The Vergecast - How much MacBook is enough MacBook?

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz discuss the Apple Macbook Air M3 review, Jon Stewart's take on AI, and a whole lot more of this week's tech news. Further reading: Apple MacBook Air M3 review: small upgrades  It’s time for a hard reset on notifications Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers  Microsoft is working on an Xbox AI chatbot Samsung says Bixby’s still not dead The world needs more gadgets like LG’s briefcase TV  Jon Stewart on AI, Lina Khan, and the other things Apple didn’t want him to say  A first look at Europe’s alternative iPhone app stores Will the Apple antitrust case lawsuit affect your phone’s security? How Meta’s global head of safety approaches online age verification Is TikTok still TikTok without the algorithm?’ The US House banned staffers from using Microsoft Copilot FCC will vote on restoring net neutrality rules X’s ‘complimentary’ Premium push gives people blue checks they didn’t ask for Spotify’s price is reportedly going up again  AI George Carlin case settled as performers demand better protection  OpenAI’s voice cloning AI model only needs a 15-second sample to work Google Podcasts is gone — and so is my faith in Google  Vote for us in the Webbys!! People’s Voice Technology Podcast  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

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That's my favorite sort of evolution of the SEO, spam is the Amazon product name that is just all of the things. It's everywhere now. Yeah. Everything on Amazon is like 60 words long now. Yeah. Which is better, though. Like the way they name phones at Samsung or the way they name products on Amazon's website.

It's Samsung. It's 1,000% I want to be clear. Samsung, the Samsung naming conventions, and in fact, most tech product naming conventions are now like performance art. Yeah. They're just like some words, a galaxy, a number, some other letters. Fine. They're just riffing. It's like jazz.

Yeah. They're just like, here's some ideas we had. You know, and then what the SEO spam is just all this technology and all this AI and all these algorithms. And we're like, what's the best way to win at them? Just shove all the words in the title field. And then off to the side, there's like Sony who's just like, would you like 16 numbers and letters together that don't mean anything?

It's very good. That's very good. Anyway, we're all together in the studios. Yeah. I'm a friend, Nealai, David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Tran's here. Hello.

It's been a minute since we were all in the show at the same time, let alone all in the same room at the same time. Yeah, wait. How were y'all's vacations? They were good. Yeah. Very good. I drank a lot of Miami vices, which is when he put a dacquerie in the peanut colato. So it's pink and white.

Incredible. That's a lot of sugar at 8 a.m. And then at 9. 9 a.m. But you're getting the fruit. So you're getting your vicarry in. vitamin C. Yeah, that's what you really want.

It was good. But we were, you know, when you travel with a small child, you end up on her schedule, like a five-year-old schedule. So you were in bed by seven? Yeah, we were in bed by nine and we were up at six and hammered by 11, like a five-year-old. And I was like, wait, this might be the ideal way to live my life. Yeah. Like on this.

And then I immediately was like, no. Especially when you're on vacation, though, like being the first one up has real ramifications. You're like, the world is your oyster for like three hours at the resort before anybody. else wakes up. You get the best cereal, like the best breakfast. Yeah. Yeah, it was good. How's yours? It was good. I mopped. You mopped. Yeah. Did you go on vacation as a small Victorian chamber made? Pretty much. Pretty much. I'm going to do like a larp. Yeah, I really needed to do some mopping, so I did a lot of mopping. My goal was to like see if I could become one with my couch for like a whole week. That's an important kind of vacation. Like I thought it was great. My dog

did not agree. He was very frustrated with my vacation, but I had a great time. Yeah. Did you watch anything? Couch time is watched time. Yeah, yeah. I saw Girls 5Eva.

Five Eva? Very good. Netflix wants me to watch this show, I'm just not going to do it. You should do it. It's very good. It's good. It's good.

It is legitimately very good. It's very funny. It's straight out of the brain of Tina Faye. So like, if you think 30 Rock is funny, you'll think Girls 5Eva is funny. And I think 30 Rock is very funny. And it spends a lot of time making fun of like a very specific neighborhood in Brooklyn that I used to live in.

So I'm like, yes. Oh, that's good. Yes. I'll give it a shot. Yeah, it's good. It's good. I went through the whole three-body problem with Netflix. You know, I was like, I opened Netflix.

I was like, I'm going to watch this show. I watched the whole thing. And it wasn't good. And I was like, I had the Netflix problem again. I need to disclose that I made a Netflix show. Our Netflix show is great. Unlike some other ones. It's called The Future of.

Less so. But, I don't know. It was like that was the thing I did. Because we went on vacation when came back, and we had, like, several days left, like, post vacation. Oh. Which is a clutch move. Oh, yeah. And I was like, how many spend this time?

I was, like, watching television. Yeah, of course. It was amazing. Yeah. And I was like, the show is, it's fine. That's why I switched it off and turned on the new Walking Dead show. Oh, yeah. And, like, that's just adorable.

It's two people being like, what if we kill a bunch of zombies and make out? And I was like, all right. The spoiler people are going to come for you. I'm sorry. I tweeted one thing about the movie. through body problem. And they came for you. And I was like, this book has been out for a million years.

What's the problem? That's fine. Anyhow, it's a weird springtime week. Yeah. I feel like there was a lot of news the past couple weeks. The government and the tech companies are just doing a thing. And then this week, everyone went on spring break. I think that's literally true.

Like everyone was like, we're just got to stop the fighting. Everyone go drink at Miami Vice. We'll come back. We'll get back right back to. it after spring. Well, and now, on the flip side, we're now, what, four weeks away from the beginning of, like, developer conference season. Yeah. So everybody is out of filing legal briefs and into planning for, like, weird AI product announcements. And this is sort of the small doldrums in the middle. Yeah, this is the quiet week where we saw them outside getting a

beautiful tour of Wall Street with all of the other high schoolers. Lovely. Oh, yeah. No, this is the New York visit week. Yeah. When's D.C. Visit Week? When's D.C. It was last week. That was last week. The cherry blossoms came out and just every 13-year-old in America went to the Lincoln Memorial on the same day. It was unbelievable. So that's this week where they, we said the Virgil's offices are in the financial district

from New York, which is very old. There's a bunch of old stuff you can look at. And this is the week where they're all here. Yeah, they're all like, yep, there's some old stuff. I'm looking at my phone. Tim Cook is like George Washington got hammered in this bar. That's a real thing he thinks about all the time. But there's a lot of stuff to talk about.

David has structured the show into three lightning rounds. All sponsored. Three sponsorable Lightning rounds which no one has yet to sponsor. We get a lot of emails from people.

They're like, I'll pay some money. Yeah. Promises don't pay the bills, friends. Hit the Venmo or leave me alone. We're going to figure this out.

I promise you we'll figure this out. But if you run a large company, we're good at taking a lot of money. Yeah. Like there's a whole floor of people at this company who's like a huge amount of money.

We know what to do. When I'm like, someone wants to pay us 20 bucks, they're like, I don't know. Just DoorDash. We should be on DoorDash. But Home We Deliver is like Hot Podcasts. It's like nothing happens. And yeah, three lighting rounds. We should start with.

We did have the big review this week. A few weeks after it came out, we hired a new laptop reviewer, Joanne and Elias. We got her up to speed, Kranz. We like let her do a think pad. And then we're like, Macwick Air, get it done. Yeah. And she did. She had a lot of feelings about the MacBook Air M3 15 and 13 inch because they both came out.

And they're pretty similar. And she was like, they're good MacBooks. They got a little faster. And then she was very upset because they had 8 gigabytes of RAM standard. And I tend to agree with her. But I know some people on this podcast don't. Well, yes. I mean, we're going to fight about that for many hours.

Some people have bad takes. It's okay. It brought me such great joy to watch someone. else come and go through the same thing that all of us have been through with the Macbooks over the years, which is, this is very good, it's probably the best laptop you can buy. It is a teeny, tiny bit better than the last one and slightly more expensive. And Apple really wants you to buy something much more expensive. Do I give that an eight or a nine? It's like, the eternal question of the MacBook error is like, it's probably the best laptop. It could probably, it's kind of annoying.

What do I do with that? Yeah. And it's just like, it's nice to see someone else go through. this very intense process. Because the story of the MacBook era is like it, it rules. Like it is, it is pretty hands down the best all around laptop on the planet. And yet, it's a pretty small upgrade over the last one. It has a bunch of the same deficiencies as the last one. And they desperately, desperately, desperately want you to spend $2,500 on a laptop and not $1,000 on a laptop. They are very good at getting you from one to the other. That's what I did. Is it? Yeah. Well, I went with a MacBook Pro, yeah. You got, you just, you let yourself get specced up. I got speced up.

Like, that feeling from the early days of the MacBook air where you couldn't get the air, you had to get a pro if you wanted power. I was like, I know I don't, I know I could be fine with an air, but I have an air for work. This is really like, it's important for me to know the whole lineup. So I can either have a pro to run all my Chrome tabs or I can have an air to run all of my Chrome tabs. Is that what we're going through? And Crusader Kings three. Like, it plays it beautiful.

So what you're talking about is directly related to the 8 gigs of RAM situation, which is you settle down to buy this laptop. The base configuration should be amazing. The base configuration compared to any other base configuration, potentially the best all are on a laptop. Like that's a real thing you can make an argument for. Sure. And then you're like, but if I put 8 gigs of RAM in this,

it will last for two years, and then it will die. And I'll do this again. So I should put 16 or 32 gigs of RAM into it. And then you're like, I should add some storage to it because now it's going to last a long time. and then you are quickly at, oh, I should just buy a MacBook Pro. Yep. I should spend slightly even more money, and I can just have a 14-inch Macquick Pro. Like off the shelf, you don't have to worry about somebody like customizing it

and them adding a little shipping time to it. Just get happy. Yeah, because what is it? You go from 8 to 16 gigs of RAM, that's 200 bucks. You go from the base storage, which is 256, to 512. That's another 200 bucks. So already you've just turned your $1,000. or your $1,100 laptop, in this case, into a $1,500 laptop,

at which point you're like, well, maybe I'll just get the 15 inch because it's not that much more expensive. Yeah. And then you get, then you're up to there. And then it is, I mean, it is so perfectly calculated how to get you to buy, like, the mid-spec MacBook Pro. It's just unbelievable. It's beautiful.

Yeah. And it is not the computer anyone needs. Like, I truly do not believe the premise that if you buy eight gigs of RAM, it's only in the last two years, and it won't work. I think, like, if you're a person who, like, really heavily uses your computer, sure. I think if you're going to spend money on one additional spec, RAM is always the thing.

Totally believe that. I believe firmly that for most people, for most uses, the base configuration of the MacBook Air, storage, RAM, everything is fine. Crazy. You're a crazy person. That's so much computer. This is what I'm trying to. But not enough RAM.

Yeah, this is what I'm trying to understand. It's because, like, you said this, and it was like just lobbing a bomb into chat in the office. Oh my God, I got so mad at me. Yeah, I resisted telling anybody that you said that. And you were like, yeah, I believe eight gigs. And everybody's like, David, what are you doing? And is it because we're all people who use our laptops a lot and always have a bajillion tabs open that we feel that need for the RAM?

I mean, that's part of it. Like, is it like a verge? I think it's two things. I think half of it is what you just described. I think the other half is we are all literally. professionally trained to be sensitive to our computers being slow. And then I look at my mom, who is on a nine-year-old iPad, and doesn't notice that it's a problem. It just works fine. She taps a thing. She waits a couple of seconds, and it opens. And I'm

like, do you know how long Safari just took to open mom? And she's like, what are you talking? It's just open. It's whatever. I think most people don't spend as much time thinking about how long their tabs take to open as we do. And maybe they should. And I think they are. For $1,100, I'm just going to throw back your Vision Pro criticism. For $1,100 being like, this computer is a little slow when it's the fastest computer. But it's not slow. It's not slow. That swap is immediately noticeable.

So the argument, the Pro 8 gig argument is that the SSD is so fast that swapping to and from virtual memory using the state of the art, blah, blah, that Apple is state of the art. Is imperceptible. This is the argument. This is the argument. And on the new one, apparently, the storage is much faster, so that argument might be closer to true. Yeah. The argument is wrong. Like, the storage is still slower than the RAM.

It might be very fast, but it's still slower than the RAM. And so when you hit the swap, which you can do really easily in a Macquarcare they gave RAM. I'm going to swap right now. Let's see. What do you do to... He's going into the activity monitor. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if you had some, like, weird utility.

David is the proprietor of installer often has weird utility. But I have hit the swap. Yeah. It's just like happens immediately. If you go to memory, it'll tell you down at the bottom. Swap used. Sorry, keep going. Sorry.

Riveting radio program. Open activity monitor and click on memory. Is it how to? Yeah. All I'm saying is that's the argument. At this point in 2024, not a good argument. They should just bump you up to 16 games around at standard.

And then I think this computer would be, amazing. I do agree with that. I think it would be better if everybody had 16 gigs of RAM. I think it's absurd that Apple charges $200 to go from 8 to 16 when that RAM doesn't cost anywhere near $200. The most enduring scam. Oh, yeah. I mean, the margins... And it's soldered in, so you can't even upgrade it later. Yeah. Right. Because used to the heck was you'd buy it with the garbage ram, and then you just upgrade it as soon as you got it. Yeah, you do the thing where you lift it up the keyboard. And just, and you're done. And now they're like, no, you will pay us $200 or swap and suffer.

Anyhow, all I'm saying is, great computer. It's like the base storage of the iPhone or the base storage of ICloud. Apple's like, how much is just enough to annoy you into paying us more? Oh, no, that's real. But how much, when was it that you switched your family to Chromebooks? Ages ago. How was that going? It's fine, because I bought, well, I got a lot of 16 gig of RAM Chromebooks running out there.

Yeah, I bought, so it's only one Chromebook. Okay. It was the Google, what was the fanciest one? The $1,000? No, it was before. Well, there was the Chromebook pixel. That was the sick one. Yeah, I'm literally Googling, bought my mom a Chromebook because I might be the only.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me just get that right. No, I bought our Chromebook pixel in 2016. Okay. It was $1,000. It has a Core I7 and like 16 gigs of RAM. And it is just rocking. Wow.

Because it was so overpower. for its time. Now it's a little underpowered to run Chrome. My 2015 IMac. Such a damning critique of Chrome. It's not great. That an I-7 and 16 gigs of RAM like barely keep up anymore. My 2015 IMac, which is done now. Oh. It's over. It's like the fans are just like on all the time. But it lasted as long as it did, almost 10 years, 32 gigs for RAM. That's if I have one piece of advice for buying a Mac, which is just loaded up, especially because it's soldered in, loaded up with Rang's it.

at the beginning. Because you can't fix it, you can't upgrade it. Everything else, you'll be fine. Like, over time. I do agree with that. I also think 256 gigs of storage, unless you do a lot of media, like if you just take photos on your phone

and upload them to Google Photos, and that's your photo strategy, 256 gigs is plenty. Oh, I disagree there. I know you do. Well, and then I'm saying this as someone who has a server at home to offload all my big files. Right. Like a super normal workflow for regular

people that everybody does it. But even with that, I'm hitting that 256. Like the, the laptop I bought now has 512 because I was tired of hitting the 256 and being like, I have to go delete this game that I play two times a year, but I really want to have access. What's using up all your storage? It's games. Okay. I mean, fair. Then I'll add that to media. That's totally fair. Games are enormous. You download two games now and you've eaten 256. But absent those two things, there's very little you're going to do that's going to take up that much storage. That's true. My mom has like a hundred billion gigabytes fine yeah and at 256 literally unless you do media which is huge and especially now like good god every photo off the iPhone is enormous now so like get as much as

you can if that's a thing that you care about and you're going to like be in lightroom doing stuff which is another case to get more RAM but if you're just I firmly believe that most people buy laptops download a web browser and that the end that is that is 98% of most people's laptop experience now and like maybe office and for that the base config is fine I so firmly believe that I think you just find at least 1499 on 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gig and then at that point why don't I get the 15 inch yeah and then there's a there's a pro I'll sell you yeah and then you're just at a 14 pro and you're like you have the 14 pro actually I thought the biggest takeaway from uh Joanna's review is that the M2 is still for sale and that's a pretty good deal if you can spec it up

Which is funny because this was also in a lot of ways the story of the M2 review was that the M1 is still for sale. Yeah. And now, I mean, you can buy the M1 at Walmart for, what is it, like $699? Did we ever, so this hit while I was on vacation. And there was like a furious amount of like conversation about whether Walmart was blowing out old stock or whether Apple was going to make more M1s. And if they're going to make more M1s. Yes. That seems to be, I don't know that we've ever actually had that officially confirmed, but that that is every bit of evidence we have.

suggest that that is the case. Unclear. It seems like it's going to be going for a while. And it's not necessarily like they're making more M-1s. They just have a ton of stock. No, they don't. That's not how Apple works. Literally Apple pioneered the idea of not having wear as a whole laptop.

They have like they have tons of extra stuff around. That's how we got the iPhone SE. The iPhone SE came because they had a ton of the cases, right? Yeah, sure. Having parts that they're very good at making very good at. cheaply, yes. Yeah, like, they had a ton of those MacBook Air, original MacBook Air casings. Right?

Tim Cook is like, what are you doing, guys? I'm the supply chain guy. Shove some M-1s in them, send them to Walmart. Send them to Walmart. I think they are still making them. I think they've projected out their demand and they're still making them. We have that quote from Walmart in one of our stories where the Walmart guy is like, we're going to have these for as long as people want them.

Yeah. Which has to be. I think it's a huge warehouse, like Steven Spielberg-style warehouse. And Tim doesn't like to think about it. You don't bring it up around Tim. But Walmart's like, we'll take care of this for you, Tim. Reminder that Apple made the 13-inch MacBook Pro with optical drive for five or six years after they stopped selling it. Liam gets it.

Oh, thank you, Liam. Wow. Yeah. No, this is, what I think is true is I think it's less that Apple has a warehouse full of them somewhere and more that Apple with that wedge design in particular is now at like unbelievable economies of scale. And to just throw that away

to get rid of all the tooling that's really expensive and the processes that you spend up to do this stuff like there is a group of people who want those and will pay that price. And what I think is most surprising is not that these still exist and that Apple would keep making them

but that Apple is interested in selling a $700 laptop at Walmart. Like to me that's a much bigger change than anything else going on here is just this is not a thing Apple has ever done before. And it's like, there's a world in which you would argue it feels like a company running scared trying to make money wherever they can. I don't really think it's that, but it is a definite, like, strategy change in a way that I think has not been talked about it.

Walmart is very focused on luxury. Like their whole thing is luxury and not Walmart. You take that back. Walmart, very confused. Let me read about Walmart. That's what I think of too. Yeah. That's something. That's something. switched up. But yeah, like Apple is very well known for being all about luxury. Yeah. Walmart, less so. Yeah. Yeah, they just do different jobs. And like if Apple wanted to figure out how to sell the best $500 computer, it probably could have. It probably could have done that 35 years ago. They put that computer in Walmart. It was called the iPad. It has been in Walmart the entire time.

Yeah. My two-year, you know, in the woods experience, Walmart was the only store. I I've spent a lot of time contemplating what electronic products are in Walmart in Catskill, New York. It's iPhones, all the iPhones, including the pros, and it was iPads. And then they just didn't put the Macs in there. And now they have one Mac. And I think the iPad Mac, a $700 M1 MacBook Air, wedge design, and whatever iPads you can get at Walmart, Apple's just like, you want the laptops. Like, let's be honest about what people want to buy here. Yeah.

They want laptops. People are going to go in looking for an M1 MacBook era and there's going to be a salesperson who's like, wouldn't you rather have a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with a magic keyboard and an Apple Pencil that's $1,400 all in and somebody's going to leave with just like a bag full of nonsense? And they're like, I just wanted a laptop. But not at Walmart. There wouldn't be a salesperson at Walmart. That's true.

Look, I did a lot of shopping at Walmart in my two years of pandemic Woods living. there was not a lot of salespeople but it was not a thing but all I'm saying is to connect the dots between the two of you the Apple running scared maybe less scared

Apple finding every dollar it can find right now and just squeezing is weird this is the company that gets rid of its old products yeah like this is the company that's like we're going to cannibalize ourselves and now they're selling

three generations of the same laptop it's weird Yeah, it's very different. And it changed kind of quietly without, like nobody made it a noise about it, but now you look and it's like it operates like a very different company than it did, even just a few years ago. Yeah. And I could probably put killing the extraordinarily wasteful and stupid car project. Yep. Like the pressure on the app store, the anger around the app store antitrust stuff.

And we're going to sell more products at more price points than ever, like all in a line. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they saw that like money is not infinite. Yeah, which it is for them. Historically, it has been, yes. But it's just weird. It's just like a weird moment for that company.

Yeah. And then there was that, I think it was a Reuters story this week, that Apple is now working on personal robots. Oh, yeah. I was like, okay, guys. Sure. That'll go good. We'll see them when we see them.

We should mention, by the way, as long as you're talking about Apple, they rolled out personas that just like float around with you this week in the Vision Pro. You should watch the video, with the videos on our various video platforms, it's like Wes and V, and they just don't seem happy with each other. I've got to be honest with it.

I have not wanted to put the Vision Pro back on since I handed our review and NTV. I was talking to Wes earlier, and he was like, I got to go FaceTime some friends and troll them really good. I'll talk to you later. And I was like, good. That feels like the right use of the vision program. That is the best use. That's a strong use of $3,500.

Yeah, seven out of ten. All right, speaking of amazing gadgets, Cranes, you got one here. opening lightning round. Oh my God. So Chris Welch, most of you are not in the verge office, so you don't get to see Chris as often as I do. As often as I do.

But he's had this suitcase at his desk for a while now. And this suitcase, I'd always be like, what is that? He'd be like, it's a TV. He'd be like, don't ask about the suitcase. Don't ask about the suitcase. And he finally reviewed this suitcase. And what I quickly learned was that everyone has been seeing this LG suitcase TV

on TikTok. And so a lot of people are like, oh, Chris finally said it's pretty okay. It's time to get it. Really? But I want to be clear. You probably don't need the $1,200, $1080P. No. 27-inch TV in a suitcase.

It's cool as hell, though. It is very cool. It just, like, it hits, like, he talked about in his review, it just hits that gadget spot where you're just like, yeah, want this. Yeah, it's foldy and clicky and, It's a little outlandish. It's a touchscreen for no reason. I sat on the floor and played Solitaire for like 25 minutes.

Yeah. You just can do that because it's fun. Yeah. And I just really, really enjoy the thing. And I think it needs no, it doesn't need to exist in the world. But also I'm like, well, maybe I do need one for my bedroom. Because I can't figure out where to put a TV. Maybe I just have a...

In a suitcase? In a little suitcase. The answer's a suitcase. On my bed? That'll go well. You need a ceiling projector. There's a fan up there. Get rid of the fan.

I saw it. At CES, of course, in some like random booth, like a combo platter light fan projector. Oh, yeah. Well, there we go. Then I'm done. That's what I'm going to get. Obviously, when you turn the fan on the whole thing, vibran slightly. Very good.

Very good. What I can't decide about this TV is whether I want it to be much better or much cheaper. Because part of me is like, give me the 1080p screen, give me 27 inches, make it 500 bucks, and like, will I buy this thing and take it on vacation with me three times a year? Like, yeah, I probably would. or am I like this becomes you know the the like basement TV for all intents and purposes

and I want it to be better than this and I'm so torn between those two things because $1,200 for what this thing actually is is too much It's ludicrous Both of you have now described wanting this TV to keep it stationary in a room You're like the basement TV

just like buy a TV dude No because it doesn't turn into a suitcase Just like buy a TV Yeah like why The purpose of a suitcase is that you take it with you. Yeah. It's my vacation TV.

I will say the thing where they're like put it in the bed of your truck and watch TV is like... The dream. It is the dream. It is also just the most specific use case. It's like I'm going to tailgate with this thing six times a week. And it's going to be worth it. Like if you are a season ticket holder to something by this television. Like that's where I'm at.

It is true. Chris's basic point was like we need more gadgets again, which is... Oh, absolutely. direct pull on my heartstrings. I think it should be cheaper. I don't think it should be better. I think it should be cheaper. He made a good point that he understood why it was so expensive

because it is such a niche product. And he's like, if they made it better, then it would just be more expensive. $1,200 is also expensive. But like, I don't know if I fully buy it, but... I actually don't buy that at all. You don't? You don't?

You don't? You can make a good TV for virtually no money, right? All they've really done here is buy a suitcase. They put it in a sick suitcase. Yeah, it really is just a TV and a hint. Yeah. Like, that's not particularly... But you can plug stuff into it?

You can plug stuff in. You can play your switch on it. It's got a touch screen so you can like... You should buy one. There's just something about this one picture in the review where the TV is on a couch and it's folded up. The suitcase is open. It's flat and there's two people on either side of it playing chess. And this picture is both like truly absurd because I cannot imagine regular people ever actually

actually doing this and also makes me want it so bad. And you can see that that that whole conflict in their faces too in the photo. Yeah, they're kind of like what is this bad chess app that I'm playing on this enormous television. But I'm also having a good time. Yeah. Who doesn't have a good time playing webOS chess on suitcase TV? All right. Speaking of gadgets, my lightning round is the yearly printer review was published. It's a big day for you. Big day for me. This is what I assume did on vacation the whole time was just plan your epic comeback with the printer. So if you don't know, something is happening to Google search right now where various websites, their traffic is declining because Google changed the algorithm.

And some of them are, we did a decoder with Mia about one of them, House Fresh, the Air Pure Fire blog. There's a retro gaming site who's editor-in-chief or owner or someone who's complaining on Twitter, their traffic is, and then a bunch of like content farms. Right. And the idea is to kill the content farms. Yeah. But they are catching some of the good, caring sites in the process. A lot of people catching strays on this one.

Yeah. Yeah. It's something, like the internet as we know it, I believe this to be true. The internet as we know it is about to fall apart. Oh, I really agree with that. Yeah. Something weird is happening on the internet out there. So my contribution to that is to make stories that pointed out.

by using the form of the stories, the content farms. It's a very meta art project. Yeah. I think the version should be an art project. So the answer to the question, what is the best printer, has been unchanging for a decade, which is the cheapest brother laser printer you can find.

Yep. But that is, like, Google cannot accept that as an answer because it's not new enough, because there's not enough shopping links, because the data isn't semantic enough. How many H-2s you got in that piece? I've won. Got to have it.

And it's just me pointing out that LMs don't know the answer to the question yet. Anyways, I wrote the piece. Once again, we have sold like 2,000 printers. That's amazing. Which is just the funniest part of this whole thing. It's the favorite part. It's easily the funniest part of this whole thing. It's like, what should this actually look like?

It should just feel like, just buy this one and shut up. Like, that's all anyone wants on the internet when they're looking for product advice. And Google's like, no. And Google wants it. You have to update this. the page. So you look at the internet and you type in best printer and all the top results are like updated last week to point out that a bad product is the new winner. Or like they, we like, we changed our methodology and you look at the number of sites that one claim

to have reviewed every printer and then claim to have updated those printer reviews yesterday and then also get the answer. Like updating it on January 1st, 2024, so that you, to say, they've updated in January. 2024. It's cool. It is. So my big edit to you in this story was to add a bunch of links to the kinds of things you're talking about. And some of it is just truly wild.

And it's like I feel like everybody has seen these at some point. You Google one of these and you go on to some say you've never heard of. And it's basically just like a product name. People on Amazon like it. Here's what they say, copy and paste a bunch of Amazon results and call it a day. But one of them is on people.com. The eight best home printers of 2024 tested in or, Like, nothing against, I have not even read this piece, I don't know, but what in the world is people magazine doing caring about printers?

Yeah. Like, how is this what the internet has become? That's how they print the magazine out. I just like, CBS News, I think it was my favorite one. And then I realized, like, the demographic of CBS News might be looking for printers. I don't know the answer to that question. It's just very odd that if you, like, look at the architecture of our internet, a lot of people are like, weird affiliate clicks will pay for everything. And then you just look at what that means in practice, which is trying to game Google search to get those affiliate clicks.

And that, we're in the death spiral. Yeah. Well, and one of the things Google has been trying to take away recently is sites that not only do that, but try to hide it, that all have a sort of sneaky navigational part of their site that's not in the nav. They never put it on the homepage. You can never find it. It's like parts of these websites exist exclusively for Google. It's not just stuff that is like made because you've seen. see it on Google Trends, which a lot of people do, and that's like, that's a thing we think about

it. It's a thing everybody thinks about, like, knowing what people want to know is fine. But, like, when you go to this deep, deep hole of, like, we are going to actively wall this off from the rest of our site so that the people who come here on purpose never even find it. It's like that's tough. And that is, that is now a game a lot of people feel like they have to play. People doesn't. You can find it on the people page. I just had to go check.

People's like, what's up, guys? We love printers. No, they also love. What's Ryan Reynolds up to? printers. Pull cleaners. Sure. And Dandra Shampo. This is the stuff. Yeah. It's just very odd.

It's a very odd moment on the internet. I fully believe that this is not sustainable like in any way, shape, or form. I give it a year before the Google-fied internet turns into whatever the next thing's going to be. I think that's probably right.

There was a really interesting that folks that 404 media the other day wrote about a search engine called Kagi, which is one I've used. and been talking about it for a while. And I just, like, posted about it and was like, oh, yeah, this is good. I'll be using it for a while. This is a good story. They were talking about how much better it is than Google.

And shocked at the number of people I got who were like, I'm done with Google. I'm out. I'm over it. I've moved on. I finally switched. And I feel like Google has had this sort of like inevitability for so long that I just feel starting to crack in a lot of ways. Like I think there is this sense that Google is not the only option anymore.

And I think AI has kind of undone that in people's brains, even though AI is not actually that good at a lot of search things. But it feels like Google being sort of too Google to fail feels like it's slipping in a really interesting way. What was the most recent like search you went to do and Google just totally failed you? I haven't used Google in a while, if I'm being honest. Okay. I still use it and I still am like, wow, it sucks every day that I don't change my behavior. So it's not a straight Google search, but I actually haven't answered this question because I've been thinking about it ever since this happened. Yeah.

I have a Google, I don't even know what they call them anymore. A circle that runs Google Assistant in my bathroom, a Nestub? What are they called now? Have they killed Nest yet? A Google home? Yeah, it's one of those. You know, a circle. Yeah.

Like a fabric circle with a microphone in it. Google Circle. A Google thing. I should know the name of this product. Is it the little guy? Is it the Home Mini? It's a Home Mini? Is that what it is?

Yeah. A circle. The little guy. The big hockey puck. I highly recommend putting one of those in your bathroom. They're very useful in there. And sometimes I have a play podcast in the morning. Sometimes I just have it set of time, like all the stuff.

And I asked it how long it would take to drive to the airport. And first it answered with a number of miles. And then it said, I can't. And I said, well, how many minutes will that take? And it just couldn't. And then it sent me some stuff on the web. And I was like, all of this AI. Like, all of this AI and Google Maps.

Yeah, like you have that. You have all of the skills. If I just asked Google Maps' question, it would immediately deliver me to answer. And you can't. And it's like, well, we just didn't close the loop. Yep. And that, to me, I was like, oh, I should have just tried something. Anything else would have been fine.

And I think that that's like the Google Loop closing. Hopefully they get better at it. It's like they've had a long time. You wrote about this this week. We're going to get to that. But yeah, that's the last one that really failed for me. And I was just like, how is it possible? Like, even if at this point, if Gemini had just lied to me.

Yeah. And then like 45 minutes, I don't know. That's probably a minute. It seems right. Yeah, sure, right? That feels right. Yeah, about 45 minutes. Yeah.

Like, it would have been better than just like, I don't know. Yes. Like, there's nothing less useful than asking a robot how far away something is. And it's like 25 miles. It's like. Cool. What does that mean to me at this point in time? Should I run?

What's the plan here? Just hustling. What's your last one at Google? Phil, Danny? Yesterday. I was trying to decide. I asked it, should I get an impact driver if I already have a regular, like, power? Oh, that's an impossible.

That's, like, too hard. Yeah, it was too hard for it. It was like, no. And I was like, what power tools should I get? And it was like, here's all the power tools for carpentry. And I was like, I just wanted to know what power tools should, like, a nerd who wants more power tools get. you failed me. I got really upset.

That's a really hard. Maybe I went too hard. You've opened, like, that's a Pandora's box question. Yeah. Like, I've seen videos of people arguing that the housing crisis caused people to switch from the standard drills to impacts because all the people with experience building houses got forced out of the market and the kids didn't know what they were doing. Like, you're touching on a third rail of that word tools of that question.

Like somewhere a data center exploded because you asked Google that question. I went like, I had to go like a couple of links in. I was like, I need something that's not people trying to sell me power tools. Yeah. And eventually I got some people debating impact drivers. And they're like, yeah, you got a lot of sheetrock, or not sheetrock. You got a lot of drywall you got to get up. You get that impact driver.

Change your life. And I was like, well, I don't have that. Our publisher, Chris Grant, is about to run in here. He's just generally talking about power tools. Yeah. He's going to go crazy. Kick the door open. Well, I was just saying, this is my prediction.

A year from now, market. What day is it? April 4th? Mark it. a year from now, whatever Google is today will look radically different. Hey, Siri. No, I agree. And I think Google knows that too.

Yeah. And I'm not sure they know what to do about it. Do you see the, I don't know if it was a rumor or report, but there was, I just saw something go by, basically saying that Google is now considering charging for its AI stuff, which I find totally fascinating. Like the actual AI search stuff would be a paid thing instead of a free thing. Messy and complicated. but like you get the sense Google knows it can't be like this for much longer and it's flailing in a bunch of directions

trying to fix it but I think it seems like the internet is getting crazy faster than Google is getting good at doing the solution they just need to sell some shit in Walmart knock $200 all sell it in Walmart you'll be fine yeah some other AI stuff for the lighting around

Microsoft is working at Xbox AI chatbot scoop from Tom Warren It's just clipy for Xbox. And he's right that it needs to be called X-Bot. It does need to be called X-Bot. Microsoft confirmed it. We are testing at Xbox Support Virtual Agent, an internal prototype of an animated character

that can query Xbox support topics with voice or text. This is the general manager of gaming AI at Xbox. The prototype makes it easier and quicker for players to get help with support topics using national language. It's like, this is great.

This is cool. but like how many people are on the daily just like asking Xbox support for help? Why did I lose it, FIFA? No, I mean, customer support AI is like just done. Like that is good or bad, that is the future of everything, right? Like all the robot phone trees are going to be replaced by chatbots

and that's just where we're headed. And that's kind of what this sounds like. I think there is possibly more Xbox could do here, but this just sounds like it's going to be an adorable little customer service guy. wait, I love this idea of it killing phone trees, though. Like, if AI kills the phone tree, oh my God. Oh, that's coming. I really, I really think it is.

Game changed. Frankly, like, just online chat customer service over having to call and wait for a human was delightful. Now all of that is just being replaced by AI bots who are like, yeah, helpful. And my favorite thing is the people who go on to those things like the people who went to the car rental company and asked it to, like, do all kinds of weird stuff. Like this stuff is going to get bad and crazy and weird, but that is, I think at this moment, probably the most slam dunk business use case for all of this. It is just going to eat the customer service industry.

Right. Because all of, I mean, working customer support is not fun. You are mostly reading scripts of people. Yeah. Just have a robot read the script. Yeah. I just want to know how they will all respond to me just mashing the zero button over and over again, which is all I do. Representative.

Human. Representative. No, thank you. I feel like I never call a phone tree with a problem. The phone tree is designed to solve. Never. It's like I don't need to check my balance. Like I can definitely do that on my phone.

You know, it's like I need to do something hard. Who calls to check their balance still? Like, why are they offering that still? Because I've noticed that too. I called the bank and they're like, do you want to check your balance? I'm like, no. No, I'm looking at the app right now that told me to call you. Yeah.

I'm going to start calling to check my balance. Yeah. How am I doing? Let's ask somebody. Samsung says Bixby is not dead, which is an incredible thing to say. Because it implies that everyone thinks Bixby is dead. My t-shirt that says, no, Bixby is not dead is causing a lot of questions. A Samsung executive tells CNBC that the company is, quote, working so hard to put AI features in Bixby,

even though they just did a big deal with Google and Gemini is now all over the phone and the phones are running Gemini Mini Gemini Nano. I'm not great at Google product names today. I'm back from vacation. You know, there was a big awards banquet this week.

The Asmi Awards, I drank a lot at them. Just like Google stuff. Google Circle. Gemini Tiny. Yeah, you're doing great. It's fine. You're as good as anybody including most of Google's product managers.

Like, don't worry that. So, if you will recall, When Vixby was announced, dog with shoes. If you are not caught up on Verchcast's lore, Bixby, the name, sounds like a dog wearing shoes. That's the entire joke. That's it, yeah. It's a good joke.

Like, if you were to imagine, if you were to draw a picture of something called Bixby, you would imagine a dog wearing shoes. Was a butler too. Yeah, like a butler. Yeah, like a dog, you know. Yeah. People have sent us pictures, cartoons.

I encourage you to go ask an image generator to make a Bixby dog wearing shoes and send it to us. Long ears, short ears. Well, long. Yeah, that's what I thought. This is a real floppy dog. Yeah, that's what I thought. That's what I thought.

Bixby. Yeah. But if you recall, the original Bixby, the idea was that it would not compete with, like, Google Assistant to do, like, web queries. It would change the settings on your phone. Right. It was designed to do stuff. Never did it. You're like, yeah, never, it was not a good butler.

I mean, it was a dog. Dogs aren't good butlers. Inherently suck at it. What do we think we're doing here? But now they're saying we're working so hard to make it that, which is fascinating because they still think that is a thing that people want. I think it is. I think like the idea that I can just yell at my phone to do something, like go download the Ticketmaster app. Way better user experience than what it actually currently takes to go download the Ticketmaster app.

but it just has never really worked. But I think we're actually at a point with a lot of this AI stuff where, like, in that sort of limited scope of like things your phone is capable of doing, have the system connect the dots for you, that can work. Like, is it easier to say, turn on Bluetooth and look for this weird name of headphones that I have? Is that easier than going into the menu and hitting the thing? Like, probably not. But I think Samsung's idea that this is less about, like,

getting esoteric philosophical answers about the world and more about just getting the stuff done that you do on your phone, I think it's right. What we talked about earlier, where it's customer support. Yeah, it basically is. Yeah, it's for people being like,

I don't know how to turn Bluetooth on on my phone. How do I do it? Right. And Bixby will appear. Pay up here. Pank to Litton. My phone's in Portuguese. Fix that.

Perfect. I was just going to read a quote from Juan June Choi, executive vice president of mobile at Samsung. I believe we have to redefine the role of Bixby so that Bixby can be equipped generative AI to be smarter. You have to redefine Big Spee's role.

Not a butler anymore. Bigsby has to have a role. We'll see. So Mixby exists on all the Samsung's other products. You can see how they build an oil ecosystem. I don't know, man. I feel like we're all racing to shove AI into these moments. And I think the phone companies are particularly afraid of the rabbits and the humanes and the blah, blah, blah.

You wrote a piece about this this week. The AI gadgets are coming. Yeah. And I think you mentioned developer conferences. I'm confident we're going to see a bunch of AI stuff in iOS at WWC. Google, obviously, at Io is going to talk about it a lot. I can't imagine Microsoft will talk about anything else at build. No.

I mean, and the problem is all of these companies, there's basically like two sides of the world at this point, right? There's the companies that have done well in smartphones, which is three companies. It's Apple, it's Google, and it's Samsung. Those companies are desperate to figure out an AI reason for your smartphone so that you will keep using your smartphone. Because what they're afraid of is that this new generation of other companies is going to come in. And they're not going to have solved the whole problem immediately, but they're going to have fixed some part of the user experience that people are like, oh, this is the thing that gets me past my phone. And I think that's what I'm particularly looking for with what Humane is doing and what Rabbit is doing. in companies like brilliant and even meta with the smart glasses that are getting the AI,

like can they start to pull pieces of what I do on my phone out of my phone? And if the answer is yes, that starts to kind of get in the way of this like essentially three company ownership of the smartphone universe, at least in the US. And so it's not at all an accident that you have Apple with Siri, Google with Gemini, and Samsung with Bixby, like desperately trying to figure out how to make your phone AI inside of the existing structure of phones, which is very hard to do because an AI that can do all the things I want it to do

is literally not allowed in the way the phones exist right now. So it's going to be fascinating. And so Apple is either going to have to say like, oh, Siri can now go download apps for you and do stuff inside of those apps, and it has weird permission that nothing has ever had before. Or it's going to like protect this crazy revenue stream that is the app store at the risk of losing it all

to gadgets that come up with a new way to do it. It's going to be a really fun, like three months. Yeah. Pure chaos. Okay, I'm telling you a year for now. Yeah. That's my prediction. In the spring doldrums.

I'm just like a year from now. Whole new internet. Yep. All right, we should take a break. We should come back. We have Lightning Round Part 2. Still available to be sponsored. Call now.

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All right, we're back. Lightning around, part two. This one's going to be fast. We're going to, David pointed out, the first lightning round was almost an hour long. We talked about four things. Classic lightning round. We're just going to go, this is my plan for this one. I'm just going to read the headlines.

Oh, okay. And then we're just going to. Alex and I'll just leave. That's fine. John Stewart's back on the Daily Show, just on Mondays, I think. He did a good segment on AI, with mostly being fake outs. And then he interviewed Lena Con and basically accused Apple of censoring his previous show on Apple. Yeah. And this isn't the first time he's done that. That's what I wanted to talk about on the show. It was like, what's going on with Apple and John Stewart? Because he keeps being like, hey, Apple censored me more than once. It wouldn't let me talk about China. It wouldn't let me talk to Lena Kahn. It wouldn't let me do stupid pokes at technology. What's going on over at Apple? And that's a bad sign. Yeah. Although, what did Apple think they were buying?

Yeah. Like, everyone around that. I've wondered that too. Like, just don't make a deal with John Stewart. It's like, it's fine. If that's how you feel, just don't have John Stewart. I don't know. Well, that's what they eventually decided. Well, right. Yeah.

But I think about, like, there was a thing Ryan Johnson said a few years ago about how one of the sneaky things about Apple is they'll never let the bad guy have an iPhone in a movie. You guys heard. You've heard that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think about that all the time as just sort of like a silly quirk of Apple, right? And there's a lot of things going on with how distribution works.

there's like now Tom Cruise can never be fighting an enemy with a name because it gets associated with the country and the movie doesn't play in that country. So like you can move around inside of this landscape in all kinds of weird ways. This one is just like, it just seems like it was a bad fit from the beginning. And I also, I don't know John Stewart personally, but I get the distinct sense that if you make John Stewart a list of things he can't do, he's going to then attempt to go do every single one of them. Yeah.

So I feel like it's almost a miracle that lasted this long with Apple. But it was very funny to hear him say to Lena Khan, I wanted to have you on my show and Apple said. By the way, Lena Khan is a chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She leads a lot of antitrust efforts. Federal Trade Commission, not the entity suing Apple for antitrust violations. That's the DOJ. But she's the face of a lot of it. She has a lot of feelings about antitrust in general.

Yeah. A lot of things. And the tech companies all hate her. It's like a real thing. But it's like weird. I come back to this all the time, same as you, Alex, which is like, These tech companies, they want to do media, and then they get one slice of what it's actually like to do media, which is just having to be okay with things. And they're like, no, thank you.

Yeah. But, I mean, we're seeing they're increasing their control in Hollywood. Like Apple is doing pretty well. Apple TV was the second most searched thing during the outage yesterday. Like, they have this power and is always, I think, very uncomfortable for me to see any media organization, which Apple now is. is saying, no, you can't cover something. And that's been the way it's been always, right? There's always been sensors at these companies saying, no, you can't talk about this.

No, you can't talk about that. And it felt like in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years, those sensors, their power had really started to wane because we had these different ways of getting this content to people. It wasn't just broadcast television. It was also the films, but it was also streaming. It was also cable, all these other ways. And Apple came in and was like, yeah, network censorship, huh? That's it.

Cool. And just brought it immediately back. And it makes sense. Sure. But the last time they were doing it so that they didn't get sued by the FCC, that's why we had network sensors for so long. This time they're doing it because Apple doesn't want to upset people in China because it wants to sell phones in China.

And like the motivation is very, very different. And I think that's what makes me the most uncomfortable here is that like we're seeing a very large company exert. its influence directly on the things it owns and then saying like we're doing it for very greedy capitalism reasons which is like fine that's your job your job is to make money but also if your job is to make money and your job is to create media but also if you don't want someone talking about AI and trying to don't hire John Stewart right that's kind of where I'm at like this is the part about this I find so confusing is like there was the thing with Disney forever right where

Disney was reluctant to do something like Add Hulu to Disney Plus because this sort of family friendly nature of a platform they called Disney was very important to that company. And that has, I think, changed internally over time, but that's a stance you can hold. If that's how you want to feel terrific,

don't hire John Stewart. And so to me, it's like the thing that I find strange is not that Apple has these feelings, but that it really loudly wants to pretend it doesn't have these feelings. and then goes around just sort of quietly trying to steer everyone in the direction that Apple would like, which is honestly Apple's whole MO with everything all the time. Yeah.

It's like Apple, Apple prefers to be sort of the wizard behind the curtain exerting influence without saying or doing anything publicly. Right. This is the closest Apple has gotten to, like, news programming, though. Like, I'm fine. If Apple wants to make, if Apple wants to be a movie studio and it only makes heartwarming movies about uplifting. That's fine, yeah. You're a great movie studio. Yeah.

Nobody's mad at the Hallmark. channel for not doing like hard-hitting news. I'm furious at the home-mark channel every single day, sir. But like hiring John Stewart is like, we're going to do news. We're going to be topical. We're being relevant. And you just see most other big tech companies, they tried it. And they're all running away from it as fast as like Instagram threads.

We don't want to do news. They're like, this is messy. It's hard. It gets us in lots of trouble. It's not even when people want. Instagram threads. The algorithm is only going to show you content about how to be a trad wife so people can do engagement bait.

and it's like, what's happening here all day long? Right? And I think Apple hasn't quite had that realization yet. Yeah, I think that's true. But I think there's also just the concern that if these are also the companies that are the primary owners of how we view media and they all don't want to do news and they don't want to talk about serious issues all the time, well, that's bad too. Yeah. Take a look around the media industry. Let's see how well this is going for everybody.

Okay, that's that one. Speaking of Apple antitrust, two things. One, the first European alternative app stores have hit because of the DMA. Not the good one yet, which is Alt Store, which is going to have the emulators in it, but like an Enterprise one has hit, which is perfect. Of course, Enterprise Software was the first to go. Would you like to jump through a bunch of Hoops to Delo B2B apps? Have we got a store for you?

But Kalim Booth, who's in Europe, we hired them to look at this stuff. We have a good, deep look at it. There are a lot of hoops. Oh, yeah. A lot of hoops. Yeah, let me just read this sentence to you. It made me laugh very funny. It goes like this.

You begin by clicking a browser-based link to load the alternative store. From there, you receive a pop-up informing you that your installation settings don't allow marketplaces from that developer. Then you head into settings, enable the marketplace, return to your browser, click the download link again, and receive another prompt asking you to confirm the install. Finally, you can open the store and browse the available apps. Perfect. Yeah. I feel like I'd screw that up by access.

Yeah. So the argument is Apple doesn't know if its things are in compliance with the DMA until they release them and the European regulators tell them, which is weird, right? Like if you're going to be a regulator and you're going to insist that things are designed, you should just say how you want them designed instead of this weird back and forth. But I suspect all of this will change because the way it's designed is they released it and then the European regulators are going to be like, aha. As they do. Yeah. And they're going to say this isn't good enough. I think that's probably right. I'm not terribly bothered by making people jump through several hoops to do this, honestly. Like, I think the thing on the Mac where if you try to download an app from a sort of non-trusted source being like the App Store, it makes you open settings, find a thing, check that box, and then go do it again. I think that is like the correct number of hoops to jump through. Like this is the sort of thing you should not be able to do by accident.

but if you want to do it, you should be able to do it. Oh, I disagree. You should have to know that you're doing it. I want to be able to absolutely destroy my phone on accident. That's how I learned how to compute, and I want to maintain that. And I think, like, kids today, that's, you know. Kids today. The kids today, they got to learn, too.

Everybody's got to learn how to, like, just destroy all of their technology because they clicked one wrong box somewhere. And it makes you sharper. It makes you think more. and we got to make people sharper and think it more. This is how we bring down a number of Iranian centrifuges. Just let the worms proliferate. Yep.

Malware. Builds character. Yeah, basically. It does. Have you ever brought down an entire computer lab trying to download one MP3? All right, now you're a real man. I think there's a balance in there because Android has had this model for a long time where you can like jump through some hoops. And the argument is like, I mean, we've seen it in the epic anti-trush case against school.

Google. Like, Google knew that people weren't doing it because the hoops were there. But then you kind of don't want a bunch of people accidentally screen things up. The thing that's really interesting, though, is Alt Store has Delta in it, which is a Nintendo emulator. By all accounts, a great emulator. Apple won't allow that on its stores. But now you're like, oh, there's an entire use case for the iPhone that's available to me now. Because there's an alternative application distribution model. That's worth it. Oh, agreed.

100%. Agreed. And I think it is kind of great that that is. the first thing. Because leaving aside all the legality questions about emulation in general, like whatever, playing those kinds of games on your phone is so fun. It's so fun. And you're right that it has not been allowed and it's never going to be allowed.

And there was a minute where Riley tested the developer thought he was going to get into the app store proper and then got that sort of ripped out from under him. This was a couple of years ago now. But now we're at a point where like if you want to go through. through the hoops, you are going to be able to get your phone to do almost anything. And I think that is the right approach. I think it should be hard work to do the dumb stuff you want to do on your phone. I think it should be more than one click of one link to download malware onto your phone. But damn it, if you want to download malware onto your phone. You should be allowed. You should be allowed. And I think that's fine. And I think it is going to be interesting to see

from a regulatory perspective how they view the hoops. Because I think if the goal of the EU and the regulators in general is to make it so sort of opaque in the process that it feels like you're downloading an app from the app store even when you're not. I actually think that's a bad outcome. But I also feel like the thing where you have to go essentially check the one box that declares the like, I know what I'm doing and I'm willing to put up the consequences and then you can move on with your life. It feels right to me. And this feels like a little overshoot of that. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I'm very excited. I mean,

this is the experiment. We've never run it before. Like, we'll see how it goes. I think there's something really exciting to happen here. I agree. David, you've added this extremely fake story about Stephen Hitchin buying TikTok without the algorithm. Defend yourself. Defend the addition of this. This is a totally fake story.

This is a totally fake story. Well, this is why I added it. Because so we got a ton of feedback over the last couple of weeks about both the Apple Antitrust stuff and the TikTok ban. And we're going to talk about all that stuff on Tuesday's episode. But for this one, my real question is more theoretical than this. like Stephen Nuchin is not going to buy TikTok. Buying TikTok without the algorithm is not a thing. He's the former Treasury Secretary under Trump.

Yeah, who is not going to buy TikTok. It doesn't matter who he is. He's not going to buy TikTok. And I think I'm just fascinated by this question. So there are two pieces of news here that I think are related. So one is that Facebook this week rolled out a unified video player for all of its video across platforms. And it's basically all in on precisely TikTok style vertical video. And that plus this thing where it's like, okay, what do you buy if you buy TikTok without the algorithm?

Just let me just believe like maybe the answer is nothing. Like buying TikTok without the algorithm is that anything? But then we're at a point where TikTok has actually gotten more and more transparent about what the algorithm is. And so in theory, you could start to do better. And companies like meta have been more explicit about like we're not going to, you know, show you stuff from your friends. we're not going to buy us anything except engagement and entertainment essentially. So it's like you can actually start to kind of reverse engineer TikTok. And without this magical algorithm that is so much of what TikTok has become,

you're just buying a brand name, right? Like you're buying a license to the word TikTok, and that's well and good. But TikTok without the algorithm feels like to me it's worth like $5. Yeah. I just don't see it. And I think if that's going to become the question, And I think so far our theory, which is that this is going to lead to nothing, has pretty much borne out. We've basically heard nothing about this since there was all that stuff a couple of weeks ago.

I hope he does it. I hope like right now, as we're recording, he's signing on the dotted line. I think of the voice of the youth, I think a former treasury secretary, Steve Medellin. Well, you get all the content. He'd buy all the content. And then you just put any algorithm on top of it, and you're fine. Sure? Yeah.

I mean, that's what you'd be buying. You'd be buying all the user-generated content that is TikTok. I guess that's true. But also all of that content now exists on all the other platforms. That's true. So that's kind of where I'm at, right? Like if I'm the Instagram team, I'm having meetings where it's like, what does TikTok have an offer at this moment that we can't?

And like the YouTube Shorts team I know is asking that same kind of question. Like it's all just sitting there. And especially if you don't have the algorithm. And the algorithm has been made out to be this like magical thing that is irreplicable. and perfect and understands people better than they do themselves. I don't know that it's that. I think part of it is just that like TikTok is so shameless about the way that it works. And like Adam Maseri, who runs Instagram is like ringing his hands trying to be a good person.

And TikTok is just like, TikTok shop, let's go. TikTok is doing the thing. It's just happened for you. I think they're testing this. It's definitely happening to me where they just start playing an ad at the end of every video now. Oh no. I have not gotten that. So you're like instead of looping, it's just like, here's an ad.

and all of those ads for me are for the Land Rover Defender which is utterly confusing like that algorithm believes that it can get me to buy a Land Rover defender and all the ads start with the same sweeping shot of the word defender so it's like I never know if it's just like

some weird IT security company no it's the Land Rover Defender that's what it is there it is again definitely not buying a Land Rover defender it's pretty good though it's just like but they've started doing it like the platform is getting they're squeezing more pennies out of it, right? Because it might go away or something might happen.

I feel like the algorithm's also just getting worse. Like it keeps showing me this guy going, What's Up, brother? Oh, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a sports person. I don't play Madden.

You're talking about you. You guys immediately were like, yeah, yeah. Maybe that's why. Yeah, I know that now because TikTok's shown me that repeatedly. The fact that TikTok just made a weird Twitch streamer, a star is like very interesting. It's super weird. Mark this down where that's a story. We'll come back to this in Microsoft.

But this story is totally fake. This dude is not buying TikTok. No. Last two little regulatory ones. I think it's very funny that the House of Representatives has now banned staffers from using Microsoft co-pilot because they're putting too much data into an insecure LLN system. Very funny. Yep. Just deeply funny.

And then we'll come back to this in more detail. But the FCC has scheduled a vote to restore neutrality. which is very interesting. It feels like we've already ruined enough things. You know, it's like, it's like hard for anyone to get excited about this. It's like, we did it. Like, because they took net neutrality away, I just want to, there are people out there who are like, nothing bad happened when net neutrality went away.

And one very specific bad thing happened, which is that AT&T bought Time Warner. Like, very specific bad thing happened. and they thought they could prioritize Time Warner Services on AT&T's network and then they paid Zach Snyder to make a 4-3 gray-scale version of the Justice League. Alex, did Batgirl die because Net Neutrality died? Yeah. Could you draw? I feel like you could draw that line.

I think you can. Because without that acquisition, they don't have all the debt when they get offloaded, which means Zazlov doesn't have to kill Batgirl. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks to Jeep Pie. You ruined Bat Girl. I'm just saying this man in his stupid mug, his stupid oversized recent.

pieces of muck. And everyone's like, no bad things happen. And it's like actually one very tangible bad thing happened. When AT&T had a theory of the case. It was like, we will buy a content service, prioritize it, and preload tiny little clips of Game of Thrones on mid-range Android phones and accept all of that from our data caps. This was it. And then we're going to get Zach Snyder for some godforsaken reason.

I know he thought it was the IMAX aspect ratio, okay? I know that's what he was thinking. But the reality is he made a 4-3 version of Justice League. That's how I watched it on my TV. It was a square. Why? The more you say it, the more I feel like, what if net neutral? Like, actually, that was a good thing that AT&T was allowed to.

We got a 4-3 Justice League. Yeah, because it proved that, like, no one wants that. It does prove. I agree with you. I actually agree. The market firmly rejected AT&T's, ideas. It was like, no, this is stupid. But we didn't need to go through all that pain. We didn't need to fire all those people. Like, the layoffs that occurred, the general pain.

Thousands of people have been lobbed upon the American populace. With black and white Dex Snickers Justice League. Four three Justice League was created. Like, we didn't have to, I'm saying, like, I think the layoffs were worse, like the millions of dollars of like debt and weirdness. But we all experienced the Zach Snyder movie. Rounds of rolling layoffs are bad. I don't think we need to do them. We should have healthy companies in a functional marketplace.

But then also, there was a 4-3 Justice League. Also very tangible results. I watched all like 15 hours of it. You had to do it as a journalist. And the only thing that saved me is because I invest in OLED technology. Oh, my God. The pillar boxes weren't shining gray at me. How is your bit rate?

Horrible. H-T-M-X is a garbage bit rate. Get that shit on Bravia court, ASAP. And excuse that from your data caps, AT&T. I'm just saying, whenever anyone tells you, whenever you see the weirdos on the X being like, net neutrality led to nothing, immediately reply with a screenshot of 4-3 Justice League in Gracie.

I feel like the bin diagram of weirdos on X saying net neutrality led to nothing, and the people who really wanted that four, three movie is a circle. It's just like, they couldn't even, they weren't even like just fill, make it 16, like just do it.

IMAX enhanced, right? Huh? Because we all have those in our house. You don't have an IMAX screen at your house? All that OLED? I do like that IMAX enhanced is basically meant we took a 219 cinema frame and made it 16 by 9. It's just regular now. It's just regular.

Like Disney Plus is like IMAX enhanced. Like what does that mean? It's 16 by 9. Yeah. That's like that's what that has worked out to. It's great. All right. That vote is coming up.

We'll probably have Lauren back to cover it in more detail what it actually means. There's some meaningful differences between this version and previous versions. I just want to point out that again, you live in an America right now, 2024, where Baccarol was killed. David Zazlov. Can't believe that. The reign of terror continues. We're down to three wireless carriers and Project Gen. Five, sis.

All because of the stupid mug. It's a real thing. There's no... By the way, at the same time, the same Ajit Pi FCC got rid of the privacy protections for broadband carriers and any ability to regulate them all. These aren't our favorite companies, the ISPs. I should note at this time that NBC Universal is a minority investor in Vox Media. Jones the Verge and NBC Universal's on my Comcast, which does not love that neutrality, or me, as it happens.

I subscribe to Verizon. It's okay. Yeah, I, I Fios, it's nice. It's okay. I'm an 18T subscriber. I streamed Justice League for free. Oh, wow. That was that.

Didn't hit my data cap at all. Congratulations. It's big for you. My 18T subscription still locked into Max, and so now I only have Max and 1080B. It's very good. All right, we've got to take a break. We'll be back.

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The Everything Else Lightning Round. Yeah, it's a kind of grab baggy. Sponsored by everything else. Sponsored by Walmart. Did you get a free blue check from X this week? No. No. Sad.

I hesitate to talk about Elon on the show. Did you get a check? Yeah. The guy who wrote, Welcome to Hell Elon. has now been gifted a blue check on X. Congratulations, you're an influencer. Yeah.

I don't know what that means. It's all working because now you're talking about it. See, he got you. Yeah, that's right. And you're going to use Grock now. Can't wait to buy a Tesla. He's had a bad couple weeks here. Yeah.

Right? So Tesla's deliveries are way down under forecast. I've never seen it before, but various investors and executives are talking about replacing Elon a CEO. That will probably never happen. But even the fact that it is a conversation. that has occurred, like in the CNBC orbits. The shine is off. Seems very bad.

Tesla's stock is generally tanking. Yep. Elon is just tweeting about the woke mine virus instead of shipping more cars or making X good. It's not great over there. No. No. I think there was a thing about Tesla that made him kind of invincible for a really long time, because it was like the conversation around Elon for so long was like, say whatever you want,

people are voting with their dollars, right? Like Tesla was on fire. Investors loved it. People were buying it. We talked on this show about how there was essentially unlimited demand for Tesla's. And at some point in the last year or so, that turned. And I think you can probably blame that on a confluence of things. Not all of it is a lot of people decided they don't like Elon Musk anymore,

but I think some of it is that. But like this sort of era of power that Tesla has, had for a long time seems pretty clearly to be, if not over, then under really serious threat. And as we've been saying, and I think as you in particular, Eli, I have said a few times on their show, Tesla is both like a great strength and a great weakness for Elon because of the way it ties him to China, because of the way it like has all of his fortunes inside of it, that like what happens to this company is so materially important to what happens to everything else that Elon Musk wants to do. including the way that SpaceX works with the government.

Like, it's all so tied up. And so you get the sense that as it is starting to turn the other way, the spiral happens in the reverse direction, too. And it feels like it's getting really ugly, really fast. So we have a story this week. There's a reputation tracking firm called Calibur. We went on and surveyed a bunch of people. The consideration score for Tesla,

which is basically consumer interest in brands, the question they went and surveyed people, I would buy or continue buying products and services from Tesla, if given the chance. In November 2021, 70% of people said, yes, that's down to 31%. Oh, whoa. Yeah. I mean, everything about that, because we've seen the quality has dropped. We've seen people talking more about that quality.

We've seen people struggling with getting their cars repaired, getting this customer service is really, really bad there. So all those things that actually do matter to a consumer experience. Elon kind of was like, don't worry about it. We're building the future. Eventually people are like, yes, but I want my car to work now. Right. I also think this ongoing full self-driving fiasco that this company just cannot get out of where it refuses to stop calling full self-driving when it is not full self-driving

and actually what it's doing is really dangerous. Like the public perception on that, I think, is like decidedly negative at this point. Yeah. Which is really ugly. Even outside of how you feel about it on Musk, the idea that Tesla is like the future of cars in a lot of ways, like, hinges on that. Oh, their entire valuation hinges on that. Right.

Like, I've watched, I mean, they go on CNBC all the time. I talk to the analysts there. You look at how the market values Tesla, and it's still built into the idea that you will go to work and your car will, like, leave your house and, like, drive itself and be a taxi service. Right. The Tesla is going to be, like, infrastructure. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. And, like, no, it's a car company. Yeah. Like, that's the, but all of the multiple of. Tesla is built on the idea that the cars will generate more value than just being a depreciating asset that most people should lease. So did they all think it was Uber?

Yeah, that's the idea here. Like the multiple, and that's why Elon is constantly talking about AI now, all this stuff, and he's like, like, Tesla's really an AI company because he's trying to get this other thing to happen and get this other multiple. And it's like the market is starting to just see a car company, a car company that shipped a triangle instead of a regular pickup truck, a car company that can't deliver well-made cars on the regular,

like all this stuff. And whose CEO is becoming more and more unpopular by the day because he won't shut up. Yep. Like, I talk to a lot of CEOs. They're not all pleasant people. Like, by and large,

very aggressive type A personalities in the C-sweets of American companies. But they know to not they have people around them. They hire publicity firms and stuff, which Elon famously refuses. And like, don't tweet. Turns out to be pretty good advice. Yeah.

Especially about the woke mind virus and the great replacement theory. Yeah. If you're a publicly traded company, don't tweet. If you're publicly traded company that sells electric cars to extremely liberal people by and large, just doing some white supremacy on the side, it's not a great idea for you. Yeah. Not great for your value. Anyway.

It's just a weird. time, like, to bring this all back around, X now giving the checkmarks away to journalists for free, very funny. Yes. Like all the way back around. They're like, what if we've verified something? It's because they need people to use a platform. I suspect we won't work. No, if anything, it seems to be, like, do you remember that moment right after they said you're going to have to start paying for the blue check, but they hadn't taken it away from people who had it before?

and all these people are coming out saying, no, no, no, just so you know, I didn't pay for it. Yeah, it's happening again. We're doing that again, where people are, like, embarrassed to have a blue check. Yeah, but. In a way that it is, like, it's a badge of, like, you are pathetically still using this platform rather than something you're actually part of. I was going to say it kind of works because then you have to go log in and tweet,

or excuse me, post, I didn't pay for this checkmark. Yeah. Like, they got you. And your unregretted user minutes go through. through the roof. Yeah. Yeah. That's enough Elon talk for one day.

Spotify, reportedly, having a price increase. They've realized they increased, look, they increased prices last year, had their best year ever. They also laid off a bunch of people, had cuts. So they increased revenue reduced costs heartlessly, but do it. That does, in fact, work. Usually math's out. There's not a lot of places to go from Spotify.

Like, I don't think people are like, oh, Spotify's going up. I'm switching to YouTube music. No, people should not and are not doing that. I mean, I think to me, the thing that seems to be true is that $999 was the wrong price for streaming music. We just kind of decided this, like, years ago. It was just like in the same way that Steve Jobs was just like, what if songs cost $0.99? And everybody was like, all right. Like, a long time ago, it was just like $10 a month.

And it's just where we are. And it turns out that is good money for record labels. and bad both for most artists and most streaming companies. Well, I mean, Spotify did it because that was when they were coming into the United States where you had this really entrenched market run by Apple. And they were like, okay, we got to compete with 99 cents songs. How do we do that? $10 a month and you get all of the songs.

And we are all like, yes, that's sick. Yeah. And I think if it had been $20 a month, it probably wouldn't work. But if it had been $20 a month, it might have been a hell of a lot more sustainable. Yeah, I mean, I would say the last 10 plus years of like $10 a month, that's a pretty good run for, it's better run than like Netflix. Oh, for sure. Yeah, no, I actually think we as users probably saved a lot of money over the last decade on Spotify's dime. But I think this feels super inevitable to me, and this will not be the last one, I don't think. It went from $999 to $10.99, and now the report is it's going to go up, I think, either one or two more dollars.

I would not be surprised if a couple of years from now we're at like 15 bucks for Spotify. What? I'll still pay it. Like music services are awesome. I have zero qualms with the fact that I have all the music on earth available to me at all times. But it is a bummer to see this.

I'm more sensitive to this for Spotify because like it's a bad business for Spotify. It's not Spotify being like, we make lots of money, but we want more, give us more. this is Spotify being like, we literally cannot do this anymore. Please give us more money. Yeah. How do you all feel like Apple will respond to this?

I don't think Apple will raise their prices at all, actually. I think any price increases get rolled into Apple One, and that's just what they're going to keep doing. I think Apple Music, they run as a loss leader, to get you into that bigger bundle. I don't even pay for it. I get it through my Verizon account, and I'm like, all right. Yeah, I think Apple is very happy to, let that be

somewhere between an okay business and a slightly less than okay business in service of everything else. Yeah. They want you in that Apple One bubble, as hard as they can be. When all their services went down, it was like people searched for the App Store being down and a little bit of

Apple TV and nothing else. Oh, it was so sad. We were looking at the thing we put in like, we're like, well, what about arcade? No. We couldn't even like find the line on the graph. We're like, oh, that's a bummer. Which is funny because Apple Music is hugely popular. Like, it is, Apple Music and Spotify are the two winners in this market by a gigantic

margin. It's not the one people go Googling when they can't get in their rush hours. Evidently not. All right, two stories that are in conflict in really interesting ways. OpenAI has a new voice cloning model. It only needs 15 seconds of audio to clone your voice. Fascinating. And there was a fake George Carlin special.

They settled with the estate of George Carlin. They promised not to do it. anymore. Actually, a weird drama inside of that story is whether there was actually AI used to make the fake George Carlin special or whether they were faking it, which is interesting. Well, they admitted to writing it themselves. Yeah. How the rest of it was produced, I think, as far as I know, at least, has not been really nailed down. But the idea that this was like written, produced and created by AI, just flatly not true.

And it's been a really fun thing going around. Like, there was this whole story this week about how Amazon's just, walk-out technology was actually powered by like a thousand contractors in India manually reviewing your trip through to make sure that you paid for everything. I think it was Molly White who runs the website. I think it's, what is it, Web 3 is going great. Who was basically like, I wish I had been tracking all the times that AI turned out to just be a guy.

It's really true. And this feels like that too. It's just a guy. It doesn't help that one of them is like from Mad TV. like we're the hosts. Yeah. But these two ideas are our intention. We've talked about it so many times like AI being able to clone a voice or clone a picture,

and then you have, in doing it faster than ever, you need 15 seconds of our voices to clone us, which we have generated more of that on this very podcast. You're welcome. And then it's like, oh, but we have no controls over how those likenesses are used or any of that is actually being done, except for these handful of lawsuits that might bring the whole thing crashing down. Yeah. Well, an open AI's strategy has been. then so far to roll it out really slowly and only with a few partners.

And it's like, okay, that's fine at the beginning. But then what's going to happen is you're going to have a better version of this technology that you give to everybody. So, like, what's the plan then? Yeah. It's like if they were saying, you know, it takes 900 hours. So we're only letting a few people use it because it's hugely intensive. I'd be like, okay, well, whatever. But this is like, we found a very good technology, but only a few people can have it.

And then everybody can have a very good technology. It's like, what are we accomplishing here? Yeah. But I think, I mean, this has been coming, right? Like the New York Times, I think it was this week, had a big announcement about how most of its articles are now going to be available in audio form read by automated narrators. Like 11 Labs, which is a company we've talked about on this show before, is doing like incredible slash terrifying work, synthesizing people's voices. Like this stuff is moving as fast as any other tech in AI right now. and it's getting really crazy, really fast.

And I feel like probably should be talked about more than it is in the way that we talk about, like, generated images and how they're being used in political campaigns and all this stuff. Like, you're going to get phone calls from Joe Biden telling you not to vote. Like, that's a thing that's going to start to happen. It's already happened. Yeah. It's like it happened. Yeah. And I think, like, this open AI is typically very good at this and I think is not usually wrong.

when it says it built something good, but is not great at playing it slow. Yeah, but one story that hit, just as we've been talking on this broadcast, Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube at a conference, said Open AI should not train its systems on YouTube, which is not how Open AI has thought about the Internet. No.

And who was it? Was it Miramirati at OpenAI, who said to Joanna Stern and our friend, Joanna was when they were talking about the video thing, SORA that Open AI came out with. Joanna was like, are you training this on stuff from the internet? And she was like, ah, some training stuff, internet, public, private. And Joanna was like, are you getting it from YouTube?

And she was just like, ah, I don't know. So it's like, oh, okay, so you're obviously getting it from YouTube. Yeah. Like, cool. It's not great. Uh, no. If Google sues Open AI on behalf of YouTube creators for training. That's a weird.

There's a copyright apocalypse. We did an entire decoder with Sarah John. You can go listen to it. But there's a potential copyright apocalypse. Yeah. Mr. Miste is going to make a video in which he sues Open AI for $100 million. And then gives the money away. That would be incredible.

All right, we got to end this thing. We're way, way over. But, David, you should end by talking about Google Podcasts. Well, this is a good, we're circling back around to, we're closing the loop on Google, not closing the loop. Google could stand to learn from us. So Google Podcast is dead. Although it's actually not dead. It's, like, ironically, Google has so forgotten about Google Podcasts.

that it seems to have forgotten to turn it off. That was its podcast app. Yeah, so it had a dedicated podcast app. It came out in 2016. Been around for a while. It did what Google does to many of its apps, which was like it launched. It had big ideas.

It seemed kind of cool. It got a couple of updates. Google forgot about it. Google launched a competitor, and then Google killed it. This is the story of Google apps. And so the plan here is to replace Google Podcasts with YouTube Music. and they've been making some moves into YouTube music. There is a, I would say, strong chance you are watching or listening to this podcast right now on YouTube.

Part of the reason Google is investing in YouTube is because that is a vast and massively growing place for podcasts. But it had this really cool opportunity in podcasts. Like Google, I went back and read their initial thing in 2016 when they launched this app, and they had these big ideas about discovery and helping people find insights inside of podcasts and doing audio transcription and search and all this stuff. And it's like, oh, that seems good. Like, why didn't you do any of that? That would have been cool.

And instead, you just forgot about this app for eight years and then killed it. And YouTube is not going to do that stuff. Are they going to release Google Podcasts with Gemini at Google I.O.? Oh, my God. If they relaunch Google Podcast at I.O., that would be incredible. With Gemini. They could have also solved huge amounts of podcast analytics and advertising. And advertising problems that everyone has all over the place.

Yep. I heard from a lot of people after I wrote this story. I had a paragraph in here basically being like, Hey, Google, if you had just done for audio creators, what you did for video creators on YouTube, you could have won this industry the same way that you did. And I heard from a surprising number of podcasters who are like, I have been begging slash hoping YouTube would do that for years.

Like build the ad tools, do the rev share, let me post my stuff on YouTube and make money. from it as an audio creator the same way you can as a video creator. And there are lots of, I was about to say good reasons, but they're bad reasons. But there are lots of reasons Google didn't do that, but it didn't do that. And it could have. And that sucks. I remember being in meetings at our company.

It's like, Google's coming. We better be ready. I'm like, do you? Yeah. They'll get distracted. Don't worry about it. It's like, I don't know. But also to everyone who wants to know, the answer is pocketcasts.

Pocketcast. If you want a good cross-platform podcast app that is not going to go away, the answer is pocketcasts. There are other good ones out there, antenna pods really good on Android, Overcast, Apple Podcasts. But if you want to know the answer, it's Pocketcasts. All right. We'll end there with that. Completely uncontroversial opinion that no one will be able to be able to be.

The lightning round brought to you by Pocketcasts. No, you got to pay the money. We can't give this stuff away for free, man. Perceived value. Yeah, you're right. I apologize. Brought to you by anything other than Pocketcast. All right, that's it.

That's the Vergecast. I want to call it a few stories. Becca did a comparison video of the Fuji film X-106 versus the RICO GR-G-R-3X. I'm saying it slowly because that's just a lot of letters. A lot of Roman numerals in that. Yeah, it's not good. But it's really fun. I'm desperate to buy these cameras for no reason other than I just want them.

Allison wrote about notifications being bad, which is worth reading. She's right. No takeaways. Just like to start over. Just like throw all this away. It's bad. And then Liz wrote about Vice One of the weirdest wildest stories

I think we've done in a long time We did an entirety code her with Liz about the story So you can listen to that next week But the gist of it is we thought we were writing a story About how advertising on the web Was like went sideways and couldn't support Vice Because they shut down their newsroom and website So we thought we were writing about like advertising cookies

And no No we were just writing about crazy people That's the story She talked to 20 people She described reporting that story as a hall of mirrors because they all hate each other. They're all lying to each other about each other. It's very good. Beautiful.

Including one part where it was revealed that Vice had a Net Shets account that was on the budget of their digital division. And then two different people took credit for shutting down and Vice's response to us was we have not had a net sheds accounts since 2021. Oh. Which is like, so you did have a Net Shets account. We're really proud of it. It's very good. Great story. Go read that.

That's it. Oh, by the way, we got nominated for. a bunch of Webby Awards. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The People's, for Best Technology Podcast, the Big Webby and the People's Choice, go vote for us. We'll have a link. Go vote for us in the Webby Awards.

Also, listen, people, it's so important that you vote for the Vergecast as technology podcast. Decoder is also nominated in Business Podcast. Nilai can have his. That's all fine. I need you to vote for the Vergecast. It's so important that Neelyi does not win as Decoder. It's so important.

Please vote for the VergeCast. The Webby's really did a sturdy. I'll take the business win. Give this show the tech win. Yeah, you get to have it either way. Decoder is nominated in both categories. Yeah. Okay. Just look for my face and click on it.

That's all I'm saying. It's going to be great. All right, that's it. We're way over. On a slow week, we still went way over. That's it. That's a Vergecast, rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.