The Vergecast - iPad turns 10, Apple's first quarter earnings, and what Google is doing with the Search design

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Former Windows chief reveals Microsoft's reaction to the iPad … Apple's iPad changed the tablet game 10 years ago today … The iPad is still finding its place ten years in Microsoft's Surface Pro X is the world's most extravagant ... Apple's iPhone 11 and AirPods help company hit a new … Apple reportedly working on tracking tags, high ... Google's ads just look like search results now How much longer will we trust Google's search results? Google is backtracking on its controversial desktop search … Google aims to unify its workplace tools and messaging apps into one service The Scroll subscription service is an ingenious web technology hack Scroll makes hundreds of websites ad-free for $5 per month … Pentagram designed a smart speaker that’s like HitClips for kids Here’s what you need to watch the Super Bowl in 4K HDR WarnerMedia takes $1.2 billion revenue hit in hopes that HBO ... AT&T tried to buy out the streaming wars — and customers are ... Comcast is raising rates for cable subscribers as it moves ... Samsung Galaxy Z Flip rumor roundup: everything we think … Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This weekend on Vergecast, we're talking about Apple earnings, the iPad at 10, what Google is doing with the design of search, and a lot on the streaming wars. That's coming up now on the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and 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. Now we can start. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of web technologies. I feel like that's what it's always been. We just haven't, it's not a great marketing line. The last defenders of the open web. I'm your friend, Eli.

Paul Miller is here. Hello. Deeter Bone is here. I'm that guy who you know you've met and you know his face, but you can't remember his name. That's who I am today. That's rough, Deeter. I want you to, we're going to pump you up. We're going to figure it out.

No, it's great to be that guy. It's like everyone knows you, but no one really knows you. You're mysterious. I don't, I haven't really experienced that in my life. I'm the person who vaguely remembers everyone but can't remember their name. So I'm just full of gambits that are like, how do I get you to say your name? There is a Dieterbone doppelganger working in an apple store in like 10 cities around the country. and people will like just DM me about it randomly all the time. Well, because your faces and malls across the country.

That's true. My face is in malls across the country. If you don't know this, the Vox Media signed a deal to syndicate our reviews videos to like a shopping mall TV network, which is great. I mean, I love it. Like the concept of that is great. Again, you know, eight years ago, we had zero million uniques and now Vieter's faces and shopping malls across the country. But it means that we often get pictures. of Dieter's face being like, here's a Chromebook, like in a shopping mall.

No, it's in the shopping mall in my hometown. And so, like, people that I literally haven't talked to in high school will just hit me up and be like, what the hell, man? Sorry. That's amazing. You know, I told you my great hope for AR glasses. I decided that air glasses are fundamentally a terrifying technology. Yeah.

But I want them because I like cool things. So that you can see my face everywhere. Yeah. Deeter's face in all mall. Yeah, it's a great, yeah, the, what AR glasses platform is going to be open enough for me to install that plug in into it. No, I want to be able to have glasses that show me everybody's name. That's it. Oh, yeah.

It's a killer app for AR glasses. It's just like telling you who people are so you don't seem like a jerk. To enable that, the one thing I want, you need a massive database of people's faces and names, which seems extremely problematic. Open real-time facial recognition. Yeah, open real-time, like, okay, that seems like I'll get some benefit out of it. But every villain, like literally every super villain in the world will get more benefit out of it than me. In Moscow, the police department just launched real-time facial recognition across the city. Does everybody know each other's name?

I mean, at least give the people that. You're going to surveil them to death. Like there's like a push notification. The police to like found this person, right? Yeah. That's my understanding. Like everyone's phone, like an Amber Alert? To the police.

Yeah. That we found. person because Nilai looked at them with his AR glasses. No, no, no. You meet the person. You meet them, but introduce themselves at that point, your glasses and your glasses only learn their name. And it does not share.

It's not exfiltrated. Yeah, but then you would need like, can you, uh, real quick grow a mustache and put on glasses so that the next time I see you, the model is accurate? That's the problem. Uh, hmm. Speaking of people who've grown a beard, Neil Young. See? I did.

I was going to do a searching for. Heart of Gold thing here. That was what I was going for. So it is, I just want to talk about this for two minutes before we talk about all the news. We do an interview show every week. This week are the interview publishers with Neil Young. Two things I'll say. One, I had like half forgotten because we recorded the interviews like weeks ahead of time.

Yeah. Especially around the holidays and CS. We just have lots of them banked up. That's why we've been doing a couple of weeks lately. Because we We want to be current, but we don't want to overload people. So it's a hard balance. So I'd like half forgotten that Neil Young had yelled at me for an hour. I remember when it happened. Like, if you listen to that episode, I'm like laughing all the time because Andrew are producers, like, in the next room.

And I was just staring at him the whole time. I mean, like, is this currently happening? Like, it was just like taken aback. Was he yelling or was he yelling at you? It's unclear from the audio. This is, well, this is the other thing I want to point out. The problem with being the interviewer is that you have to be somewhat dumber than you normally are because you need the other person to talk. Sure.

So I'd read his book. I know what he wants to say, but I need to get him to say it to me because he's interviewed. Sure. Yeah. So a lot of my questions are like, how does sound quality work? Which if you listen to the Vergecast, you know that I have extremely set opinions about sound quality. So a lot of my questions were just like, do you think MacBooks are bad? I know what he

I knew what he was going to say So there's like just like the little play acting component And it's just he kept getting matter and matter I was just trying to calibrate like Where do I where do I agree with you Here's what I will say about that interview Having said all of that Right I want to be respectful to the guests want to let

He's Neil Young He's right I want to be respectful to Literally a legend of the culture But he is extremely wrong And I just want to put that out there I want the audience to know that I think Neil Young's idea about analog audio,

always being superior to digital audio, is fundamentally wrong. Like, just on its face wrong. I get what he's saying about sampling and quantization errors, not getting a whole day. I buy all that, I understand it. But when he's like a cassette tape, sounds better than any digital file

because you can feel it. I'm like, no, it doesn't. It just does not, Neil Young. But he was so mad at me that I didn't have an opportunity to say that and get that across. And also, I don't think that he would have listened, I think is the word. But I think what he was getting at when he continues to get at, and what I do believe is that we often, especially in audio, because you cannot, there is no objective way for two people to compare it the way that I can show you a picture or look at a screen. you just cannot compare hearing that way. It just doesn't exist.

He's not wrong that we often trade convenience for quality. I just don't think that like cassette singles represented any sort of peak of audio quality. And, you know, like vinyl has actually a pretty low dynamic range. Like it's a physical medium that degrades over time and you can only cut the grooves so low. And like, actually the, you know, if you ever plug the wrong thing into the phono input on an amp, like it sounds all weird. Yeah. It's because the dynamic range of a record is modified so it can be cut physically into a groove. And then it goes through something called the R-A-A-A-curve inside the photo amp and the photo stage to come back to a normal one.

Like, that's a lot of analog processing and compensation for the limits of the medium. You do that with digital, too. You just do it in a different way. So anyway, it was very entertaining. I'm glad everyone had a good time. Many people have tweeted me about it. You know, I think a sign of a good interview is like when half the people are like, Neil Young is right.

And then half the people are like, you are a dummy. Sure. I'm glad we're all talking about sound quality again. For the record, I do not think the MacroCrow has Fisher Price audio quality. I think that's what you put in when you get at. And I think on Bally's just run every Grammy, I think. It was every single one. Unprecedented achievement.

But she like made that music in her bedroom, using consumer tools and Logic X. Like, you know, there's good and bad. Neil doesn't agree with me. It's okay. But it's like amazing to wake up on like Tuesday morning and be like, oh, the Neil Young interview hit. Here we go. All right.

Speaking of Apple, lots of Apple news this week. Do you want to start with history? You want to start with earnings? Oh, we should just start with earnings real quick. Apple made all the money. They did make all of the money. I would say there's two things. I mean, they set a record of the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro did really well, sales records, numbers.

I think the big news for me is that their wearables category is soaring. Yep. So the Apple Watch Airpods are obviously hit. The services line was a little down. That was the news to me is you would expect after spending literally the entire year not being able to form a complete sentence without using the word services that this quarter or some, there would be some kind of major growth there. And instead it's just sort of a shruggy.

Now, a lot of this is there's still like, I don't know how much money they're getting from Verizon for that Apple Music deal. I don't know if they're just not banking any revenue yet from people, everybody that's getting the free subscription to Apple TV Plus, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe this stuff is sort of a slow build and then bang, it hits. But I was expecting them to be be clocking in a lot more money. And one of the possible, I don't know, analyses here is the idea that Apple is, the idea that Apple is, going to be able to extract more value out of its current user base is maybe not obviously true. It may actually be harder than they think to get people to pay them extra money and when, you know, and when they're using a four-year-old phone or whatever. Yeah. So it's a,

well, it's harder for the services is not an obvious slam dunk way for Apple to make more money with the same customers, but AirPods is. Yeah. Well, and Apple Watch too, actually. They, they They couldn't make enough Apple Watch Series 3s. Right. Yeah, it's $200 and it's like the easiest gift to the world to buy. But continue to be my theory of Apple. Like if they can just make the thing at the holiday that you can buy a loved one that you don't really know anything about. Yeah.

You know, like, hey, you're 15. Here are some AirPods. I love you. Right? Like, that's like, it's a slam dunk for them every time they pull it off. And if you really love them, you get a poop emoji engraved on it. Yeah, exactly. I just like, I was very impressed this year on TikTok that AirPods were the demarcation line between rich and poor.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, but that's like, that's been a meme for a long time, right? Yeah, but it's still a meme and it's very important. Yeah, but look, they have AirPods Pro, and they'll put out some new ones and we'll keep the old ones around at 129. Like, they're going to keep pushing them down to just destroy the market, which great, they should do it. I think that's just an easier side. Like historically, where are they strong? They sell hardware at a premium to make a lot of money doing it.

Every time they have a hit hardware product, it does really well for them. That's the nature of having a hit hardware product. The services piece, that is way more streaky. If you think about the bulk of their services revenue, and we've written this, Haim wrote it a while ago, it's all like in-app purchases and free-to-play games. That's the money. That's all the money. There are two candy crush whales out there that Tim Cook keeps an eye on.

Wait, app store revenue counts as a service? Yep, yep. The app store and then app purchases and the app store is by far the bulk of Apple services revenue. So that's great, right? But when you think of services, your instinct there to react that way it was. It's like upselling me on ICloud storage and this mythical Apple television thing that I haven't really. Yeah, so I think they've got everybody thinking of ICloud, maybe not even ICloud storage, but they've got everybody thinking of Apple News, Apple Arcade, Apple TV, Apple Music.

that's not it yet. Like Apple TV is not even real. It's like everyone has a free year. They're not even banking any money yet. It's in-app purchases. So that's one thing. And then if you think about just the cost dynamics of the other stuff, in-app purchases are just free money for Apple.

No one has to make anything. Game makers just have to irritate you into pushing a button to do something, right? So there's no cost of production. So it's like 100% profit. But Apple TV, they got to hire Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. They got to find an elephant. They got to follow the elephant around. Not Jennifer Aniston.

That's another, you understand what I'm saying. The Muppets have to show up. They have to throw the Muppets a party for the premiere. Jason Mamoa has to scowl. That's not free. That show is so bad. Someone has to pretend to Jason Mamoa that his show is good. That's probably very expensive.

And they've got to do it again. And they got to market those shows. They got to do the Oscar screener. They got to do a whole thing that's very expensive for TV shows. They got to hire Richard Puppler. Yeah, they got to hire the X HBO guy. For music, right, they don't own the music. They got to pay a bunch of license fees back out to the labels.

They've got to do the advertising for Apple music. For Apple Arcade, no one knows how that works. Zero, except for the game makers and none of them are talking. So do they pay up front? Do they pay per time spent? But they still have to pay. They have a product that isn't just like, you pay them five bucks a month, but they have to put new games in it over and over and over again to make it worthwhile. And they just tried to push a Fortnite competitor that's like kid-friendly, which is really fascinating because Microsoft in its earnings specifically said Xbox revenue was down because of Fortnite.

How so? Because people were spending so much time in Fortnite, which is a game wherein Microsoft doesn't make money selling you games or selling you Microsoft, you know. services, Xbox cloud services or whatever, that they made less money than they expected to in their Xbox division. And their suspicion was it was a third-party title, which is code for Fortnite. That's amazing. Yeah. That's not a suspicion.

That's like they have absolute telemetry to know. Yeah. Yeah. And they didn't. Yeah. Their average dollar per minute spent on the Xbox was down. Yeah. So there's a confluence of like two things that we have been obsessed with in two different

tracks. So on this show, we have been obsessed. with the question of will Apple compromise user experience in order to make more money on services? And in processor and in, you know, the newsletter and also on all this iPad stuff, I have been obsessed with the subtle ways that your behavior changes because of the way the user interface is constructed. And it all sort of crystallized for me with this new version of fantastical that just came out. Because if you just think about the way that apps work, they are constrained.

in very specific ways by the rules that Apple has set up for the App Store. People getting pushed to subscription services. Everybody knows how in-app purchases and games are, you know, constructed in a certain way. The way that Apple doesn't allow you to admit that there's another way to subscribe to something outside of the Apple store inside your app. All of that stuff is a pressure that changes your experience that is completely invisible to you unless you are, like, really paying attention. and you have very few levers to actually change it or work on it. With Apple TV Plus, you just choose not to subscribe. But with your apps and what games are actually made in the first place,

that's like a third order of effect of a change that decision Phil Schiller made two years ago. And that's a much harder thing to track down. That's really interesting of how many apps are like, okay, let's think of what app we can build. And like, well, no, there's no business model for that. There's no business model for that. There's an obvious business model for that. Okay, let's make a candy crush. Yep.

And I think what's, you brought up the TV one, what's particularly interesting about all of their services, but TV especially, is they know what the business model for the TV Plus service is. They're just not confident that it's going to work, so it's not the default. Because what they really want is for the TV app to be the home screen of the Apple TV. And then you open it up and it shows you a bunch of shows you can watch. and you subscribe to HBO inside of the TV app on the Apple TV for however much a month and Apple takes a cut Right and then every month HBO gets billed and Apple takes a cut and then you're like oh, I want to watch this whatever's on showtime I'm gonna subscribe to Showtime on my Apple TV and Apple gets a cut and every month Showtime is billed to you and Apple takes a cut they have that hundred percent profit

button built into it right it's in that purchases in the TV But instead of getting the next level on candy crash you get HBO and HBO bears it's cost of making HBO shows or whatever. That is the model of the Amazon Fire TV. That's what it works. If you kind of zoom out and squint, you're like, oh, they're just making it the cable box everybody wanted, right? Where you plug in your cable box, you tell it exactly what channels you want.

It builds you per channel and off you go. They're just not confident because not everything is there that that can be the default interface of the TV. You cannot subscribe to just full freight ESPN on that thing yet because Disney launched Disney Plus. right Disney Plus won't give up the interface to Apple that way it'll show you the shows inside of it but it won't give you the like actually subscribe here so there's just like a lot of that going on

but you see at least the the model is there we'll we'll promote the morning show enough so that you open this app now we've shown you a bunch of other stuff maybe you're gonna hit subscribe in HBO and we'll take some money and that's actually a direct money that is the business model for Windows 10 now how's that we will give you the OS for free and We will let it work with as many apps as possible and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. We just hope that when you happen to open up Windows to do your computer stuff, you will subscribe to OneDrive or Microsoft 365. Yeah.

But like, okay, at least it makes sense. Like, I can explain to you how Apple intends to make money. Yeah. Even though it's like it has Oprah on the payroll, right? Like, that seems expensive. How are they going to make that back at $5 a month? It's like, oh, there's this other thing they want you to do. They want you to buy this other stuff that costs them no money.

or that is pure profit for them. Yep. But HBO is for any cost. What is that for the arcade? Like it implies that at some point they're just going to ruin Apple Arcade by asking you to buy stuff inside of it. Well, unless games are just cheaper in some way,

and so they actually can cover the cost with the $5 a month, or maybe they believe there's a spillover effect just by dint of being an Apple Arcade, you might get something outside Apple Arcade. It is a little bit unclear. There might be a second order effect there. You're not wrong.

And then the other one is, news, which seems like an unmitigated disaster. Like, it just didn't play. No one likes it. It's, like, kind of too expensive, but if you're in the media, like, this isn't expensive enough. I'm not going to make enough money here. Like, that's why the Times is in it.

That's why the post isn't in it. And I think that's just one of those where it's like, what is the, there's going to split all this money with all these publishers. The publishers are just sort of cautious about it. Is it a real business for them or is just a thing they felt they had to do to complete this bundle? Like, I think, Paul, your point is, like, when you were surprised about it being the app store, that's the service, that's still the bulk of the services line. All this other stuff they've launched is totally unproven.

Right. Well, in Arcade, it's interesting. Arcade is, in a sense, implicitly critical of, like, at least the game's revenue that they're getting traditionally. Yeah, there's no, like, massive upside, right? The one person who's playing a Farmville who's going to spend $10,000 this week. Yeah. There's no arcade whale. Yeah.

Like, all you can do is cost them money by buying and playing all the games, right? And, like, splitting that even more finitely. Go ahead. Sorry, the thing that undergirds all of this, or I don't know, it's like, like, ambitly around is this all sounds like, oh, well, screw Apple services. Well, on the other hand, like, you get tracked less when you play an Apple arcade game than when you play a regular mobile game. You get track less when you watch Apple TV than if you use another TV app or your smart TV. You get track less if you use Apple News than if you use... the web. So there are like these really, there are these privacy benefits and tracking benefits

that Apple really wants to push and really are real, but it's unclear, you know, is Apple doing it because it's the right thing or because it also happens to hurt like Google's business model? And the answer is basically both. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think implicit in that is it's like good to check our assumptions, right? I think everyone's assumption is Apple sells the most phones. My assumption is they're going to ruin the user experience of the phone by pushing its services. And it's going to be a juggernaut. Right? And that's sort of just like always, it's my, it's just sort of my default assumption.

Apple will be successful. It's a pretty safe default assumption. Like, if you control the user interface of the phone and you want everyone to open your news app, you can probably get them to do it. Right. And they'll send you a million weird pop-up notifications that are like, the Senate has reconvened. And it's like, I don't, I know. I actually wish I knew less, right?

But fine, and you end up in the news app. I think the narrative is like maybe it's not working as well as we all assumed. Maybe that service is revenue line. It didn't grow the way that you thought it would this quarter because it's not as easy as they assumed it would be. Yeah. And that I think is a, we're just going to have to keep checking it, but it's good to, it's a good reminder to me that, you know,

the monopoly doesn't just always get what it wants, which is many people constantly remind me of that. But to actually see it play out, I think, is, useful. The important thing to keep an eye on is if we're right and these things aren't doing as well, will Apple just sort of go and let them limp along and then they'll eventually die like Mobile Me and get replaced? Or will they like try to force it? And if they try to force it, that's the nightmare scenario. Yeah. Great. You just took my positive and you turned it and literally said it's the nightmare. Okay, Paul, to your point about business models, this is a good way to segue into the iPad.

because the iPad turned 10 this week. Dieter wrote about it. Tom Warren wrote about it. I thought the two most unexpected pieces I saw were from John Gruber who said the iPad awkwardly turns 10 and then Ben Thompson called it a tragedy. And both of them were pointing at the fact that the app ecosystem of the iPad has never had a shot. And it's because of these weird business model problems.

It's because people think mobile apps should be cheap or whatever. But, Deeter, I'm curious, you mean, you've thought the most about the iPad as a computer of anyone in the world, I believe. I'm curious for your read on it. Well, so with regard to John Gruber's piece, I hate to say this, but I told you so. I've been writing about how weird and awkward the multitasking is on the iPad for a year or more, especially with iOS 13. I've written about how it's unintuitive in my particular definition of the word intuitive, which is easy to learn. I've written about how it mixes the metaphors of time and space, you know, like all of that stuff. But nevertheless, I'm still interested in the iPad because it's the only OS that's really trying to do something new with user experience user interface on a screen right now.

It really is. So I'm not as angry about the foibles of how slide over works on the iPad as a lot of other people seem to have been on Twitter. But I am super worried about it as a computing ecosystem because the thing that kills the iPad that actually makes it a tragedy is the value that you get for pushing through and learning all the weird ways that it works when you try and become an advanced user isn't high enough. The return on your investment of learning and time isn't enough to make it worthwhile. You're better off just using it as like a Netflix and reading machine and not trying to turn it into your computer. I think for a lot of people. People that have pushed through it and have gotten that return,

I'm not saying you're wrong. If you have made the iPad your main computer, good on you. I say you wrong. I'm putting it out there. Well, there you go. And then, you know, with the app ecosystem, I think the iPad got knee-capped

by the decisions that were made early on to price apps at 99 cents, right? It's very, very difficult to convince people that they should spend a lot of money on pro apps for the iPad, especially when, you know, there's all these other, like, UI things in front of it.

And then on top of all of that, the truth about the iPad is you get 96% of the experience by buying the $330 iPad that you do when you buy the $1,300 iPad. Yeah. Like for most people, there is functionally no difference between those two iPads. And I think that's when I think of the word tragedy, that's it, right? There's no app ecosystem that leverages the faster processor in the iPad Pro. So we just bought Max, who is not yet to, an iPad, and put it in one of the big cases. Because it turns out, baby, it's easier to feed the baby when they're watching YouTube.

Just do that. And she says, Fishies, and we play Finding Dory. And it's great. At $300, this is a perfect solution to a wide variety of parenting problems. So, like, okay, there's that. But within the same month, we acquired the cheapest iPad that is destined to. be destroyed, and then I got an 11-inch iPad Pro. And, like, yep, one's swipy and one has face ID and one has whatever.

But, like, at the end of the day, you could hand them to people without the home button. If you just took away the home button disparity, and you said, which one's which, it would be really hard to tell them apart. Right? Like, really hard from just, I'm using this thing and I'm seeing apps open and closed, like, almost impossible. And I'm, like, I try to push my iPad. I try to use it as a computer, and the app ecosystem of things that are hard to run is kind of not there. Yeah. But at the same time, it is a great computer for the plane.

It has almost entirely replaced my beloved 12-inch MacBook, which is my plane computer of choice for a long time. Yeah, I don't enjoy using any computer more than I enjoy using an iPad. I just hit that wall. Yeah. In the same way, yeah. The stand-up write-up for me was Steven Sinovsky talking about the Microsoft reaction, which is really actually kind of in line what you guys were talking about. Microsoft thought that Apple, one, the Apple had a creative response to a netbook.

And this is amazing line about the origin of netbooks. We knew that netbooks and Adam were really just a way to make use of the struggling efforts to make low-power fanless intel chips for phones. So Microsoft's over here. like covering for the fact that Intel can't make a phone processor by making, you know, very popular, but very cheap, low-powered netbooks possible. That is a significant revision of history. Like, that is, you have to, you have to have lived in Redmond and only seen the world through the filters of Microsoft to believe that that is 100% what happened. Yeah.

Right. So, but through this filters of Microsoft, they're like, oh, Apple is going to make a tablet that will run Mac app. and have a pin, and we're ready to compete with that. And Apple came out with a thing that is not exactly a computer still, and definitely wasn't when it came out. And I've talked a lot on this podcast, I don't have to rehash it. Like, I have a reason to use all the processing power that's possible, like, for on an iPad, because that means I can add, like, more audio effects to my tracks.

And, you know, record more things simultaneously. You know, the music ecosystem is this amazing ecosystem where people pay for apps and the apps are amazing and they work together and it's wonderful. And it's very different than using a computer. But yeah, as far as iPad replacing a good number of people's computers, that is definitely not happening. So can I just address the revision of history there? First of all, if you saw the iPhone and then you heard Apple was going to make a tablet and you're like they're definitely just going to make a Mac with a pen, you are on a really. Like, what? There's, that's, how did Microsoft miss mobile?

They saw the iPhone and they're like, they're definitely going to make a Mac with a pen. That makes no sense. Everyone knew it was going to be a giant iPhone, and that's what it was. Maybe inside Microsoft, they all did what I did, what a ton of people did, is they got a Dell Mini 9 or a Dell Mini 10V and they hacked it. Remember that? Yeah, those are great. So that's the other revision. The Adam and Netbooks did not launch.

with Windows, if you will remember. The first notebook, the Seuss EPC, where at one point I had just the flat specs memorized because they put out a new one every day, and that's what Engadget did. We're like, there's EPC 1009. Mostly the same specs, this one's blue. 20 minutes later, the EPC 1011 has been released.

The same specs, this one comes in a C foam. Like, that's what we did. Like, I had macros for the spec line of those notebooks. But they launched with Linux. And remember, they had the EPC operating system. It was like a custom version of Linux. And like the CEO of Assouc, Johnny Shee was like out there being like, this is a revolution in computing.

And we had the moment of like Linux on the desktop is here. And then Microsoft panicked and let Windows go on it. Yep. Like so I would say just a significant rewriting of history there where like everyone thought they were going to make a notebook. like Microsoft didn't even make a netbook. They panicked and allowed Windows to be on netbooks. And then they held that spec line down, which is why it was flat,

because they didn't want to eat the margin. They didn't want more powerful netbooks to steal share from the mid-price PCs. I'm saying, like, I get it. Like, I'm sure that is basically how it went down. I'm just saying, at the edges, like, you really saw the iPhone, you're like, they're definitely going to make a Mac with a pen. Anyhow. Yeah.

All right, do you know what happens to the iPad next? Man, I don't know. We need to publish another review with like specific clear asks so that the next time Apple holds an iPad keynote, they respond to the one by one like they did with the last one. What would your ass be? By the way, we said netbook a thousand times. We didn't mention Joanna's name. Joanna was the best netbook reporter. Joanna Stern was the best netbook reporter in the world.

I will ask her if my version of history is correct. Anyway, what are we saying? Ask for the iPad. I think they need to clean up the gestures and make them a little bit easier to understand in iOS 14 or iPad OS2 or whatever they end up calling it. I think that they need to open up even more for what apps are allowed to do in the background

and what they're allowed to talk to. Because this sort of layering on functionality on top of functionality and top of functionality, I think it's been great that they've been giving us new stuff that we can do, like hooray USB drives. But eventually you hit a point of diminishing returns. And this isn't a perfect analogy, but the original Mac OS had features laden on to like a pretty basic core until eventually it broke and they had to go to OS 10, right?

And that future, I think, might be in the cards for the iPad in a weird way. Again, this is a very imperfect analogy. Do not yell at me. Yeah, they're not going to change the kernel of iPad OS. Right, but just layering on, oh, people want to do this thing, we'll make an API for that. Oh, people want to do this thing, we'll make an API for that. It's great for security, but it's not great for creating a general computer platform that people can do new and imaginative things that you hadn't thought of. With computers and even with phones in some ways, but definitely with desktop PCs, people thought up of things to do that the company that made the PC hadn't thought of.

And with the iPad, if you want to do something with the whole thing and not something just, inside an app, you don't get to think of that. You have to wait for Apple leave you permission to do it. Well, and one of the worst cases in my experience with the music, especially like if you have samples, right, a very file-based workflow. So there are a ton of file accessing in, there is a ton of file accessing in all these different music apps. And so basically everybody either rolled their own or they'd like point you to like audio

or something like an app that had custom file stuff. So there's like seven different UI paradigms for working with files. And then now there's a real files API. And so that whole ecosystem, like trying to recombine is a total mess. So anything where app developers have found a way to work around the fact that Apple wasn't providing an API, they're almost in a worse spot now that Apple has an official API for it because they kind of have to support both methods. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I'm always complaining about, you know, Apple building special hooks for its own platform or, like, lifting features from the third-party ecosystem and building them in and then not letting other people do it.

Like, right, so the big example is like AirPods. So you cannot build an AirPods competitor because you don't have access to the OS. The worst example is like the flashlight app ecosystem like went away one day, right? Apple's like we just, we should have a flashlight. You can use it from Control Center. Like, here it is. And like a bunch of flashlight app developers just like disappeared. Like, is that a problem?

Like, does the antitrust engine need, of this America needs to start? So somewhere in there is the right answer. Like, I think that's the spectrum. But if you don't enable people to build those new experiences or to modify the user interface or to add functionality that is totally unexpected or not foreseen, then actually you have nowhere to steal from. Like, you don't even get, you can't even get into the trouble. Right? Like, you can't, you're just like, well, we, I guess, I guess no ideas are forthcoming except the ideas that we have. And that is like a real death spiral for a platform. So that's

one thing. Allow extensibility of the platform. I think that's a big ask. That's, that's the one that I would want. And they, they've tried it several different ways. You know, you look at the share sheet and you can just, like, every icon in the share sheet is Apple's, like, huge attempt to like have sensibility in the way that it wants inside its garden. Series shortcuts that, you know, they bought the workflow thing and they're doing that same thing. I just think

that all that stuff is just not as developer friendly as it ought to be. Like, it's great for writing macros, but you know, you got to write macros on macros on macros to do anything interesting there. Yeah. I think my big ask would be that they, so I

do use this thing on a plane all the time. I use the multitasking. I'm sort of in your camp dealer, like, if you figure it out, like, 25%, it'll, like, it'll be fine. If you have any interest in going beyond it, you're like, this is a confusing nightmare. Yep. Right. I can get two apps on the screen at once. Like, I can have Slack and Twitter open at the same time.

Like, okay, that's like, I'm good. On a plane, I'm good. Fine. The second I'm like, oh, I need to open a browser. And everything goes away. Yep. And you get one single, and, like, I would have preferred this to open where Slack was and leave Twitter alone.

Like, if you're going to make it insanely complicated, just let it be. insanely complicated. Yeah. Right. Like let that windowing paradigm just be way more freeform than you want it to be instead of trying to control it with metaphors. I think they'd be way better off. It's the imposition of their metaphors that just blows the whole thing out of the complexity

curve entirely. Yeah. This is how Windows 10 does it. When you open up a new app, it's like which side of the screen do you want to put it on? They don't let you have multiple like spaces and blah. Like unless you want to, you can enable a bunch of spaces. But their tablet mode is like basic and straightforward, but it totally works.

And if it's not enough for you, you just turn it off and you got Windows. Yeah. Maybe they should make a Mac with a pet. All right. We're going to take a break. I'll be back to complain more about product design shortly. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right. I promised that we would complain about product design. Do you want to talk about this Google search thing? It's another one where I feel kind of like my assumptions got checked.

But tell people what's going on. So Google rolled out a redesign. And Google's claim is that they want to enable more. trust. And so in order to do that, they put the URLs above the title of the web page, and then they put the FAVACON for the website next to the URL. And while they were doing it, they're like, well, we've already got this whole, like, framework of what a search result looks like. Let's just do that for the ad. And so there'll be a big ad word, and then there'll be the ad URL, and it'll blah, blah, blah. But that turns out that it made the ads less visually

distinct than the rest of the search results. And the entire internet went, what the hell, Google. and within a week they are like, we're going to experiment some more. And they basically rolled it back or they just started moving Favacons around. And now they're messing with the way that Google search results look. And, you know, I have many feelings

about a lot of this, but the thing that blows my mind, the more I think about it, is this is the company that tested 4,000 shades of blue to figure out what was the right thing that would work. And did they really just roll out

a redesign to, their most important product by far, the thing that makes the most money, the thing that most people look at, and they're just like, oops, and then within a week they start screwing with it, did they not really actually test this thing up the wazoo? Yeah. It's, I mean, they must have. And so their argument was, this is how it's looked like on mobile for a long time, which is a horrible argument because Google results on mobile are just a landmine of, like,

UI corners that make Google money. Or like, you know, we needed the answer to be simpler on mobile, so we're not going to send you to a page or just going to scrape the data and put it here in a card, right, and give you like the one true result in like, oh, no, is that the correct result? Is Yelp going to get mad at us today? The answer is, yes. If you're wondering if Yelp is mad at Google today, the answer is, yes, yes, it is. They always are.

So I think, like, did they test it? I think they did. I think what they got was more people click on the ads, and that makes more money. And so this is what I mean by my assumption being checked. Google's at the point where they're by far the dominant search engine, at least in America, but everywhere. No one else has any meaningful market share, right? Like, what was it? It was David Hanmeyer-Hanson at the trial said, if we lose our Duck, Duck-Dug-Go placement, nothing happens.

If we lose Google, we lose our business. Yep. Right? So that's like a big deal. for them. So now you're out of market share to conquer. Your incentives to capture more users are gone. Your

incentive is how do we get more money? And they're like, well, if more people click the ads, you get more money, like, well, just make the ads look more like the results. And then more people will click the ads, because they won't be like, oh, this is that. I should continue scrolling 14 pages down past all this crap to get the results I want. What checked my assumption

was there's an outcry, but they don't have to do anything because they're still Google. Where are you going to go? You're going to go to Bing? But they reacted and they rolled it back, which means they still kind of care a little bit, which like, that's nice. Can I give you an even worse scenario? You just described the scenario where they're like, ooh, this makes us more money. Let's do it. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Twerled my mustache. What if they just didn't see that it was worse? They weren't twilling their mustache. What if they were just naive? Because this is the thing that I saw when I saw it. I was like, oh, this makes sense. I get it. I understand how URLs work.

I understand what favikons are. I actually look for favikons. all my bookmark bars are favikons. That's how I identify it. This is how I use the web. I get it. What if everybody at Google is like that far out there and like engineer webland like me? And they didn't realize that this would be a problem.

Let me answer that question by flipping this for you. Okay. What if I said all those things, but it was Facebook. I realized that your wife works for Facebook. Just say the disclosure and then you can answer the question. My wife works for Facebook over Oculus or Division of Facebook. Even with Facebook, I don't know, do you give Facebook the benefit of the doubt? Do you give Google the benefit of the doubt?

Which is worse? The answer is that most people would like Facebook did this because they're evil. Facebook optimized for revenue. That's what they do. They're always doing that. Facebook is bad. Google still to this day has a reputation of like a bunch of lovable idiots who just wanted to make a map. Right?

And by accident, they scraped everybody's Wi-Fi addresses and put a camera on your face. Like, yeah. Right? Like, that's their rep. And I think it is just time for that to be over. Yeah. Like, we know a bunch of Googlers. They are, by and large, like, sincere seeming people.

There is no way that you roll out a change of this scale to your largest revenue product. And someone has not modeled the revenue impact of the change. Of course. So, one, I use duck, duck go. I just want to, I don't know where these points lie. I just want to say some stuff. You're serious. I'm just about that.

I use duct, go. It has favicon's on it. So when I saw these articles, are like, doesn't search already look like that? Two, in my experience of watching people use Google over their shoulder, everybody clicks on the ads. Like, I wonder if it's even possible for Google to get a bump in ad click-throughs because they already do get a ad click-throughs for every single search. That is not like, because the other thing that I think about with Google a lot is that Google is that Google is that Google is, is sort of like a, it's not just a search engine. It's also kind of a launcher. Google is kind of how you navigate to, you know, how do you go to, I don't know, what's a website that is a non-confrontational,

a news. News. News, Candy WZ. How do you go to news, right? You Google news and then you click the first link. That's just, that's just user interface, right? Yeah. So I don't know, there's aspect where I wonder how big of a blip, how big this actually did, how much this actually did change Google's metrics. So this is the theory that Jonah Prattie CEO BuzzFeed said to Peter Kafka and Peter Kafka's Code Media Podcasts, which you should subscribe to. He's like, you know, what if Google ads are actually bad? What if they're not like evil geniuses, lords of the universe? What if people just click on them because they're at the top and they're actually not that effective? What if they're just kind of bad in terms of their like efficacy?

I don't buy it for one second. And I think like if they are kind of bad and they're kind of ineffective, like Google can't sell them anymore because people can measure the return on their dollars spent. So Google has every incentive from their actual customers to make the ads perform better. And the best way to make the ads perform better is to make them look like real results, which is why they've gone from having a colored background to not having a colored background to not being set. off to suddenly having this tiny little fab icon to like just looking like results. Yeah, anytime anybody wants to say, well, you should give Google the benefit of the doubt.

Just show them that picture of what the ad separation has looked like over the years. And it's like it's so obvious. Yeah. Google is full of very smart people. And I like I love the notion that Google is mostly lovable nerds who just like want nice things. But the more we like learn about how they run Android as a platform, the more we learn about how they run assistant is a platform, the more we see things like this, it's like, oh, you're as ruthless as anybody. Your logo's primary colors, and then we think that makes you a little bit dumber than normal

people. Okay, wait, but this is half, this is half ruthless, half Google is, because I'm chesting out this wild product called Google Search that I rarely use, but I just searched for news. Wow. There's no better radio than Paul using Google for the first time. Searched for news. First result, an ad for news.com, and it's got them the breakout, like business, national tech.

those ads with a bunch of stuff to click. You just search for the word news? With a K, with a K. Oh, with a K. Then news is the first result, but it's an ad. Then it's top stories, right? These are Google News results, I guess. For news.

This is the most confusing search in the world. Then below the fold is New York Post's news story about canoes. Yeah. And then it's canoes.com. So if canoes.com doesn't buy this ad, then they are, literally below the fold and then a little bit more to be clickable. Can we just take one quick break for the audience? I just want to help everybody understand what happened.

Okay. News Corp. N-E-WS. N-E-W-S, which owns Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journal, which owns the New York Post, which runs a bunch of stuff. It's Rupert Murdoch's thing. Yeah. NewsCorp.

Uh-huh. They launched what I would say is like a, like if tech meme and Vox.com had a panic attack together. an aggregator. It's a tech meme for regular news, but it looks wild. Called News, K-N-E-W-Z. Yes. This is like the talk of the media world yesterday because it looks wild. And it's called canoes.

They had a press release that literally broke my brain. So Paul was like, what if I was searching for canoes? And that's what you get. And what I'm saying is if they weren't paying the Google ransom to have an ad, then they wouldn't even show up above the fold on a Google search cell. So Google's argument to you is the way that the algorithm works is they made some changes to foreground news and foreground newness novelty.

And this is also a brand new URL that nobody's linking to. And so there's not a whole lot of information for Google to go on. over time canoes.com will be one of the top results, although it won't necessarily be the top result because of an ad. That might be they pay for it, maybe someone will try and conquest it. And it might not be, if it continues to like be a thing that makes canoes, they might still be stories about canoes. But it not being the top search result is a factor of the algorithm works. Is Google's claim? Sure.

Okay. So the real example is David Hannan-Moy Hansen, the guy from Base Camp, Ed. At the hearing, the antitrust hearing, he's like, you search for base camp, you get ads from Monday.com above base camp. And so it's a tax. If I want to be the first result, I got to pay Google the money to just be the first result for our own company name. Which is fine. The conquest thing like that has happened forever. The real thing is if someone's violating your trademark and doing a bad one, Google will clamp down immediately for its own products.

and everyone else has to go through some Byzantine bureaucracy because they don't care because it's all just money coming in. Anyway, Google search is a confusing landmine of problems, but it's dominant. And so what we have not said here is

we should all switch to duck.com or Yes. Bing. By the way, if you look at Bing, Bing has turned into such a near perfect clone of Google. I'm not even sure switching would do anything. You would just have a worse experience with the worst search algorithm?

Like, it doesn't matter. Duck, DuckGo has three news, any WS results on the top. Then the news, which is apparently a band in Buffalo, New York, then the Facebook page for that band. Then canoose.com above the fold. Well, I just search for Duck, Duck, Duck, Doe Go on Google, and the first result is an ad that Duck, Duck, Doego paid for itself for Duck. So Google's winning, coming, going. All right. Speaking of web technologies.

Deider, I would say that you went through a roller coaster of emotions the other day when Scroll launched. Do you want to explain to people what Scroll is? Scroll is a $5 a month subscription service that if a partner website is partners with Scroll, that website does not serve you ads. Disclosure of Vox Media, which includes a Verge as a partner. So if you sign up for Scroll, you will not see ads on the verge. It's not an ad blocker because the ads never get show up on the web page in the first place. So when the verge sees that you are a scroll user, it's like, oh, when we load this web page up dynamically magically, we're just not going to put the ads there for you. So I was like, oh, okay, that's cool and interesting.

By the way, just to continue that disclosure, neither Dieter nor I made the scroll deal. I had basically no idea it was happening. Yep. Yeah. I learned about it from your tweet about it, Neelai, actually. I was like, what is this? And I learned that it had gone live from someone else's tweet. So I knew, like, in the back of my head that someone somewhere was talking to scroll, but I have no idea what the details are.

Big company. You get some insulation. Anyway, keep going. So the way that it works, and this is one of my early revelations, is how does the Verge know that you are a scroll user? Well, there's a cookie, of course, because everything is a cookie. And what that means is, like, eventually it could break because all the browser makers are trying to change the way cookie. work, but that's far off in the future, whatever. But scroll, it pays out based on, you know, what websites it sees you're searching, and it shows

you a history of literally every website that you look at. And so here's this tiny startup that you've never heard of who you're paying five bucks a month to, and they get your entire browsing history. Yeah. That seems, that seems, like they promise they won't sell it. They promise, you know, privacy, et cetera, et cetera. But it also seems like it is a data mining time bomb, I think, is the phrase I used. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like one of those, like, if you run out of money and this doesn't work, what's your most valuable asset? It's like a bunch of targeting data. Yeah. But at the same time, like, we are handing that over to. Here's a tradeoff. Do you want like a bunch of anonymous trackers in Google to have it because Google owns the entire ad stack? Or do you want this tiny company run by a CEO who like is down the street over here?

It's actually, it's not or. I think it's and. I mean, who knows how many trackers? They do turn off some trackers, apparently, but I don't know exactly what. I have ad blocker on. I have third-party cookies turned off. I can't see Google fonts. And I also paid for scroll.

You should just use links. What? Text-based Unix. Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty much there. But, like, I'm relieved to hear that you guys are also concerned about scroll tracking everything. But really, that's what they just have to.

It's so tough. Like, I felt horrible giving scroll this much information to be a plugin that tracks all my browsing so that I don't see ads. But at the same time, I've wanted something like this forever. Well, there is something vaguely like this. You know, there's the Brave browser, for example, which blocks ads and may or may not pay creators, depending if they signed up with Brave, et cetera. It's a crypto scam.

It's a token. Every time I write about the web, I have my inbox is filled with angry Brave users who are mad at me for not talking enough about Brave. All of those people also own the Nvidia Shield, and they also all write me at the same time. I guarantee you there's a one-to-one nexus of Nvidia Shield owners and Brave users in crypto stands. And then one day they're going to light up the crypto mining ability

of the Nvidia Shield, and it's going to be over. There's like a harder problem here, right? If you want to build a business like this, where you pay in some money as a user, and then you dole out money to the things you actually visit, which just on its face, abstractly, seems like a great idea. There is almost no way to do that without some sort of centralized billing and tracking. Right.

You have to trust somebody somewhere to deliver your money. Bitcoin, lightning, like there are promising ways of doing microtransactions without centralized third party. Like the Bray browser. If it all gets built into your browser and your browser dills out money as it is its websites. Why I refer to as something that's not Bitcoin as a scam and something that is Bitcoin is not a scam is because most crypto things do are just a shell game and have a centralized third party. In this case, it turns out to be the brave corporation.

Right. But I don't think like, let's say, so just to do that, you got to put money in, right? I got to like deliver some currency to you to somewhere. So it's stored and then I can go out. Right. and unless I have my own physical Bitcoin wallet connected to my computer every time I browse. That doesn't seem appropriate. And there's no way to do it across platforms.

You need some, you need to put money into the network. You're immediately at that same problem. If you have a lightning wallet, you can pay, like, you go to Yalls is a website that does micro payments where you just pay directly to read a store. You pay like 10 cents and you just pay with lightning. It goes through it a couple seconds. So that's a lightning wallet that you have. You have the money. You possess the money.

And then you pay and it just goes through it right away. But yes, traditionally with every single microtransaction set up, it is like that where you have to pay the money in and it's stored by somebody else. And then they dole out the payments. And I'm saying I think the whole privacy conversation, like another example of the same thing. Let's take it out of that model. I pay the New York Times every month and I have to log into it all over the place. And it's always forgetting that I logged in. And this is like a central complaint of every new subscriber on the internet is why am I not logged into the Washington Post at this time?

I already paid you money, just like leaving you alone. Why is that? Because Apple is aggressively deleting third-party cookies that store your login information across browsers and states. Like, what are you going to do with that? Right? Like, how do you solve the problem of not tracking you when some of the basic things that every consumer wants require the browser to know who you are? requires the website, requires you to identify yourself

to a website. And without some kind of tracking somewhere of like just this is who I am and I can tell it to you, like it's impossible to build the consumer experiences that we want in the web. But then there's like a disaster of privacy next to it. It's worse than that. Because even if

you come up with a very in principle smart anti-tracking method, separate from like the payment thing. So Safari has an intelligent tracking prevention. Oh, we actually haven't talked about this story. This is a wild story.

Yeah. So it's, you know, Safari and Firefox, they both have got different ways to prevent fingerprinting. There used to be this button called do not track. And we're like, oh, cool. If you click Do Not Track, then, like, you know, websites will know not to track you and they want to serve your cookies. That'll be great.

Well, everyone ignored it. And in fact, it turned out that Do Not Track was another signal that a website could use to identify you via this method called fingerprinting. Because when you visit a website, there's all sorts of information. that gets told. Like, it does support touchscreen. It doesn't support touchscreen. The browser is this big.

It's this resolution. Like all stuff that a web page needs to render, right? And enough of that information adds up and they can identify you. So Google's answer for this is a privacy budget that eventually will stop. You know, there's arguments about that happening right now. Firefox's answer was, we're just going to make a blacklist or a white list. And like, anybody that's bad can't track you. Apple's solution was very clever.

They're like, you know, if we just use a white list, that'll get gamed. This privacy budget needs more web standard stuff. We need to fix this problem right now. So what we're going to do is we're going to use on-device machine learning. And we are going to intelligently try to guess whether or not a website is trying to inappropriately fingerprint a user using machine learning. Because machine learning is good at identifying stuff over time, right? And great, amazing, super smart, super clever, great technology. Google researchers figured out that it.

became yet another fingerprint. Like yet another way to track you. So they told Apple and they told Safari and Saraje is like, oh shit, okay, and they fixed it, right? It got fixed in December. And now there's a paper out explaining it. So even if you can, in principle, get the entire web ecosystem to agree that there should be a payment system. And in principle, you get the entire web ecosystem to agree on a methodology for that system that seems very clever. you're still going to be screwed.

Like, there's always, it's an arms race that is just very, very difficult to win. I agree. It's an arms race. At the same time, I feel table scraps at this point are just basically, I want to reject cookies for everything except the thing that I'm actively logged into right now. Like, I really just don't, I don't think there are legitimate uses. There are enough legitimate requirements that you have to have all these cookies to make it worth the risk. Do you understand that rejecting cookies no longer is to,

efficient to stop you from being tracked? I know it's not sufficient. I'm saying it's just where you start out. It's like, how do I stop falling onto knives that are laying all over the floor of my kitchen? Like, okay, well, first we'll take the knives off the floor of the kitchen. Like, that might not be enough, but it's the first step. First, first we'll, like, we'll stop pouring Crisco on the knives. It's so confusing.

This metaphor is very bad for, like, just like, just like. huge number of reasons. No, you're right. I just think this tension between what outcomes do people want as just consumers, remember that I pay for the New York Times, right? Like, classic sort of like user story. Like, as a subscriber to the New York Times, I would like to be logged in all the time. Okay, just to get there, you got to put some knives on the ground.

You know what I'm saying? That's just the first step is like, well, you got to put those knives back all over the floor. And like that, I think is, it's the tradeoff. And I think one of the answers here, you could totally decentralize it. But then when someone is a bad actor, like, they'll still get to, they'll do this thing where you can like, okay, actually intelligent tracking prevention turns itself into a fingerprint over time. Right. And they'll just be a bad actor. And then that's an arm's race.

Or you could say, we need to come up with a system where the centralized. players get punished if they become the bad actors, which is like how you end up at a GDPR situation. You've got the data. You are required by law to tell people what data you have. If there's a data breach, you have to respond so fast, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the other solution. I think we're just seeing kind of both models play out. Yeah.

I think that solution is the correct one. Yeah. Well, the fight over like what should the future of cookies and web browsers be, gets back to this earlier discussion we had of do you trust Google or not? Google's like, oh, what if we create a privacy budget and let's work together and let's create new ways to create, you know, ways to like give websites attribution for clicking on ads and blah, blah, blah, blah, because we don't want to have this arms race. And everyone else is like, yeah, but taking it really slow really benefits you, Google, right? Yeah. And also it's just like there's no market signal for this stuff, right?

Like, who is, how can you even possibly begin to vote with your dollars in this world? like you can't like who are you paying you're the product so like it's i don't know like that i think is the other side of it is like whether the advertisers if you talk to cmo's in this world at c s i saw a bunch of them they keep being like well you know the cookie-free world is coming and it's like that is a big deal for the advertising industry i i think that's the spirit behind a lot of like open source decentralized efforts are that i'm not i ultimately don't want it to be up to another company of whether or not I get to be safe online. I want to be able to, on my own, ascertain that I'm safe and maintain my own safety and privacy to the extent

that I want it. And I'm not asking for anybody's permission to achieve that on my behalf, because if I wait for that or I wait for a government to order that, it's probably never going to happen sufficiently. The only truly sufficient privacy and safety that I can ever achieve in this world will be something that I basically cobble together on my own. Yeah, I think that's fair. I just think that's the level of complexity required to do that is not appropriate for those people. I think that's very much the tension.

Okay, we're going to stop this, and then we're going to eat you hell about streaming wars. How's that? You're ready for this? All right. We'll be right back. 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 or waiting.

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usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds

that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, 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.a.ai slash vergecast. And check out Claude pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash verge cast. Paul Miller. Hello. Every week, you insist that this nation come together. This is appointment television and an age of cord cutting. It's like, we're all in our bedrooms, watch our iPads. And Paul's like, did. Everyone has to come to the kitchen and listen. It's so funny that this started as a joke about holding country together. Now I'm just like, what if it did hold the country?

It's called The Cloud, but for kids. Oh, Kee Cloud. Yeah. There's actually two stories along this line. There's this really cool speaker. It's called the Yato Player. It's designed by Pintagram, which if you remember, are the people who like designed

that really cool looking GPU a while back. Okay, but so the Yato player is like a connected speaker but for kids. And it plays audio based on which NFC card is inserted

into it. So like the NFC card could do music or or an audiobook or whatever. But importantly, all the content is in the cloud, right? So the NFC card is really just a URL for the media that's in the cloud. So that's got me thinking of like, what if you had like a mad DRM apocalypse world where to listen, all the music is in the cloud?

It's all in Spotify or Apple Music. But to listen to it, you have to drive to Best Buy. Or I forget what music stores were called. What's a music store name? Sam Goody. Sam Goody. Tower Records. Tower Records.

You go to Tower Records and you buy a little NFC token that looks like a CD. You put it into your computer to unlock the album on Spotify. I thought that would be pretty cool. Anyway, something to think about. A bunch of a bunch of Nintendo Switch. games are now, you go to the store to buy a physical box, you open it up and there's a download code in it. Not a cartridge.

That's amazing. Not a cartridge. See, that's a thing. There's something so compelling to me right now for whatever reason about like switch cartridges. But it's very important to me that the data is on the cartridge. Otherwise, it's so meaningless. I'm always like I want to buy the physical media, but what I want to consume is the digital

version. Like, what if the internet goes away forever? I need physical backups of this. And it's like, I mean, if the internet goes away for like for that long, like something worse is happening. I shouldn't be watching gravity and H.T. Blu-ray? What am I doing with my time at the end of the world? Okay. So you're watching things.

Super Bowl. Super Bowl is this Sunday. My team's in it, which is heartbreaking. They were supposed to be in it and they're not. But we did a piece today. Cameron wrote it, how to watch Super Bowl in four. 4K HDR. Now, if you will recall, earlier this year, Fox started doing Thursday night games in 4K HDR. We are a big piece. They're like, we're just doing 1080P in the cameras and upscaling

to 4K and sending it out. But it's high-res. Upscaling is very good. And it is true. The upscaling is very good. But they're like, the big deal is shooting an HDR. That's the hard part, but we think it's a meaningful upgrade. So I wrote it up, got all excited. And then basically only like Fios customers with one cable box and direct TV customers with a special box could see it. Comcast dropped out the night before because they couldn't reach a deal and every stream platform didn't get it. Right. Because it's too hard.

Now they're going to do the Super Bowl in it. You can get the Super Bowl streaming in 4K HDR if you have like one of two Amazon Fire devices, like special in the Fox app. They've listed Roku on their website as being able to get it in 4K HDR, but they told us we're not 100% sure. It'll be 4K, but we don't know if we can deliver HDR to Roku. We're working really hard. And then Fubo TV, a streaming service that you can also pay for if you wish, they're saying they can do it, but no one's ever seen it, so we'll see. Yeah.

So if you want to watch Super Bowl and 4K HDR, you basically need a fire, like one of two fire devices. You're with me so far. I'm with you so far Okay you know you can't use you can't use the Apple TV No you cannot So this is all related to like a very quiet Very nerdy format war That is like the death of me

Why can't you get on the Apple TV? Because Fox is shooting in a format called HLG hybrid log gamma Which is developed by NHK in Japan and BBC in the UK It is an HGR format that is like well suited to broadcast television Because you can basically you make a stream that is

downward compatible. Okay. Right? So it works live and then you send the same signal to SDR TVs and HDR TVs. The SDR TVs can just show you SDR and HDR TVs will figure it out. That's HRG. HDR10 in Dolby Vision I'm going to say this phrase now. They're known as PQ formats.

PQ stands for perceptual quantizer. Okay. They require metadata stream. Sure. Okay. Right. There's a different thing. and they're not down-compatible. So you've got to send two different streams.

Almost nothing supports HLG. The Apple TV doesn't support it. Roku's just another format to support. Right. But now we're in the world we want to watch the Super Bowl in HDR. You've got to figure out how to support it. So you can't like convert it.

You can do all this other stuff. Apple doesn't allow you to like do any hardcore video to code in their boxes. That's why YouTube is not in 4K in the Apple TV because YouTube wants to use its codex. Yeah. Apple's codex. So Fox is like ready. They've hacked the fire TV to make it work.

They don't really know if they can get it there in the Roku. And they're not even trying them with Apple because they have to do this format conversion. I don't think Apple's going to let them. Yeah. Can I make you even angrier? Yes. You know those magic eye posters? Oh, my gosh.

Where like you look at a cross-eyed and a picture pops out? You know, when you're like standing at the mall and there's a group of people staring at the magic eye posters and someone's like, I see a sailboat? And the next person is like, I see a sailboat. And then I'm the third person. And I say, yeah, I see it too. but I'm totally lying. That's how I feel about HDR. Ooh.

You gotta come over. I have an HDR TV. I mean, we were like CS together. There's one place you can see it. It's a C.S. Like, eyes searingly bright. So I did eventually get a TiVo edge. Why are you such a...

Tiva, why do you still buy Tivodes? Because I refuse to get the Verizon cable blocks. Like, it's just not going to happen. Get out of my face with that thing. So I got the TiVo Edge, which can decode HLG, and I watched some games in HDR. Okay.

It is, if you are paying attention, remarkable. You actually see more detail. The helmets would be, but like, data, come on. What are we doing? It's not like brighter, it's just like there's more detail, and it's a wider color gamut. Right. See, there's actually more color information coming to you.

Oh, by the way, just to make this even more complicated, I have this TiVo Edge. What's a big selling point in TiVo Edge? It has Dolby Vision. But Dolby didn't tell anyone that there's actually two versions of Dolby Vision. It's a true story. One is decoded on device and one is decoded in the TV. Sony was like, we're only going to support the one that's decoded on device because of some latency issue.

Yeah. TiVo didn't know. They didn't know. So it doesn't support Dolby Vision on my TV. And all the support forums are like, what's up with it? So like, oh, yeah, we just found out about these Sony TV. Microsoft had to do with a quiet update of the Xbox to support Sony. Apple had to do a quiet update of the Apple TV to support Sony.

Amazing. They just made a custom Dolby Vision profile for Sony and didn't tell anyone about where some of the decode goes. And so now there's even inside of this bad format war, there's yet this other X factor of like, what if Sony was a little bit dumber than everybody else? When there was Blu-ray versus what is, what is? What does Fox Sports get out of using a weird HDR format that nobody else uses? And also, would it kill them to transcote it on their end and send out like a, you know, they could have a minute delay on it, a different stream.

For the Super Bowl? For the PLEBs. Do you know how many like gamblers would die if they had a minute delay of the Super Bowl? Okay. Well, they just, they can be warned. Have you guys ever watched the Super Bowl streaming in like an apartment building? It's amazing because there is a delay and so you're like watching the game and then you just hear somebody across the way screaming. Just screaming.

I know that's a sensation. That's amazing. So the benefit is Sony makes a lot of the broadcast equipment in the world and they are all in on the broadcast side on HLG. Right. Right. So this is like a standards battle that's happening with a bunch of buyers over there. And so, like, the broadcast world is quickly standardizing around HLG because you need to do less work and you can send out one signal that works for both sides is what I am told. I mean, have I talked to...

And Fox is just like, whatever you say, SOTI. Well, I mean, they got to buy stuff. Look, here's a solution. They need to use some AI to solve the format problem. Dying. And then they can get it up to 8K. And then you watch it over 5G. It's horrible situation.

What's crazy to me is that obviously, everybody has the same televisions. They're not saying you have to buy this or that television. This is a box that is going to transcode this HLG stream into something that the television can handle. So I'm just asking kindly that Fox does that earlier on in the chain before they send it to their app. So I think Fox is doing it earlier on in the chain because it's, says, Cameron's Post says, the Fire TV stick 4K and the Fire TV Cube will get the 4K HDR 10 feed via the Fox Sports app. They can deliver it to those. They should be able to deliver it everybody else.

But there's got to be some underlying technical reason. I'm pretty confident it's like they want to make sure they get it right. And they can do more with what are effectively Android apps on a fire platform than you can maybe do with Roku or depend on the processing power of a Roku. And then you are somewhat, not even somewhat, you are extremely constrained with what you can do on the Apple TV. So you're saying the NVIDIA Shield's going to knock this out of the park. As soon as you turn off your Bitcoin renderer and switch that processor power over. Renderer. I don't know.

Whatever they do, man. I said that just to get their email. I know. It works so well. And VITCOE people and NVIDIA shield people. That's a true honeypot of a phrase right there. Invidia shield Bitcoin renderer. Come at me.

All right, Dieter, you answer. We did not talk about streaming more stuff last week with Comcast. There's 18T earnings this week. There's just a lot going on with the legacy companies streaming stuff. Oh, and I have a fact to share, which I think is really interesting. But you go, tell me about AT&T first. So it's earnings week. We talked about Apple earning.

Everybody else had earnings. AT&T's earnings were basically, yeah, we took a $1.2 billion revenue hit that we won't normally have to do in order to secure content because we're really going to make HBO Max a thing. And then Julia Alexander listened to the call and she was tweeting it and talking to me about it in Slack. And like every question was like, I don't understand what you're doing. And AT&T was like, well, you know, like, you know, like,

HBO is going to be a thing, and then 5G is going to be a thing. And then we're not going to say that there's going to be a super cycle, but we're not going to say there's not going to be a super cycle. Oh, my God. It's a super cycle. Well, you know, people want HBO. They set up for AT&T, and then they want 5G to get the HBO faster. So then they buy a new phone.

And now they've got a new phone. And if they've got a new phone, they're obviously going to want to watch some HBO because they've got a new phone. So that's cool. And it'll create a whole, like, virtuous cycle. And it's like, you are making a giant, almost bet the company bet that, that there is some sort of synergy between HBO Max and 5G and buying a new phone. And I just don't believe that any one of the three of those connecting things in that circle are real, much less all of it together creating a flywheel.

Yeah. I mean, I'm an AT&T customer. I also pay for HBO. Yep. Someone unsurprisingly own a phone. Yeah. Nope. I mean, okay, you can already see the ads, right?

Like, that's like some business logic. Imagine the ad, right? Buy the new Samsung Galaxy S-20 5G plus and get a year free of HBO. Yep. That's what they can do, right? There's not much more they can do. But so the thing, and this comes from Carl Bode's article on The Verge today, the day we're recording this.

You should go find it. It's very good. It's titled AT&T tried to buy out the streaming wars and customers are paying for it made me realize that a few years ago we all won because we stopped paying subsidies for our phones. The cost of the phone wasn't built in. We didn't have to your contracts. We got much clearer pricing. Well, the subsidy for your physical phone got replaced with a subsidy for some random streaming service you may or may not want.

Yeah, right? Don't think that you're getting AT&T or AT&T, don't think you're getting Apple Music for free in Verizon, right? It's free, but is it free? Yeah. And don't think that HBO Max is going to be provided free to you, AT&T customer. Is it free? Is it really free? And so you can't not pay for these streaming services if you have a phone now.

Verizon and Disney Plus is another good example. Quibi, will be free for T-Mobile customers in case you were wondering about that one. There you go. Netflix. Team Mobile bundles Netflix in. Same deal. Netflix gets paid for those subscribers, that money comes from somewhere. Going through that list, I don't know who, which side is paying for each one.

The carriers are paying the streaming services. So Verizon wanted the edge of having Disney Plus for free. I assumed that maybe it was like Disney wants to get it in front of a bunch of eyeballs. No, no, no. The way these contracts usually work, I am told. I don't know how all of them work in like specifically. But they negotiate what's called a wholesale rate. So there's the retail rate for, yeah, for Disney Plus, like whatever.

Verizon, you know, they guarantee some minimum number of signups. They get a wholesale rate on them. And then if people actually sign up, they pay the wholesale rate. Is that how all of them specifically work? I don't know the details. That's usually the shape of it. So it's really interesting about this. I am told Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, which has, you know,

they are investor in Vox Media, blah, blah, blah. My understanding is that the little bit of competition from AT&T and 5G and the shenanigans of like home internet and bundling and all the stuff has gotten Comcast to the point where they're going to start to say, we treat all internet traffic the same. Like, you can sign up for this crazy

mobile service on 5G that's maybe just as faster, faster than the wires in your house. But AT&T will throttle the video and do this weird bundle pricing and blah, blah, blah. And we won't. Remember us? Good old trustworthy wires in the ground, Comcast. Look at that.

And it's like the tiniest bit of competition has pushed Comcast to be like, yeah, we're going to go ahead and advertise Net neutrality. So I'm trying to get them to say that to us, like, from an executive on the record, but that's what I have been told. I think that's super interesting if that's the message they go out with. I hope they do, right, because I think that'd be great for everybody. But it's funny how, you know, when you suggest to the world that Comcast would somehow

zero rate NBC's peacock, they're like, no, no, no, we won't do that. We want our internet service to be differentiated from the world. weird shenanigans in the mobile carriers. Because every mobile carrier does weird bundle pricing, net neutrality garbage. So they're like, what if you had pure internet? Which I think is like, cool. But what they got to actually commit to it, which is the thing I'm pushing. Maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but is that, you know, there's always these ads for like,

you know, mobile for seniors. And it's like a phone carrier where like the, it's like $20 a month for a phone plan. And you can get the flip phone with the big buttons. It's like, what's the catch? Like, and so is there, because I've known that MV&Os often have, in a sense, like, less priority than the traditional customer. So maybe they get worse service. And I thought that was the main catch for why an MV&O could offer cheaper than Verizon, Verizon service. But is it also the case that these carriers are spending so much on content now?

No, so the NV&O, I've learned about this more because of the T-Mobile Spring. deal, right, where T-Mobile and Sprint will combine and then DISH network will stand up a fake fourth carrier that is really just a T-Mobile NV&O while it builds its own network. And so, like, the argument is MV&Os have traditionally not worked. Like, if you just wanted to start your own carrier and your first move was to go to T-Mobile and buy a bunch of access, you would lose because T-Mobile would make sure that the rate that you pay them is enough to price you above them, right? That's just the natural, why would they let you compete unprice with them?

There's no reason, like head on for the same customer. So most MV&Os are customers that the carriers don't want or are small enough so they can be over there or that are too hard to service. So what's like the most successful in the now is like boost? Boost is like mostly lower income people, right? And they're like, it's too hard to get the money out of them. They don't want to sign up for postpaid contracts. They don't want to sign prepaid. That's why they're mostly prepaid MV&Os because T-Mobile is a business is like,

we'll just be guaranteed some money from this MV&O and they can handle the hassle. Senior citizens, you don't want the fanciest phone, they just want a flip phone, whatever. The NVino can serve them at a low rate because T-Mobile's like, we can't foist Quibi upon them. we'll just like take some margin and not have to worry about that customer. We won't deal with the cost of it. No, that was a pretty cogent explanation, but I think we could do better. I think if you're listening to this, please pull over in your car and tweet at a remarkably handsome and cogent actor, Ryan Reynolds, who is a co-owner of Mint, the MVNO, and ask him to come on the Vergecast and explain how MVNO's work. Yes, please, Ryan Reynolds on the verge cast talking about the economics of the wireless industry would be incredible.

we will happily shill his aviator gin. I've never been a gin fan, but I'll make an exception. Yeah, pull over and ask Ryan Reynolds come on the Vergecast. Him and Ajit Pai at the same time. That's what we're going. Oh, my God. Do you think they've had a meeting? Like Deadpool rolls into Pye's office and is like, I'm starting to be an O.

The part of it that I think we're kind of circling around here is like they have now all spent so much money to do this. this thing, right, to marry content with the network, because they all want to be fancier than just a pipe, do they have to pay it off? AT&T in particular has to pay off this bet. It's existential for AT&T. And that means they are going to do the scammiest things in the world to get those HBO max dollars out there. And I think, like, I've said it before, but what's like the vergious story in the world?

Like all of our threads come together. Our hardware review program, our policy conversations. The interface covering disinformation, it's at the end of next year, they're launching HBO Max in May, give it a year, right? We'll see what happens at the beginning. But by the end of next year, you will reasonably be in a position where when you buy a phone from AT&T, it comes preloaded with CNN, and CNN will stream for free, and Fox News will not. right? And like you will just be in a position where one of the largest access corporations in the world is preferentially pricing one news outlet over another and they're ideologically opposed in a time when like that polarization is worse than ever. Like Ezra Klein and our colleague just wrote a book called Why We're Polarized and like this is one of the reasons because we've actually we're going to price information differently. And I think that's like it is just worth thinking about like you're going to buy the $400 LG mid range and phone from AT&T, it's going to come preloaded with their media. And if you want to consume any other media, you're going to have to pay extra in one way or the

other. And I think that's like, we haven't quite grappled with it yet. We haven't thought that through enough. It's like everything I've been yelling about for years. I'm sorry, people in your cars. You've like heard it before. This is not surprising to you. But it's here.

It's like way more real than I think people are giving that moment credit for. Why do you think Trump, like, wanted to stop the merger? Because he's the one who's like, man, that mid-range Android phone is going to suck. Anyhow, but that's strange. Like, it's not quite here yet. Like, they're not launching until May. Peacock is not launching until later this year. Like, we'll see what they do.

But you have a bunch of big, big media companies that are actually parts of big, big ISPs. And everyone's got to pay that debt. And, like, Comcast is raising its rates. AT&T is raising rates on U-VIRS and Direc TV subscribers. Like, they're trying to make up the money while people transition to streaming. and it's like causing a little death spiral because raising rates means people quit and that's like right that's going to catch up to them in a really big way i just think it's interesting if you're going to spend this much money like it seems to to open uh the gateway for somebody to i don't know space internet or something something that isn't encumbered with all these extras uh to to truly be competitive i have no idea if that will that will happen but it seems like there's an opportunity here if they're true going to jack prices to give people things that they don't want.

Yeah, I mean, we'll see, or, I mean, their argument is that this is what people want, right? Like, what people, I mean, the classic cable pricing in America for like 20 years was the triple play, right? You're going to pay Comcasts. They're going to deliver you a medium, fast internet connection, a phone line, and cable television. And they're going to be your provider of those things. And everyone wants that bundle. We've moved all the video to the internet, so you don't need the one part of it anymore. But you're still getting the bundle.

and it's just like, you're just back at it again. And the question is, is that what people want, or do they want more a la carte access? Like, I don't know the answer. But that bundle is definitely getting reformed. Except for the phone line part. By the way, you can, you can, if you've, in fact, tweeted Ryan Reynolds about the Vergecast, you may now drive again.

Are you done? Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's the one part of it that I think is better than the old bundle, for sure, is you can quit way easier, right? I encourage you. Do this right now. Just go cancel your Disney Plus subscription. It feels great. And then you can sign up again tomorrow.

Right? Like that is way easier than canceling HBO for traditional cable. My whole plan with Picard is to wait until I can, I've got the time to binge it in a week, and I'll sign up for CBS All Access again for a week and then cancel. Yeah. And so I think that is different and will lead to different consumer behaviors. But yeah, that bundle is just like, it's barreling towards us built into access. because they got to pay it off.

Like I said, I think, like, the sort of consumer side of it makes sense. Like, everyone kind of knows what AT&T is up to. They have to because AT&T is saying it all the time. Like, they have to tell their investors. But the part where, you know, the largest wireless carriers in America are excusing their preferred services from data caps and making you pay for the other ones is, like, a little diceier. Yeah. I'm going to blow your mind real quick. The business bottle here is paying for access to infrastructure and then getting content as a bonus.

Sounds a lot like Amazon Prime. Yeah, I mean, right? Like, where's Apple going to fit into that? Like, are they going to pay Verizon AT&T for sponsored data the way that those companies would want? How's Netflix going to survive in a world where they have to pay for peerage fees? Like, that's all just up in the air. I've got to say Amazon's really trying my patience lately. I feel like all the good shows, all the good murder mysteries are like you got to pay for like Britbox or something like that.

like the actual Amazon Prime is pretty bare and I don't know it seems like they're trying to upsell me it's like I already pay you I don't know more than $100 a year that's where you're talking about it stop stop upselling me so hard that's there actually Ronnie Mola

Recode wrote a great story that's like Amazon Prime video is also has a bunch of like user submitted videos in it and so like yeah the long tail of that library is just a bunch of really wild crap and you should go read it's on it's on Vox slash recode Okay, that's it.

There's enough. There's a folding Samsung phone. Yeah. But we're not going to talk about it at this time. No. It's there. Next week. You just think about it.

It will be discussed. You just think about what you did. You can tweet at us, Deeter's at Backlon. Paul's feature Paul, on that reckless. We love hearing from you. Deeter. Tell them about your newsletter. I have a newsletter. It's at the verge.com slash newsletter.

It's called processor. I write about computers. It's very good. I enjoy it. I enjoy it a lot. All right. That's it. We'll see next week.

Rock and roll. Paul. Snip, snip, snip. Thank you.