The Vergecast - Into the iPad Confusion Zone

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss a whole bunch of tech news from this week — a new Apple Pencil, the latest Cybertruck confusion, streaming updates, and more. Further reading: Apple Pencil joins the iPad confusion zone Apple announces entry-level Apple Pencil with USB-C charging Elgato’s new $279.99 Prompter is an all-in-one teleprompter and extra monitor Analogue is making a 4K Nintendo 64 OnePlus Open review: right size, wrong price Elon Musk says ‘we dug our own grave with Cybertruck,’ offers new delivery date Elon Musk answers Tesla pricing question with anti work-from-home rant https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/18/23923256/musk-dodges-question-about-accepting-legal-liability-for-tesla-full-self-driving-cars Tesla profits dip as it invests in factory upgrades and AI development https://www.threads.net/@keubikooriginal/post/CyjavWouN0w X will start charging new users in two countries $1 per year ChargePoint is bringing Tesla’s NACS plug to its vast network of EV chargers These space-saving public EV chargers are ridiculously fast and rolling out now FCC kicks off fight to restore net neutrality https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23923617/nokia-announces-14000-job-cuts-amid-5g-downturn Here comes another Netflix price hike Netflix’s first live sports broadcast pairs up F1 drivers with pro golfers  Spotify launches hub for artists’ merch YouTube might make an official way to create AI Drake fakes Get ready to see a lot more product ads in YouTube videos YouTube wants to get you watching more news from ‘authoritative sources’ There’s no way you’ll miss YouTube’s like and subscribe buttons now There's no way you'll miss YouTube's like and subscribe buttons now How Ecobee is becoming the smart home company Nest should have been 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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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar 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. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Confusion Zone. We'll explain what we mean soon.

Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Cranz is here. I'm your friend who is always confused. So not in the zone. No, I live in the zone. Oh, I see. Yeah. David Pierce is here.

I'm never confused about anything. David's out the zone. He's like, I'm not going in there. Not in the zone. We have quite a lot to talk about, we're structuring the show this week is a series of lightning rounds. Which I assure you that I am working on finding a sponsor for.

There's one I have in particular in my brain, starts with an it, and ends in a tell. If you're listening and you're from one of America's most important shipmakers, caller people. I don't do any of that side of the, that's the other side of the house. But they're waiting to catch your money and rebrand this, the Vergecast Thunderbolt foreground sponsored by, you know what I'm saying? saying? Yeah.

Anyway, so there's a lot of news. We've got to get through it all. Yeah. But before we begin, I want to shout out to two listeners who I would like to give t-shirts to. One, I literally just ran into me on a train today. It looked surprised, said they were a big fan, and I forgot to say giving an email address. So just send me an email, tell me what your name was on the train platform, and I'll make

sure you get a T-shirt. I'm not saying their name because I want, that's my verification scheme. So the second one is a little more of a story and is truly one. of the funniest moments that I've ever had hosting this show. Okay. Which is 10 years now. So we're in New York, like lots of people just expect to see people in New York. It's like a normal thing that happens is someone like, hey, the verge.

Yeah. You're a guy. I'm super mad at you about headphone jacks and like we're off to the races. We should say, by the way, that that is what 95% of people say when they meet one of it. They just go, ah, the verge. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a real thing. Look, there are creators who are vastly more popular than we are.

So we're down here. But one of the best aspects of this is because it's a podcast and people have been listening to us for so long. People just come up to us and start talking to us. Like, they know us. Yeah. And often whoever's partner is like, do you know each other? And I'm like, no.

It's always very funny. So I appreciate this. I happy to talk to whoever at any time. But I'm saying in New York, that's normal because people know that we're in New York. Like, you have some baseline expectation that we're at least supposed to be in the city or at an Apple event or whatever it is. I was in Boston this week where Harvard is launching something called the Applied Social Media Lab. And it's big fancy event and big fancy people. And it's like a launcher.

There's panel interviews and da da da da da da. How can we help social media reinforce democracy? Like Neli stuff. You know, the stuff. And so it was there. The stuff. And, you know, at the event, watch the thing. We did a decoder episode with Larry Lassig.

It was all great. But like 8.15 in the morning, I met Walgreens in Cambridge. And a Vergecast fan just looked like utterly perplexed. As I'm walking into the Walgreens, they walked up to me. And very politely, and they had headphones in, and they were listening to the last episode, the Sonos episode. Whoa. And all this person could do was just like point at their phone. they were just like, that's you.

I was like, yeah, it's me. And then they said their name. So thank you for listening. I'm sorry, but I was like not supposed to be in Boston. Like I could see that it was just like unwired. Like, why is this person here? And I get it because why was I there at 8.15 in the morning at Walgreens? This poor person was just going to work.

Send me an email. Say your name. I remember your name. We'll get you a T-shirt. It was just like one of the purely funniest moments. Like it's like honestly. like, why was I there? There's no explanation.

I had not tweeted. I'm in Boston. Like, nothing. Just context-free, see a person that you're listening to. Must have been truly strange. So, send me an email with your name, and I'll send you a T-shirt. Is it because of your tremendous brand loyalty to Dwayne Reed that no one could believe in the New Yorker Bawkins?

CBS. So, yeah, there's two T-shirts I want to send out. If you saw me on the train today, or if you saw me randomly in Boston, which, again, truly random situation. I like that they didn't point at you because that's what I do when I see someone. I just point. It was showing me the activity widget on their iPhone home screen. It just really got me.

I would have done the same thing. Yeah. If I was like watching Red Zone on my phone and Scott Hanson was there, like all I would have done is just like point at my phone. It's you. That's you. You're there and here at the same time. Wait, Nehye, before we move on, I have a really important question. Yeah.

How many gadgets did you bring on the train today? I cannot tell you the response that we have gotten to your thesis that you would like to be the guy who just walks under the train like a murderer with nothing. Nothing. The number of emails and posts, we got so much response to this being like, this is the way. Yeah, this is all anybody wants to do.

Have you made progress? How are we doing? So I, since that episode, I had not been back in the office. So my plan was to sneak into the office reviews closet today and see if we have a galaxy fold with decks. And I was going to give it a shot in the coming week. Okay. Because I'm commuting in the office like two or three times a week.

So I'm going to give it a shot one of these days. Okay. This requires like an enormous amount of upfront work as all assassinations require. Just a lot of planning and preparation. I have to set up a Dex workstation in the office, which is like perhaps not the best use of my time in the office. I'm sure IT can help you. No, no, no, no, that's not a ticket you want to file. Hello.

I would like to put an unvetted third-party operating system on this network. It's fine. Yeah, just can I full access to the land, please? You've never heard of this operating system. It runs on a phone. We don't even own. You know, I've got to do some prep work, which I will attempt to do today. Yeah.

Okay. I don't know why in my head this has to be a folding phone. No, it makes sense. Right. Like a regular phone's not enough. But like many Samsung phones run decks. But not as well. It's for the reading on the train, right?

Like it's like you want the something to like sit down on the seat and, you know, cross your legs into your crossword puzzle. Like that's the, that's the interim stage. That's where you open the phone. Right. But there's no part of, I'm not bringing out my laptop on the train. I'm just using my phone. Yeah. Shut up.

Doesn't matter. I don't have the middle ground between phone usage and laptop usage. It's because you don't have a foldable phone. I don't understand. This is it. The other side of it is at my house, I have to set up an always-on desktop computer or on beeper so I can get my eye messages. Yeah.

So if you just think about the amount of prep work I have to do, so I can just roll up onto the train. Okay. No, but here's the real thing. I have to set up two different, extremely weird computing environments and make them both work. Perfect. So I can execute this plan. If the verge believes in anything, it's in doing so much work so you don't have to

carry anything anywhere. That is what we stand for. I saw those notes and I was like, people get it. Yeah. Yeah. You just want to roll up. It's the dream. But Nilai, the middle ground is you open it up and you accomplish your other dream, which is to write on stories with a red pen as an editor. So you get on the train, you unfold your phone. If Google wants me to switch full time to Android, just make it in the Android Google Docs app. You can circle things, and that shows up as an edit everywhere in Google Docs. Make that exclusive to the Android version of Google Docs. I'll switch tomorrow.

All I want to do is circle things with the red pen and send in to David where it says clunky. That's it. As an editor-in-chief, I've had but one goal, and I've stayed laser-focused on it this entire time. David's less excited about that goal. At the very beginning of the verge, Joanna Stern had a post-it note. on the side of her monitor that just said clunky. So she would, she'd be like, I know what you're going to say. So she would just remember it.

I'm very predictable, man. All right. That's all the preamble. I'm working on my deck situation, David. Okay. We're going to check in next week. This is not a task you are allowed. If you have things on the train next week, we, the verge cast public,

would be very disappointed in you. I hate it. I carried my backpack on the train today. I was like, why don't have all this stuff? This bag exists solely to have my laptop in it. No bag. And I don't need all the stuff that's in it, but once you have a bag, you start filling it with stuff. Some people would say the answer is buy another laptop.

I say that's not thinking about. A good answer is that I could actually ask our office people for a desk. What fun is that? We're in return to work and nobody has this stuff. I don't use software work. I'm not filling out IT tickets. None of this is happening. You know my dream.

It's to never use enterprise software. Yeah. I'm going to get, I would bet that I get closer to consistently heavy. emails printed out and handed to me than using Dex at Work. Yeah. Like long term, what is more likely to be a real thing that happens? It's I get to the point where people hand me printed out emails, then I consistently every day use Dex at Work.

I think if you don't, if you have a bag next week, then yeah, we're just going to start only communicating with you with like printed emails. Be like, can you check this in Slack? No. Email. All right. There's news. There's news.

There's a lot of news. But I'll, I'm going to go check out the deck situation in the closet after this. Okay. Lightning Rounds. Let's start with gadget lightning round? Yeah. David, you got the first one. What's up?

I want to talk about the Apple Pencil. The Confusion Zone. The Confusion Zone. We are entering the confusion zone. Who knows how long we'll be here, but we are here now. Thank you, Rod Sterling. So Apple launched a new pencil. It's a pencil, but it charges with USBC.

That is the only thing about it that I... understand. There is now an Apple pencil that charges with USBC. What Apple also did was make the entire situation of buying an iPad and an Apple pencil vastly more confusing on top of already being more confusing. And the funniest thing that has happened this week is that there are, I would say, a set of people on the internet who spend a lot of time explaining weird decisions Apple makes as if they are not weird decisions. And Apple lost everybody on this one. This was one of those, everybody was like, why on earth are there three pencils? There's now the Apple Pencil first generation, which works for a subset of iPads. There's the Apple Pencil second generation,

which works for a subset of iPads. And there's an Apple Pencil USBC, which works for a different subset of iPads. And there is just no world in which any of this makes any sense anymore. And it has led a lot of people to reconsider whether the iPad makes any sense anymore. And I just, I just need you guys to feel as annoyed about this design. That's the domino meme, right? Where it's like, they released the Apple Pencil with USB it's the first little domino and like the last one is someone is like I'm switching to Windows

I saw this happen this week they're going to go full surface yeah they're like at least the surface pen makes sense and I can just buy the one and it works everywhere so I get why they needed to make an Apple pencil with USBC and I like the little design it's a slidy cap

so just opens maybe the first affordance to charging an accessory that makes sense that Apple has released. Ever. At least in the context of computer, like obviously AirPods. Yeah. You don't have to plug it in. It's not in the bottom. You don't have to take the cap off.

It's not only magnetic to some iPad. You plug a thing into it instead of plugging it into a thing, which is the obviously correct and better way to do everything. Yes. It's a port people recognize and might have charging cables for it. Oh, very good. Yes. Great. So that part's cool. It's missing a bunch of features. There's like a, Apple released a chart with check marks of what all the things do.

And it looks like one of those charts of like when you go to buy health insurance or something. And you're like, I don't know what any of these words mean or whether I want this. And this is definitely going to put me in debt. Like it's like that level of confusing in the chart. Yeah. And there's a bunch of features that if you don't know you need them, you're like, do I need hover? Do I need double tap to switch? Yeah.

It's hard to convey the value of the features in a short like this. Well, and there's also the fact that the USBC Apple Pencil, which is ostensibly the newest Apple Pencil, is missing a bunch of features, including features that exist on the first-generation Apple Pencil. Like pressure sensitivity, which I would argue is a very important feature in like a high-end Silas. This thing is $80.

It does not have pressure sensitivity. The very first pencil Apple ever made, has pressure sensitivity. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah. Well, it's not us. It's not circling things. It's definitely not.

Also, the image they released to promote this new pencil, just go look at it. We had a full Slack conversation about it. It is ridiculous. It is, it's a picture of like a boba tea custard. And it, I don't want to, it's like an illustration of it. Parts of it look like a recipe. Arrows go nowhere. The recipe would not help you.

If you just like look at an illustration of custard and there's just like some words aren't that like bake until 350 you're like, I don't know what I'm baking. And then, yes, there are arrows that go to nowhere. Yeah. And then it says how many there might be as though this is like a catering order. But then it's beautifully illustrated. I like that the highlights were all the exact same width because there's no pressure sensitive.

I didn't notice that. So it can be the same width. Anyway, just go look at it. Whatever, it's marketing materials an ad. We did that post a long time ago. It's like the only thing people can think of. to do with the service pen is circling things. And this is like the ultimate exercise and nonsensical circling of things.

Like this image, no one would ever make it unless they had been assigned to making an image to market a stylist. That is the only reason to exist. And I think that's kind of indicative of this whole exercise of the iPad. They sell a lot of them. They have a lot of different kinds of uses. it is 500 different kinds of appliance to people, but that means it has no narrative. It's just a thing.

And it's like you can sell the 9th-gen one with a lightning port so that kids can watch Disney Plus. But it's cheap. It's like that thing needs to compete with fire tablets that are essentially free. Or you can sell one at the top end that has all the features in the world and is meant to compete with Windows laptops.

Yet there were a bunch of rumors before this announcement that we were going to get a big iPad refresh this week, that there was going to be some much bigger news about tablets. And I think A, the fact that that didn't happen is sort of telling. I mean, the iPad is way overdue. That whole lineup is overdue for like a real serious refresh. It's been, I mean, the ninth generation one has a home button and a lightning port. Like, it's way behind. And you can still buy it.

And it's still, I think $329 is the source. starting price for an iPad is really important to Apple. And I think the new low-end iPad is like $450. And I'm just, I'm betting Apple just cannot figure out how to sell that thing at its margins for $329. But we're getting to the point now where it just doesn't make any sense that lineup anymore. It's like if you're an iPad mini person, it's easy. You just buy an iPad mini that thing kicks ass. I am an iPad mini person, buy an iPad mini. Same. Beyond that, there's an entry-level iPad and another entry-level iPad. There's an iPad Air.

There are the iPad pros. They've just lost the plot here. And I think you're right. It's because Apple is increasingly unclear what this thing is for. Like, I think the MacBook was going to die and the iPad was going to be the computer of the future. And then actually the MacBook got awesome and has had a real resurgence. And now the question is like, we're back to, is there a space between your increasingly

large, increasingly powerful phone and your increasingly long-lasting, increasingly portable laptop. And, you know, what, 13 years ago when the iPad came out, there actually was a lot of gap that your phone didn't cover and your laptop didn't cover. And those two things have both come closer together. And it feels like the space for the iPad is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. Yes. I would remind you that we open the show with a ludicrous but entirely realistic conversation about whether I can just walk onto a train with a folding phone that turns into a desktop PC at this office. Yeah.

And again, ludicrous. But not a thing I can't do. Like, it's just a thing I can do right now. I can buy a phone that opens into a tablet, arrive at work, and turn it into a reasonable facsimile of a desktop computer. Yeah. Because it will be running decks, which RIT will have to let them put onto the next. The iPad does not, like, it's.

It's not cognizant of that reality. Right. In the application ecosystem, in the user interface with stage management, like all that stuff, it still thinks that people don't want laptops. I think that's just getting increasingly untenable for that. No, I think they know it about the laptops because half of those iPads become laptops. You know, you have to spend like $150, $250 for the case, but you can turn most of those iPads into it.

The magic keyboard is $300. I was going to say, I wish it was $150. Look, it's been like four years since I bought one. But that's brutal. But like, they're very aware. And they try to go after that kind of surface pricing. They try to position it as a surface. But then they have the cheap ones and the mini.

And they're like, well, no, no. These are iPad iPads. And these are iPad laptops. What's really interesting, what has changed my mind about the iPad is watching two people in my family use them. Okay. Max, who is five, who watches YouTube kids and plays Minecraft. And there's actually a really real. tight nexus there. She watches

people play Minecraft on YouTube kids and then she plays Minecraft. And that means she is now great at Minecraft because she's five. She doesn't have to make any money. She's terrifying. We feed her. We take her everywhere. We can just pick her up and move her if she's not in the right place. You know, like, all of her mental energy is

focused on Minecraft in a way that is wonderful and I miss it. But like, the thing is perfectly adequate for that task. She is not like, I want a new better iPad. It doesn't even matter to her. The thing is a window to Minecraft. I don't even know how she does it because she's using touchscreen controls to move around Minecraft. It makes me dizzy watching her play this game. I'm like, do you want to control her? She's like, get out of here,

old man. It's weird. She's five. She's mean. No, she's not. And by the way, in a certain way, that is like the dream state of the iPad. Like what an unbelievable success story of a device you just described, right? It's an appliance for Minecraft. Yeah. Yeah. It is doing that job perfectly, and it charges using the same cable as her mother's iPhone, which makes life very convenient for those two, right? Very inconvenient for me at this juncture. It used to charge the same cable as my phone. Now I'm just like a weird old guy in the corner being like, it's a USB-C.

Like I'm just like left out of my family. That's her, right? Appliance for consuming video on like handful of video apps and playing one one game. Then there's my sister who is a full, like iPad as a laptop. person. Love this. So there's a doctor. She goes to work.

Windows is foisted upon her. She comes back and she has no desire to further use traditional desktop operating systems. She just is on her iPad. And she's ultra effective. She's like an iPad person. And I watch her use this thing and it's like literally just a relief from desktop operating metaphors. Yes. I mean, I do that.

I've got one where like if I have to do work on the weekends or something, sometimes I'll go and use my computer. But a lot of times I'll be like, I'm going to pull out my 2018 iPad Pro and use that just to escape, just to not feel like I'm at work. Because Slack will probably still be open because I probably left it open and like some drafts that I owe edits on or there. And I'm like, I don't want to look at that. I just want to go and do things. And so it's really nice. And then I got my other iPad, which is just for in bed reading and looking at YouTube and not going to sleep. Yeah. It's great. You're hitting a point that I've, I've, I've, I'm starting to hit now, which is like, I should have computers per room.

Yeah, that's basically what's happened? Like, I used to, like, have a laptop that I would carry around. I'm like, what if I get a Chromebook for the living room? It's like, it's right over there. Yeah. I don't have anybody to be like, no. So I try to do this with my iPad. I was like, the iPad will just live in the living room.

It's hard. It'll be my TV computer. And an iPad on a magic keyboard is, like, not a good laptop. So if anything at work happens, it's like, I can't do it. I have to go get my laptop. And then the magic keyboard is, like, not great for, lap. Yeah.

Like, if you're on a couch with it, it's like, oh, this is somewhat uncomfortable. I put it a pillow. Yeah. And then I put it on top. That's my little. When I say this is the Domino, by the way, Apple released the USBC Apple Pencil. And here we are. I'm like, I got to get a Chromebook for my living room.

Yeah. I'm telling you, people are like evaluating all the places they would otherwise put an iPad. I mean, like, oh, there's a slightly better product to put in that place. Unless you're using it as an appliance, unless it has a single purpose and you've jammed an iPad. add into that purpose. Like, playing Minecraft, watching videos for the longest time, my oldest iPad,

lived on our old treadmill, and Becky just used it to do Peloton treadmill workouts. Like, it was just a Peloton TV. And then we moved, and she's like, I'm buying a real Peloton. We threw that iPad away. But, like, that's all, it's, the thing is an appliance.

And I think Apple has not, it has not marketed the thing well. It's like, it is an appliance. It's like, here's all the iPads you can buy. And it's assuming the market will just, figure it out, but then you get to the pencil, and you're like, I don't even know what to buy. Right. I mean, I think the thing that Apple has held on to all this time is that it is possible to be all things to all people, because it's just a screen, because it has the

accessories, because it has a gigantic app ecosystem, it can solve everybody's problems because everybody has different problems, but everybody has problems, right? And the iPad can be the solution to all those problems. And if you have a subset of problems, I think that's true. Like, if you want to play a certain kind of game, the iPad is the best thing that exists on earth to play that kind of game. Alex and I talk about reading on the show all the time, and it's like, the iPad is the best reading device. Like, it's not close.

Yep. It just is. It's the best Minecraft device if you want to watch videos about Minecraft and then play Minecraft, right? Like, if you have this one need, it's a really expensive device, but it works. The problem is Apple has made it so vastly complicated to figure out which one is the right one for your needs that you're going to start to, like, literally push people away because I just, I'm looking at these pencils and the answer for me is I'm not going to buy one because, like, what is it happening? I'm going to go buy the $10 knockoff on Amazon that just works with all of them. It's going to be fine. Like, Apple used to be really, really good at this, too, right? Like, Apple would go and kill something just to keep their lineup as clean as possible. And over the years, it's gotten messier and messier. And that's fine. In a lot of ways, it's good. Like, there's a lot of phones you can choose from. They're very affordable. All of that. But with the iPads in particular, it's like, no, you've got made it too messy. It's just too messy. It's just too messy.

Because I don't know, for most things, well, Apple's so big now, they sell some new products. They need something at every price point. Right. And so they just bring things down the price. So that makes a little bit of sense to me. A little. Like the old one's still here if you want it. They particularly do that with the iPhones.

With the iPad, I think they don't, they have to articulate a reason that you're not going to buy the cheapest thing, which I think in this case is a fire tablet. Well, and not only that, I mean, I think we could sit here and I could pretty quickly explain to you the difference between the four models of the iPhone, right? Like there are features that you get on one that you don't get on the other. Other than screen bigger thing more expensive, can you tell me the difference between the Android-level iPad and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro? It has a LiDar sensor, David. I don't know what you're talking about. Everyone is constantly out here doing LiDAR stuff.

It's a future. I will say that in my new office in the new house, Liam, our producer, legitimately has, like, carpet samples for me to, like, D.E. echo this room and treat this room that I have to go look at. And he was like, send me some dimensions. And I did the LiDar room scanning thing with the iPhone. And it was super cool. And then I ended up with like a file that I had no idea how to use it or send it to anyone. You're like, it's here. This lightning around has gone on. It's a confusion zone. Yeah. That's all I'm saying. But it also, my prediction is at some point in the next 12 months,

either this is going to get much worse or Apple is just going to clean it up drastically. And I would bet on that. I think we're going to get a bunch of new iPads that make a lot more sense. very soon. I hope the latter. I'm going to bet on more confusing. Just to be contrary, I have no insight. One of the iPads is going to be a soundbar. Yeah. We got a lot of emails of people who are like, you don't know what you're talking about. They're definitely making a soundbar. No way. I'm going to get printed out emails delivered to me at work before Apple releases. And they're all going to be the soundbar. All right. Here's my lightning round one. I'm actually really excited about this. I would have done the whole show on this product. Ogado has a new

thing called the prompter, which is just a $280 teleprompter. I want it so bad. With a bunch of lens adapters, so you can, like, screw it right under the end of various DSLR lenses. It has other mounts for whatever. It's a display with a mirror and a little bit of software. Like, the tiniest bit of software to be able to let them claim that they've done

something here. But it's a USBC display with a mirror and some clever mounting hardware, so you can put it right on a DSLR. I think this is one of the funnest products ever. Yeah. It's just a teleprompter, but for people. Yeah, and it's like itty-bitty. Because right now, if you wanted to do teleprompter

and you didn't want to go spend money on an actual one, you'd have to get an iPad. And, like, there was a whole setup you could do. So in the pandemic, I was given a giant teleprompter to do review videos. Like, we did a bunch of review videos. I remember we did one. I think it was the first M-1 MacBook airs. Dieter and I, like, reviewed them.

We were home. I think I did a MacWreck Pro. We did a bunch of reviews at home, basically. So the studio sent me a prompter, so I could, like, read the reviews. This is a good time to tell everybody, by the way, that every single thing Neela says on the Vergecast is scripted. And he's reading off a prompter right now. He's just that good. Obama's in the ear right now.

Listen, everybody. So we have one to mount an iPad on a meaningfully good prompter. required like the world's biggest heaviest tripod. It's just like a huge heavy thing that you need to have to get an iPad going. And then you need special software on the iPad. It's all just a mess. This is just a little USBC display that you like plug into your computer. It does have a little bit of software, a little bit of teleprompter, run some text or software.

But the most important thing is because it's just a monitor, you can just slide Windows to it. Yeah. So you can just slide the Google Doc right to it and read that as opposed to like having to send it to some other weird software that I needed to have on an iPad. It's small, so it can be mounted on a variety of things that means the heavy iPad. And importantly, you can just put Zoom Windows because you can just put Windows in. So you can just like make eye contact with people while your video conferencing, which is the secret of my success. Okay, quick, can we talk about this though? Because this has come up a bunch. And I both want

to talk about this now, and I also want people to email us. Vergecast at thevirge.com. Is it good or horrifying when the person you're talking to in a meeting is staring dead into the camera and attempting to make eye contact with you. I believe it is horrifying and bad, and it should be illegal to look at your camera during a Zoom meeting. But I genuinely, like, you, Eli, like went way out of your way and rigged up a whole system where it actually appears like you're looking at the camera as you're talking to somebody who is on your screen.

Yeah. I hate it. I think it's weird to exist in a world where no one's ever looking at. at each other. And particularly in the pandemic, it just really impacted me that no one was ever looking at anything. In one way that I could signal that I was paying attention was by looking at the camera because necessarily if I'm looking at the camera, I'm not just like looking at some web page. Now, with the Elgado Promptor, which is $280, I can definitely look at a web page. It is an interesting thing, though, because I feel like the thing.

that so many people learned during the webcam is like everyone is always just kind of looking six inches below you. It's like I always just think about it as like everyone you're talking to is always staring at your belly button, right? Like that's the angle we've all gotten used to in these video chats. And in the abstract, I agree that's weird and it would be better if we all just like barreled the camera and stared at each other. But also the funny thing is if I'm looking at the camera right now, I'm actually not looking

at you. You're looking up. I'm looking at the camera. And all of the norms of this were weird. there have been all these studies that show when we do Zoom calls. Actually, we spend most of the time looking at ourselves and not the people that we talk to. And that's, like, exhausting and emotionally problematic and really bad because we're not supposed to be looking at ourselves this much in life. But just this prompter is like, if you're somebody who, like, makes videos and streams or whatever, and like you're the creator and they're the audience, I can see why you look into the camera and that makes sense.

But these new norms of, like, virtual conversations are so odd to me. And I just don't know the right answer. but I do think something like this where I can feasibly be looking at you and the camera at the same time is very cool. So, like, I'm into this for that reason, but I still think it's weird. Yeah. I mean, I love it. Well, especially because I can put a fancy camera behind it. Like, they have, have you seen the TikTok ad for the center cam?

I'm bringing Sony imaging webcam back. Oh, no. I'm going to buy you an HTML card. And you're not leaving the office before I have a folding phone and you have an HTML card. You've seen the thing, like, it's like a center can't, I think that's what it's called. Yeah. And it's just like a little itty-bitty camera sensor on a stick. And the idea is that it is not in the way.

And it's just a bad camera. Like this is my problem with it. It's like I wanted to look good because I'm a precious camera. You want to look nice, yeah. So this is like what gets me at this is like, oh, you can put a good camera back there. Yeah. And that, that I think, changes my relationship with, I know, I'm definitely getting one. The other thing that I think is super important about this.

Uh-huh. is we just keep seeing this over and over again. All these companies, the little companies, are making gadgets for creators. Like, there's a real market there. Those people have needs. The needs are not perfectly met by pro hardware or pro cameras. There's a sweet spot there for Twitch streamers and YouTubers and all that. And I think it is fascinating.

I thought we would see a bunch of that stuff for work from home in the pandemic. We've definitely seen some of it, some like, cooler little docs. that market petered out because people were not like you buy it once and it goes away and it's not growing hey I want to grow up to be a streamer or hey I run a small company and making content is the best market I can do in these things I need some help doing it well that is a large and growing market and just the amount of gadgets that are coming out to solve that problem is actually pretty fascinating yeah and I like I'm a gadget nerd so I'm excited about it but I think there's something durable there about the creator platforms that we haven't quite seen yet. Like, YouTubers been around for a long time. The stuff to make YouTube videos well, there's not actually a lot of it. Like, you still kind of get funneled into buying a Sony camera and premiere

if you want to make a YouTube video. Podcasting where the first time you do it, you have to go and you Google, and there's like three websites. They look like absolute garbage, and they give you the actual list of stuff you want to buy. And it's all, like, pro stuff, if you want it to be good. And even that market, there's like a new shore market.

there's like a new shore mic that's a key s to see it and we've started to see in the last couple of years we started to see like oh used to I'd have to go buy a whole rig in order for my my podcasting setup to sound nice and now it's like pretty inexpensive for most people to just sound nice out of the box and I think we're getting rapidly to that place with cameras and and that whole setup and soon in the lights and everything else like everybody's going to look the same I can't wait to put up the gamer lights in the office Liam they're coming they're coming this lightning around just keeps going on Alex was All right. So mine is analog who makes really, really good emulator slash consoles is doing an N64. And I'm personally, am very, very excited because the N64 is the hardest, maybe not the hardest, but probably one of the hardest consoles to emulate. It's super hard to emulate in software because the processor was all custom. And so you have to have a really, really powerful computer to play a lot of N64 games if you're emulating them. This you'll be able to play carts. it's got an FPGA that mimics the original hardware. So it should be a lot faster. It should play carts natively. And then if you do somehow get software on it, it would play the software natively, the emulated games natively.

And I'm just like super, super excited for this thing. Yeah. Like a little too excited. I'm going to have one. The lack of emulation for the N64 has made it like almost a forgotten console. Yeah, because everybody's like, okay, what was it on it? Golden Eye, which like... Important.

The greatest game of all time. Yeah. Like Mario 64. perhaps the most important game of all time. Yeah, I mean, Mario 64, there was obviously the two legends that Zelda's, and those are about it when people talk about it. But if you grew up in that age, it was like, no, you played a lot of games. Like Chris Welch is always like WC at W.

There was also the first Mario Tennis, which was the video game in my life I have been best at. It wasn't the first Mario Tennis. That was for the Virtual Boy. Wow, David. How dare you forget the Virtual Boy? How dare you? How dear? It was the first one.

Let's not call it. The first one people play it, do you mean? Technically, the first one was like the one someone made in their lab in Japan, but I don't consider that one real either. The first one was for the N64. All right. I'm excited about this. There's no pictures of yet. There's like shadowy, render-y things.

It's going to come later. I know we'll probably be talking to that team and hearing more from analog soon. So I'm really, really excited. And it just looks cool. And also closer to a GameCube from Analog. And that's what I really want because they are so expensive on eBay. And I really regret selling mine. Can I tell you my story of GameCube Regret?

Yes. This is so deeply. The face alone says it's going to be a great story. All right. I'll tell you after the break. Liam says I have to tell you after a break. We'll be right back, everybody, with the story of GameCube regret. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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dot com. That's grammarly.com. All right, we're back. What is it? There's a story for my youth about the GameCube. Okay. So there is a bar by my apartment

in college called the Cove. All right. And on Thursday nights, the Cove would have $4 pitchers. So we all went to the Cove quite a bit. Is this a story from like the 1930s? Yeah.

This is like a real thing. In Hyde Park in Chicago, the Cove had $4 pitchers on Thursday. So we were just there. We were there a lot. This is Milwaukee's best, though, right? No, it was Miller Lite. It was like any garbage domestic beer.

Okay. But you can tell that I grew up again in the 50s. And this is the time that the GameCube was the state of the art console. Yeah. The war had just ended. And yeah, so we're there a lot. We know all the people will come through. And one day, Heineken is at the Cove.

And they're having a Madden tournament. And I'm like, I'm in the Madden tournament. I don't know if you've ever tried to play Madden on the GameCube controller, it makes no sense. Like, everyone was horrible at Madden on the GameCube. Like, I want you to go, pull over in your car, and look at a picture of a GameCube controller, and imagine trying to play Madden on this thing. Best controller ever made.

For playing three games. Soul caliber. Like, in classic Nintendo style, they're like, we made this controller to play one specific Mario game. Yeah. It's a game where Luigi fights ghosts with water. And there's only one. There's essentially one button on the GameCube controller, and all the rest of them were tiny and thousands of miles away from each other.

I love it. And Madden is about quickly deciding what button to press. And everyone's like, I don't know, yellow. It's a disaster. So this is the longest Madden tournament of all time, fueled by $4 pitchers of beer. So on top of it, everyone is destroyed. The long story is, I won the Madden tournament. And I came home with a GameCube with the Heineken logo, Silkscreen.

all over the top, which my friends and I all called the Heinecube. And if I only had held on to this thing, Max would be going to college tomorrow. Yeah. I'd like, take her now, Harvard. Yeah. Heinecube, baby. That's my story. I thought that was a sad story.

That's an awesome story. Well, I don't have it anymore. Oh, okay. It's the loss of money. I think I gave it to my friend Robert when he graduated. Robert, if you're listening, I'll send you a T-shirt in exchange for the Heine Cube. Neelai, I have really good news for you. Huh?

You can buy right now six Nintendo Heineken GameCubes for the low, low price of $20,000. No, are you kidding me? No, that's real. I just found this on eBay. Buy. Like a lot of six Heinecubes? Six Heine cubes, three purple, three black. There were only a hundred of them made, according to the eBay listing.

$20,000. I had one. That could have been you. 33 people have this on their watch. list. I'm just saying. I had one of these things for three years. Not anymore. I'm so annoyed with myself. The Verchcast is over, everybody. We're done for the game. I've got to go back in time to play Madden on GameCube. So my daughter can go to college. I have to invent a time machine and tell my, tell my drunk 22-year-old self. You hold on to that GameCube. Don't you give it away?

I'm much worse. I've been playing the new Madden. I have no idea how this game works anymore. describe Madden as knowing what button to push quickly, that is no longer true. It's like team management now, right? No, that's a whole other part of it. There's like a whole Pokemon version of Madden you can play. But now you have to know, you have to know where to look and you have to like ain't. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's all lightning around show. Although this is kind of like, the Tesla round. Because Tesla had earnings. There's a lot of news buried in Tesla earnings. I will quickly start by saying, as long as we're talking about Elon X, the artist formerly

known as Twitter, rolled out a plan where in two countries they're going to start charging people a dollar to sign up on the web to keep away the bots. I don't know about you. If I, for example, had access to a bot farm, I would quickly realize that I could just bankrupt Elon Musk with credit card fees. I don't know this plan's going to work. I don't have access to a bot farm. I wish no ill will to anyone.

I'm just saying it seems like you open the door to a particular kind of problem with this plan. We'll set that aside. Yeah. Tesla earnings, though, are kind of like all over the place. Do you want to start with the cyber truck and do you want to start with the money? Let's start with the cyber truck. All right. Here's the quote.

Elon Musk says, we dug our own grave with the cyber truck because it's so complicated and so hard to make. And ugly. There's that aspect of it. I would say. Just throwing it out there. Just a little feeling I have. They're going to deliver the first few on November 30th at the factory in Texas, the gigafactory in Texas. They have not said how much these will cost or to whom they will be delivered.

Concerning. You get the feeling these first, these are like show deliveries. Like Kimball Musk will take delivery of a cyber truck. It's like one of those things. It's like who is buying them for what price? There's no price release. The only people buying them are obviously in a pre-existing relationship with Tesla, and they will take delivery. Upon delivery, the price will be revealed.

Again, not how most people buy a car. Just put that out there. Although, I will say, if any company can make that a thing, it's Tesla. Yeah, I think that's... The specific hold this company has over a subset of people where they can just like... Oh, and like Ferrari. I guess Ferrari does kind of do that now. Yeah, the ultra high-end hypercar manufacturers.

It's like invitation only, and then you find out afterwards. Yeah. But look at a Ferrari and look at a Cybertruck. Which one of those do you want to have enough money and spend it on it? Like, if you're that rich. I can't wait for that moment to be a TikTok with a picture of a Ferrari and a picture of a cyber truck. Which one do you want? The cyber trucks that we've seen, and we've now seen a lot of pictures of these things in the wild, they look like crap.

I think reasonable people can disagree on whether the cyber truck is a cool looking vehicle or not. It's personally not my thing, but I know it is lots of people's thing. Fine. The ones they're making look like shit. Like they are poorly made. Elon Musk has talked a lot about the machine tolerances and how close everything has to be. They're out there with essentially duct tape holding the pieces together. They're not making this thing well right now.

And I think it's very funny that the people who are going to get the first ones are like the diehards, either the Tesla diehards or the Elon Musk diehards or the cyber truck diehards, and they're essentially going to get cars that look like I built them. And like, that's not good. So let me read you this quote, the rest of the we dug our own grave quote. And I want to see if people can make the connection to the other person who spoke like this. We dug our own grave with the cyber truck, said Musk. The cyber truck is one of those special products that only comes along once in a long while.

in special products that come along once in a long while are just incredibly difficult to bring the market to reach volume and to be prosperous. So the first part of that is Steve Jobs. Yep. I'm very excited to be standing here to you today. Every now and again, you're lucky to make one special product

like the Mac or the iPod or the iPhone. That's how we began the iPhone event, is almost this line exactly. What he did not say at the end of the iPhone event was the iPhone is going to be incredibly difficult to bring to market in a way that is prosperous. We barely know how to make this thing. And the thing is, like, Apple didn't make phones at the time. Tesla is an existing high-volume car company.

The iPhone at the time was barely existent. Like, all the stories we've heard is, like, it barely worked. It's a miracle the demos came off as well as it did. There were, like, two of them on Earth. Nobody knew how to do anything. And still Steve Jobs got up there and was like, it's fine. We got this. Today, Apple revolutionizes the phone.

Like, that's what he's saying. So I get, and you know, you look at the cover of the book, there's a real Steve Jobs thing happening with Musk. Oh, yeah. You can see he's, now he's saying the lines, right? He's doing covers. I'm just saying the cyber truck. The competition is real and exists at volume and scale. And the market for electric pickup trucks right now is not great.

Yeah. Like, you can just go get an F-150. lightning, even in the middle of the UAW strike, because the people who wanted them bought them. I think GM just cut back production of its electric pickup trucks because they're trying to figure out where the demand is. I asked a friend who only owns trucks. Everybody are a family. They're ranchers.

So they all own trucks. Everybody around them only drives trucks. You will, like, don't have small children in their parking lots because all the trucks are so tall. Yeah. And I said, are you excited about the cyber truck? It's coming. And she's like, what is that?

And I was like, ooh, that's, yeah. That's like the core, that should be the core audience. Like, oh, you drive it all over the ranch and then you come back and you plug it in at night. And they're like, who? Yeah. So, it's bad. A lot of people are going to, a lot of people buy Tesla cars. We should get into the rest of the earnings.

Yeah. We can dive into what that exactly means. I'm just saying this product is entering an incredibly saturated market full of very strong opinions. And its competition did not sit still. I think what Musk is talking about. talking about here is like stainless steel manufacturing techniques and like unibody casting and that stuff makes the product special. But then it still has to go be a product. And in particular, Alex knows pickup truck owners. I know pickup truck owners. If you read pickup truck forms, these are some of the

most customized, most highly personalized vehicles that exist. And they spend a ton of money on the the amount of money you can throw at a pickup truck. They're like platforms unto themselves. And if this one isn't durable and it doesn't work. Yeah. Hey, do you think people in America have opinions about pickup trucks? Like, if you're driving your $100,000 triangle down the road and there's panel gaps, do you think the people who've been doing like screaming matches about Ford versus GM for 100 years are going to have opinions about this?

It's going to be amazing. Anyway, November 30th, the first deliveries, but I don't think a regular person, let alone a car reviewer, is going to get their hands on this thing until next year. Yeah, I think that's right. Maybe late next year. So that's the cyber truck. There was no discussion of the wiper. I know everyone wants to know. There's only one thing I care about.

People have seen them. They've taken pictures of the truck. I'm saying if you encounter one of these trucks, don't take pictures of the side. We know what shape that is. take pictures of the wiper, man. Get up in it. I want macro shots of the wiper. Take the wiper off the cyber truck and bring it to Nelai.

I've heard a theory about how that wiper is constructed, and none of the images I've seen so far are confirm or deny this thing. Is it going to like whip? I can't. I don't want to, it's an unsourced. I don't even want to put the energy into the world. Okay. I need some photographs of this thing.

Up close and personal to confirm or deny the theory that I've heard. I'm not telling you what it is. Okay. Other little Tesla earnings news, the actual money at Tesla is looking pretty weird. Yeah, it's good and bad all at the same time. I think the numbers they reported, I just wrote it down. It was $23.4 billion in revenue,

which was up from the same time last year. They're making money, they're selling cars. Earnings way down. They made a little less than $2 billion in profit. down from $3.3 billion on about the same amount of revenue last year. So Tesla has a bunch of reasons for this, right? They're like they are making big upgrades in the factories,

so production goes down a little bit, which means you're going to make less money. Also, something AI and supercomputers that I don't, like, I don't know. Elon Musk just like says robots a lot, and people are like, oh, that makes sense for your earnings, and I don't care about that. The biggest thing is they keep cutting the price. These used to be expensive cars, and they're really not expensive cars anymore in a lot of places.

And I think what is happening is that Tesla is selling more cars because it's making them much, much cheaper to get in a time when that is not a lot of company strategy at the moment, which has been sort of fascinating. And Tesla for a long time had, like, crazy profit margins. Like cars, Nelai, you probably understand this much better than I do, but my impression is cars are not a high margin industry. And for Tesla, they have been, and that is starting to go away in a big way. It was like 20% margin in some of the earlier years. And now it's like not that. Most big car companies make all of their money on financing. And so they have just sort of brought the margin of the cars themselves down because they assume that you're going to lease the car and they'll make all the money on the lease.

And then you'll give the car back to them and they'll sell it again in a much higher margin. So a company like BMW basically assumes they're going to sell every three series twice. And that's just like baked into the model. And that's why BMW in particular is like, carplay is here when you lease it. And when you buy a pre-on one, it costs $40. Like they're able to monkey with it because they know the dynamics of how they sell that vehicle. Yeah. Or just not what people expect.

Tesla also had the benefit early on of having consolidated basically all of the car into a single compute stack. Right. So, like, your average GM or Ford vehicle has, like, 5,000 suppliers in it and 5,000 different microcontrollers. And Tesla is like, there's one, right? And it was more expensive, and it was a harder way to architect a car. And now it's, you know, every car company CEO will tell you that's what they're going to

do, too. But they just had less stuff in the car. Yeah. Less engine stuff. Less transmission components. Less exhaust stuff. But also, more importantly, less fewer microcontrollers and computers. and they owned all the code.

So they just had this ability to create all that margin. But now if you look at Tesla's financing rates, sky high, while the big automakers are like back to 0.9% because they just desperately want you to buy a car. And it's like they're fighting a war there where they're just lowering prices.

Elon went on a rant about interest rates because he has, I don't think they have that business that like the financing business, the big car makers do. So like in the middle of this earning, They asked him something really silly, right? Let's see. He answered a question about the Tesla, and he compared it to the RAV-4 for some

reason, which I thought was interesting. So he says, if our car costs the same as a RAV-4, no one would buy a RAV-4, or at least they would be very unlikely to, which is a bold proclamation. But then he said, I think since so many people who buy cars, especially in the U.S., can't afford to wait for tax credits or something, our car. is still much more expensive than a Rav4 when you look at it that way, which is like, I'm not 100% sure what he's talking about. But he's got a lot of thoughts about how people who make a lot of money don't understand what life is like for people who don't make much money.

And I think the case he's trying to make is that it's good that prices are going down, which like, sure, I am pro this. I'm not sure how he ties that back to interest rates. Maybe you can make sense. So he's basically like interest rates are too high. People can't finance these cars, right? And then he's saying our car is more expensive. And so it's even harder to finance them.

And that's what I'm saying. Tesla has not built up that low zero interest rate financing. That's just not where they've made their money. And you can have, like they're valid opinions. So that's a better way to do it. Like BMW selling every car twice because they assume the first purchaser will finance or lease it. You can have a lot of opinions. I think you should.

But it's just true that in the market today, Tesla just like sells. cars. Yeah, I mean, and it doesn't sell them very well. Like, this is a company that is actually pretty bad at the whole finance and just like. Right. On Tesla's website, they're like, here are the three ways you can buy this car. You can finance it. You can lease it or you can buy it in cash.

And like they kind of want you to just buy it in cash. Right. And I think they probably sold a lot of modelists in cash, actually. And, you know, they want to take Bitcoin for the cars. Like they've pioneered a new way and they don't move the prices and there's no negotiation, all that stuff. But what is happening is he's bringing the prices of the cars down, reducing the margin. and his investors on a call are asking him,

are you also reducing the cost of the car to preserve your margin? He's got a quote here that says, it's like Game of Thrones for pennies. That's how he describes reducing costs at Tesla, which is actually a great quote. And I think what is happening is he's feeling all of this pressure from high interest rates, weird economic environments. He calls credit card interest rates, he's serious.

Yeah. Right. He's got this real populace. streak in him. Yeah. And I think what he's basically saying is the market isn't fair to me at Tesla. Everyone should want to buy my car. Like, why are you pushing a RAV-4?

You know, like, you should want a Model 3. Which is goofy because nobody wants to. I mean, a lot of people obviously do want a Model 3, but it's not a well-made car. Like a RAV-4 is pretty well-made. It's not going to have enormous panel gaps I can fit my whole hand in. It's true. I can't guarantee the same on a Tesla. Right. And then this all transitioned, by the way, into a rant against work from home,

where David, I believe he compared people who work from home to Marie Antoinette, which is pretty good. Yeah. It is very good. Yeah. And he, I think the question was something relatively benign. Like, do you think that more people working from home and thus not commuting and caring a lot about gas mileage in their cars might have an effect on Tesla, which I would argue is like a perfectly fair, question to ask any car company right now. And I think the quote was, yeah, he said, these are some real Marie Antoinette vibes from people who say, why doesn't everyone work from home? What about all the people that have to come to the factory and build the cars? Which is a funny thing to say from Elon Musk, who has been very demanding about people coming

back to work. And all the people who have to go to the restaurant and make your food and deliver your food, it's like, what are you talking about? How detached from reality does the work from home crowd have to be while they take advantage of those who cannot work from home? Interesting, again, sort of populist streak. funny thing to say from the guy who has been selling very expensive electric cars for a really long time and is also the richest man on earth. Yeah. And also, by the way, the CEO of four companies. Thus, by definition, working remotely at three jobs at all times.

And has been very demanding about bringing people back to work. Just saying, always working remote. If you can, there's one person who is definitionally always remote from at least one of his jobs. It seems like he's getting it done. We'll see. So there's just a lot going on with Tesla. I think that company, particularly as some of the Twitter debt comes due, and there's lots of questions about how that will be secured, and whether those bankers, that's all Tesla money.

It's propping that up. So just a lot of pressure on Tesla right now. Yeah. Yeah. And it does seem like the push that they've been making is to make like a thoroughly mainstream, everybody can afford it kind of car. and you can see, I think he said something,

it was like digging a tunnel with a spoon, I think was the way he phrased it. And like I believe him, right? Like it's, I think it's going every dollar to get out of that car from now on in order to make it the price of a like Honda Civic

is going to be a fight. And especially in a time when money is hard to come by and lots of things are really expensive for lots of people, it's going to be interesting to see. Yeah. Which is like why you would think the cyber truck, which is presumably going to be very expensive,

would be like a salve for a lot of that stuff, except they can't figure out how to make it, which seems like a problem. It's going to be like $100,000, right? If it ever comes out, man. Look, all I'm saying is, I've heard a rumor about the cyber truck windshield wiper. Yeah.

If you can just send me some really close photos of it. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Two other lightning round pieces of the puzzle, also important in the context of Tesla in its future. Yes, you can argue about if the car is. are well-made or not, you know, you're not. It's really just, can you justify? Can you make an emotional argument about why it doesn't matter?

Sure you can. Lots of people can. Yeah. The moat for Tesla's for so long is if you are in the market for an EV, they have the single best charging network. And then they opened up the standard NACS. The Biden administration said, do you want this money? You got to open your network.

Tesla chose the money. They could have not chosen the money. I've seen a lot of people say the Biden administration forced Tesla into opening its network, if dangling huge sums of money and saying, I will give you this money if you make this decision is force it. That's fine. You can believe that that's true. But that is the dynamic here.

The Biden administration said, we're going to invest in charging infrastructure. Here's a bunch of money for it. And Tesla said, we'd like some of that money. So they open up their network. Chargepoint is going to do NACS plugs into its network of medium experiences. It's fair to say about it. all of the non-Tesla charging network. This is the one like behind the gas station that you have to charge.

Point and Electrify America are like the two big networks. Yeah. Chargepoint is one where like if you were in a small town and you're like, is there a charger here? There's like one in front of the library. And you know, like it's running. It's running on 120. It's like that's charge point.

Electrify America is like, we've built a thing to launder VW's reputation for Kiesel game. And they're slightly better. Okay. This is, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is broadly true of these two networks. Yeah, no, that's basically right. And no one is very good at making chargers that, like, work over time and aren't broken or wildly complicated whenever you pull into them. Yeah, but charge point's going to do it.

And they have a picture. The funniest thing about this is EVSE charging plugs are the least exciting thing to take a picture of. But they have to put photos in their press releases. So it's just like a guy holding a plug. I don't know how to describe this. They're like, here's the photo of us with a Tesla charger. And it's like, here's a guy. The photo is just hand out.

It's just a disembodied hand. He's almost charging the car, but he isn't. You know, it's like great. They're going to do it. There are other new chargers. A company called Gravity has new much smaller chargers designed for urban environments. So, really fast, actually, faster than any car in America to take right now. So you see there's a lot of action on the charging front because.

of NACS. Yeah. BMW just said they're going to do, like a bunch of other car companies are going to start doing this by 2025. So you see, okay, this thing will be the standard, and we're going to eventually stop talking about the supercharger network as a mode. We're going to start talking about charging cars. And I think that's going to change the dynamic of Tesla's yet again.

Yeah, I don't think Tesla's long for this world, like 15 years. You're crazy. I'm sorry. I love you. It's crazy. And I'll end this by saying this. Because I know what you think. You think that Tesla's a bad build quality and people are going to over time.

The batteries are all going to die or explode and people are going to be pissed. That's true, of all cars. People love range rovers. They shouldn't. Like a modern rangerover mostly does not work. It looks pretty. They look amazing. But I like went to buy one or just like look at one because it's like Becky's dream car.

And then like people are jumping out of bushes being like, don't. stay away. My dad was not one of them. He would have said... Yeah, he'd be like, not anymore. We did not buy a range rover. Good. I'm just saying you right now.

But I'm just saying, people love cars. Like, they keep selling range rovers. They love them. That's Tesla's future. They keep selling Ford in Chevy pickup trucks. Tesla has fans like that way longer than 15 years. Yeah. All right, we got to take a break.

More lightning round to come. But this time, they're actually going to be bolts of lightning, not extended deliberations. We'll grab it. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing

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All right, we're back. It has been a very philosophical sort of lightning round trail. Let's go back to my feelings on Tesla's longevity. What is a car? All right, I've got a few telecom lightning around ones.

A few? Just a couple. I'm going to try to bundle them together. So today, McKenna Kelly is in Washington, D.C., as we speak, watching the SEC vote to restore net neutrality, which is not done. But Biden finally fully staffed his FCC, by the pure failure on Joe Biden's part,

to just not have a functioning FCC for most of his administration thus far. But he finally pulled it off. He's got all the people. They're going to go do it. A lot of people are going to tell you it didn't matter. We haven't had it this long. The telecom companies didn't do bad things. No one's straddled their data.

They're lying to you. They're lying to you for two reasons. One, there's a bunch of state net neutrality laws in the books in New York and California, all these other big populist places. And two, the telecom companies have done a bunch of dumb things and blown a lot of money and attempted to do bad things. They were just such horrible ideas they blew up in their faces and resulted in massive layoffs across the industries that they covered. For example, a company called AT&T, I don't know if you... Never heard of them. They're just a little thing.

You know, a funny thing about AT&T, I don't know if people know this, you can actually split it up into hundreds of little companies, and it will slowly reform over time. You know, they'll just blob back together. There is again. And one of those companies will be HBO for 10 minutes. Yeah, it's amazing. Anyhow. It's like mercury.

Lightning round. Anyhow, AT&T bought Time Warner in order to zero-rate data on its network and make you watch a gray scale justice league. Because my data cap was the reason I was worried about streaming services. That tracks. It's a real thing. Anyhow, so Netanitrality going back in the books, if you are the sort of person who's generally worried about censorship on the internet, I would say that free speech online, a set of keywords that usually implies people of slightly different politics than mine. But if you are worried about censorship on the internet, you should be worried about it at the pipe layer, most of all, because it is the least transparent, the least accountable, the least competitive part of the internet stack.

You should say, okay, we should definitely not have any control over data here. I firmly believe this, that that is an inappropriate place for any kind of censorship or throttling or business model interference with information. So that's what we're doing again. McKenna is there. We're going to have a weird fight about it. Brendan Carr, classic bad faith FCC Huckster is like given PowerPoint presentations about why everything's great within our access in America. We're going to cover it again.

Does it have like a little sponsored by AT&T at the bottom of the deck? It's just it's a death star. Similarly, you might have noticed that I've paid a lot of attention to the end of the 5G era, as I've taken to calling it. Yeah. I was like, Nilai is looking towards 7G. What are you talking about? Yeah. Whenever I get one of the PR emails about talking about 6G innovations, I'm like, you dummies.

I've been on 9G this whole time. Turn that frown upside down. Nokia is cutting 14,000 jobs. By the way, do you know Nokia still has 86,000 employees? They became an infrastructure provider. And there was a thought that Huawei would take over the world of infrastructure, and then we basically banned Huawei. The Europeans basically banned Huawei from providing cellular infrastructure.

So companies like Siemens and Nokia all invested heavily into 5G equipment. That's the stuff that's running right now. Nokia has now cut 14,000 jobs. The reason the operators have found it challenging to monetize their 5G investments. That's a quote. That's a quote. That's a quote from the CEO of Nokia. This is why we're cutting 14,000 jobs.

The operators invested so heavily into 5G with no plan to make money. And now they're cutting back on their further investment because there's no money here. So we Nokia are cutting $14,000 drops. Here's where you could put a bunch of 5G towers, rural America. But the backhaul. Sure. But I'm just saying like what are the promises of these networks is that you will bring broadband to more people more effectively that is not done. We have lots of listeners, readers in rural America.

Alex and I both care about this quite a bit. McKenna cares about it quite a bit. we pay a lot of attention to it. The broadband deployments. I don't care, just apparently. I don't care at all about rural broadband. I'm not interested. You're a city slicker, Pierce.

City slicker. Urban cowboy, David Pierce. All right. Well, John Travolta. What floor of a New York skyscraper are you guys on right now? Anyhow, I'm saying is it didn't happen. They did the thing that they always do. Yeah.

They blew a bunch of money. They made a bunch of promises. They served urban areas and covered the highways of America. And nowhere else. I would argue Internet's actually gotten worse in rural America. Interesting. Like, especially phones. Used to, I could drive from one town to another.

My mom's, to visit my mom, have phone the whole way. And now every time I go down this little hill, I say, I'll call you back at the end of this hill. Every time, it's very consistent. That's true. If you stand on a street corner here in New York City under a street light. Yeah. You can get like 10 gigs down. I just tell my mom,

be like, go to New York, stand under. Get to that street corner. Look, all I'm saying is the amount of nationalist rhetoric that we heard about 5G, we have to win the race. Otherwise, China will win the race. And then they'll be doing the robot surgery. And you'll be, I don't know, working with a shovel for the rest of your life. Do you remember this?

I remember it very clearly. It was last week. And I'm still on the hunt for a 5G application. that require 5G. AT&T released a helmet. They did Gallaudet University. I think that's how you pronounced it. They made a helmet for football players who are deaf and has displays in the visors.

They can call plays. Very cool. Where is the football played in rural America? That's true. I'm just like looking at this thing. I'm like, this is not, you don't need 5G for this helmet. You just need Wi-Fi. Good Wi-Fi.

I would have gotten you there, right? This is kind of the level. that we're at with this technology. To this day, we're pretending that 5G is enabling applications. Well, and it's part of the reason stuff like the Nokia News is so disappointing is that we were promised

that the reason 5G was going to win was because it was so deployable. You don't have to dig trenches in the same way. You can actually get this thing to people more easily and they can use it using devices and infrastructure

they already have. Sounded good, and now to see everyone pulling back because they can't figure out had to like immediately monetize this small speed increase that people like the three of us got from 5G means the people were talking about who actually could have benefited from 5G being rolled out in their towns where digging trenches is hard work not going to happen that sucks yeah yeah i just kidding they're the pivot to 6g is coming so hard just what will

the surgery be they're like they peeled a carrot it's going to be amazing all right crayons what's yours Okay, so, wah-wah Netflix raised prices again. Which we knew was coming. Yeah, we knew, we knew, it's happening. It's only for two of the plans this time. One is the basic plan. It's going to be $11.99. The other is the premium plan, which gets you $4K and everything.

That's going to be $22.99. Oh, that's right on the... See, I'm upset, but at the same time, I thought I was paying that already for that. So I'm like, this sucks, but... All right, disclosures. I have an AT&T account. I have for some time. I'm a Netflix producer.

We made Netflix show. It's called The Future I can watch on Netflix for any number of prices, apparently, including with ads. There is a little silver lining. We've done a little Tolcom dunking, and I've talked about neutrality. Comcast through its subsidiary NBC Universal is in the Western Box Media. I think that's it for now. We'll see what else we have to go into.

Yeah. Comcast provides my internet, and it's very slow most of the time. There you go. We've gotten some notes that you're not taking them seriously. Those are serious disclosures. Those are all real conflicts that you can evaluate.

We want you to know. The only kind of like bright side of this is the basic plan. No, the ad-supported plan, the $699 plan. Used to you, you couldn't get offline downloads. So if you were going to be on a plane,

sucks to be you. Now you. Do you get the ads of the offline downloads? I don't know. The idea of paying money to download someone else's ads is a lot. That seems fine to me.

That's like, that doesn't bother me at all. And they'll get good at dynamic ads the way that podcasts work. There's a good chance if you're listening to this show you've heard dynamically placed ads based on what you downloaded.

If there's one thing that I've heard from our listeners is that our dynamic ads work great. Yeah, it's perfect. Nothing ever goes wrong with dynamic ad placement. But no, what's truly wild to me about this is so the thing you get

for the premium price, which is $23 now, is you get 4K streaming, and I believe you get four at a time. So, like, you can, up to four people can be watching, which isn't really true because of the way that the password sharing stuff works. So, like, I used to have the four screens account because it was feasible that four different people might be using our account at the same time. That's probably not realistic for most people anymore. So I think you're already probably overpaying.

But that's also the only way to get 4K. So if that's a thing you care about, Netflix just knows it can charge you whatever you want. But you can now get the ad-supported version on six screens. for less than the cost of the premium. Like, it's just so transparent that Netflix will charge you whatever it has to in order to get you to switch to ads. Like, that's just what it is going to be. They are going to price gouge you until you switch to ads.

Yep. And the upper limit of that, God only knows. Like, premium might cost $50 in a year because if there will be, it's like the people who still pay for AOL on discs. There will be some of those people, and Netflix will gouge them for every penny their worth. So I understand the dynamics of this pretty, easily, right? We have a lot of people who ask us why you can't just pay us to turn off hats.

And the answer is, if you just look at the revenue drop that would cause, the price I would have to make you pay more than you think too high, especially in a market where, like, the basic thing that we provide, which is tech news, is readily available for free all the time. The kids on TikTok just reading verge articles is a thing that I can't price out of the market, right? I think Netflix is discovering the same thing. But the bigger issue is, for me, as a big media nerd, is 4K. The only way I can get 4K is to be price-couched. Right, because they know that there's like perfect price elasticity there.

If you want 4K, if you're us, there's a zero percent chance I'm paying anyone anything for less than 4K. Yeah, the only reason I do it is for 4K. I don't have four TVs running Netflix at my house all the time. I should. Get those data caps. Just hit them. Use that Fios. And I guarantee you Netflix is going to spend the next three years testing that theory of you.

Like the question is, will you cancel before you switch to HD? That's the thing Netflix is trying to figure out. Yes, I will cancel before I switch to HD. I don't believe you. And I don't think Netflix does either. But we're going to test that theory. They don't know what I know about websites on the internet. that sucks to be.

We're just going to start writing headlines that are like, the 4K on HBO Max is free. Yeah. Like just shaming them into competing. That's our function in journalism. It's true. It's true. David, take your Spotify victory lap.

Mine's very quick, and it's just because I'm very proud of myself. I said on this show, not terribly long ago, that Spotify should stop mucking around with trying to be the TikTok for audio or whatever that means, and just try to win it music, because for all of the stuff going on in the world and all of the audio things out there, we actually don't have a really great music app at this moment in time.

There are a lot of Apple music nerds who are going to email me and tell me why I'm wrong, but you're wrong. Apple music is not a good product either. They're all bad. And Spotify appears to be slowly taking my advice. It has sold merch through Spotify for a long time, if that's a thing you want to do.

There are tools for that. But it has now rolling out a dedicated, hub for artist merch on Spotify. This is a thing you're going to start to see a lot of. You're going to see merch. You're going to see ticket sales. You're going to see all kinds of ancillary. So you like this music.

Here's how we can make money from you stuff coming to Spotify. But I just, Andrew Marino, our producer, went back and found the TikTok that we published of me saying this. And I was exactly right. And I'm very proud of myself. And also, good job, Spotify. Stop trying to pretend that all the other stuff you're doing is going to work. exclusive podcasts were a stupid business.

You wasted a lot of money. And merch is actually going to work. Tech companies are really bad at being media companies. The only tech company has ever been good at being a media company? Netflix. You don't think they're a good media? I think there are a lot of people who argue Netflix was never really a tech company, that Netflix was always a media company masquerading as a tech company.

It was never a tech company. And got valued like a tech company. I would agree. But it's also, it's a bad media company. It is not a very well-run media company because it can't put out bank. fingers. It puts out like maybe one year. Yeah, but you're paying $23 a month for that, Alex. I know. It's because I'm watching Ugly Betty right now and I don't have it on DVD. All right. Well, email us, tell us, tell us if you will quit.

Tell us your price. Before you drop 4K. I'm actually really curious where the audience is on this. This is a self-selecting group. I think I already know the answer. But I would like a little data from the virtual house audience. will you quit Netflix before you downgrade from the 4K plan? And tell me why. Because I'm sort of desperate to know. I think I'm gone before I lose 4K. I don't believe that for one second.

Yeah. I'm married to someone who watches a lot of comedy on Netflix, who probably doesn't care. Keecock. This is going to be a whole conversation my house. Frazier's on Paragon. We're watching like ads supported SD comedy specials in our house before I dropped this thing. All right, that's it. We're way over.

William's spitting mad. He's not. actually. He's smiling. He loves it. Everyone write Liam a nice note. A nice note. We'll see it later. Lots of great stuff on the site this week. There's a bunch of YouTube news actually, like incremental YouTube changes

are really interesting, including an AI feature where when people say like and subscribe, the bell starts shaking. This is hilarious. Like a perfect creator economy moment. Jen Toey has a great piece on EcoB, and it's like ever expanding ambitions in the home. She compares

it to Nest. The headline is it's becoming the company, Nest wanted to be. If you know anything about me and the verge, you know that we started, our first big feature was on Nest. Like, I wrote it with Tony Fidel, and I remember him telling me his ambitions for the company. It obviously failed in spectacular fashion because of Google. So I loved this piece about EcoB and how they're building up their ecosystem. Very cool.

All kinds of other great stuff on the site. And then we would be remiss to not note that there's a war happening in Israel and Gaza. We have a lot of coverage what the information. space of that war on our site. There's a lot going on with misinformation, disinformation. I just need to take a break from it during the Vergecast. Many of our listeners have told us the same. But there's a lot of coverage on the site.

We're taking that stuff seriously. Go look at that. Particularly what is going on in Europe with the Digital Services Act and the European governments being able to issue take-down requests of social networks is new. And it's going to have a lot of implications for a lot of things in the future. Okay. That's all on the site.

That's it. That's Verstst. Rock around. 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 Box Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.

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