The Vergecast - iOS 14.5 update features / Apple sales skyrocket / Podcast platforms amp up their product

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Nilay Patel is joined by Verge deputy editor Dan Seifert and news editor Chaim Gartenberg to discuss i0S14.5, Apple's earnings, Epic vs. Apple, chip shortages, and Samsung's new laptops. Senior reporter Ashley Carman joins the show to talk about the wave of action in the podcast industry this past week. Further reading: People who are vaccinated don’t need to wear masks during many outdoor activities, CDC says Social media platforms become triage centers as India struggles with a COVID-19 surge The first problem was vaccine supply. Now, it’s demand. Officials lift pause on Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine iOS 14.5 is out now with new Face ID mask features and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Why Apple’s new privacy feature is such a big deal Apple’s iPhone 12 and Mac sales skyrocket despite ongoing pandemic Here’s who Apple and Epic are calling to testify in next week’s trial Eddy Cue wanted to bring iMessage to Android in 2013 Apple fined $12M by Russian regulator over App Store monopoly abuse Can Apple get you to pay for podcasts?  Spotify launches podcast subscriptions, but you can’t subscribe in-app Spotify’s miniplayer for Facebook launches today Facebook is building its own in-app podcast player Clubhouse is partnering with the NFL for draft week programming SiriusXM acquires Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible and a bigger stake in the podcasting world Spotify is raising prices for lots of its plans Spotify premium subscriber count increases 21 percent to 158 million Spotify is okay with Joe Rogan telling 21-year-olds not to get vaccinated Samsung’s new Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360 are lightweight laptops with OLED screens Samsung announces a cheaper entry-level Galaxy Book with no OLED Samsung’s Galaxy Book Odyssey introduces Nvidia’s new RTX 3050 Ti Elon Musk says Tesla made ‘significant mistakes’ with solar roof project Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Haim Gartenberg and Dan Sefert joined the show. Talk about iOS 14.5. Apple's earnings. Apple versus Epic. What's going on with the chip shortage? Lots to talk about there. Then Ashley Carmen joins talk about the wave of action in the podcast industry. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

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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. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of outrageous earnings. That's right. If you're into money, this is the podcast for you. It's not. It's not at all. I'm Neil E.

I'm your friend. Dieter Bone is out on vacation this week. He just moved house. Congratulations, Dieter. Fancy, fancy new pad. But Dan Seferred is here. Hello. Heim Gartenberg is here.

Hi. And a little later in the show, Ashley Carmen is going to join me. We're going to talk about all of the action in the podcast world. That's coming up later. Heim and Dan and I need to talk about all of the tech news, Apple earnings,

all the tech company earnings, actually. Apple antitrust lawsuits, Samsung event, all kinds of tech stuff going on. But as always, I want to start where we always start with COVID. Still the biggest story in the world. vaccines off and running. I will tell you it's recording this on April 30th, which actually the day it's coming out. So if we're a little late, I apologize.

But seven weeks ago, Joe Biden promised that there would be a vaccine finder website by May 1st. That is tomorrow. So we're keeping track of that. We're going to hold on to that promise. But vaccines are widely available now to anybody over 16 in the United States. Please go get vaccinated. We are now also learning about the boundaries and limits of what you can do if you are vaccinated. So the CDC updated its rules.

If you are vaccinated and you're outside CDC says basically you don't have to wear a mask. There's some boundaries there still, but that's starting to get back to normal. I was on a plane yesterday. Like, starting to get back to normal. That's pretty good. The vaccine logistics issue has switched from being, do we have enough? Can we get enough? Can we get it to our people to demand?

You're going to hear Ashley and I talk a little bit later about the Rogan podcast and that controversy around vaccine hesitancy. They're trying to get the vaccine and more people. The people have to want to take it. which lets us get fully back to normal. So that is the story you have on the site. The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, the single-shot vaccine, unpaused. There was that period of study where they paused giving the shot. It's unpaused.

We have coverage of that on the site. And then just in general, vaccination stuff has become a cultural movement across all the platforms. So it's sporting events. Uber is pushing it. Google is pushing it. Like you just see that has become the focus as opposed to before, which, just testing and tracing. And on the subject of testing and tracing, oh boy, that Apple Android COVID-19 contact tracing stuff, yeah, there was a bug in Android exposed some of the logs to the

pre-installed apps on the phone. Not great. I would say that system was really hypey when it came out of nowhere. Like the ultimate in, oh, the big tech companies are going to do something about this. And they did. I mean, like they worked together. They got it out as fast as they could. And they were just still too, a little too behind the curve. So hopefully, I say hopefully. I say hopefully. Hopefully. When there's another pandemic, I'll have built all the stuff. But we are now at the point where the story here in America is vaccines. The story elsewhere in the world is not. The story is basic care, oxygen, respirators. That's the story in India. But here in the United States, where we are, for the most part, the story is very much vaccines. We have a ton of coverage of that on the site. If you haven't gotten a shot and you're eligible, I really encourage you to go do it. It's how we get back to normal. All right. iOS 14.5 is that? finally, the single greatest feature of all of the pandemic, which is that you can unlock your phone with your Apple Watch. It only cost you $399 to bypass Face ID. Look, again, I was in an airport yesterday. I was on an airplane. I wore a mask for a total of, what, six hours throughout that

whole process. I've greatly appreciated being able to just type my passcode into my watch and have my phone unlock every time I looked at it. It does work very well. If you happen to have an Apple Watch and you've got an iPhone, and you update both the Apple Watch to, I believe it's watchOS 7.4, is that right? Yeah, 7.4. Yeah, 7.4. You get your phone onto 14.5. Both of them have been out since, I think, Monday.

So you got plenty, it should be easy to update. It works really well. You toggle a thing in the watch settings, and then it's just, it just kind of happens. For me, it actually, like, works a little too well. I've been using it in the beta for a while now because 14.5 was, if you weren't following in beta forever. But I've been using it for a while. And sometimes I'll pick up my phone,

accidentally push the power key, and it'll like kind of catch a side eye from me, and then unlock, even though like I'm just kind of like carrying my phone. So, so it is, it is very effective, maybe to a little too effective. It's not enough to bother me. Well, so the thing that it, because it be,

it buzzes your watch every time. Yes. Every time it locks. Because, I mean, anyone's face with a mask will unlock the phone, right? It just has to see a face with a mask. So long as your watch is on your wrist. Yeah.

So like, you know, if you, I don't know, your partner could be looking at your phone with a mask on, but it sees a face with a mask. You're wearing your watch. It's authenticated or unlock. And so it does a haptic on your watch so that you can immediately lock your phone if you didn't intend it. But that means that in a course of just normal usage, your watch is going insane. Like, I've like checked for phantom notification.

so many times in the course of using this yesterday. It was great. What else is an iOS 14.5 time? There are new emoji, which I'm sure is the thing that you're hoping I would tell you about. It's all I care about. There's also one of the new, one of the new emoji is the new vaccine emoji, which is great. They changed the syringe to not have blood in it. It looks like a vaccine now.

So that's good. But the big dramatic thing other than the watch unlocking, which is great, is Apple's new app tracking transparency privacy feature, which has made a lot of. lot of people very happy if you work for like internet privacy organizations and has made Facebook very upset. Yeah, Facebook is very, very happy about this. So this is, I will just say, I miss Dieter in this moment. Like this is like a web standards versus apps versus Google has a technology idea that is ill-fated and everybody hates moment. It's like the swirl of things that is Dieter. But let me see if I can do it justice. So right now on the iPhone, if you don't have 14.5,

There's a identifier called the IDFA, the identifier for advertisers that can be tracked across apps. And this was Apple's first cut at don't fingerprint devices. Don't look at the Bluetooth status and the screen size and the IP address and whatever else and try to identify a person. We're just going to give you a number. Maybe sometimes we'll rotate that number and a gesture towards privacy. That number is still just widely abused. And Apple's perspective is that advertising,

should have to ask you to track you, which I think is the right perspective. Like if you open an app and it's going to track you, push, you know, it should definitely ask you. But they've gotten rid of how that initial IDFA works, which had some settings elsewhere in the OS, and they've put it front center in a style of box that says basically allow Facebook to track you across other apps. Facebook is allowed to put in some text there that explains why they would like to track you. In my opinion, there's no sentence that can fit in that box that makes a good case for tracking

you. The app developers give, they can put like a splash screen before you get there. So like Apple lets you make your case in as big of a screen as you want. You can grovel and say, please let us track you. You know, it is essential to our business. But Apple isn't really, they haven't changed at all how like IDFA works. They're just saying you have to ask first. If users are okay with it, it works exactly the same as it did before.

You can do all your tracking and all your ad targeting and all that. But it's particularly telling that like the response to, oh, if we have to ask permission with this, we're going to lose like 80% of the people who do this, who we currently track, says a lot about the tracking in general. Yeah. And I would say that on top of you have to ask every time, there is a global setting in iOS where you can just say, never ask me. The answer is always no. And I pushed that button as fast as I could. For me, it was already like turned off. The way that it blocks globally is you turn that toggle off. So if you turn it on, then apps will have the ability to ask you. So I don't know if it was because, like I said, I was using the beta. I've been testing this for a while. Who knows where the toggles were set?

But like when I got the final version of 14.5, it was just off for me. So like- But I bet in 14.4 or whatever, that setting used to be limit ad tracking. That's probably right. Yeah. And it probably carried over in some other way because mine was off and I wasn't using the beta. Yeah. All this is to say, Facebook is very unhappy. this. Other companies are very unhappy about this. All of this is next to what Google is doing

in Chrome, which is the dominant desktop web browser, where they are getting rid of cookies, third party cookies from other domains other than when you're visiting, to limit ad tracking. They have a technology called Flock, Federated Learning of Cohorts, I think, is the acronym there. It's not great. Everybody hates flock, except for Google. All of it, like that whole industry is now in turmoil because Apple is saying we don't need to. attract activity across apps without asking, and Google is saying, we're not going to let you just drop cookies all over Chrome. Facebook, I think, is responding by saying, what if everything was built into Facebook? What if the entire creator economy was inside of Facebook? Which is

interesting. And, you know, later on, Ash is going to come on. We're going to talk about podcasting. Facebook is building a podcast player into Facebook. Like, they're just on that road. But the big change in 14.5 is, well, there's the unlock stuff. But the big technical change that's reverberating across the industry is this ad stuff. And I suspect that's why. it took so long so that everybody could be fully in their feelings and then gets where Facebook is now, which is like, oh, this won't matter. We'll, we'll find, we'll figure it out. Neil, all I really want to know about this is how it's going to impact how many car phone docks you get targeted at through Instagram ads and how many you will be buying in the future

if Facebook can't track your car phone doc searching habits across the OS. Well, no, so this is, this is a good example. This is good news for Facebook. buy all the car chargers in Instagram. Like, I just like in the payment flow. So they know that they've converted inside of Instagram. They got all the day. That's first party data for Facebook. Right. Yeah. First party data, you're allowed to still do, you know, it's open season. And you're allowed to track between apps if you own all the apps. So Facebook is allowed to track your Instagram activity and show you car ads on Facebook. And it's allowed to track your Facebook activity and show

you car ads on Instagram. It just can't then carry that data. and link it to other advertiser profiles from other places and put that all together to get a better targeted picture. It also affects like a shockingly small portion of Facebook's business model. The information reported it's less than 5% of Facebook's $84 billion ad revenue is actually impacted by this change. So it's more of a, you know, spiritual moral win for Facebook, I guess, that they're fighting this. Like, I mean, 5% of $84 billion is probably a lot of money, but probably also not a huge amount of money to Facebook. We need to talk about Epic versus Apple. But I think Facebook is saying, wow, this company has a lot of control over our fate and what we can and cannot do in this platform.

So when you say Facebook isn't allowed to combine its data with other data, I mean, Apple's not like the law. Like, they're not the sheriff. Tim Cook doesn't roll up to your house on a horse and prevent you from combining databases. they just can't do it as easily as they were before. Some of the options to do it are, I don't even think Facebook would do it, right? Like the options are real shady, which is to pull a lot of identifying information off of your phone, off of your laptop, and build a fingerprint that's durable and then combine it with other company's fingerprints. Yeah. So the Apple, the Apple terms prohibit that too.

The thing that gets the big spotlight is that if to stuff is you have to ask permission. That's the one that Apple can control. But if a user opts out, and it's a little bit of an honor system right now, if a user says, don't track me, Apple's rules say that you can't use anything on iOS to build a profile to track them across apps. And they're saying that they will enforce that in the same way that they deal with other violations of the App Store guidelines, which depending on the day and Apple's mood is extremely varied. So this brings us to Apple versus Epic. Epic obviously next Fortnite. that trial is starting next week. I don't think we can overcover that trial.

But Addie and Liz will be covering it every day. We've got a whole war room set up. It has already begun. They've started releasing depositions, exhibits, other testimony that will form the basis of what happens at this trial. Inside of that, right, we've already seen, you know, emails from 2013 between Eddie Q and Craig Federigi debating whether or not to bring iMessage to Android. And that conversation was just dead ahead about locking.

Like it wasn't shaded, right? He's like, we have a great messaging platform. Google has all these other services that people love. We should bring, Eddie Q says this. We have a great messaging platform. We should bring it to Android and become the industry standard. We'll figure out how to monetize it later. We shouldn't just give the bag to Google, which is really funny if you think about Google and messaging.

Like seven years later, we know that that wasn't a real concern. But at the time, Google was thinking about buying WhatsApp, like somewhere between a billion. and $10 billion. And you could see why Eddie Q was like, hey, we've got this thing that people love. Craig Federigi is like, it's good, but it's not like the best. Like, it's only marginally better than what's there. If we put it on Android, people will just, well, they'll buy Android phones. They'll buy, specifically he says they will buy Android phones for their kids.

Like, like he sees it as like, you know, we've got to lock in on the parents already, who are likely iPhone owners in their income bracket or whatever. But their kids, maybe they want to. to buy a smartphone for it. Those Android phones are a lot cheaper. They would be inclined to buy those for a younger kid, but nope, we're going to lock them in with the iMessage with the blue bubbles. So it's a little ruthless there. I mean, they're not bad at business. I keep reminding, I've like, I've reminded, like, members of Congress that, like, these are some of the greatest business people that have ever existed. They are there to sell you an iPhone. They're there to,

like, that's her job. They're extraordinarily good at it. Of course, they're having this conversation. I just think it's funny that, you know, there's no shading of it. Like, that's what they're doing and they know that that's what they're doing. And that sort of platform control extends all the way into Epic, can't put another payment processor into Fortnite without jumping through some elaborate set of hoops and getting itself kicked off the store. This is related to, okay, well, I think Apple should force every app to ask you if you want to be tracked.

That is a good use of platform control, in my opinion, along for the ride. Like riding shotgun in that car is all payments have to go through Apple system or you can't be in the store. And I think we're at a really interesting inflection point of how powerful we want the platforms to be. And the trial is step one. The morning, this morning as we're talking, the EU found in a complaint lodged by Spotify that Apple's absolute rules increase the price of rival music services. There's like a long Apple's going to appeal. There's a long trial to come. This is years of fighting.

but they are waging this war about how much control they have over the iPhone on multiple fronts in multiple countries. This is like the double-edged coin of Apple for like the last decade is Apple's push towards privacy is also pushed towards Apple's walled garden. Like we just had this conversation about air tags like last week. It's the same deal. Like the air tags have this whole privacy network and, you know, they're secure because Apple doesn't open it up to outside things.

but the flip side of that is that Apple's only letting air tags get, you know, access to those radios and air tags work better than, you know, any competitor's thing can make because Apple is Apple. Yeah. And, you know, I'll say Apple's Apple. Like, we also saw emails between people at Epic who are like, yeah, it turns out bringing Fortnite to iOS was a lot easier because metal is better than OpenGEO. Like Apple's argument is like the iPhone's great. We spend a lot of time making it better than its competition for developers. Like, you're. You yourself are admitting that metal is better than OpenGL on Android, this is what you got to pay for it. I don't think Epic agrees with them. But like you kind of see how this fight is going to play out at the trial, which again, starts next week. From what we're seeing from this early discovery, the early depositions and exhibits and so on, the fight really breaks down of Epic saying, look at all this control you have and you're locking people in. So it's harder to switch away.

Like our users aren't picking the iPhone anymore. They're not choosing in a free market. They just, it's so hard to leave that they just stay here. And Apple's saying, wait, hold on, the iPhone's great. You admitted it. Yeah. And we got to pay for that somehow. I think at the heart of this is, as time goes on, Apple is getting more and more direct about saying it's our phone.

Even after you buy it, it's our phone. So the latest example is today there's the EU ruling about Spotify, about music streaming services being more expensive because Spotify is to pay Apple a cut for every subscription. Apple doesn't have to pay itself a cut, right? That's just the way it goes. So the EU issues this ruling. there's, you know, all this, Apple issues a statement, it's on the site. Just pay attention to this.

Like, the tone of this is really interesting. This is Apple. Spotify has become the largest music subscription service in the world, and we're proud of the role we played in that. Spotify does not pay Apple any commission on over 99% of their subscribers, only pays a 15% commission on those remaining subscribers they acquire through the app store.

At the core of this case, as Spotify's demand that they should be able to advertise alternative deals on their iOS app, a practice that no store in the world allows. Once again, they want all the benefits of the app store, but don't think they have to pay anything for that. Now, that is like, they just want people to be able to sign up on the web. Like, that's all they really want.

The idea that the store, that the apps on the phone are an extension of the store is like, it's a big moving of the boundary in a way that usually running software on your computer is not an extension of the platform vendor. It's not an extension of the platform vendor store. Here, Apple sees the whole thing as one integrated whole, which is very Apple. It's very in keeping with their point of view. but here I was just looking in our list Russian regulators find Apple $12 million

for app store abuse this past week too we're seeing governments and companies around the world say hold up you might control a little bit too much of the overall economy here and then you know hi I know you're looking at earnings if you look at earnings this week from all the big tech companies yeah it turns out the big tech

companies control an awful lot of the economy yes they do that that $12 million fine is going to put a dent in Apple's quarter Tim Cook is like, I got it in the car. It's in the back of the Aston. Let me just get it for you. So yeah, a quick rundown.

Basically, every major tech company did earnings this week. Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Here's a quick rundown on how they did. Alphabet had revenues of $55 billion. Microsoft had revenues of $41 billion. Apple had revenue of $89 billion. Amazon had revenue of $108 billion. And Facebook had a mere $26.1 billion.

bringing up the rear. And this is all growth in pandemic. If you look at their, if you look at the calls they have, the statements from the CEOs, they are all saying things like, we thought the pandemic would accelerate change. It did more than that. And now the change is kind of here to stay. Yeah. Like, this is astonishingly good numbers for all these companies, like far and above what

I think most of them were even expecting. And following, like, previous record setting quarters from during the pandemic, just because these digital services and the companies that run them have become such an integral part of life, especially now. Like, Amazon delivers you stuff. You need your phone and computer and Internet services and teams to get online. You know, it's easy to see how they've become so big, but it's also hard to argue that they are massive. Yeah.

And it's also hard to argue. You know, when like Facebook and Apple fight and I look at these numbers, it's like, you're fine. Like, this is fine. But then I look at like today YouTube TV was pulled off of the Roku platform because Roku and Google are in a fight over carriage fees and advertising splits. And it is reported that Google wants Roku to use the AV1 codec, which I feel like is a real VergeCast turn that we could talk about for a long time. Even Google's not using it.

So it's like a pretty insane demand. There's a moment now where whoever makes the hardware platform realizes they have control over the software platform and the software is all. of the money is getting made. Like every button you push is like an economic decision right now. And that control, whoever controls the operating system, the platform, the hardware is trying to extend their control and take a cut out of every button that gets pushed everywhere. That has always sort of been true of Apple on the iPhone. I think you're seeing it play out between Roku and Google right now in a way that just like doesn't benefit any consumer. Like you bought a Roku and you were signed up for YouTube TV.

Life was great until yesterday. And then you got an email being like, yo, this is going away. And it's like, why? Like, if you were in that ecosystem and you buy a new Roku today because you were like happy, you can't like live your life because two companies that have nothing to do with you are fighting and when they're done, your prices will not go down. And I think that's just kind of reflected across this whole, this whole ecosystem. It's reflected in the Epic versus Apple Fight. It's reflected in the Spotify versus Apple Fight. Big companies are all rich. They're all powerful. They're going to fight. But at the end of the day, like, you know what Spotify did this week? they raised prices.

Yeah. Like, who cares? One thing I want to call it from earnings, and I want to get both of your take on it, because this really has surprised me. Apple's Mac sales went up and their margins went up because they make their own chips at the M1 now. So they're not paying Intel. So Apple has a bigger, richer Mac business than ever, which makes sense.

Great computers, pandemic, work from home. I'm excited to review the IMac. All that stuff is happening. All that makes sense. iPhone sales went up huge. And I'm like, I'm at home. I've never felt less compelled to buy a phone in my entire life. Can you put that together for me?

We've actually, you know, we were chatting about this in our Slack this week, trying to find the answer. And like, there's theories. I don't have, like, hard evidence to support this. But, like, one theory I have is there, you know, a lot of people were sitting at home for the past year. They do have some disposable income. They were not taking vacations.

They maybe weren't commuting, weren't going out to launch every day, all this other kind of disposable income stuff. And a quick way to burn a lot of disposable income stuff. disposable income is a shiny new iPhone. And so, like, you know, that's one way that, you know, you can look to as the sales trends. This is like the second huge quarter for the iPhone 12 as well. The last quarter was big. It was enormous for them. We didn't really expect that. We don't really see 5G being a driving factor, especially if, like you pointed out, you're sitting at home on Wi-Fi all the time. But this is now quarter number two. Like, people are really into the iPhone 12 for

whatever reason. Maybe it's a square size. Maybe they got some, they got some, uh, some, uh, Benjamin's burning in their pockets. You know, whatever it is. They love those five Gs. It's like they're, they're really into it. And, you know, it's what's, what was interesting to me about the, uh, Apple earnings report, um, was if you've been paying attention to any of the consumer electronics industry for the past six to 10 months, there's a huge chip crunch and a huge shortage of these components. being available. And that hasn't slowed down Apple's sales, at least yet. M1 Airs and M1 MacBook Pros are pretty much readily available. If you want one, you could just go buy one. iPhone 12s are

readily available. They do use a lot of internal Apple components, but there's a lot of what they're called legacy components that are coming from other suppliers, the display controller, some other wireless bits and bobs in there. Intel still has a Thunderbolt controller in the MacBook Air, et cetera. So, It was interesting that the guidance that Apple gave this week was that they might actually start seeing supply crunches going into the next quarter. Like they are going to hit this point where they're running out of these ancillary parts and they're just really hard to get right now. But so far, it hasn't really hit them. iPhone sales are through the roof.

Mac sales are doing really well. iPad sales are doing really well. People are buying things and they're able to buy them. Today, actually, just before we recorded this, they opened up pre-sales for all the new stuff that was announced last. the week, so the iMacs and the Apple TVs and the iPads. So those are coming real soon. But if you are trying to order one, the ship dates are already starting to slip into June, maybe even a little further by the time we're talking here. So we're going to probably see a crunch. And I think Tim Cook said that they are anticipating more of a supply crunch than a demand crunch. The demand is there.

People want this stuff. But can they actually provide it to them? Yeah. Let me just put this in context. I'm very curious for your thoughts on the chip shortage. But just to put those numbers in context, Apple's able to execute. They have some legacy parts they need. That's, I'm very curious for your read on that. But just to make a comparison, Ford also announced earnings this week, Ford Motor Company, they're going to cut car production by 50% this quarter because they don't have enough chips to make cars. And like the number of chips in a car versus an iPhone is like a weird thing to compare.

But like Apple's like at scale with the iPhone. Like as many as they can make, running as fast, multiple different components on multiple different process sizes. Ford's just like, we're going to cut production by 50%. Like they're a big company too and they're facing it in a really keen way. Hyam, what's your read on that chip shortage stuff? So a couple things. Apple's shortages are probably coming.

They're not immune to everything else that's going on in the tech world. But they are in a certain sense more sheltered from it than smaller companies. We've already seen reports like Foxcon's CEO said last month or two months ago that they were already not going to meet 10% of their orders this year. But they start from the bottom up. So their highest margin, you know, companies that they work with get the priority. Apple deals with, you know, Foxcon are much, much, much bigger than, you know, the small Kickstarter project or your small startup that, you know, is ordering things on orders of magnitude less. So from just like Foxcon's perspective, and from the chip company's perspective, and from the manufacturer's perspectives, it makes sense to prioritize Apple versus smaller companies.

And in the sense of chips, Ford is a smaller company. In terms of both chips and volume and price, the chips Apple's buying are higher powered. They're more lucrative for these companies to make. Unit per unit, you know, a chipmaking company is probably making more off these, you know, hyper-advanced chips that you need for an iPhone versus the comparatively less powerful and less, you know, critical chips that are in these trucks. So I think that's a big part of it, but also the shortages is also just simply its supply has remained largely constant. Demand has gone up and just a host of factors have given just such a speed bump that I don't think

anyone is going to be immune from this, at least for the next coming months. It's extremely possible that we will see another, you know, late iPhone launch like we had at the iPhone 12, which didn't launch until October, November. Yeah, it was late. It was a whole month later than usual just because, and Apple was straight up about it. Like, they had mentioned, Qualcomm had mentioned, like their suppliers mentioned, like the factories were shut down for a month and that derails everything. So it's possible we'll see something like that. What do you make in the argument that things like disc controllers, whatever chips are in cars, are on legacy node sizes? And it's not like the ultra advanced 5 nanometer M1 that's constrained. It's the factories have moved on and there's a bunch of legacy chips at old process sizes. Because I've heard this argument in a few places and I was actually kind of desperate to ask you about it because there's a bunch of parts that you don't need to update to 7 nanometer even or 10, right? Like you just leave it at 90 and it's fine. and it gets really, really cheap.

But then the demand for all the other stuff means that it's harder and harder to make that stuff. Right. So it's, again, it's, and there are economists who I'm sure can talk better. But there's like a finite amount of manufacturing space. Your, your hab is a physical size. And on a cost per chip perspective and a demand perspective at a certain point, it doesn't make sense to maintain that legacy equipment for the older stuff when you can be retooling and focusing on manufacturing for these.

new or more lucrative stuff, the hyper-advanced stuff. That said, the reason companies like Ford still use it is that those manufacturing processes are still around, and they have been around for so long that they're extremely cheap. And if you don't need to have an M-1 powering your truck, although please do that for it, I would really love to see that. You don't need that in your truck, though. So Ford's not paying for it and not jacking up the price of your F-150 to include a full iPad. the headboard. But it's similar to like, you know, with apples. Why does Apple, why was Apple still selling, you know, Apple TVs with the A7 chip in it for $180? Just because it was, it was a mature process and they can crank them out by, by the bucket load. Is there a part of

this where Apple is basically the only one with access to the M1 chips? It is the only source. It's a very huge source or huge buyer of them, of course. But these legacy chips are in everything. You mentioned Ford cars. They are in every single. laptop, every single display, every single so on. So is it like there's just so much demand for chips now, now that we, you know, cars have had computers for a long time, but obviously they are getting much more complex and much more advanced than they used to be. And also so is like literally everything else we touch. So like, is it a demand thing where it's just demand has gone up so much that, you know, the HABs can't keep up on these legacy chips or what? Yeah. So it's, it's part of it is just

demand. The biggest issue that's really in the chipmaking industry is that there's not enough chip making. This was a storm that was always going to come for the industry. There are more companies that want chips than companies. A real few number of companies. You have TSM, you have Samsung. There are a couple Chinese firms. You have Intel, which up until extremely, extremely recently only made chips for itself. And demand has been steadily going up. While the number of companies that make it have been staying relatively the same or even decreasing over the last, you know, decades. And then when you add in delays and shutdowns and, you know, constraints from the coronavirus, there are trade war issues from, you know, Trump's former President Trump's trade war

with China. It is like a perfect storm of spiking demand, not enough supply, and no real way to increase those. But yeah, at the, at a certain point, the solution for these companies is not going to come down to how much stuff can the companies make. It's going to come down to how good is your relationship with these companies to get those parts. When there's when there's only a certain amount of chips to go around, it comes down to who can who can get them. Right. It's funny because the next turn is like years away, right? There's TSMC building a factory in America. Intel is talking about increasing manufacturing capability in America. But that is not happening tomorrow. Decade easily. Like this crunch is right now.

good news is that, you know, these companies, TSM's $25 billion that they're investing, Samsung's investing, Intel's investing $20 billion. Like, these will help, hopefully. Hopefully they will help to the point where they outpace demand. And there's probably an upcoming crunch, not of who can get the chips, but of who can get the stuff to make the chips. Like, there's only, there's a similar supply constraint for processing technology, for the parts and machinery to make these chips.

So that will probably be the next box. But yeah, we're we are still years away from any of those resulting in meaningful change. Yeah. And in the meantime, we're just going to argue about who gets a cut of every button that you press on your phone. It's a perfect storm in the tech industry right now. Not enough phones arguing over the money made on those phones. Everybody's getting richer. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back. Ash and I are going to talk about the podcast world. We'll get back with Ash to Carmen. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start

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Hello. Just a ton of podcast news. That's what, I mean, that's what we talk about. There's like a lot of podcast news every week. You've been overcome with it, overwhelmed by it. But this week in particular, just a lot of action that is like big strategic moves about the future of the industry. So you and I have talked about Clubhouse before.

Clubhouse is partnering with the NFL for like live draft week programming. Like I'm a person who watches the NFL draft and I find it overwhelming. Like I don't know if I need people rambling live, but like that's the clubhouse opportunity, right? It's like live reactions. Yeah. I feel like you would have the good. take on this. Because for me, I mean, the main takeaway from this announcement is like

clubhouses getting serious about programming and not just some randos in their houses talking to each other and more like, oh, the brands, the people you want to hear from are going to be here. And specifically interesting that they came with a sports partnership because Spotify recently acquired Betty Labs, which makes a competitor named Locker Room, which its whole thing, as you could probably guess from its name, is people talking about sports. So to come out the gate being like NFL draft week, it's on Clubhouse and not locker room. It's kind of a move. It's a move. It's a good move. And, you know, you and I've talked about this before.

So much the podcast industry is just kind of like rebooting the radio industry. And obviously, sports talk radio is massive. So it makes sense that that's what Spotify went after first for their live offering, because so much of their strategy looks like radio. And then they would build it out to do other things. Clubhouse is coming from the other direction, which is a bunch of random stuff, and now they're moving towards a more traditional thing. So that's happening. We're obviously paying a lot of attention to that. Speaking of radio, Sirius XM, all the big radio companies are doing acquisitions and consolidation.

So Sirius XM acquired 99% invisible. It feels like they're moving their distribution from satellite to the internet. Like that's just what they're doing. Yeah. I think what we've really seen is sort of these radio companies, Sirius Odyssey, which you to be called Entercom, IHeartMedia, really trying to invest in the podcasting space and use their resources to promote their podcast. Like if you own 100 plus radio stations, sure, why don't you just play your podcasts on them? Like, do it. It's like the best marketing you can do. So we're

seeing that happen. And like this big serious move with 99% invisible was a big deal for the industry because Roman Mars is an independent podcaster who everyone kind of was like, he's making it work. Like he started a company. He's a podcaster. He became big. Like, He's doing the independent thing, only to be bought up by Sirius. And it's kind of like, oh, shit, is this, what does this mean for the future of indie podcasting? Which is interesting in the context of subscriptions, which we will get to. Yeah, I mean, what does this mean for the future of indie podcasting?

I feel like is the question at the end of every podcast story, because the whole industry has been mostly independence for so long. And the big companies are here. And so, yeah, there's a part of it that's like, well, like all media, there will be big corporations and there'll be indies and then like as indie players get older they're going to get tired and they're going to like cash out like it's just like the circle of life in the times he literally said he's just like I'm tired yeah and I want my team to have more resources and it's like okay like fair I mean that show is great I'm confident we have a ton of overlap with first cast listeners

but it is interesting as you said there's the big players and they have the cash and there's how will independence thrive and as we have seen with virtually every kind of media, the best way for independence to thrive is for their audience to pay them directly. That's the substack story. And so now Apple last week launched subscription podcasts and then Spotify launched like a weirder riff on it. Explain that to me. Yeah. So let me just do like a very quick overview of the Apple podcast so that we can compare it.

So the Apple in-app podcast subscriptions is a big deal because it's in-app. So meaning you can view the page of the typical podcast you listen to and literally tap, subscribe. You'll get bonus content possibly. It's really up to the podcasters is what they want to do, and they can set their own subscription tier. The catch with it for the podcasters is they have to pay $20 a year to Apple just to offer it. And then any revenue they get, it goes on a subscriber basis. So it's 30% for the first year of each subscriber and 15% for every year after.

And they have to use Apple's backend to upload content, meaning it's not RSS based, and they won't get the data about their listeners. Okay, so that's Apple. So this week, Spotify had its earnings call. And presumably they knew people would be like, what's up with your guys' subscription situation? So they announced something. Their offering is, yeah, it's totally just, I don't know.

It doesn't really pull off what Apple did. For one, podcasters have to host with Anchor, which is their creation software. It's free hosting. But still, so MPR is an initial partner. They don't use Anchor. for their typical hosting. So what they're going to end up doing

is having to upload their special shows that are ad-free, like Planet Money, into a separate feed through Anchor that will be called Planet Money Plus is an entirely separate show. So if you listen to Planet Money, you won't even see this in your feed. You'll have to find it separately.

Also, all subscriptions aren't done in the app, presumably because Spotify doesn't want to give Apple a cut of any in-app revenue. So you're going to have to navigate to these creators anchor web page, which they're going to presumably just have to paste all over their bios and show notes and shout it out and do anything they can

to get you to go over the hurdle of subscribing, which is the whole reason in-app subscriptions were created in the first place is because that hurdle is immense. And that's why Apple's such a big deal that they're launching the in-app. In the show, we've already talked about Apple versus Epic, and like that whole lawsuit

is about buying stuff in Fortnite. Yeah. And here you've got Apple's product, which it has pluses and minuses. I think a lot of people are going to see it. Like the Apple podcast player is huge. It's influential. It's enormous. Apple's already got your credit card number.

You can see why people want to partner with Apple, even if they don't get email addresses and data and all the other stuff that podcast creators want so they can do events and other things like that. You just push the button. You're off and running. It's easy. Spotify cannot put that button in its app because they would have to pay cut to Apple, which just on its face now seems unfair. Like, that is not a fight between two giants

between Epic and Apple. And that is a fight between podcast creators and Apple and the platforms they want to find their audience on. And it, I mean, it's just funny that this is happening like literally with the shadow of the epic lawsuit. Yeah. Yeah. Have you talked to any creators about, I mean, podcasters are like, we are podcasters, but like the podcast community is, pretty religious about RSS feeds and player independence and interoperability. This is all making it more proprietary, making it harder to discover, locking your audience to a platform. What does that reaction been like? So I haven't talked to as many creators about the Spotify offering, but if you're an anchor

creator who's been offered this chance, there's a wait list right now. They're only doing it with select partners. But presumably that's an easy lift for you. You're already publishing there. No big deal. For the out of the output. situation, it's a little bit trickier because if you're a small indie podcaster, this is becoming kind of a huge workload. Not only do you have to just edit your show, record it, you know, do all the things that go with podcasting and maybe monitor your analytics and whatever else, you now are having to upload to multiple backends and maintain them. And this is kind of the future thing I see coming is that as much as this is designed to help indie podcasters that might help

them bring in more revenue. You end up in a situation where it's like, how is this tenable for, you know, the dream of the independent podcaster going out and doing this on their own? Because if it's not a full-time job yet, it's becoming one easily. Yeah. You can see how the next turn of the story is like the wave of startups that help you manage all your podcast platforms. And like, they're like, even I can already see the web page. One dashboard for all of your metrics and monetization. Like, if you run with this idea, that we get, Ashley and I get points that I'm just telling you right now. This is, it's our idea.

I mean, I want someone else to do it. I don't want to do it. I just want, just cut us a check is what I'm saying. I have heard it's very tricky to upload things to Apple, like even for hosting platforms, because you have to log in with your Apple ID. And this is why, like, Anchor, if you upload their anchor to Apple, it's like on anchor. It's associated with Anchor's Apple ID. So they own your Apple podcast page.

And this is why. This is what I mean by creators being stuck in the middle. Like Anchor is Spotify. you're uploading through Anchor to Apple. Apple and Spotify get into a fight. Something bad happens to Anchor's Apple ID and upload process. Apple turned off Facebook's apps. You think these things are happening,

and they have been happening in an accelerating pace. And it's the independent creator who's just trying to make a simple workflow that gets caught in the middle. And there's just a part of this where one of the big arguments for Apple's in app purchase is, okay, Apple is trusted. they already have your credit card. They will convert at a higher rate because it's very simple. You don't have to reenter your credit card.

I buy all of that. The other argument is, well, most people who are going to pay for podcasts and Spotify are probably already paying for Spotify premium. So Spotify is already another big trusted company that has your credit card. And they should just be able to have the button so independent podcasters can get paid wherever they are. And like, I don't know if Apple and Spotify's politics should be in the middle of that. you know, we just had Amy Klobuchar on Decoder, and like, I asked her, what advice would you give to these companies?

And she was like, lower the rates to all this stuff. And it's like, Apple could just let Spotify have this button. And it would just like bring the heat down. Yeah. But I don't think they will. Well, and Spotify is clearly trying to undercut them because they also are taking no cut for the first two years. Yeah. We'll see. This brings us to like, I mean, now it's just a wave of Spotify news. They are doing partnerships. They're going hard, man. Yep. So what? What's going on with Facebook? This was super interesting. So Casey Newton, friend of the verge, we all know Casey.

He did that chat with Mark Zuckerberg. I think it was a little bit over a week ago now where they talked about Facebook's audio plans. And Casey sort of prompted him like, oh, you want to announce something with Spotify, right? So Mark has been talking about all these podcast plans, how they like love podcasting and they love audio. And it goes, yeah, we're working with Spotify to do an integration for music. And I'm like, listen to us.

I'm like, wait, what? Because I was under the impression this was going to be for both podcasts and music. So Spotify, I talked to them after. They're like, yeah, this is for both podcasts and music. Weird that he just called that music. They announced this week that the mini players launching. I think some people have it in the Android app already on Facebook, which just means you can play Spotify from Facebook.

So if someone shares a podcast or music, you can keep scrolling from your newsfeed and hear it. But then I was like, okay, what's going on? So I reach out to Facebook just to double confirm some things. And sure enough, they've confirmed that they are indeed building their own in-app podcast player, totally except from Spotify, which is some drama. And the reason why this could be a big deal, we don't have any details about how this would work. But my suspicion is Facebook's an advertising company. If they could get podcasters who already have really popular fan pages to upload their podcasts again on another back end and target ads against it and get all that data, that could be huge for Facebook.

Easy way into audio advertising. So that's my suspicion. They have not said anything like that. Just that an in-app player is coming. I know that Facebook executives all love podcasts. Zuckerberg has said this. Other Facebook executives said this. They like being on podcasts because they get room to like actually explain their complicated

decisions versus giving the one quote to us or the times or whatever. It's like, we are very sorry about the bad things we've done. Like, I know the executives are in a podcast because they get the additional space to try and explain what they're doing. I don't know if they're ever very successful, but they get that space. I also think, again, the context of all this stuff is the amount of controversy that, like, Apple is in. So, yep, there's the epic Apple lawsuit. Also, Apple turned on the app tracking transparency button this week with iOS 14.5, which we talked about. That means Facebook can't track you everywhere else.

Like, I didn't even, I didn't even set it to ask me for every app. I just hit the global no. Oh, yeah. How on that. Like, just don't track you. Like, I don't even ask me if I want to be tracked. That means Facebook can't, they can't sign a deal to track you in Spotify as well. And I get that data.

They can't track you across the web. Like, all the stuff that these people do, they can't do. What's the natural response to that? Keep you in that app for as long as they can. So make that app your podcast player, make that app, you know, where you can listen to podcast while you're browsing Facebook. Just like keep you in there. So that first party data that they,

used to target ads. They don't have to ask your permission to share it because you, being the good and responsible consumer you are, have already read the complete Facebook terms of service and privacy policy. And if theoretically hit, I agree with the full knowledge of how your data is being used. I just don't know if, like, the all-in-one Facebook app is what people actually want, right? Or whether Facebook should just build its own podcast player and, like, go at it that way. Well, I don't think people want another app from Facebook. I think starting its own podcast app would be like, just don't go. Like that's just a lot of work. People are

very loyal to their podcast players. A third party podcast player, I feel like it's kind of a hard sell unless you're like a super listener. But do people want to listen to a podcast in Facebook? I don't know. Maybe if you're, they seem to think that because there's so many people connected to fan pages, that they'll be like, oh,

I'm here in the true crime Facebook group. I might as well listen to the true crime podcast in here and have like a listening party or whatever they're going to do. I hear this about podcasts all the time. And they're great because you can do something else. And that's true. Like maybe you can cook or maybe you can do it.

There's no, I personally cannot listen to something and read at the same time. Oh, maybe. Like my brain just doesn't. I got one language processing unit and it's got to be focused at one thing. And like it is single threaded. And I just, that part where you're like listening to Facebook and you're reading comments on something like just as a user experience. I'm like that sounds like too much. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Like I can do something with my hands maybe. even then I like tune out. But we'll see. We'll see. The reason I brought up another podcast player and another music player is Spotify announced it's raising rates this week. It also had earnings. You know, they've got Rogan.

There's a Rogan controversy. There will always be a Rogan controversy we should talk about. But you get to raise rates when you're the Monopoly player, right? Like Netflix raises rates because you basically have to have Netflix if you want to like watch all the things that are coming out. Is Spotify in that position now where it's like raising prices? It's confident enough to do it that it won't churn people off. And it's like spending money on this podcast stuff to keep people in the ecosystem. It's interesting because in the U.S., they only raised prices on the family plan.

But in the UK, they raised it across a variety of plans. But, yeah, I mean, it's, I didn't think that many people were on family plans until we talked about this in the Verge Slack. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, I just got the email from the family plan. People who, like, maybe don't have families. Yeah. So, I mean, have families. But, you know, everyone has a bomb. But what I would say is like, family plan is like a well-known lock-in strategy.

Yeah. Like that's how cell carriers get you. You're on the family plan. It's like, oh, man, I'm kind of mad at AT&T. Now I have to tell my parents to switch to, I guess we're sticking with 18&T. And like, that's this. I was thinking that this week with the Rogan stuff where I was like, what if I did want to cancel Spotify? I am on a family plan.

And I was like, damn it, then I have to have a combo with my dad about like Joe Rogan. and it's just opening up a whole other can of worms, you know, where I'm like, I, I guess I'm stuck. Yeah, I guess I'm stuck. Well, I just think it's, we've always thought about this as Spotify versus Apple Music and that there, you know, there are a few dominant music subscriptions services here. But Spotify is just kind of dominant. Like they've, they own a spot in the culture that Apple Music does not. Even though Apple Music is pop, like I am an Apple Music subscriber. But Spotify owns this place in the culture. and I think with their podcasting efforts, they're trying to own an even bigger spot in the culture with the live audio stuff, right?

They're just trying to make it so that if you're listening to something, you're probably doing it through Spotify. I mean, their earnings are great. Like, they're executing that strategy. Yeah. And I mean, they also, not for nothing, are trying to usurp their radio as well

with their car thing. I mean, we talked about car thing last time but you were on the show. Do you still have that thing going? Oh, hell no. I'm worried about microphones. like, I really just don't want to find my car. And I like the radio. It's my one time that I get to listen to the radio. It's, like, nostalgic for me. Yeah. I mean, we are, we are, we live in the middle

nowhere. So we have serious XM. And I'm like, oh, yeah, these are my bros. These are like radio djs. Like, you were in 1980s MTV, BJ and now you somehow have a serious show. Like, that's a true pipeline that exists. And I'm like, yeah, I do want to listen to Tom Morello's hour of radio. What an odd, what an odd situation to find yourself in. But their earnings, you know, they, we should talk about Rogan. Rogan is driving subscriptions for them, even that you get some world and controversy after controversy. That's their big hit. Do they have other big hits coming? They mentioned that Obama and Bruce Springsteen's show was doing well as well internationally. But that was kind of the two shoutouts, which is like, okay, yeah, Barack Obama and Joe Rogan.

Yeah. Like, yes. Okay. The spread, the total spread of all content in the world. It really is sort of, though, like this deal with the devil with Rogan. because the stories don't stop. I mean, the dude is controversial. They knew that going in. He also happens to be the biggest podcaster in the world. So they were like, this is it.

This is what we need to make it work. And yet again this week, there was a story with Rogan saying some kind of anti-vaxy opinion-y things. Yeah, he said if you're 21 years old, by the way, if you're wondering why Ashley's being hesitant, it's because our science team always tells us not to repeat the claims. But I'm just, it's, I think Verchcast listeners, know, you should get vaccinated, no matter how old you are. Rogan said if he would not advise 21-year-olds to get vaccinated, that is just bad advice. Like, just flatly bad advice.

The shape of the pandemic now is that younger people are actually getting infected at higher rates. So it's just bad advice. He didn't really say why. No, and that's the funny part is it's like, okay, if he kept going with that thought, you know it would have led somewhere that would probably cross Spotify's terms and they would have to take down the episode. But Spotify left up the episode. And then it just got them into a whole new bucket of shit. And Dr. Fauci came out and was like, Joe Rogan is wrong about this. Like now the White House is having to denounce Spotify's biggest podcaster, which is like personally a space I don't want to be it if it was me.

And I think this is one of those tech companies at being media companies, being news providers. we live in a space, like we are a news organization, people criticize us all the line. That's like our business is to write things that other people do not want us to write. Okay, that's fine. And like we have strong ideas and strong opinions about the First Amendment and its limits. And like, quite frankly, people send their lawyers at us when they're very angry at us and we like fight them off. That's a thing we do. But that is our business, right?

And it's like inside of our company, we all know it's our business and that's our team. And like even at big, big companies, you're like news division is kind of isolated because their business is to get into that kind of trouble. Spotify is like a tech company that wants to serve everyone all the time. And then they've got basically just like one guy. Like I don't think anyone's, I don't know what Bruce Springsteen said on that show with Barack Obama, but I'm guessing it was mostly platitudes about America. But like, Rogan's job is to stir up controversy.

He's very good at it. People love him. I'm not discounting anything. But Spotify as a company, it's not organized to have a media division, a news division that gets into that kind of trouble. Apple is a company that makes Apple TV shows. I think Ted Lasso is amazing. I think it's one of the best shows ever made. It is like the nicest show in the world.

It's like so it's very safe for Apple. As all these companies start to do more and more content, they end up in what either looks like the YouTube and Twitter set of controversies, the Facebook set of controversies. What are users doing with your platform? Or they end up with the what are you paying for controversy. And I think Spotify does not want to be in the, what are we paying for controversy? And yet here they are. Yeah, but it's working out for stockholders. Yeah, I mean, he's a good podcaster.

I don't want to discount the fact that, like, he is popular for reasons. No, I know. I'm just saying, like, I guess if you were that I'm weighing out, okay, we can either have the biggest podcaster in the world. We have to pay him possibly $100 million to get him over here. But we could get him. Or do we want to avoid this entire situation and, like, all together? you're like, well, look at Facebook.

They have seemingly caused an insurrection in the United States and a genocide in Myanmar, but people still use them and invest in them. So I guess if I was Spotify, you're like, okay, we'll take it. Yeah, it's worth the controversy. Like, we'll make the comparison to Facebook correctly. Facebook knows the controversy is coming. They've, like, built it into their time. And they, like, after a lot of controversies, they've developed, like, a certain amount of

resilience or response to it. And often it just looks like they don't do anything and we continue to be frustrated that nothing seems to be able to knock Facebook off its course or get them to like meaningfully change how it thinks about the platform. At the same time, they just stay the course. Spotify seems to get really rattled. Yes. And I think part of that is like Instagram is kind of Facebook's like cool cultural thing. And for the most part, Instagram's been pretty like sectioned away. Like you don't really associate Instagram with all the bad. Facebook things. Facebook is just like, yeah, we're copying Clubhouse. It's like, okay, another day. Like, they know what's coming. They leave it at that. Instagram is still trying

to be kind of good, whereas Spotify has this all as one place, and they want it all to be like culturally cool. And I think that's where they run into the like, oh, snap. How do we, how do we make this right in the culturally cool way while still being like potentially a huge platform that like dominates audio? Where do we land? You can't be cool and a monopoly. That is true. It's like, you just can't. So you have to. to pick one thing that I have thought about a lot and we've talked about this before giving everybody in the world the ability to publish text has caused a wide variety of problems at least with text right like it is already in a format that computers understand and can parse not well right you miss

tone you miss context like we all know the problems with moderating text now we're letting everybody in the world just like talking to a microphone live potentially in that moderation challenge is going to get even crazier. Yeah. And I don't think any of these platforms are there for it. I'm not like, if you're a virtualist, you know, I have just deeply angsty thoughts about content moderation, especially at scale. I'm not saying like we should turn it all off. I'm saying I'm not hearing a lot of thinking ahead. No. And, you know, Liz Lapato brought up a good point when we were talking about the Rogan story where it's like, okay, fine, you don't, you want to leave up maybe this Rogan

comment. Well, all the other tech platforms have put up these little labor. like Twitter, Instagram, where even if they just detect that you're talking about COVID, they put a little disclaimer, like, check out the CDC's website. So, yeah, why don't we have that for audio yet? Things like that where it's like, okay, maybe you're not at the place to fully police this type of speech, but maybe there's ways to, like, offer reputable information as well. It just seems like that's sort of that not forward thinking. Yeah.

I mean, the way, again, deeply angsty thoughts about content moderation, I am the sort of person who thinks maybe the answer is like we'll never get it right. And like when you use the words police and speech, like, you know, it's just like the hairs in the back of my head prick up. But if you really think the solution to bad speech is more speech, then the labels are like literally more speech. You're just putting the information next to the other information. I just think Spotify can do that with their, their highly paid famous podcaster. Like, I don't think they can exert that kind of editorial control. And I think they're going to, they're just going to run into it over and over again until they come out with a point of view.

I say that about Rogan. Again, I know why people like Reagan. I think he's very entertaining. My wife listens to Oregon. Huge admissions. She loves comedy podcasts. It's like a real thing. It's great. It like keeps me like in the culture, like you're saying. But I just don't think you can be a big tech company trying to do tech business and be a culture company without those things frequently running into each other. And as all of these companies try to get big into podcasts, they're going to find themselves in that position in a way that they weren't even in with text. And so I think that's fascinating. All right. War between the elephants, we are all just the ants in the grass. That's what this feels like. Ash, it was great talking to you as always. I'm confident as these next couple months, as all these things roll out, we'll be talking about on the show again soon. Thanks for having me.

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Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. cloud. a. a. slash vergecast. That's clod.com. A.I. slash vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.com. We're back. Thanks to Ashley. I always love talking about Joe Rogan on our podcast. It's always smooth sailing with no controversy at all whatsoever. All right. Haim and Dan are back. Welcome back. Gentlemen. There was a Samsung event this week, Dan. Yeah, there was. It was kind of out of the blue. It was like, why is Samsung having another event in April? And the way they tease this event was like the most powerful galaxy ever. So I think a lot of people were really hyped to see new phones. And then Samsung was like, here's a bunch of laptops. Yeah. So they, I don't even know the full count off the top of my head, but they released at least four new laptops. We got a hands-on look at the Galaxy Book Pro in the Book Pro 360, which are their new OLED screen laptops.

start in a thousand bucks they are really sleek they're really light um if you read monica's article and go check out her video her main takeaway was that the screen looks great and this thing is surprisingly light i think the 13 inches under two pounds so these these laptops are getting like you cannot beat this weight with an ipad and a keyboard case like you are you are heavier when you add that keyboard case uh than this laptop which is which is kind of like a wild uh thing to be at but they're not the first ones at that point but they are definitely this is like a trend right ultra lightweight Windows laptops. Yeah, we're definitely seeing much more of it. And the thing that we're seeing with these is they are not compromising in the way that ultra-light laptops used to be.

So, like, you know, the old 12-inch MacBook was extremely light. It was right around that two-pound mark. And obviously, it was very compromised in power. These are running 11th-gen core processors. They've got, you know, XE graphic options. They've got designs with convertible flexibility. They've got the OLED screens, like we mentioned. So these are like actual laptops. They're not like secondary computers. So they're really slick. They're really nice. I like that they come in blue. I think more laptops should come in navy blue. I really like them. In addition, Samsung also announced some entry-level models that don't have the OLED screen. Very similar design, similar feature set. They just trade the OLED for Q-led or LCD panels. And then they have

a new gaming laptop called the Galaxy Book Odyssey, which is probably coming later this year. They were kind of nebulous on availability about it. But they also announced the RTX 3050TI graphics card in it. And we went to Nvidia and be like, hey, what's up with this graphics card? And they're like, oh, yeah, uh, Samsung wasn't supposed to know that. Really? Your partners will get you. Wait, Hyme, can, can Nvidia make enough of those chips? We'll find out. I mean, talk about like chips for it. The GPU market is like out of control. Yeah, exactly. It's a, it's a great question. I mean, like, really the only way you can get a modern GPU now is if you buy it in a laptop. Or if you buy it with Bitcoin. Yeah, buy it with Bitcoin in your laptop. That's not true. So it's kind of like an interesting gaming laptop in that it is not the most powerful

on the market by far. However, it is really light. It's sleek. It's thin. It seems to be targeting the person that maybe wants to game sometimes, but really just kind of needs a laptop for work or school or whatever. They don't want to advertise to the world that they're gamers. They don't want to listen to fans all day long.

But it should be nice. The thing that gets me with all of these Samsung things is they make. really like interesting and nice looking hardware. Obviously they have a lot of display expertise and things like that. And I've never seen anyone use a Samsung laptop that wasn't a Chromebook. Like who is buying these things? And I just don't know. Maybe this, maybe this wave will change that. Well, if you are the prospective Samsung laptop buyer, Dan is at DCCFert on Twitter. Send him a photo every laptop. Please tweet at him. Yeah. So they're coming out soon. We'll have reviews up in the near future on those. And they should be interesting.

even if no one buys them. I'm fascinated by this trend. Lenovo just did a think pad that was like super lightweight, no compromises. Yeah, Lenovo's got Acer, I think, or a Seuss. I constantly confuse the two of them. But one of them is in the game. Vio has had these really lightweight computers. The thing with the Vios, though, is they always like compromise the battery life.

So they're like three hours of battery life on your 1.9 pound computer, which is always a silly thing to me. If you're going to make a super portable computer, you think you're away from a laptop or away from that one. What's driving this trend, though? I mean, like, even battery life aside, like the Lenovo one has reasonable battery life. We're expecting the Samsung one to have. It's the new processors.

I think it's processors. That's a point. Yes. Intel was sitting on its hands for this next generation of chips for like five years. And they finally got them out the doors. And then all the laptops have good battery life and performance and small factors again. Yeah. I mean, there's that.

But, like, the processor is not the heavy. part of a computer. The heavy part is the battery cell, it's the chassis, it's the cooling systems. So like where the processor comes into play is it's way more efficient. It needs less beefy cooling. That cooling system can be lighter. That battery maybe doesn't need to be as huge of a capacity to get that runtime so they can shrink that. And we're also seeing a lot more materials being used. We're seeing more magnesium and we're seeing other things that are not necessarily aluminum. And it's kind of funny is that we're seeing these manufacturers play in this space that make an iPad or a MacBook Air feel heavy in comparison.

Like my MacBook Air is like portly at 2.75 pounds. It's like such a silly concept. But if you hold it next to one of these, you're like, wow, this MacBook Air is a lot heavier. And it's because it's made entirely out of aluminum, which is now not the lightest material to be using. So it's kind of an interesting trend. I'm eager to see where it goes.

I think there is maybe a part of this that is they want to compete with the folks who are using iPads with keyboards or tablets with keyboards. because once you add that the tablet starts out really light, those might be one and a half pounds or even less, depending on the size. But once you add that keyboard, you're back up to three pounds. So it's kind of an interesting trend. I think it's cool. I think it's great.

All laptops should be as portable as possible. So that's the whole point in them. So I'm excited to see more of that. Haim, what is the process of the specific process? Is it just a new Intel Core chip? And we're off to the races? These are the 11th gen Tiger Lake processors that they released last fall. They're great.

They have great integrated graphics. And they're just by standard, like by the sheer definition of technical advancements, they are dramatically better at power efficiency than, you know, the 14 nanometer generation that came before it. They have more transistors and smaller transistors. So they get, you know, more bang for your buck, literally. So you need less battery and you need smaller batteries to get similar returns as you did with those computers, you know, two, three years ago. And that, like Dan said, trickles down to everything. If the processor is more efficient, you can have smaller batteries, you can have less batteries, you can take up less space, you can have less cooling systems, which is all great. Yeah.

The one thing that all of these have, though, is they still have fans. And like, they still have that cooling system, that traditional one. And, you know, the M1 MacBacare doesn't have a fan. And it's great. It's so quiet. So there's still ways for them to go. Noted M1 Stan, Dan Seaford on the Vergecast, everybody. All right.

I'm going to give three Elon Musk updates. And then we've gone way over. So we got to get out of here. one, we've got a big story on Tesla's solar roofs, solar roofs on the site from Andy Hawkins. This is just classic Elon. Like, he made a big show of what the solar roof could look like several years ago. They've been stumbling towards development. And a bunch of people who pre-ordered saw their pre-order prices rise, like their estimates went way up.

People are very unhappy about this. Andy has a full story of that on the site. Elon said on Tesla's last round calls that they, quote, made significant mistakes with the solar roof project. So check that out. They also launched 60 Starlink. Well, not they. Tesla and SpaceX are different companies.

They run by the same guy. SpaceX launched 60 more Starlink satellites this week. As some version of listeners know, I have a Starlink. Actually, because I'm in Wisconsin this week, I gave it to Monica, who lives just a little bit east of me. We'll see if it works at her house. Starlink is really fun if you can get it over the trees at your house. So we're going to have a review of Starlink.

If you have questions about it, let me know. But it has been a fascinating process using this internet access system. At times, extraordinarily fast. But even but a single tree brings your speeds to virtually nothing. It's great. I'm really interested in reviewing it. The reason I'm bringing up is I want to answer people's questions. Otherwise, that review is like, yep, it's a plastic dish.

You pointed it to the sky. And there's not a lot to talk about. Like, there's not a lot to talk about. So let me know your question so we can build up that review well. That's it. We've gone over, as always. I want to call it a few things. One, there was a big hearing in Congress about algorithmic amplification of content.

McKenna wrote that up in her new newsletter, The Hill Report. You can subscribe to it. It's the verge.com slash Hill Report. It's also on the site. Every time there's a hearing, she's got some big plans for that project. Check that out. I interviewed Senator Amy Klobuchar about antitrust on Decoder this week. If you haven't heard that interview yet, go check that out on the

decoder feed. We'll be back next week with more Virchcast and Decoder. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Ashley's at Ashley Carman. Hi, I'm is C. Gartenberg. Dan is D.C. Seafurt. I think that's all the things I have to say. That's it. That's the Vergecast. We'll back next week with Dieter. See you soon. Rock and roll. Later y'all. Bye.