like, there's a big grain of salt here. And I think the reason to think it might happen is that like this is just what Apple keeps doing is getting rid of headphone jacks. And so like in that sense, sure, there's a decent chance that at some point this iPad will be gone.

And the thing that sucks about this is what's really going to happen is this is this is going to normalize playing stuff on speakers out of your iPad in the world in the way that like my mother-in-law, who hopefully does not listen to this podcast, because I bring her up a surprising amount, likes to walk through the grocery store on speakerphone. And I think that is the worst. This is just like societally acceptable. And what's going to happen next is like YouTube kids on full blast at Olive Garden is just the world that we are going to live in. And I hate it already.

I hate it. I'm done. And we'll all fall down the YouTube radicalization funnel together on one iPad. In the Olive Garden. Reports are that this Olive Garden got super racist. We don't know why. A child was spotted watching YouTube kids unsupervised. It's just one of those things.

It's America in 2022. We'll see. We don't know. It is a sketchy leak. Look at it. The Mac sites are believing it. That's like part of the reason we, 9-5 believes it.

Like, at the end of the day, the casemakers just have to stamp a hole in their cases, so they've got it out. Right. But it saw as a home button, which is really interesting. The iPad Air Design with the home button is really interesting. I'd really love that most of the people who hit it didn't notice the missing

headphone jack. They were like, look at these CAD files. I cannot believe they're doing a redesign. And I think it was like, Chris Welch, was like, hey, there's something missing.

We've got a brand here. Yeah. We've got a checklist. If they were like his headphones? All right. Yeah, he saw it and he was like, nope, we got to blog it. All right. Other news, other gadget news.

One plus 10T came out. Allison reviewed it. She likes it. Yeah. Good processor. Snapchat 8 plus generation 1. Not only one of the, I think the best processing in Android phone, one of the most words in a name per processor on the market today. Very important.

Really good screen, high refresh OLED, camera, no mute switch. It's just like 649, right? It's like the most power you can get for that money. Yeah. Which is cool. Very one plus. We did get a tweet from someone. You guys saw it.

Someone was like, I'm the person who plays games on their Android phone. The one. And they're like, I play them on Stadia. And I was like, but then you don't need the game phone. Yeah, then what's the point? Don't get it. That's why Stadia exists. But we got one.

They were like on my commute home. It's the only time I get to play video games. They're also the only Stadia user that exists. This is like a unicorn of a person. Yeah, Deter, if you're listening, find them. They have many things to tell you. It was soon to our pitch eyes burner account, for sure. But the launch is really weird.

So the One Plus held a launch event in New York. They invited a bunch of people. We don't take junkets. But, you know, the world of tech influencers arrived in New York City for a tech event. The first in-person tech event, kind of in a long time. Like, Apple had one. It seems like the doors are open to it again. Just strange, I think, is Allison's, like, no one knows what they're doing.

Like, it's like everyone's first day of school again. Mm-hmm. We'll see if we have more of them. But I think the funniest part of this is all the people there already had the phone. They had review units. So I'm not sure what the event was for. They were taking pictures of the event with their review units. I mean, this is like the thing now, right?

Because we're like in this place where if you're not Samsung and you're not Apple, everybody has decided that the only move is to try to outshine Samsung and Apple and like be cooler and create cultural moments and have fandom and influencers. And it's like we're on this weird, like, I don't know, lifestyle brand kick among all of these smartphone startups trying to take over the world. And it just, it feels like maybe there was like a time when that was a thing that was going to work for a lot of people. And we've all like forgotten how to be humans. Yeah, it was 2012.

Yeah, it was like a good time. And then the pandemic happened. And now I don't remember how to go outside. And so it's like, how much is this going to work anymore? I think like we were moving. away from this even before the pandemic, right? Like, Apple is very, very good at this. And everybody else, even Samsung is very bad at it. And they all want to make the moment, but they also want to give everybody the embargo. And like the reason the Apple thing worked, no PR person, take notes, please,

put away your notebook. But the reason the Apple has always kind of worked is because it is a surprise for everyone. And then Samsung will go and give all of us early access. That's wonderful. We we have time to be very thoughtful about what we write about it. We have time to work with these products and see them. And it gives us a much more nuanced take when we write about it. But at the same time, the mystique is gone. It's just not there. And they just keep doing that.

And I don't know who that is for. Because I don't think, I think that translate, that lack of mystique for the journalists covering it, translates to the audiences. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. But I also think, like, it's a mid-range phone. I say that it's a mid-range priced phone with a nice processor. And like, what are you going to do? Like, there's not a lot of ways to get attention for that thing anymore.

Well, you put LEDs on the back. Yeah, that's how you do it. You're like, the ringtones make the back light up, which worked. It did work. We made a TikTok about it. It was cool. The phone's great. You should read the review.

Awesome, a great job. The camera really seems like it has some wacky-do focus problems. This is like the One-plus story. The macro is just beautiful. Yeah, One-plus's ability to like almost do it. every single time continues to amaze me. And it's like, there's just little stuff every single time that it's like, okay, One Plus is on all the right roads and then right at the very last minute,

just like flipped his car into a ditch, like right before the finish line. This is just there. We're like a decade of this now. And it's very impressive. Well, that's why they left to do nothing. Yeah, right. But I think one more thought on the, like, event thing. One of the strange things to me about this is it seems like, like, the advantage that Apple has

is that there's this, like, giant list of people who already care about the next iPhone. right? Whereas I feel like even Samsung now, I don't know that there is like a huge amount of pent up demand to know what the galaxy fold for is going to be like. Maybe there is and I'm wrong, but I just like people are showing up to be like, what is the next iPhone because I'm probably going to own it at some point in a way that like no one else is doing. And I feel like this idea that I can like get people to care with an event is just not true. I'm not sure it ever was. But like if people already care, you can do a great event and a lot of people care and pay attention. But if people don't care, I'm not sure that like a splashy presentation is the way to get people to care. The way to get people to care is clearly like ringtones and LEDs.

But it's like do cool stuff with your device. Don't just like make a device and then have a splashy presentation about it. The lights need to be on the phone, not on the stage. I'm sorry. That's good. That's the title of like your PR manual. Lights on phone, not on stage. Well, I mean, I think we've had a version of this conversation lots and lots of times.

I've had it with Tony Fidel, right? Like every year Apple just changed the shape of the iPod and the underlying software was the same. But like one year it was skinny and one year it was fat and one year it was tall. And one year it was color. One year it had little videos. And the next year they made the screen bigger and it had big videos. And then one year it was the iPhone. Right.

And like they just kept changing what it looked like because that gets more attention than anything any software capability can do. True. And like Apple somewhat learned this with the iPhone like every couple years. They're like, it looks different. And everyone's like, I got to get that one. And like until foldables really hit, I don't think that moment is kind of, I think that's why all the Samsung's of the world are like chasing after foldables. Yeah. Because it is a better differentiator from the iPhone than anything they can ever do on the software.

Like Bixby isn't, no one has ever bought a phone because of Bixby. As far as that, if you were that person, did you buy a phone because of Bixby? Email Alex Cranz at the verge.com. Maybe it was the stadia guy. It was the Android gaming guy. That's him. It's him. This poor man.

This poor man. It was a very sincere note. Thank you for sending the note. But did you buy your phone because of Bigspee? Someone out there has to have, and I just want to meet you. Okay. A little Pixel 6A update. They're immediately updating the software to unlock the bootloader, which is cool,

but I think also says a lot about the pixel. It's also already on sale. But the hackers at it. We'll see what happens. Google is just like systematically deciding to not really care if anyone buys its phones. They're just like, we're going to keep making them. They're neat. But, oh, it's cheaper.

It's like, it's on sale on Amazon, like 15 minutes after it launches. And we're unlocking the bootloader. And it's just like, they're like, we've made these things basically as development tools anyway. So just, you know, have at it. Knock yourself out. I will say we talked a lot about Zuckerberg and Meta and Zuck turning up the heat and sending up a note. And poor Gary from Chicago. Gary, if you're out there, man.

I hope you found a friend with the boat. Soonerper Chai sent an email to Google being like, we need to get better at this. We're not as productive as we should be. They're doing this thing called simplicity sprints where, like, Google employees are being asked to simplify how Google works and, like, be more productive. Like, the heats on at Google, too. And I think some of this, like, flailing around the pixel is going to become a casualty of it because there's no point to it right now. Like, I don't think Samsung is afraid of the pixel. Just don't.

Like, it's not a useful hedge against Samsung doing Bixby, which is, like, kind of what it existed for. And they spent, what, a billion dollars on HTC? Has that paid off? Have they made that money back in Pixel? They have not. Probably. So I think over the next couple years, or however long, there's not a recession, recession lasts, right? This is where you would expect people to squeeze because all of their money is in search and YouTube.

They make no money and like basically anywhere else. Yeah. Like their cloud division doesn't make money. Yeah. And there was a great, I forget who wrote it, but somebody made a very convincing case in a blog post that Google is smart to keep throwing money after cloud because it's like this is the sort of land grab moment and market share is really easy to get right now and is really hard to lose over time. So it's like, okay, Google's probably correctly going to continue to lose a lot of money on cloud

for the foreseeable future. But it does this thing every once in a while as a company. Like there was that, I think it was Larry Page who wrote a thing forever ago that was like more wood behind fewer arrows or something. It was like this big blog post where they essentially announced the same thing, right? They're like, Google is this giant sprawling company full of people who do basically whatever they want all day. And then we ship it no matter what. We're going to stop being like that.

And then they sort of slowly become that company again. And now they're going to try to stop being that again. And they're like combining all of their many messaging apps into a slightly more confusing but smaller set of messaging apps. And like, I will say thank you to them. We got to write the headline of the year because they did it. It was very polite. I'm just going to read it to you now. Google Meet meets Duo Meat with Meat and Duo.

but Duo isn't going into meat. It is a perfectly accurate headline, too. Every word of it is exactly correct. It's so good. That's 100% what's happening. And random Google people, like, we're tweeting it being like, it's happening. I don't think what happened was like a thunderous dunk on this strategy. It was very strange.

But yes, Duo is becoming Google Meet and they're killing the meat app over. I don't know. Chris Grant, who's the, you know, he's like the SVP of the Virgin Polygon. He called me that. And he always calls me on Google Duo because he has an Android phone, the service in the house of bed. He always calls me a duo, whatever. Usually my phone rings. This time every Google home in my house rang and my phone did not ring.

And I'd like run across the room and answer him on a Google home and be like, I don't know what's going on. And he calmly goes, oh, this happens all the time. Just call me back. And he still does it. It was great. Loved it. Love every minute of it. Last little bit of gadget news, kind of like a hot week for handheld gaming.

Yeah. Alex, like a lot of handheld gaming news went down. There was a lot. Logitech announced exactly what I've been wanting, which was a dedicated cloud gaming handheld device. We know almost no details about it, but it's coming. And if Logitech is doing it, a lot of other people are probably going to do it, unless it's like the last great idea they had, which was remotes for your home theater.

and then they killed them. So hopefully it's not that, but they're working with Kinsent games. It's Logitech G, which is like the smaller kind of sub-brand from Logitech that does all of its gaming hardware and stuff, usually pretty affordable gaming hardware. So this makes perfect sense to me, right? If you are like, okay, it's a cloud gaming product, then you don't have to worry about your GPUs, your megahertz, your Rams. You're like, whatever, we're just going to pump Stadia or Luna or Xbox GamePass into this thing

and all the hard work isn't happen on their servers. Yep. So we need a pretty good display. We need enough connectivity to make it go, which is like pretty commodity stuff now. Like you just call Qualcomm or whoever up.

Yeah. Media tech is foaming at the mouth right now trying to get it on this thing. And you're like, you know what we need? We need great buttons. You can just see like the Logitech G division is like,

dude, we're really good at buttons. We're so good at buttons. They're like the perfect company to make this. I'm so excited about this for that exact reason. It's like I'm very curious if it ends up There's like the Switch look. There's like the Steam Deck look. And then there's the 3DS look.

And then there's the thing where it's just like a basically an Xbox controller with a little screen above it. There's like a million ways you could skin this. And I'm very curious how it goes. But I feel like if anybody can do this very simple, just stream the thing to my buttons thing. Like it should be Logitech. Yeah. And like they were probably like knocking on the door of a C like Brack and Daryl to see. Dude, the button thing is going to pay off.

We did it. We've been waiting. The button people are freaking out downstairs. they want to come talk to you. I bet it could, like, they could just gut a bunch of old PSVitas, and that's it. That's all they need. Just gut it and put in, like, a good Wi-Fi chip. Yes.

It's got a nice display. That would be amazing, actually. Yes. That's such a good idea. Were you a Vita person? Oh, yeah. I've got one. Would you play on your Vita?

The thing that's like Tomb Raider, but with dudes. Uncharted. Dude Raider. I mean, that's also an accurate description of Uncharted. To be clear. It's true. I was never a Vita. I always wanted one, but there was nothing there.

It was like none of these games are for me. I don't know. I bought it like used for like a hundred bucks with that. And I think Gravity Rush came with it. I played both of them. And it's still sitting in a box somewhere. Like I did it and I was like, okay. Yeah.

That was a cool use of $100. Hack it up. Put it away. I think it even has like 3G on it and stuff. Never used it. You should figure out this is like a very Alexhans project. Figure out if you can like, hack it and get it to run Plex.

Yes. And then you should run your entire Plex system off your PSVita. I don't want to do that. Like that's what you need. Like it's like in a place of honor. You're like, that's my Plex server now. And you can call it a Logitech Harmony remote. The Logitech thing comes in an interesting time because Nintendo is saying switch sales are

dipping mostly chip shortage. But it's also about that time, right? Yeah. We've been expecting a Switch pro for a minute. There were lots of rumors last time around. It didn't happen. It's like, it's about that time. I would also say, Breath of the Wild 2 coming out in March.

Hopefully. We'll see. On the other hand, they've got this thing called the Orion, which is just one of my favorite hacky peripherals. We should just do the full, the rest of the show, and the Orion. Yes. Like, it's so silly. It's basically just a display that clips onto your switch.

It eats your switch. It's like a television that you put on your switch. I don't know. Yeah, we're all describing the same thing. You take your switch, which has. has a screen and then you plug it into a bigger screen and like clip it in there. A bigger worse screen. A bigger worse screen.

720P but it's bigger. So it's going to be uglier and it's like noticeably a cheaper screen than even the original switch. America loves a big cheap screen. Also it's 768P my friend. Oh, sorry. There's 48 more P's in this thing that you had better account for. It looks very silly. I love it.

I love a silly hardware hack. This reminds me of those old magnifying glasses people used to put over their game boys. Yeah. Do you guys remember the Asus Transformer? My favorite gadget of all time. Was that the phone that went into the computer? No, it was the phone that went into the tablet.

It had a little flap on the back of the tablet that you literally stuck the phone into and then you had a tablet. This is that, but good and not stupid and bad. It's very exciting. It's not that, really. Is it not stupid? What it is is a big cheap screen.

It's like an HDMI monitor with a sillier form factor that you can plug your switch into. I do like that it's got places for the handles. You can, or for the joycons. Yeah, but then it has handles for the joycons. So you can hold it because it's a big cheap screen. And it's also two pounds with the games in it. It weighs over two pounds. So you can just do like little presses, little, little hammer curls while you're playing.

Get those biceps working? I mean, all right. I mean, tiny little biceps. Tiny little biceps. I've got some Nintendo Switch or Ryan biceps. But wait, can I just complain about the switch for a minute here? Because I have a switch that I've had for a while and it like sort of periodically reenters and leaves my life depending on games.

Like I'll get very into Mario Kart and then stop playing Mario Kart for a year. But so I dug it out the other day and was like, okay, what I'm going to do this time is I'm going to dock it into my, I have a monitor with two. HDMI ports. One is my computer. I'll dock it in the other one. And then when I have, you know, five minutes to kill, I'll switch it over and play some Mario tennis. Love this idea. Huge win. I bought a third-party dock that just flatly didn't work. Then I bought another third-party dock that didn't work. Then I eventually like conned Nintendo into like letting me buy a dock from the official Nintendo store without buying the entire new switch. I was able to actually buy a dock,

which is very exciting. But that dock doesn't come with the Nintendo approved AC adapter, which is apparently crucial to the integrity of the Nintendo doc. And now I have to buy that, which is also being complicated. And I've just, I've just, I've just gone down this road where it's like, it's just, it's a USBC port that plugs into the wall. Like, I have a hundred thousand of those in my home and I'm not allowed to use any of them. And it's just driving me absolutely insane. Like, this is the kind of thing that it's like, it should plug into an HDMI port and it should plug into a USBC port and everything should be wonderful. And instead, it is the opposite and it is driving me absolutely insane. USBC is the future, David.

And I won't have you denigrate it on this program. It works perfectly every time. And every port, regardless of function, should look like a USBC port. It is the universal cable, for sure. It definitely always does exactly what you think. All right, that's enough. We're going to take a break. And then we're going to figure out what happened, HBO Max.

We're going to come back. We're going to talk about it. We'll grab up on it. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary. too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify

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Okay, we're back. Warner Brothers Discovery earnings are out. They lost some money. A little money. HBO Max lost some domestic subscribers, gained some international subscribers. They've got a screenshot of the flight attendant here, so I think the flight attendant's safe. Yes. They got a screenshot of the Batman in here.

one of the silliest movies ever made. They're making a sequel of that. Joker 2 got a casting announcement today. All right. So, like, the basics are in place. I'm sorry, how did you skip over 90-day fiancé? You can't skip 90-day fiancé. Or, you know, Street Outlaws is one of their,

that's what this says. Street Outlaws are some of their best launches. So I need to apologize to everyone carmically. Last time on this program, I said, HBO Max is ticking closer to zero on the Go-90 scale than 90. And then immediately all hell broke. I'm sorry. That's just clearly my fault. So if you don't remember the go 90 scale of doom streaming services, you start at zero and then you can go 90, which it means you die. Like go 90, the dead

streaming service from Verizon. It started with an idea that teenagers would form gangs on their cell phones to make YouTube videos. I don't know. It was a bad idea. They died. They went 90. Quibi went 90. HBO Max was doing great. I think it was people's favorite streaming service. Yeah, despite being bad app. Like the app itself is garbage. But the content is good. People like the shows. F Boy Island, a great show.

And just putting that energy in the universe, it is hilarious. So we said we complimented HBO Max. We shouldn't have. Little did we know. The new corporate overlords, Discovery Communications, now known as Warner Brothers Discovery, tagline, the stuff dreams are made of. That's their real corporate tagline.

It's true. I'm not even remotely kidding. Would realize that. they had spent a bunch of money on HBO and the rest of Warner Brothers, which you might remember was purchased by AT&T for some reason. Do you remember what it was? No, to kill Filmstruck. To kill Filmstruck. Now, AT&T bought Warner Brothers because their idea, this is true. They said this to a judge in the trial that the Trump DOJ filed to block the merger because Trump was mad at CNN. They were like, this is a deal about the vision of the future where we're going to take

Game of Thrones and turn it into bite-sized content for cell phones. And then they quickly realized no one on any side of that equation thought that was a good idea. And they were horribly in debt. Jeffrey Katzenberg thought it was a good idea. No, even he wasn't like we should do that to Game of Thrones. But he tried on with Quibi. Yeah, but Quibi was like, we're going to turn the phone sideways. That shit went 90. You know, like, fine. So then AT&T is like crap, we're in a mountain of debt. Also, our various 5G promises came to nothing. Whoops.

So they flip Warner to discovery in a secret deal. Underlying this, by the way, the old CEO of AT&T had left. And the CEO who did all the deals for him became the CEO. And that guy, John Stanky, immediately started selling all the things that he had been made to buy a C.O., which is incredible. Right? Like, your boss is like, go buy DirecTV. And you're like, fine. then you become the boss, like, that was stupid.

Like, real things that are happening at AT&T. So now Discovery owns Warner Brothers. They own HBO Max, the whole big bet on the future of streaming. And then, like, this week, chaos starts breaking loose because the discovery people have taken over. So, like, the first thing they did was they canceled the launch of CNN Plus, like, 20 minutes after they launched CNN Plus. So that's a mess.

And then the rumors this week are, like, they're going to CNN Plus HBO Max. Yeah. And then, Alex, they did a bunch of tech stuff, right? Yeah. I mean, they've been doing it. stuff for a while. Like David Zaslov, who is the CEO, he was the CEO of Discovery. He basically built Discovery, acquired History Channel. Like, he made that the big giant empire was, it is now. He was part, he, like, helped create the deal, obviously, to acquire Warner Brothers. And for him,

it was always, like, I want to get HBO, because he's a linear TV guy. So he wants, like, HBO is, like, a big crown jewel if you're still one of the three people in linear TVs. And he's one of them. So he's like, I want that. And he didn't really understand streaming as evidenced by the fact that they launched Discovery Plus and about 20 something million people have subscribed to it, even though it's $5. Like they, and they like throw it at you, I think, if you're on T-Mobile. They're just like, here, have some Jeff. What is it name?

It's Chip and Joanna. Have some Chip and Joanna. Just enjoy. So he bought it. And then he obviously killed CNN Plus. He thought it was a stupid idea. and as soon as the merger was closed. He was like, all right, you're done.

Then he went and he started killing all these shows on CW, which is a joint venture between VICOM and Warner. So he started killing all those shows, which also had the added effect of hurting Netflix, because a huge part of Netflix and CW's revenue stream was their relationship. That's an ice cold move. So, like, kills off all these shows,

and just like, oh, no, Riverdale's ending. I guess they're going to stop a comet with superpowers. That really happened on. Riverdale. Riverdale quickly lost the plot, I would say. They're like, one guy got murdered, and at the end, they're like, we are teenagers, and we are definitely fighting a comment. And like, I think there's another season still left, but.

Oh, good. But that's the end. Then it's going to be over. And then this week, they killed Batgirl. Like, I mean. How dare they? Yeah, how dare there? But they were going to do HBO Max.

It was going to be on HBO Max. It was going to be part of this big DC universe. They were bringing Michael Keaton back to play Batman. and they were like going to introduce him into the whole wider universe to basically replace Ben Affleck. And there was going to be a whole bunch of stuff in the flash about why they were doing that. But it was all going to start with Bat Girl. But they got rid of it. And it was really weird because they were super inconsistent on why they killed Bat Girl.

Because they're just putting it in a vault. It's basically done. They've spent like $90 million on this film. Yeah. The movie's over. Yeah. They've shot it. They shot it.

They were in editing. They weren't finished, but they'd already done like some screenings of it. it was in like a fine place. I think it was like an adequate film, it sounds like. But they made it to stream. Yeah, it was specifically made to be a streaming film. It was never going to be a theatrical release. Okay.

And so they then put it in the vault and they initially say, well, we're putting it in the vault because it's such a bad film. It is so awful that no one can ever see it. And it's like, but we've seen so many terrible Warner Brothers films. Like Batman versus Superman exists in the world. You can watch it right now. And I really find it hard to believe anything can be as bad. But that was the original thing. And then deadline reported a couple hours later that, no, it wasn't because it was bad.

It was fine. It was actually because they wanted to do some weird tax stuff because they're in a lot of debt. Like when they created this merger, they acquired over $55 billion in debt. And their stock isn't trading where it needs to be when you have also $55 billion in debt. Like normally, okay, a company wants to have a bunch of money. debt and is a public security company, fine, it can do it. But if it has too much debt, then people will get scared. So they're trying to get rid of a little bit of that debt. There's like three billion of it they want to get rid of. And so everybody is claiming now that like

getting rid of Batgirl was helping with that. And canceling this stuff is going to help with it. You're in this world where we don't know what the future of movie theaters is going to be, but we know reliably the big superhero movies will make people go to movie theaters. Why, in that world, would you say, we're going to make Batgirl a tiny streaming movie instead of a blowout theatrical release that'll make a billion dollars? That was part of like Jason Keeler, who was the former CEO of WarnerMedia. That was his strategy. His strategy was, we're going to have really, really big movies, but we're going to put every single movie we make, big or small, onto HBO Max, because we're not just competing in theaters. Day and date. Yeah, day and date. Because we're not

just competing with theaters, we're also completing with Netflix. And so, if we want to have like, if Netflix is going to go do the gray man and do these big theatrical releases, but just on streaming, we want to do that too. And we also want to build out our entire, like, universe because we still have, like, they've been struggling for years to compete with Marvel. So this is where I will disclose that we made a Netflix show. Yes. I mean, an EP of a Netflix show.

I will say this disclosure, and I will also say, the gray man is bad and is, like, the ultimate definition of, like, the tent pole streaming movie. Yeah. right it's like streaming movies have a vibe and the gray man is the most that vibe yes yes right like it they were just like whatever you're going to be looking at your phone so like this exposition we didn't finish writing it you know look up when there's loud explosions you'll have a great time right like you can tell like movies made in the theater are designed to like hold your attention the whole time because they assume you don't have your phone and movies made for streaming are like

you probably have your phone yeah like you left the room to go to the bathroom these three minutes didn't really matter like it's the stuff between explosion like every stream streaming movie is like this. Yeah. But like why would you make Batgirl, which theoretically could drive people into the theater? I don't know. That's a weird decision. Yeah.

I think it was like a weird decision at the time because I think their calculus for like Jason Keeler was, hey, we're going to, we're going to make this. And people are going to be so excited about Batgirl because she's, she's a big superhero. Like her comic book sell very, very well. Like she was, she's kind of when you think of D.C. comics and you think of like women's superheroes. You're like, Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Harley Quinn. Yeah. Right? Like, she's big. And so I think they were like, oh, yeah, we're going to do like tent pole, but cheaper and on a TV. And so they shot basically a very expensive TV movie. Like, by all accounts, it looked like it was for TV. And so it was

too small to go into theaters. And Zazlov was like, well, let's just get rid of it. Let's just put it in a vault. But then they took it a bunch of other stuff off the service. Yeah, a bunch of other stuff has disappeared from the service, but it's still available if you want to go buy it and watch it or you want to go rent it and botch it, you can still do this. There's a lot of rumors that, like, part of this was also to get back at Jason Keilar because, like, Zezlov apparently didn't like him. And so part of this is like, well, I just want to like stick it to the last guy. That's some real Hollywood stuff. Yeah. So there's like some Hollywood backstabbing plus the accounting stuff. Plus, apparently it was like a deeply adequate film. Fair enough. So those are like

the pre-shocks of the earthquake. All this stuff is like early in this week is like Batgirl went away and you're like, I'm going to drag myself into caring about Batgirl because I care about the streaming industry. And then yesterday into today when the earnings came out, but it hasn't

happened yet, the rumor mill goes wild. Absolutely wild. Zaz is going to shut down HBO Max. Yep. Or like fire a bunch of people on the HBO Max Originals development team. Put all the money into like, street Avengers or whatever reality shows he's making.

And then he's going to merge the apps into a super app. But then you don't have to worry because Casey Blois, who's the head of HBO, is actually going to get more power. So he's not going to kill all the good stuff. I'll tell you, the Westworld subreddit went nuts yesterday. Yeah. The Westworld has one season left and they're like, do not cancel this show. It's a mess.

Fewer people are watching it. This season's very good. I will say that. But they're just like, the Westworld people are freaking out. that they will, this mess will not come to a conclusion because no one knows what's going on. We should say one, one useful piece of context here is that Discovery has basically been telegraphing this move for six months. Yeah.

Yeah. Even before the merger was finalized and Discovery wasn't like allowed to say out loud what it was definitely for sure going to do with this new combined company. It was like very loudly hinting to the point of not really hinting at all that this, their, that their ultimate plan was to, their CFO at some conference basically said, we think the future is a combined app. Like it has been, it has not been unclear that this was the plan all along. And I think it's sort of a branding mistake to think that discovery is like a cooler, shinier thing than HBO. If indeed that is where this goes. But like their whole pitch was always, we think we can do the like

appointment television and do the like while you're watched while you're folding laundry stuff in one service. And that that's going to be the thing that like most closely mirrors how people actually watch TV and might be a huge hit. And there's like a version of that that makes a lot of sense to me. It's just that now they seem to be running around killing everything that costs more than $15 an episode to make. Well, I don't think they really are. Like I think, I think Zeslov is like, he's been very clear from the beginning what he was going to do. He was very clear, like, we're going to cut back on this content. We are not going to spend as much content as our competitors. That's a dumb thing for us to do, especially when I can like throw $5 at somebody

buying a new house and get a season of television out of them fucking it up. So, like, that's not a direct quote. There's literally a show on HGTV called Help, I broke my house. It's a thing. But, like, so they knew that they were, like, he's been saying for months what they were going to do here. And I think what really scare people was this Batgirl thing, because this is super unusual to put a film back in the vault when it's that close to being finished.

And the last time we saw that happened was in another. merger when Disney acquired Fox, they get a hold of the new mutants, and they're like, what the hell is this? It's like a horror film, and it's got like X-Men references, but it's not really X-Men, and they're fighting a bear. This is stupid. We're throwing it in the vault. And then they eventually released it, and it was fine.

But that doesn't usually happen. And for them to say, we have zero plans. There is no chance this is ever coming out. This is going in the vault. It will remain unfinished. It's going to sit here for eternity. It's really, really, really uncommon. And I think that's what started to scare people.

Because, like, yeah, everybody knew that this merger is coming. They knew that, like, Discovery Plus and HBO Max are eventually going to become one super app. Presumably, HBO will be the primary point there because it has, like, almost three times as many users as Discovery Plus. But we don't know if they're going to keep that name. Yeah, so we don't know the name. It seems like unlikely that they will. So after all of this, HBO now, HBO Go, HBO, HBO. HBO Max Originals, Cinemax, which existed and had its own platform called Max Go.

This is a real thing. They did all this work and made people understand that HBO Max existed. And they're like, we're going to take it away. Yeah. And they're just being super confusing this week, too, right? Like, he also said repeatedly, we're going to do this. We're going to merge this together. But we have like nearly 100 million subscribers and we don't want to confuse them.

And instead, we're going to cancel our show, like cancel stuff, start quietly. pulling things, be like, well, yeah, I mean, we're probably going to merge them together. But now Chip and Joanna Gaines from Fixer Uppers, which is this huge part of the Discovery Empire, are now going to, they're going to have a bunch of their stuff on HBO Go or, excuse me, on HBO Max. And it's just like, it's super confusing and it's super, I think, scary for a lot of people who have watched these things happen before, who have watched these like films get pulled and lost and stuff they really like get canceled. And usually the, stuff that's getting canceled, happens to be the stuff that's, I don't know, the cast is primarily

people of color, or the filmmakers are primarily people of color, or the subject matter is especially, like, about more diverse communities and that marginalized communities. So I think there's a lot of that, like, general anxiety, and the guy's just not talking. I mean, presumably he's going to talk. So they can't talk before earnings. Yeah. So now earnings are out. So you would expect in the next couple days there's going to be the big, announcement that HBO Max and Discovery Plus have been merged into Disco Max

Plus. Yes. Whatever they're going to call it. It's going to be great. And we'll see what happens. There are deeply conflicting rumors about the whether there's going to be like

layoffs inside of HBO. Yeah. We've seen some people say there's going to be like 70% layoffs. Most of the people saying that I would not usually say are like hit home runs every time. I would take that with their grand

assault. But then I would also take the people who are like nothing will change with a grain of salt. I think change is coming. Change is already happening. We're seeing it. We're seeing these plans be put into place. And we're seeing like, I think if you liked HBO before this, it is not going to be the same service.

Whatever name it gets, whatever, like, the content is about to start radically changing. You're going to start seeing a lot more fixer-upper. If they don't finish Westworld, you will burn it to the ground. I'm going to lose my mind. It's like, I think if they cancel that, our flag means death is another one where, like, teen girls from Tumblr will just appear outside of Zaslov's house, ready to murder him if they cancel it. Like, there's some high stakes drama. The thing about this that's so weird to me is like, this is now the second company in a row that has taken HBO and been like, wow, so cool. You make amazing shows.

Your hit rate is better than anybody. Congratulations. Let's systematically destroy the systems that allow you to. do that. Like when Stanky became the CEO of AT&T, he was like, okay, HBO, y'all are awesome, great work. I need you to do three times as much stuff with much less money. Can you do that? And they were like, well, no, that's not, it's not how HBO works. And now Discovery is going to be like, okay, we want to be just like HBO, still just as shiny, but with more Chip and Joanna games.

Like, why do you, why buy HBO if this is what you're going to do? Well, they didn't buy HBO. They bought Warner, right? They bought the fancy movie studio and CNN and HBO and TNT. Like HBO is like one just like tiny expensive thing whose entire revenue stream was like premium cable subscriptions. And that's going away. And so they like to compete with Netflix, they did need more volume. But they like all the AT&T stuff aside, they executed on that strategy.

This is why like last week, I was like they're they've ticked their way away from 90. I think we put them like 20 or 30 last week. Little did we know. Like they're the third largest, I mean, HBO Max right now, third largest streamer in the United States. It's doing very, very well. And Discovery Plus, nowhere near the third largest. It's behind, I think, even Hulu and like. Well, on that point, one thing to note here is that already Discovery is not breaking out the subscribers between the services.

It is only reporting a combined subscriber number, which is like going to start to make whatever it wants to do with all this weird. stuff. That is one useful thing to do if you want to make the numbers look better than they actually are for your weird streaming service that you just folded a much more expensive streaming service into. We'll see. Okay, two more quick things on streaming that we get like rig. One, trademarks for a TikTok music app, which is really interesting. Obviously, music is huge on TikTok. The music industry loves TikTok. That's how they break songs. You'll notice songs are getting way shorter because they're just TikTok length now. Fascinating. We'll see. This reminds me of when Sujjn Mujiski is, at YouTube, used to run around saying YouTube was a music service because the data inside of

YouTube showed that people were watching tons and tons of music videos, but that did not mean that they wanted YouTube music. So like the view of the data inside YouTube was like, we're a music service. And then you would like say it to normal people and everyone be like, what are you talking about? Well, wait. Okay. Hold on.

I agree with that except that, A, YouTube music is more successful than you think. and B, YouTube never connected the dots. They built this thing that it's like if you go watch a, if you go watch a music video on YouTube, your ability to then like save that album to your YouTube music library does not exist. It's like they like, they built the two sides of the thing

and then just kept them as far apart as they possibly could. And what I've heard from people in the music industry over the last couple of years is that like TikTok is this amazing music discovery engine that doesn't convert at the rate that they want it to. That like Lizzo being the biggest thing on TikTok doesn't transfer to people streaming the whole album in the way, like on Spotify, in the way that those people would want it to.

And so if TikTok can actually be the one to bring those things together and be like, oh, you like this song? Here's this album. That becomes like a hugely powerful thing. No one has done that successfully. So I'm not positive. It'll be easy. But like there's a big win to be had there if you can be the one to actually put

those two sides together. Yeah. But TikTok also just burns a track to the ground. I don't need to hear that Liza song for a while. Yeah, but that's culture now, man. That's what we do. We listen to one song at a time and we all listen to it 24 hours a day until we're done. It's just very linear.

All right. Here's this week's song. That's all you get. Move on. I saw a stat. I was talking to Ariel who writes Hot Pod for us. Catalog music, which is like songs are older than 18 months, ever increasing share of all music streams. So people are listening to older music and less newer music.

So the music industry is desperate. Like it's like 70 something percent up from like 50 percent a few years ago. Like crazy jump in people just listening to older music. Partially because like TikTok can also break a Stevie Nick song. Like Fleetwood Mac is hot again. It's like where did that come from? Kate Bush, man. Running up that hill is like the biggest song in the universe.

Right. Like Kate Bush was like, oh, TikTok, that happened to me. Stranger Things. It all just like combined. But it means that old music now is as discoverable or valuables. new music. New music is harder to break. TikTok is how new music breaks because it's just the way it goes. So we'll see. I think it's fascinating. I would not say Spotify, Apple, have like innovated on the music listening experience since they came out. Maybe a little competition would be good. Last one, this is just for me personally very funny, just because Roku is such a complicated company. Roku is an advertising company.

So Roku makes the boxes and then like every dollar that flows through the box, Roku gets a cut of, just like Apple on the phone or Google on the phone. Roku actually just hired its first lobbyist to go lobby against the privacy bills and the antitrust bills because it has the same problems as Apple as in Google, which is really fascinating. But their numbers are down because they sold fewer boxes, but because they sell the boxes for nothing, because all the money is in advertising, their actual revenue hit when they sell fewer boxes, is they get fewer license fees for the buttons on the remote. So they're like revenue is down and hardware because they're not selling as many remotes

and thus collecting fewer frees from Netflix, Apple, Hulu, whatever for the buttons on the remote that those services buy. You mean the like dedicated app launcher ones, right? Like those four at the bottom that are like... That's their hardware revenue. Their hardware revenue is not in the hardware. It's in the buttons. And they actually had to call it out being like, our button revenue has suffered this quarter

because we've sold fewer boxes. incredible. Very good. All right, we've got to take a break. I'll come back. We're going to do a little little lightning round. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already

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start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, we're back. Lightning Round. First, I got to call this out. I really put this Lucid story here, so I can just complain about the Jeep. So Lucid Motors, high-end EV company,

really fancy car. Lucid Air looks great. They slashed their forecast like by 50% for production. They're going to make 7,000 cars this year. Did you see Elon Musk tweet that he had more kids in Q2 than Lucid made cars?

Like really genuinely like an all-time great. Elon Musk tweet. That's great, actually. That's like a great Elon tweet. Really good. Whatever. They make 7,000 cars

that cost like $120,000. Again, I want to say, the Jeep Grand Cherokee hybrid with battery. Yeah. They announced this thing last year. It's still not out. It just won an award from a German magazine for best off-road vehicle.

The car doesn't exist. It's very off-road. It's so far off-road. They keep announcing the thing. I'm in the forums. People are like holding candlelight vigils to get their plug-in hybrid. One day it's going to come out. It's going to be great.

Speaking of Tesla, Elon Musk, Twitter, A, we got a trial date. They're going to start October 17th in Delaware. There's going to be a fight to the death on the verge team over who gets to go to that trial. It's going to be great. We're going to live stream it. I'm so excited. Not the trial, but the fight about the trial. The pre-trial.

The pretrial fight to cover the trial. Great. Get your popcorn ready. So that starts on October 17th, but now because Elon's money is so tied up in Tesla, Tesla is now drawn into it. It's just a mess. This thing needs to settle. Like Twitter wants all of Tesla's docks and, like they're doing discovery against Tesla

because all of Elon's money is Tesla. Messy. Everyone should settle. Okay. And then a little GM news. GM, which has also shipped approximately zero electric cars. Just putting that out there. They've got a couple of bolts.

But you remember the bolt had some fire problems. You know, it's back. Batteries are hard. They discounted the bolt to try to move it. They've got like two or three hummers floating around. They got a render of the Silver Auto. Anyway, GM says by next year they're going to be shipping one in Tesla. But as they build up to this, they're announcing all this stuff.

And they're saying their autonomous vehicle strategy is superior to Tesla supercrues. They're doubling its coverage to 400,000 miles of highways. they've got Ultra Cruise coming next year, which will cover 95% of driving tasks. So they're out on LinkedIn saying that their approach to safety with Super Cruise and Ultra Klu's is superior to Tesla. I mean, if they don't do a public beta, then they're correct. Like if they're not putting their autonomous driving as a public beta that anybody can do and drive around with, that is significantly safer than what Tesla's been doing.

Yeah. Well, there's this great term in the industry called a tono washing where you pretend your autonomous vehicle. It's just a great word. Like, honestly, we should just use it more. We should be like, that's a ton of washing. And basically, the argument boils down to Tesla called it full self-driving and GM called it supercruise. And so people understand it's just fancy super like cruise control. It's a great interview, Andy Hawkins, in it with the GM folks, the chief engineer of autonomous vehicles, a GM.

Like all this stuff is like happening, but it's all a lead up to GM saying very soon it will become the number one supplier of EVs. And so they're just picking their spots, but they've, nothing. They just ship it. Nothing exists. They've got to ship some cars. And then Cruise is out there doing it's like robo taxi thing in San Francisco. It's like it's been like slowly bubbling for a long time and you kind of keep waiting for it to be like, this is the moment. And GM keeps kind of being like it's almost, it's almost time.

It's almost time. And at some point, it's going to have to be time. Can I just say, by the way, that measuring the number of miles available to your system is, like, maybe my new favorite meaningless statistic of all time. It's like, in terms of, like, what that means to your actual life, that means nothing. We have 400,000 miles of roads literally could not mean any less to my ability to actually use this feature. It's nothing. Well, also, your comp is Tesla, which is like, I don't know, we'll work on any road. Like, let's see what happens.

Either will or it won't, like, try it to. Your life is in your hands. The Tesla experience. Yeah, I mean, I just think it's funny to see the traditional carmakers come at it, but I think it's hilarious. There's nothing. I cannot act on this information. I cannot be like, yes, that sounds great.

I'd like to buy a GM vehicle, a GM EV with Super Cruise. You cannot do that. You can buy an escalade with Supercruz, the opposite of an EV. you're like, I'd like to burn one Tesla's worth of carbon to go two miles, but it drove itself on 400,000 miles roads by itself. It's just very, like, the Jeep thing is, like, to me, the funniest. It's just hilarious. It's the same drivetrain as the Wrangler, which ships.

The Wrangler, by the way, the most popular hybrid in America, and it's so popular that people are making serious money buying them from dealers and immediately flipping them on Corvana. And it's like, to just put the engine in the other car. Okay, so Counterpoint, if you're already winning awards, what's the point of shipping your car? Like, isn't there just all downside for Jeep at this point? It's like, never ship it and be legends. Like, it's the dream.

We should start giving car awards for most announced cars. That's a very good idea. The cyber truck is America's most announced pickup truck. Like, send an award to Elon. Last couple things. Some weird FCC mysteries this week. We got a battery-powered Google device. in the FCC and what looks like a new echo device from Amazon, you know, we're coming up on the holidays.

It seems like refreshes for home stuff from the ambient computer companies are coming. October will be so fun. Yeah, I mean, it's like it's the matter moment. Like one of the things that I think is that because matter is coming, there's going to be a like level of public interest in this stuff because just a lot of people are going to be talking about smart homes. So even if all you have is like a teeny tiny upgrade on the thing that you are. make and the thing that you already make perfectly supports matter just like having a new thing I suspect a lot of these companies are going to like gin up new things to have at this moment because it's like the first interesting smart home moment in a really long time that's and that's what

all this stuff seems like to me is Google's like what if we took our speaker and changed it ever so slightly would you be interested in that yeah and now it's better at smart home stuff yeah same with the Amazon all the Amazon one we had it spent like we spent hours on this with our team because Amazon files for its FCC listings with fake companies. It has like shell companies it uses to hide things from us. It didn't succeed this time Amazon. The shell company was called Flake LLC. So we'll see what that is. It's called a digital media receiver and it has a power plug and a Zygby radio. So we'll see. I think you're right. I think the matter moment is here and a bunch of hardware's coming out. As soon as Apple releases its next set of devices, and they're like,

we're all in on matter. Like the ecosystem is there in Google, which theoretically supports thread, at least, in the hubs, with the newer hubs. Like, everyone's just going to race into it and be like, new hardware is here. We got to change the way it looks to support the software, because no one cares, whatever. Last one, I think, David, you added this. We reviewed the Sony InZone M9, which is a gaming monitor. It's like really a TV. I have but one thing to say about this. Go ahead. I mean, I basically put this in here because I think, like, we've talked about it a couple of times on the show, but it's like, this is a moment where people are making good monitors and trying hard to make good monitors, and I think we should celebrate that here

on the verge cast. Like, we get a lot of shitty screens here on the verge cast, and people who make good monitors should be celebrated for trying to make good monitors. Well, this is like a fine monitor. Well, this is, I think the big deal here is Sony hasn't been in this space, right? Like, Sony doesn't make monitors. They make really, really good TVs, but they don't make monitors and especially gaming monitors. And this was one of their first, like, big ones. It's similar to the one I'm, in fact, using right now from LG, which is similar specs, similar price. Mine's great, by the way, very uniform color, no vignetting on the sides. Whereas this guy has a bunch of vignetting. It's got some bad color uniformity. And if you're spending $900 on a monitor, it should look

nice. It should look nice. But it does have HDR. It does have 144 hertz. VRR, it has low latency. Like, it's TV stuff, spec for a monitor. Yeah, and it sounds like Sony use some of that, like, there's smarts in the TV space for processing and stuff to do better processing on this monitor. So, like, the HDR is a lot nicer than you would normally see on, like, I do not have the HD on my LG monitor because it's garbage. It's like just useless to use it. Whereas this would actually be useful. So if they can, like, improve the quality of the panels themselves, that's cool. go Sony.

Yeah. So this is my one thing that I have to say by this monitor for this price, Sony was able to deliver full array local dimming with multiple multiple zones,

right? Like 96 dimming zones. I love it. Apple was not able to do at like $1,700 on the same size panel in the studio this way. And like,

it's just like this is the feature you need. But it doesn't have an iPad built into it. It's true. It does not have a mediocre camera built into it. Well, I will say this review

gave me hope that like the second version of this might actually be pretty good because there's a bunch of little things like cam was annoyed that they didn't ship video cables in the box which for a $900 monitor I absolutely agree with and there's there's little things it's like the stand isn't great it doesn't do good enough pass through the stand looks ridiculous it looks like a little baby PS5 and then because that isn't enough to hold it up they're like and also some other little tripody legs yeah it's insane it's like they designed it and then it fell over and somebody just like propped it up with the first things that they could find. And they were like, that works.

Ship it. But then, so like all that stuff is like stuff you solve in the second one, right? Those are like first monitor weirdness. But the panel thing is weird. Like, Sony knows how to make good displays. So the fact that this one wasn't better was a bummer. Because you would think if Sony's going to get one thing right, it would make a good screen. Sony doesn't always make its own displays.

Like its OLEDs are really, really good. But they're not making the OLEDs themselves. They just have far superior processing. and stuff on the LG OLEDs. And we saw kind of the same thing when Sony started getting into that OLED space really aggressively. The first few iterations of the Sony OLED was like not worth your time and money, just way too expensive for what you were getting versus the same thing from LG.

And then it improved a whole lot. It got really, really good. And now, like, you should probably consider a Sony OLED instead of an LG OLED. And that could be the same thing with this. Like, the LG monitors are perfectly fine. There is not, like, the monitor space in general, there isn't a lot of thought given to processing. There isn't a lot of thought given to, like, local array dimming, any of that fun stuff that we're seeing in TVs. So having that trickle down and having somebody who's proven that they're good at it doing it is like, I'll be optimistic about that.

I'll be excited for round two. Yeah. That's going to be fun. I mean, for so long, it was like, do you buy the really expensive LG screen or the really crappy Dell screen? And just the fact that there's more things to do now in computer monitors makes me very happy. like competition is a good and valuable thing. This stand looks ridiculous. And I'm just saying the competition should be adding more full array local dimming to computer monitors.

That's all I really want. What do they want you to do? Do they want you to put the PS5 next to it? And how do you put the PS5 next to it? Look, if you're pull over in your car right now and just like look at this thing, be like, why did they make this choice? It's very confusing. The power move would be to make it so that you can take that part out and put your PS5 in and it's also the stand for a monitor.

That would have been cool. And then you can carry it around with you with the Joycons on the side. all right we've gone over that's enough from this that's it we're done goodbye calling it if hbo dies before wednesday we'll do an emergency podcast if not we'll cover on wednesday uh speaking wednesday show this last wednesday uh you all talk to sailboats solar generators and starlink which is pretty good about working from anywhere it's very fun it's work from anywhere week at the verge so like there's lots of cool coverage on the site on how to work from different places and what working from home means in this very weird post pre next pandemic time monkeypox yeah this mid

pandemic period that we're in pandemic interstitial and then our homeland package is back with the second round of stories it's very good we've got a great story called the most surveilled place in america which is about the wall and just the enormous amount of cameras and sensors that are pointed at this like one strip of america it's really really great story you go check that out and then next week on decoder I talked to Terricanman, who is the CEO of Racketon Mobile in Japan, the world's only functional O-Ran network. They sell some components of it as part of the thing called Racketon Symphony, Racketon Symphony, a vendor for Dish Network.

So I asked him, how does O-Ran work? Like, what's going on here? What does it mean to be a cloud-based 5G network? He is a very charming man, and my dude loves some O-Ran technology. So that's next week on Decoder. That episode is 11 hours long. It's very rarely that I'm like five minutes into an interview. I'm like, I'm already out of time.

I've got to stop this train. But it's a great episode. It's like the right mix for decoder between like think fluency business stuff and then like in the weeds hardcore product stuff. Do you know, Racketon Mobile, they're operating costs because of over and 40% cheaper than the other networks in Japan. Are they part of the Rackettin who does the books? Yes.

they're like, you know, they're based like the Amazon of Japan. So their model is like, you buy Racketon and stuff, you get points and you can spend Racketon points on other parts of the Racketon ecosystem. Get your Kobo E-reader. Nely, you just let Alex talk about Kobo.

We have to end the show. You did this. I'm ending this. You did this. All right, that's it. That's enough. You can tweet at us. I'm at Rackett.

Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Pierce is at Pierce. Again, if you are a hardcore Android phone gamer, let Alex know. That's all she wants to hear about. I'm so excited. We'll see you next. week or assuming HVMX was up on our merch podcast.

That's it. That's for a chast of Baccarol. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Box Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters.

That's it. We'll see you next week.