The Vergecast - How to keep your data safe when you travel

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

 If you’re heading on vacation this summer, you’re going to want to listen to this. The Verge’s Gaby del Valle joins the show to explain how worried you need to be about your digital data when you cross borders, and what you can do to protect yourself. Even if you don’t think you have anything to hide, a little precaution goes a long way. After that, Puck’s Matt Belloni joins the show to explain why Apple, Amazon, Google, and other tech companies continue to pour money into the streaming business, when it seems so far removed from what those companies do well. (Spoiler alert: it’s fun to be friends with Ben Stiller.) Finally, we answer a hotline question about the Google Pixel’s ascent to “best Android phone for people who just want a phone.”  Oh, also: thanks to everyone who voted for us in the Webby Awards! We’ll know soon whether we won, but however it shakes out, we’re so grateful to everyone who voted for us. Further reading: Is it safe to travel to the United States with your phone right now? DHS’s airport panopticon is getting people deported and detained Trump says he wants to deport US citizens to El Salvador Matt Belloni at Puck The Town podcast From Puck: How Long Can the Apple TV+ Experiment Sputter On? - Puck Google Pixel 9A review: a midrange phone done right Google Pixel 9 review: the phone that Android needs Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of having really famous friends. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am in my backyard, on my patio, putting together this little Tykes house that we got for my toddler. It was a gift from my parents. My two-year-old, I think, is very much going to like it. But also, if I'm being honest, it was very fun and cathartic to put this thing together in the way that it's fun to, like, do IKEA furniture. It's a little bit of work. It's just enough to make you feel like you've really accomplished something. And I'm like, yeah, I built a house today.

Is it made of plastic and will it blow away next time there's wind? Yes, but that's not important. I built a house today. Anyway, this house is not what we are here to talk about today. Today on the show, we're going to do two things. First, I'm going to talk to Gabby Del Valle about a thing we've actually heard from you a lot about recently, which is how to travel with your phone, especially across borders right now. It's very complicated in the United States politically, and so Gabby and I are going to try to give you some tips on what to do to secure your data before you travel.

Then I'm going to talk to Matt Bellany from Puck about what he's seeing in the big tech streaming wars and why companies like Apple and Amazon and Google want in on this in the first place. We also have some really fun hotline question about Google. Lots to get to you today. But first, I have to figure out how to get out of this house. I barely crammed myself in here and it's going to be very ugly getting out. So this is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on. duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com.

We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients.

And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. All right. The house is finished. I get to get rid of this giant box behind me. I made it out alive. Life is good. Let's get into it. We've heard from a bunch of you over the last few months with kind of a similar question, which is basically some version of, I'm about to travel

and I don't know what to do with my devices. I think for a lot of political reasons, especially here in the United States, there are new questions about how you should be securing your phone and what data you should be traveling with across borders. It just feels different now. And I actually think this is the kind of thing that has been interesting and important for a long time, but is really just coming to the forefront now in a new way. So I grabbed Gabby Del Valle, who wrote a really great story for us about this, and we dug into it. Let's do it. Gabby Del Valle is here. Hi, Gabby. Hi, how's it going? You're here out of the trenches of the insanity of our world right now. I feel like every time you turn in a story, it's just like, the world is weirder than you even

think or realize by Gabby. Yeah, that's kind of my beat. it sucks. I mean, I like it. I like doing it. But I'm like, what if things weren't that way? That would be awesome. Yeah, indeed. So I've asked you to do this because you wrote a story about basically traveling to the United States with your phone in 2025. And we also got a hotline question very specifically asking about the same thing. Your story did super well. This is clearly a thing people are curious about. And I just wanted to dig into somebody. But let me just play you the question that we got on the Virchcast hotline as a way to just kind of set up the conversation we're about to have. So that sound good? Yeah. All right, let me just play this. Hey David, I'm European and I'm about to travel to the U.S. I read about Customs and Border Patrol searching phones. What might happen if I refuse? And if I have to let them search my phone, how do I prepare? Do I delete apps and password managers?

Do I log out of my Google account and delete my Google Drive? Do I change my phone password? And what about my laptop? Okay, so there are a bunch of good practical questions in here. But before we get to all the good practical questions, I just want to sort of lay the land a little bit on this. And one thing I've been wondering a lot is how widespread is this kind of border search right now? The idea that like somebody will detain you and search through your phone and look for anti-Trump text messages is like a thing we're hearing about. How big and widespread is this right now really?

I would say it's not super widespread, at least according to the most recent data we have, which is from the 2024 fiscal year. So it's not current. But that year, less than 0.01% of arriving international travelers had their devices searched by customs and border protection. But at the same time, we are seeing, you know, a lot of anecdotal reports of people having their phone searched or people having their laptop search of being turned away because of what comes up in a search. So I would say, even though it's not necessarily something that happens really frequently, like people's anxieties are not entirely misplaced either because you don't know if it's going to happen to you ultimately. Right. And it does seem like it'll probably be a minute before we get real quantitative data about this stuff. But it certainly seems like anecdotally, the stories we're hearing about this seem to have increased pretty dramatically. Yeah. I would say anecdotally, they've increased. And I mean, you know, part of that could be like whenever Trump is in office, like people care more about what Customs and Border Protection is doing, what ICE is doing. It's just kind of like an attention effect. But at the same time, like the reasons why people are being turned away. are, in some cases, unusual. Like a French scientist who sent, like, text messages saying that Trump's research cuts were bad.

Like, that's not a usual reason to turn someone away or deny them entry. So how did it come to pass that these are legal searches that Customs and Border Protection is actually doing? What is the legality of these searches right now? So in 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement cannot conduct warrantless searches of people's cell phones without their consent. but there is what is called the border zone or border search exemption, which is exactly what allows CBP to search your phone at an airport or other port of entry. So in this instance, border doesn't mean like the physical, like land borders of the U.S. Like if you're flying into Chicago on an international flight, like that's a border zone.

If you're flying into like, I don't know, Omaha, I'm just picking places in the middle of the country. Like you don't have to be physically at the border for you to be in like a border zone. So the border zone exemption basically means that there are just like areas where the Fourth Amendment, not that it doesn't exist, but it's a little bit more flexible, a little bit less robust, because you're being inspected for entry into the country. So even though you are physically present in the United States, you have not yet been legally admitted. So it's just like a kind of different situation. So is the idea that just by virtue of the fact that you are coming, from not in the United States to in the United States that somehow there is, I don't know, like, probable cause or a reason to check? Or like, I guess what is the reason behind that exemption?

So I spoke to a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who explained it to me basically is like, you know, there's always kind of been a border exemption. And it's before there were phones, it was they would check your luggage. They would check the things on your person. Things that similarly, like what you would need like reasonable, um, reasonable suspicion or whatever for search and seizure. But because you are entering, these things are considered, like, related to your travel, related to your reason for being in the country. But your luggage, you know, they might be looking for you, smuggling something, trafficking something, drugs, people, contraband, eggs recently. CBP has had an increase in people smuggling eggs for Mexico, which is really funny. Oh, boy.

Yeah. But your phone is not really like. just a thing that you're carrying with you or your laptop, it like contains your entire life on it. Which is why, like, domestically, the Supreme Court has held that, you know, law enforcement can't just go through your phone without a warrant. But it's because of this border search exemption. They can do it at courts of entry. Right. It's exactly the thing you just said about your phone is both the reason it should be more protected and the reason Customs of Border Protection would really, really, really like to look at. Exactly.

Those two things are exactly in like diametric opposition at all times. Exactly. Okay. So what do we know about how these searches actually work? Like I'm imagining just like a dude standing in the corner just like flipping through the apps on your phone. What actually happens in one of these searches? So it depends, I would say. You know when you get to the airport and you go through customs and they're like, where were you?

What's the reason for your travel? That's just like your standard run in the mill inspection. You can get pulled into what's known as a secondary inspection, which is when they take you into a backroom, and this is like they ask you more questions. You're sitting in the room, and so they can also look at your phone. If you say yes, there's two types of searches they can do.

There's what's known as a basic search. They have to put your phone on airplane mode, and they can look at whatever is on your phone on airplane mode. They can use a search function on your phone. They can go through your pictures. They can go through your texts. Like any apps that you have opened that, like maybe you're still cache. Like they can look through all of that with your phone on airplane mode.

Then there's what's known as a, advanced or forensic search, which is when they hook your phone up to an external device and they like grab everything that's on it. And they keep it. They keep it for as long as they want. And in some jurisdictions, like they can only do warrantless forensic searches that are pursuant to border crimes. In some jurisdictions, they can only do searches that are pursuant to other types of crimes. It depends. But mostly they can just look at your phone and take what's on it. And they just store that information forever. Or maybe not forever, but for a very long time.

I need to check the laws on that. Yeah. But even in the basic search, to your point, like, I think it strikes me as, I think one of the questions a lot of people are going to have, like, our caller here is like, okay, what information are they looking for? And I think to the question of like, okay, you're going to dump everything on my device and take it off, I think that's one question. But like, okay, I'm sitting in the room and there's somebody flipping through my phone.

Are they just doing a spotlight search for the word Trump and seeing what happened? Like, is that a reasonable guess as to what's going on here? I don't know if I could speak to that just because I don't know. They could be looking for anything. Like, it's kind of like the inverse of, well, if you have nothing to hide, like, what are you afraid of? It's like, you don't know what's on there. You don't know what could be used against you. Like somebody texting his friend, like, it's so crazy that Trump cut science funding.

Being a reason to deny them entry from the country is like, why? Right. There is, there was a story of a Brown University doctor who had her visa rescinded and got turned away. The CBP agents who were interrogating her say that she had admitted to going to Lebanon where she is from to attend the former leader of Hezbollah's funeral, which like, in most instances that would, that would get you turned away. But they apparently searched her phone and found photos, they called sympathetic photos and images of the former leader of Hezbollah in her phone's recently deleted folder, so not even like in her camera roll, but in the recently deleted folder. And when they asked her, like, why do you have these pictures

on your phone and why did you delete them? She was like, oh, my family sends them on WhatsApp and I deleted them because like I, I don't know, like, they're not me, but like, yeah, I support some of his, like, religious, like, whatever. She said a lot of stuff. But the point being, like, if you read between the lines there, like, WhatsApp defaults to downloading whatever images people send you. So, yeah, like, yeah, like, my family sounds like a zillion, like, good morning, everyone, things. And I have to delete those on WhatsApp, like, every single day. Yep. All of which is to say, you don't know what they're going to find in your phone.

And even, like, trying to delete stuff might not necessarily help you if you don't fully delete it. And then they find it in your recently deleted folder. Right. Interesting. Yeah. I was just thinking, like, we're in the middle of, you know, litigating, like, the signal group chat for attack planning and all this stuff. And it's like, there's actually a lot of ways that things can happen on your phone without you even necessarily being actively engaged in it. Like, I was actually thinking about the WhatsApp one where, like, mine is all, all my friends are, like, degenerate sports gamblers.

So there's now, my camera role looks like I'm a degenerate sports gambler, even though it's just all of my degenerate friends sending the bets that they're losing that just dump into my camera role now. And so I'm like, if you just opened up my phone, you would actually make a bunch of assumptions about me that are wrong. And that is just one specific tiny way that that stuff can actually start to happen. Yeah. Your friends are the ones whose parleyes are hitting. It's not you. It is your friends. All my parley's hit, Gabby. Yeah, that's right. That's right. But yeah, like, I don't know. Like, I have texts on my phone from like 12 years ago. I don't know what I was saying 12 years ago. Totally. Like I just, I don't think about it. And, you know, maybe, maybe we should be. thinking about it, which is concerning. And it applies both to people traveling to the U.S. from outside the country on visas and to U.S. citizens. The difference is just like what your rights are,

whether you have the ability to say no and what happens if you say no. Yeah, let's talk about that actually, because I was going to ask you about this because you said if you say yes, these are the two kinds of searches that they can do. Can you say no? Who can say no? What happens if you say no? Technically anyone can say no, but different things will happen. If you're a U.S. citizen and then you say no, they can't deny you entry into the country because you are U.S. citizen. They might hold you in there for a while. They might try to be like, why are you saying no? But they can't not let you in. They can take your phone and they can use forensics tools to get into your phone if they really want to. This has happened before. There's case law about it.

If you're a permanent residence, you have a green card, it's tricky. Like, you can say no. And in some cases you can't be denied entry into the country, but like, if you've been out of the country for more than six months, then you are basically like once again being inspected for entry. And so saying no could like affect your inspection for entry. If you have like certain charges on your record, like that could lead to you also kind of being inspected again. So it's just a little bit trickier than it is for U.S. citizens. If you have a visa and you say no, they can just fully not let you in. They can send you back to wherever you came from. And, you're just a and they can deny you entry. So the safer thing to do than saying no is to, you know, travel with your devices really locked down and really clean. Yeah, okay, so this is a good segue to, like, let's get super practical about this here. The sort of nuclear option here is just like factory reset your phone

before you get on the plane. Is that just the idea here? Is that what you should do? I mean, it's not a bad idea. I would say it's not a bad idea. like upload whatever, back it all up, factory reset. If you don't want a factory reset, there are like other things that you can do. And I would say this advice applies most to U.S. citizens and permanent residents. If you have a visa, I'm not really sure like whether,

you know, just like targeted deleting of stuff is going to help you much. But if you don't want a factory reset your phone, you should, I mean, actually everyone. Everyone's turn off biometric fingerprint, face ID, turn it off. Turn it off. Yeah, but can you explain that to me, actually? Because that was one thing in your reporting that I found sort of confusing and surprising

that there is a difference between what they can do with your face ID or touch ID and what they can do with your like six digit passcode to get into your phone. What is going on there? Yeah, so this is like a very interesting legal thing. It's the difference between what's known as testimonial and non-testimonial.

Testimonial and non-testimonial evidence, I believe. And this has mostly been litigated in, like, local police departments, unlocking people's phones with their fingerprint or their face. But, like, some courts have ruled that a cop cannot compel you to give them your phone password. Like, one, two, three, four, they cannot ask you or whatever it is. But they can use your finger or your face because basically, testimonial evidence is evidence that compels you to disclose the content. of your mind or your thoughts. So you were, by telling them your password, you were disclosing something that you think. You were being compelled to tell them when you think. Interesting. But that doesn't happen when they're just like putting your finger on the thing.

This is also like when people go to protest, they're advised to, you know, turn off like biometrics because they can take your phone and just like kind of. So just like, yeah, like the only analogy I can draw there is like that's the law you make so that they can fingerprint you at the police station. And but you still don't have to talk. Like, is that? Is there some similar there? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if like that's like the legal, like reason. That is like an analogy that like makes sense to me. There is, um, so one federal appeals court ruled that non-testimonial evidence. So like a biometric login for your phone requires no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking. Yeah. So you're totally right. Oh, there you go. Okay. Yeah. So because it doesn't require you to think or express your thoughts against. your will, then they're allowed to do it. Okay. I'm not sure I buy that distinction, but it is an interesting distinction, nonetheless. Okay, so the practical advice there is turn off everything but the pass code.

Yeah. For sure. Turn off all biometric authentication. And turn off your phone before you cross. Why? Because the first time you turn your phone back on, you can't log in with biometrics. So even if you forgot to turn off biometrics, like the first time you need to put in your pass code, there are, depending on your device, You can maybe disable biometrics by like pressing the button on the side a couple times. So like, yeah, the main thing is no biometrics, pass code login only. Turn your phone off. So, you know, backup your device, wipe whatever you want to wipe.

And again, like people are going to say, like, why do I have to wipe my device if I'm not doing anything wrong? It's like because the scope of what is wrong is expanding and expanding and expanding even if the law hasn't changed. Yeah, and truthfully, like, the way I would answer that question is like, maybe you don't, but is it worth the risk, right? Like, even if you don't think there is something in there, like, I think about this, like, you were saying your text messages from 12 years ago, like, this is the reason I, like, deleted all my tweets at one point. I was just like, I don't know what I was tweeting in 2010, but I absolutely do not want to be held responsible for it, right? Like, no one should be held responsible for what they were saying on the internet or in text messages 15 years ago. And in this particular case, you are potentially signing yourself up for, if, if If nothing else, that. And that should scare everyone. And if they do a forensic search of your phone, they keep the data. Like, they keep it. It's theirs.

So DHS is building out this massive surveillance database called Hart, which stands for the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology. And it's going to basically replace their current massive database, which is called the automated biometric identification system or IDENT. And Heart is like, their plan is to be able to map people's like non-obvious relationships, like all of these different things about a person's life that again, like go beyond like who, like, why are you traveling to the U.S.? Where are you coming from? Like, what do you have on you? Like if you let them, you know, take your phone and take all the contents on your own and back it up for God knows how long,

like that is being fed into this like massive machine. And you don't know how it's going to be weaponized against you or other people. It's kind of like the 23 and me thing, you know? Like you get a Christmas present, you spit into a vial and like suddenly like your 12th cousin is getting arrested for like murder. Maybe, yeah, just weird analogy, I guess. But it is true. And I think that that question of not only like how does this affect me, but how does this affect, you don't know the sort of second, third and fourth order effects that this data being out there has. And this is the thing we've learned over and over, right?

that like the location data in your phone and the usage data on social networks, like this stuff actually affects a much broader circle of people than just you as it gets out there. And I think it's like that's a useful thing to hold on to, especially in this particular case, I think. Yeah. There was actually just an instance of a lawyer who was coming back to the U.S. with his family from spring break. U.S. citizen lawyer. The agents at CBP at the airport like tried to look at. through his phone. He got away with like just a basic search, basically, um, not a forensic

search. They didn't back up his information, but it's like his client's information is on that phone. There was another instance where CBP took an immigration lawyer's phone and, you know, they did like use the forensic search to like calm through what was on it. And a lot of that, what was on it was like client information. Um, and so, you know, a lot of us, myself included, use our phones for work for personal things. And there's not just information about me on my phone. There's information about my friends. There's information about my family.

There's information about, like, my sources. And so I would say, like, it's really important for everyone. And it's, like, especially important for, like, journalists or lawyers or people who have, like, sensitive information on their phones. So given all of that, do you think the selective deletion strategy even makes sense? Like, is there a sort of half measure people can take that will help them? Or are the possibilities here just so huge and broad that you kind of might as well just do the nuclear option because it's the safer way to go? I mean, I would say, like, you know, it's still a small, a very small percentage of people who are getting their devices searched. But at the same time, like, realistically, how long does it take to back up your data and wipe your phone and then put everything back.

on your phone. It doesn't take that long. It might be annoying, but it's also annoying to sit in a weird interrogation room for hours and have law enforcement looking through your phone. So I would say, I'm not going to tell anybody what they should do, but I think that the wisest course of action is to minimize your risk as much as possible. And maybe that means wiping down your phone entirely. Maybe that means like typing in keywords that you don't want people to see and then deleting whatever fits into those keywords. I think just like the main thing to do is assess your risk as much as possible and try to protect yourself as much as possible. And then also, especially if you are U.S., it doesn't like assert your rights as much as possible

as well. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. And if you delete things, you have to then go to trash and delete them again. Delete permanently is the phrase you want to look for in almost every case, because that's when they're actually deleting. All right, last thing. And then I'll let you go. How do you think about this stuff as it pertains to other devices? I think phones are unique in that they have that sort of massive information that you're talking about. But also, like, I travel with my laptop. Should people think about their laptops the same way they think about their phones? Are all devices kind of looped into this?

I would say all devices are looped into this. I kind of want to do a separate piece on laptops because I also travel with my laptop. I have so much stuff on my laptop. I do not want to put everything, like, I don't know, like on an external hard driver in the cloud. and then back on my laptop, like, that frankly sounds like really annoying and time-consuming. Yeah, resetting your laptop is way more annoying than resetting your phone. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure about that, to be honest.

I will say that my old MacBook does not have biometric login, which is great for me in this particular instance. And yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. And I think one, I should probably call up some lawyers about because I'm not 100% sure. Okay. But in principle, if you're traveling now, you should be applying kind of the same thinking and rigor to all of your devices, not just your smartphone. Yes, yes, definitely. Okay.

And like smartphones, you know, are maybe easier to lock down, also easier to search. But there's a lot of stuff on my laptop. Yeah. A lot of J-Store articles. Yeah, like think of the PDFs we both have just like randomly kicking around in our downloads folder. I'm confident some of those would get me in trouble. I don't even know what they are. But I am confident they would get me in trouble.

Oh, for sure. Same. I know what mine are and they're weird. They're weird even like when I'm showing something. Like when I'm sharing my screen, I'm always like, no, no, no, guys. And you don't understand. It's research. It's research.

I swear. Yeah, exactly. There is a part of the challenge here that there is so much kind of mystery in it. And like you mentioned in the piece that you wrote that even what airport you land in could change the way that you go through some of this process because of the different ways that different districts of federal courts have ruled about how these searches can work. So it's like, I think my sense is it is in part designed to be complex and hard to understand, which makes it all the more important that like you as the person going through it, understand what is in your rights to do. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's like, it's, I mean, I just like

having to read about circuit splits to write this piece. I was like, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. What's going on? And I was talking to lawyers. And lawyers are like, yeah, this is really complicated. It's really complicated. It doesn't make any sense. We have begged the Supreme Court to rule so that there's like a single national binding policy, and there isn't one. But at the same time, like, I don't want people to think too much about, like, the circuit splits in the different jurisdictions because ultimately, like, the rulings and the differences are mostly about forensic searches. The legal question hasn't really been raised for basic searches, which means, like, they can do basic searches basically anywhere.

And, you know, once again, if you volunteer your phone, if you say no, then there's like a whole situation with like legality and everything. But if you're like, yeah, sure, here's my phone. Like, maybe don't do that if you don't have to. Yeah, that's a good place to start. All right, Gabby, thank you. This is great. Super helpful. And to our caller, thank you for calling in.

I hope this helped. Thanks, Gabby. Thanks so much. All right, we've got to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and talk about streaming. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of, from payment processing to analytics to website design. Their design studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website you've been envisioning for your business. If you're wondering, what if I need help, then no worries, because you're never left to fend for yourself. Shopify's award-winning customer support is available 24-7. It's time to turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic,

can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Grammally gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Grammarly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction.

You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Gramerly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else.

With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring. partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes,

you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. So I think I've mentioned this before, but one of my favorite podcast is called The Town. And it's hosted by this guy named Matt Bellan. who is also a writer at Puck. He was the editor of the Hollywood Reporter for a long time. He is like a guy who knows everybody in the entertainment business. And that's mostly what he podcasts about.

And he has talked a lot recently about Apple TV in particular, but also kind of all of the big tech streamers. And I've been listening to him talk about this for a while, wondering why on earth would a big tech company want to get into streaming in the first place? Hollywood is a messy business. Everybody's up. Everybody's down. It's super complicated.

It's all about relationships. It's like the exact opposite of what these ruthlessly efficient tech companies want to do. So I called up Matt and just basically said, this is what I want to know. Can you come on the show and answer it for me? Why on earth is big tech doing streaming? And he agreed, and here it is. Matt Bellany, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here. This is very exciting for me. You see a lot of the same like streaming wars stuff that I see and that we talk about on this show all the time. but you see it from a very different perspective. Like, I'm a guy who grew up, like, reviewing smartphones, and you're a guy who grew up in Hollywood. And I think it's, like, we're sort of running at each other in the tech industry right now. And that's what I want to talk about.

I was the last guy with a Blackberry. Yeah. I feel like everyone in L.A. was the last guy with the Blackberry. They were very popular here. I don't know why. Maybe that we were just kind of afraid of losing the keyboard. Yeah. There was something, too, though, like everybody in L.A.

wrote really long emails way after it was cool to write long emails. is a theory of developed. So I think I want to start with Apple because I have like a big picture question I want to talk about. But I think the easiest way to talk about it is probably by talking about Apple TV, which is on a run of like pretty good hits.

Severance was huge. Everybody's excited about Severance. The studio seems to be very good. You're in it. So you're hopelessly compromised. I am. Yes. I'm not going to trash my own show.

The three scenes I'm in. The good news is it seems to be very good. I think you're safe on that front. And yet, there's been some reporting that Apple is losing up to a billion dollars a year on this whole project. So I guess maybe the easiest place to start is why is this not working for Apple as a business? Well, do we know that it's not working? Just because they're losing money doesn't mean that the entire endeavor is not working. It's just not working on traditional metrics where you have a P&L and you get into a business to make money

in that business. Apple seems from the very beginning to approach Hollywood from two perspectives. One, this would be a brand halo. This would be something nice that they could do that would give them something cool to talk about and they would work with the kinds of stars that they, as Apple, consider themselves worthy of working with. And they would put out some shows and have a service that would be additive to their services business, which they seem to care. very much about these days and would give them something cool to put in commercials and to talk about in tweets and on earnings calls. That was one reason. The second was to essentially provide a bundling opportunity with their other services. If they could keep you longer in the Apple ecosystem

because they had Apple One and they had news and games and, you know, television shows that you've heard of, that that would be additive to their other businesses. So I think when we talk about the failure in Hollywood, there's legitimate things they're not doing that they should be doing, in my opinion, but I don't know that we can say that they're not getting out of this what they wanted to get out of it. That's fair. I mean, and I think the question of, does it matter if Apple TV Plus makes any money? Seems like it has been sitting there for Apple since it started this project. And I feel like I'm curious how you see the brand halo piece of all of this, because to me, it's like, I remember back when they first launched this thing. And do you remember they

had that event that they just like paraded a bunch of A-list celebrities out on stage? Oh yeah. It was the cattle call. Right. And so it's like, is this entire endeavor worth it just for that? Like, is that what Apple needs to get out of it? And it can just sell a bunch of iPhones and who cares about the money? Like, is the brand halo real enough that it's actually worth it for this company? Well, you'd have to ask them, but I think from my perspective, it was meaningful for them to get all of these celebrities up to Cupertino. Remember the famous Oprah line. Like, they're in a billion pockets, y'all. Yeah.

Like, that was her reason for getting into business with Apple. And if you look at the choices they are making on the content side, one after another, it is huge stars. If you, I mean, it's a joke around town. Like if you've got a big star-filled package and you're selling it around town, Apple will bite. Like they just want to be in business with big movie stars and big TV stars. And the criticism of them is that they don't ultimately often enough follow through on the promise of those stars. There's lots of projects that are kind of littering Apple TV Plus that have big names in them but don't ultimately turn into great shows. There are examples, of course, of shows that do turn into great shows with big shows.

stars. But the evidence we have for whether they're getting out of this what they want is that they continue to sign up big stars. And when it works there, Eddie Q can go to South by Southwest and have an hour-long conversation with Ben Stiller and he doesn't have to talk about all the

other problems that are circling Apple. Is that something we see across Hollywood, this idea that it's worth the cost to be able to sit next to Ben Stiller for an hour? Is this sort of a long playbook run by companies in Hollywood? People in Hollywood don't care. They just want them to keep doing it.

The biggest nightmare would be if Apple suddenly decided one day to get out and this is not worth it to them. So people in town are like terrified that Eddie Q's going to wake up one morning and be like, wait, why do I have that meeting in L.A. on my schedule? Like, let's just not do that anymore.

Like, that is the fear because then it would suck a few billion dollars out of the professionally produced content industry. and Apple's a big buyer of that kind of content. And does the average Apple customer think more highly about Apple because they have a John Ham show or they produce the studio? Like, I don't know the answer to that. I mean, that's a Harvard Business School study waiting to happen.

It probably doesn't hurt. And it's a rounding error for them to be in this business. and it does let Tim Cook go to the Oscars and talk about it on the earnings call and tweet about how much he loves Ted Lassow. So is that worth it for them? Maybe. Yeah, the people will pay a lot of money

to have famous friends is a lesson I have learned over and over in covering this business. Especially when you already have a lot of money. Right. Right. Yeah, you already have the money. Get the famous friends.

Yeah, exactly. Like when you got everything in the world, what don't you have? Exclusivity. And famous friends are exclusive. and to be able to say that we are producing a Martin Scorsese movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, not everyone can say that. Yeah.

So you've kind of run at the big picture question I wanted to ask you, which is basically why do these big tech companies want into Hollywood in the first place? And I think the way I think about it, like it's a risky business at best and a terrible business at worst, these companies don't necessarily seem to have any particular, aptitude for it. And yet, it seems like every tech company that hits a certain kind of status is like, okay, our next big project is we're going to go just headlong into the streaming wars in some way. Well, I think it's specific to the companies. If you look at what Amazon is doing, for instance, I actually do think that it makes sense for Amazon to get into this business because look at what

Amazon is. It is a massive retailer. And television is a massive retail product. If they can be the next generation gatekeeper of all television. That is a good business for them to be in. And by the way, it would also help keep people in the prime ecosystem and sell them more toilet paper. So Amazon, I think, is the poster child for what a tech company can get out of Hollywood if they do it right. And I think the jury is still out on whether they are doing it right or whether they can turn this into a massive business. they think at Amazon, they think that Prime Video is going to be profitable in the next year or two. And if that's the case, then good for them. They spend a lot of money and they are making headway there.

And in some ways, they have a leg up on Apple because what did Apple do this past year? They put Apple TV Plus in the Amazon Prime channels business. They essentially bowed down to Amazon and said, okay, we need you to sell our product. We, Apple, the biggest company in the world, need Amazon. to get people to subscribe to Apple TV Plus, and it's working. They are getting a lot of subscribers through the Amazon channels program, as are all the other services. And that is the end game.

Just like Amazon wants to sell you four different varieties of recliner, they also want to sell you four different varieties of programming. But is it definite? Are we sure that you then need your own massive slate of content and you need to spend and a half billion dollars on MGM in order to do that. Like, I actually get the retail side of that for Amazon in particular. That makes a lot of sense. But do you need your own Hollywood universe in order to be that company?

It's a differentiator, for sure. I mean, there's a lot of these companies out there, like Roku and DirecTV, that don't produce their own shows on that scale. And Amazon believes that if it owns enough of this stuff and can use it as a lure to bring people into the ecosystem, then that is a differentiator. And I think I agree there. I think that the the fact that they have original programming that people do watch, I mean, these shows like Reacher and Cross and, you know, the kind of guy with a gun shows, people are watching that stuff on Amazon. Obviously, now they have Thursday Night Football, which has been a big deal for

them, and it costs nothing but money, which is what they have. And they are in business with the NFL, which is the most premium video product there is. So I do think it's a differentiator and it sets them apart from some of these just platforms. The programming does matter. Maybe not on that scale and maybe they won't do it forever, but I think it does matter. I'm particularly curious. When companies like that come into Hollywood and they're like, we are going to invest in streaming in some meaningful way, we're going to start making content, they all have essentially unlimited amounts of money. What happens in Hollywood when one of those companies shows up?

it just like, oh, thank God another money fountain that they're just going to have to come by our stuff and everybody's psyched about it? Well, yes. I think that's certainly part of it. But then it becomes, what do they actually want? And what are they actually going to do for my creators? And that's the representative community when they're looking at this. And I remember when YouTube started doing professionally produced shows. It wasn't just whether Google had the money to make them. Obviously, everybody knows they do. It was, okay, how is this going to be produced? Are you doing this via the unions?

You know, that's a big thing. Netflix, the first thing they did when they got into original programming was, we are going to play by the rules and we're going to do union contracts with all of the different unions. We're going to pay people differently. They're going to give you more money than your quote up front, but they're not going to pay backends. And that was a big shift for the industry.

And everybody went along with it because they were making more money up front. And when YouTube started doing this, it was, how is this going to be displayed? Is my show going to be a pop-up video next to a cat falling downstairs? Or is this going to be presented in a premium elevated app format where you go to a separate area and then the premium shows play? And I think those are all the questions that people get asked. Still, to this day, people complain about the Amazon interface. And it's hard to find stuff. And it looks like a retail store.

And that's a factor. The Apple interface is super elegant and looks like an Apple product. And people like that. And their shows look like they're expensive. And they are, how are you going to market this? That's the other thing is that Netflix doesn't do very much marketing. They have an algorithm that does most of the marketing for them. So outside of the awards context, you're not going to get much marketing for Netflix.

And Apple and Amazon have said, okay, we will actually market your shows. And I think it depends on who you are as to whether you actually get that. But those are all the things that you look at when the tech companies come to town. And is that kind of the list that any new entrant in this space would have to come up with? Like if you're any studio or distributor, are you having to answer those same questions? Like, is there anything different when it's these tech companies that are trying to do this? The thing that's different, I think, is the question of present. Because in the old format, you kind of knew what a movie was.

You knew what a show was. You knew if you sold it to NBC, it was going to get a certain kind of treatment. You could argue over the marketing and you could argue over the time slot and all that stuff. And in movies, you argue over the release commitment, whether you're getting a wide release, whether you're getting a platform release, the marketing spend associated with it. On these platforms, there's a fear of just being churned up by the algorithm. and not being presented in a way that your art is should be presented. And when I talk to representatives, they really try to think about that.

In some places like Netflix, say, you got to, you know, you got to trust us. This is what we do. We will find the right audience for your show. Others, you could have a little bit more of a conversation. What's the marketing going to be on this? Where am I going to get for a theatrical release for my movie? And, you know, the F1 movie that Apple is releasing this summer, they guaranteed at least a 45-day window in theaters. We'll see how long it ultimately ends up getting beyond that.

But that was a big reason why that F-1 movie went to Apple and not to Netflix or one of the others because they got a guaranteed theatrical release. So those are some of the considerations. There's an interesting disconnect sort of inherent in all that that that you've written about a bunch over the years. And, like, you always use the word content as sort of a shorthand for the difference in how these people talk about it, which I really like. The C word. Yeah, we talk about it all the time, too. It's, right? It's like, what is art and what is content?

Yeah, and that was the big problem in Amazon is the head of the studio referred to a James Bond movie as content. And the producer of the James Bond movie did not like that. Yeah, so that's actually the exact example I was about to ask you about. Like, I think the whole saga with Bond and the Broccoli's and the great quote where, you know, She hates everybody at Amazon. Still not perfect relations everywhere. But I remember years ago, there was this feeling that, like, the tech people don't get us Hollywood people. And the tech people were like, shut up, we have all the money.

And has that gotten better over time? Like, have these groups of people figured each other out a little more? Well, the interesting thing is that slowly but surely these tech companies have been populated by traditional studio people. If you look at the people that are running the content operations at Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, they're all traditional Hollywood people. Bella Bajaria ran the content group at NBC, and now she's the chief content officer in Netflix. Jen Salgey, who just ended up leaving, but she was also an NBC executive before she went to Amazon. And over at Apple, the top content executives ran Sony Pictures Television, and they were big producers.

So, you know, and on the movie side, they pop up. So slowly, but surely, at least in the Hollywood groups. I'm not talking about the people who work in Los Gatos for Netflix, but the Hollywood people are Hollywood people. So there's a level of comfort that the representation and talent community has with those people because they're one of their own. Now, often that will butt up against the instincts of the tech companies. And that's when you see conflicts.

And it comes to a head all the time at Netflix, where they absolutely do not want to put movies in theaters. And obviously the artists all want their movies in theaters. And they lose projects right and left over that. And they want traditional marketing. Netflix doesn't do that because they have the algorithm. And there's an interface where, you know, the creatives would love for the credits of their shows and movies to play after they air.

But the Netflix model is to push, push, push to the next piece of content. So it starts auto playing before you even see it. credits. Like, that's what you have to live with if you're working with those services. But I guess in the words of Don Draper, that's what the money's for. Yeah, I was get a kick out of whenever you're watching something with a post-credit scene, you have to like work really hard to go find it because Netflix is desperate to just get you off the credits and onto something else. And I'm like, no, no, I'd actually like to watch this Netflix. Thank you. It's annoying. I know. And, like, makes me feel 100 years old, but it's like, why? Why are we

already on the next show? And I get it. Like, you know, it used to be that those would count as views. When the auto play started a new episode of a show, all it would take is like 30 seconds or a minute and Netflix would count it as a view. They don't do that anymore. But yeah, it was kind of a fraud. Yeah, agreed. So I feel like there's that kind of Hollywood people inside of these companies who then have to go like sit in conference rooms with the business people and the tech people and the product people. That tension, at least from where I sit, still seems sort of alive and well. And I feel like this is a thing that we hear about and cover all.

all the time. It's like if you're, you know, you're Andy Jassy or the CEO of Amazon and you look around and you're like, okay, times are tough, tariffs are coming, things are complicated, where can we pull back and you look over at this thing where you're like, well, we just spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Citadel, this show that no one watched and was awful. That's a lot easier to cut than a bunch of like AWS engineers. And so I wonder, like, it does seem like there's been a little bit of a cultural shift towards sort of understanding how that world works and what the investments look like

and caring about the art and those people seem to be more powerful inside of those companies than they once were. But I do still feel like if you're an executive at Amazon or Google or Apple or any of these companies, I don't feel like the Hollywood people

are winning yet. That's probably true. The ultimate deciders still are in the headquarters and they're not in the LA operations. And I think that is You know, they are, they operate on the whim of these, these overlords that determine budgets. And there have been a couple, come to Jesus moments, especially at Apple, where they have said, listen, you know, we, we put these movies in theaters and they flop.

People write about, people write the words Apple and the word flop in the same headline settings. Like, that's not what we want. We're Apple. We don't have flops. So, although I guess lately they do. But, yeah, more so recently. So they're like, why are we doing this? So when they had this movie, Wolf's last summer, Clooney and Pitt, and they didn't think it was great, they just said, we're not doing that.

Well, you know, we're going to put it just on the service. And there's a real question as to whether Apple's going to put more movies in theaters. I think F1 this summer is a big test because they don't like the bad headlines. If they're not doing this for money, essentially, they're doing this for brand, halo, and for services, then why endure bad headlines if you don't have to? I feel like streaming hits are like the new cult classics where you say that movie was a huge failure and everybody's like, well, no, everybody saw it later. They really liked it. It's like, sure. Well, that's been true forever. I remember being in meetings with the HBO people in the 2000s where they would talk about how all the press attention is on their original series. But when you look at the bread and butter of who was watching HBO, it was people watching those movies that they didn't see in theaters but had their first run. on premium cable on HBO. And one of the biggest movies for HBO of all time was the flop battleship. Remember that movie?

Oh, yeah, I do. Huge flop in theaters, but it had a lot of stars. They had Rihanna, remember that? It had all these, like, hot stars in it. And, like, there is a train wreck element when you're watching on television that works. The thinking in streaming is that the originals bring people in, and the license content keeps them. Because you come in for the sexy title,

if it's Max, you're coming in for the HBO original series, and then you stay for the Warner Brothers Library of Movies and all the other stuff that's on Max. The knock on Apple is that for reasons beyond me, they have not invested in a library. They could license a ton of movies. They could license kids stuff. They could license shows from other networks.

They don't do that. It's really just a repository for their originals with some other stuff that they put in there. And as a result, the engagement numbers, the time spent on the platform are tiny. Nielsen releases a gauge metric once a month where it tells you the percentage of time for each service on connected TVs. And obviously, YouTube and Netflix are the top draws. But Apple doesn't even rate. Apple's not even on the top 10 list because the engagement numbers are so low because people are coming in for those five shows that they've heard of and that's it. They're not staying

for anything else. So as we look ahead where obviously it's a weird moment in the world and economy right now, but I feel like we've been for years, everybody has been asking like, okay, at what point are some of these companies going to decide to just go all? in on this. Apple's going to buy Disney or Netflix. Somebody's going to go, Amazon's going to go spend all the money in the known universe and just eat the NFL entirely. Like someone is going to fully like 100% this strategy. And yet it hasn't happened yet. Why do you think not? Why haven't we seen the like full push into the middle of the table from one of these companies? I think there's a couple of reasons. First, the antitrust concerns and the Biden administration

was so openly hostile to M&A activity that I think there's a, there was a real sense that any effort on the tech company's part to buy a studio or pull off another MGM or Fox Disney would be met with pretty swift resistance. And now under Trump, we're seeing a different kind of chaos where the market is so volatile that you're afraid to do anything in this kind of environment. So that's one reason. Secondly, like, other than the beads acquisition, we have not seen Apple do anything in the M&A space in this arena. And all these people out there saying, well, oh, it's only a matter of time before they buy Disney. Really? Like, are we sure about that?

Apple wants to be in the churro business and the turkey leg business in, you know, countries around the world and have to deal with a kid getting eaten by an alligator, a Disney World and things like that. Like, that's what they want to be in. I just don't see that. I could see them picking off something like Warner Brothers, which would give them HBO, which is what they wanted to buy a decade ago

and Time Warner wouldn't sell it to them. That's right. I forgot about that. And I think that that makes a little bit more sense. But again, that would come along with all of these dying television networks. And does Apple want to be in the business of managing the decline of television? I mean, they could try to sell that stuff off, but that's a real challenge. there. So there's all of these different M&A scenarios from the tech companies. They,

they raise both regulatory and logistical problems. And I think that's why we haven't seen them so far. Doesn't mean they won't happen. I'm just saying that's why. Last thing, and then I'm going to let you go. F1, you mentioned this earlier. Strikes me is kind of a big moment for Apple TV Plus specifically, but also this whole sort of big tech streaming thing. This is certainly the biggest most expensive swing I can think of from one of these sort of big tech companies trying to make this happen. It's doing the theatrical thing. We've been seeing ads about it for like forever. Brad Pitt was like at F1 race. This is like this feels like a moment to me. Does it feel like a moment to you? Like are you watching this carefully? Certainly for Apple. It's definitely the biggest thing

they've done. And they partnered with Warner Brothers for the release. Apple doesn't release their own movies and theaters. They partner with the traditional studios for that. And I think it's a big moment for them because it's kind of a make or break, I think. If this is a total flop and they put all this effort and money into a movie for theaters that didn't really make a dent, I think they really question what they are doing in the theatrical space. And that has repercussions all the way down the line. Having said that, Eddie Q was at the CinemaCon movie theater convention last week.

And he was doing meetings with the traditional theaters. And he was at least saying, we care. about theaters and we're going to do some movies in theaters. So maybe they're committed to this, but I think if F1 flops, they're going to really question it. I don't think it will. I think the movie looks good enough and I think that there will be

an audience globally for this movie. So it may not be a billion dollar grocer, but I think it will do enough for them to feel like it was a success and that it's worth doing for the right movie in the future. All right, Matt, thank you so much. This is really fun. Appreciate you doing this.

Yeah, no problem. All right, we've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back, take a question from the Virgcast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database.

You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid compliant, Enterprise ready and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers.

MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro

streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track.

Terms and conditions apply. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning,

and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. Let's get to the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge 1-1. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com.

Call us, email us, text us. I don't know if you can text us, but try in text us, actually. And if it doesn't work, let me know because I think that's a thing I can do. I might just have to go and turn it on. Anyway, we try to answer at least one question on the show every week. And I think, by the way, we're going to do like a full hotline episode here in the pretty near future. So if you have questions you want us to answer, get them in. We got a lot of fun stuff coming up.

This week, we have a question about Google. Hello, my name is Nick. I'm a long-time listener of the Virchcast. I have a couple thoughts after your last episode. I wanted to ask about the Google Pixel. It seems like the pixel has gone from being a, what is this phone book to even do in the future, to a, this is what I recommend to my friends and family.

Can you walk us through how that happened? Thanks. I really like this question because one of the reviews that I am, frankly, most proud of in retrospect, but was very skeptical of my own thoughts at the time, where when I was at Wired and the very first pixel came out, I said it was the best phone on the planet, period. Like, not just best Android phone, best phone,

best phone, because what we had been wanting was a phone that ran Android that didn't come with all the limitations of iOS and the iPhone and all of the closed wall gardeness of it, but was simple and easy to use and just worked. And you didn't have to spend all your time like tweaking settings and installing launchers and thinking about it, something that just did all the things your phone was supposed to do. And the very first pixel was very close to that.

It wasn't perfect, but it was very close to that. And I think to me, the most fascinating thing about the pixel line ever since then has been this weird roller coaster of progress that it has made. I think Google has over the years gotten better at design. I think you can quibble with that a little bit, but the sort of cyclopsy thing that happens on the pixels now, I think looks nice. The cameras have consistently been very good.

And yet every time you turn around, there is some weird thing going on with the pixels. This is what I mean by the roller coaster. It's like it's sort of two steps forward and one step back with every one of these hardware iterations. There have been these mysterious hardware issues with a lot of them. My wife actually had one of these with a pixel seven, I believe it was, where her screen just went green, like matrixy green all of a sudden out of nowhere. And I looked it up online and tons of people were like, yeah, this happens. Google says it happens. They'll replace it.

This is the kind of thing that is hard to engender real confidence. And Google has had pretty rough customer support over the years. Its interest in the pixel lineup has kind of waxed and waned. It has set some issues with the tensor processors. There was one of the pixels where the fingerprint reader didn't work very well. Some of the phones have been really sort of big and clunky. Google has just never quite put all the pieces together. But the thing it had going for it all this time is that it was the simple one.

I think Samsung for most of its life in the Android world has been the default Android choice. And with good reason, right, Samsung makes really good phones. It has really good, interesting hardware. It has great cameras. It caught up a long time ago in a lot of those things and consistently does a very good job. But a Samsung phone is sort of by definition a power user thing. And Samsung has still not done enough to pull back the operating system, to make it so that you can just get a phone and have it and use it and it can just be your phone. I don't think most people want to do

work on their phones, right? And so I think for me and for Allison Johnson on our team and for a lot of our reviewers, the thing that we keep landing on is that simplicity is really important, right? And when I say like a pixel 9A is a perfect phone for my parents, I mean that literally, right? Like, I think there are lots of people who want to do stuff on their phone and they like mucking around in settings. And I actually think Samsung deserves enormous credit for how much it lets you do on the phone. Samsung is just like a tinkerer's paradise of an Android device and should get real credit for that.

But not everybody wants that. I think most people don't want that. And I think, frankly, the reason Google started making pixels in the first place is that it understood that most people don't want that. Most people want a phone that they turn on that works. And that is not a thing you get from most Android manufacturers. And so Google set out to say, okay, we think Android is really great. we think everybody is kind of bastardizing Android in the name of being interesting and customizable

and trying new things and adding their own apps on top of our existing apps. And it was just too much. And so Google came in and said, okay, we're going to pair all of that all the way back. And we are going to give you the basic, simple, straightforward, pure version of Android. And I think that was the right idea. And Android, you know, has also had its ups and downs. Android has had some weird ideas about like where apps go. And, you know, how widgets work and all different kinds of settings ideas. But I think at this point, Android has landed in a really stable, really mature, really solid place, and so has the pixel. I say this with real trepidation because, frankly, at any moment, Google could just decide it doesn't care about this stuff anymore.

And it has made grand promises about supporting these things for a long time that it has walked back in the past. Right now, it promises seven years of security updates for its devices. That's a big deal and a big win. Am I confident that Google is going to want to make smartphones in seven years? No. But if Google does want to make smartphones in seven years, I think that's great. And so at the least, I think we've landed on a place where you have two really great Android options. And that's a victory.

You have Samsung, which is like the power user lineup. It lets you do the most. It is the most capable. It is the most phone, like in every imaginable way. And on the other hand, you have the pixel, which is simple and straightforward. It is like the set it and forget it smartphone. And I think that's also very powerful. And I think different phones will work for different people.

I think frankly, I'm an iPhone user. I have been for a while. I'm terrified of leaving I message, just to be completely honest. But that dichotomy, I think, is great. And I think the fact that the Apple lineup doesn't have that, where you get to choose between the one that just sort of works and you don't really have to think about. and it's simple and clean and nice versus the one that will just let me go in and muck around and have some fun. I love that about Android.

I hate that about iOS. But anyway, so that's where I've landed with the pixel. I think the pixel and really sort of solidifying with the nine lineup last year and the 9A this year has landed at a point where like I trust these phones. Right. They're good. They don't have obviously huge glaring flaws. I don't have to tell you about the thing to watch out for. It's just a good phone.

and it is a good phone that I'm not going to have to spend hours teaching you how to use and that you're not going to have to spend hours figuring out how to use. And that's a victory. And we need more of that in the tech industry. I say all this and, you know, give it three days and Google will cancel the next pixel and everything will be set. But until then, I'm going to keep recommending the pixel to a lot of people because I continue to think it might just be the best phone out there.

All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. you, by the way, to everybody who voted for us in the Webby Awards. We're going to know on, oh, today, Tuesday, the 22nd, whether we won or not, we will tell you on Friday. We're either going to, you know, happy celebrate or sadly yell at Brendan Carr, one way or another. That's going to be the Vergecast. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other Android phones you want to sell me, you can always email Vergecast to theverge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge

1-1. Like I said, we're going to do a full hotline episode here in the very near future. So get your questions in as soon as you can. We love hearing from you. And they have set us up on some truly wild reporting adventures. So thank you for that. This podcast is produced by Eric Gomez, Wilpore, Brandon Kiefer. Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday with Brendan Carr, OpenAI, more signal shenanigans in the government, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.