The Vergecast - Is this peak TikTok?

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the Apple Vision Pro review rating, changes to the TikTok app, streaming news, and more. Further reading: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not The Vision Pro is a computer for the age of walled gardens Apple’s Vision Pro battery pack is hiding the final boss of Lightning cables Even without Netflix and YouTube, Apple’s Vision Pro has over 600 apps at launch TikTok loses Taylor Swift, Drake, and other major Universal Music artists UMG set to remove music from TikTok amid AI and payment concerns TikTok test automatically identifies products in videos and offers purchase links TikTok goes full YouTube Hulu is cracking down on password sharing, just like Disney Plus and Netflix The death of the Amazon deal could mean goodbye iRobot Lawmakers propose anti-nonconsensual AI porn bill after Taylor Swift controversy All the news from Congress’ Big Tech child safety hearing Snap is recalling and refunding every drone it ever sold TikTok’s CEO can’t catch a break from xenophobia in Congress Your home’s internet connection could soon be called .internal Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th Tap in with us Hello and welcome to the first cast The flagship podcast Of putting windows all around you and then walking around them and looking at them and being in the future

The future Yeah That's iTunes's most specific genre It's Verstcast I'm your friend Eli David Pierce is here Hi Alex Trans is here Hi I'm your friend that really

misses Microsoft's Windows The HoloLens people are so mad at me. They're like, how did you do this whole review? And you never mentioned HoloLens, the thing that invented spatial computers. And it's true. Microsoft invented a number of these words with no regard for what they meant. They're like, HoloLens is mixed reality.

That means augmented reality. This VR headset in Windows, that's Windows mixed reality. Like, just anything. All the words meant the same thing. And I have done some very cool HoloLens demos in my life. I put on a HoloLens and I changed a spark plug on an ATV in the basement of a Microsoft building. And it guided me. Yeah.

It put arrows like go to this drawer, open this drawer. I don't know if any of that was real or it was totally state. Whatever, it was awesome. I was like, this is definitely the future of changing spark plugs in an ATV. As long as the room is set out exactly right and the computer knows where all the parts are. Like, this is how we should change spark plugs. which, by the way, if you set up the room exactly right, you know where all the parts are, you no longer need the computer to change the spark plugs.

Because you put the spark plugs where they go. But whatever. You outsource that. But they were like, imagine a mechanic on an airline. And now I'm like, man, I wish building had bought more HoloLenses. They're also in Seattle. Just putting that out there, Microsoft. The problem with the HoloLens.

Oh, and I did a very cool demo, Microsoft, one of the few companies in VR that has ever solved co-location. so I wore a HoloLens and someone else was wearing a HoloLens and we were looking at the same thing at the same time and like I would interact with it was like a model of something and I would interact with it and they would spin it the other way and no one else as far as I'm going to vary no other company is on a commercial scale I don't think the Quest headsets can do that the Vision Pro can't do it

it okay that's cool then right so I just all credit to HoloLens the HoloLens is a gigantic failure which is a why I didn't mention it. It failed as a product. The person who was leading the project got forced out of Microsoft for sexual misconduct allegations. They did a bunch of layoffs on the

team. They've reorganized their hardware portfolio and they say, quote, and this is a real quote, we'll make a next version of the HoloLens when the time is right. Oh, is it right? No. You know what they're going to do? They're going to make a bunch of AI stuff

and print money instead of being like you can change a spark plug with our glasses on. I'll never be able to change a spark plug though. Yeah. Anyway, so shout out to the HoloLens people. HoloLens also objectively the coolest product name in this entire category. Oh, yeah. No question.

HoloLens kicks ass. It's good. It's a good name. And the first one was cool. And the second one was even better from what I'm told. I never tried the second one. And, you know, if you have the perfect spark plug set up, that thing kicked ass. Are you saying you don't fondly remember the ACER A-H-101-D-B-E-Y Windows Mixed Reality headset?

That had a good game. That's a good ring. Say it slower. Slower. But Adi and I just decided what the words would mean in our review. We made a sidebar. We're like, this is what mixed reality means and this is augmented reality means. And then Addy was like, you know, this is a flip of how Microsoft wanted it.

And it's like, I don't care. Like, I'm putting my foot in the ground and this is what we're saying. Anyhow, so shout out to the HoloLens people. I feel you. It was a cool demo. Did any magically people get at you? The magically people were just happy to be mentioned. Right?

Like your product is a true AR product, optical AR that has fatal compromises in it and no one should buy it. They're like, oh my God, finally. The validation we deserve. Some people, I will say two things. Some people, I basically called the top on two technologies in this review. I said camera-based pass-through might be a dead end and I feel that it might be a dead end

and I said hand and eye tracking there's a part of it that's valuable for some things but it's also a dead end it cannot be the primary input and I heard from people who've been working on this who have shipped

Wait sorry real quick we should just say by the way this is your review of the Vision Pro which went up this week we talked a bunch about it on Tuesday but if you haven't been living inside of Neely's brain for the last week or so

he's talking about the Apple Vision Pro, which we just got to so fast. I was going to say, let's worry. No, this is right. I woke up. I use this app called Sleep Cycle on my, as my alarm clock. And yesterday I woke up, and it basically congratulated me on finally getting some sleep. Oh, boy.

It was like, good job. You've got 400% more sleep last night than you've been getting. And I was like, this is a disaster. So, yeah, I'm wired. Now I've got too much sleep, but the amount of count. I've basically only eaten cinnamon toast crunch this week. It's bad. All of it's bad.

The inside of your mouth after that much cinnamon toast crunch. Well, I didn't eat it all in one go. Yeah, but it's cumulative. It's cumulative in that each bowl is 25 grams of sugar. Oh, my God. We'll miss here. I'm just like, the crash is going to be bad. We're not buying this anymore.

But that's, I would get home and be like, what can I eat? You know, like fast. Cereal. Serial. And I was like, this cereal. Anyhow, yes, the Vision Pro review. I heard the two things in my review that I, they were like the big ideas that I didn't overly highlight

is Vision Pro is the best version of a device with camera-based pass-through and hand-and-eye tracking they've ever seen. And I was like, it might have inadvertently proved that these are dead-eds. And I have heard from people who have shipped millions of devices with camera passer and who have invested millions upon billions of dollars into hand-and-eye tracking.

And they were like, you, have a point about camera pass-through. It's good for what it's good for. And like, it's not a dead end if you use it right, but Apple's trying to make it do too much, which I thought was really interesting feedback. That's fair. Because it is like on the, on the quest three, it's useful in spots, right? It's like the, I'm playing a VR game and I like double tap on the headset and it opens up

so I can like see what's around me or whether I just kicked my dog or whatever. But it's not like you don't live in the pass-through. And so for that, I think pass-through works fine. Apple is like default state is pass-through. And I think that might be where it's pushing too hard. There's a really cool app that Gen 2 we posted on the site where it's shortcuts. Yeah. And you can put the shortcuts all around your house.

So you get all these shortcuts by your TV and all this stuff. And that's really cool. It's like, oh, but to use that, you have to word this all the time. Right. So no longer useful. So this is the argument. This is a simulator of what Apple really wants. But they're like, look, camera passer has its uses.

But if you try to pretend it's AR, you're going to run into the problem. We agree with you there. And then the note about eye tracking, and this person has spent a lot of money on eye tracking in their life, was you are overloading an input channel by trying to use it for output, which is fascinating. Way to explain. So your eyes are an input channel. So you're used to taking a lot of information with your eyes or an input channel, and then you overload it by trying to use it as an output channel to control the device. Oh, that's smart. And so the feedback was you hit on something that this industry has been talking about.

for a long time, which is you can't overload your input channels as output channels. And you'll run into this problem with eye tracking because you have to look at what you want to look at. You have to look at what you want to control instead of what you're looking at. Yeah, because historically, eye tracking was just to like enhance it. So like if you kind of glance to one side, the camera would move so you'd see what was ever, whatever was over there. Yeah, that's like, that's foviated rendering.

Right. Yeah. And it didn't really. But that's to save processor cycles. Right. But no, it also made it a smoother experience. It made it like less, oh, I'm just staring at some screens. Oh, yeah, so it hits a blurry.

Yeah, like it made it a nice experience. And even when you do it just on a regular laptop screen, I reviewed way too many Toby laptops once in a time. It was really useful because you could just kind of look at things and it would pop up and make it a little brighter and make it a little easier. But like anytime I would try to like control the computer with it, I was like, oh, I hate this. Yeah. Because I'd like glance at my watch and my character just start running around in circles. Yeah, and this is overloading an input channel is up. So when you use it the way you're describing, for foveated rendering for highlights, right, that make a little brighter, you're enhancing the input channel.

Right. When you use an output channel, you might overload yourself. So this person was like, yeah, in the history of eye tracking, this is a thing that we understand. And then they said, I had it wrong on hand tracking. Oh. The industry believes in hand tracking. They're going to get it right because it is the most natural way of doing things. And there's a lot of work being done.

I keep pointing out. The computer is always watching hands. And the Vision, regardless of that joke, the Vision Pro does misregister a lot of hand input. Also, cannot differentiate between your hands and someone else's hands. Also, you personally look really goofy doing it in the office. It was so good. Wait, hold on.

So if you're just sitting at your desk on the Vision Pro, I can just stick my hands in front of your face and start literally typing on your keyboard. Sure can. Or you can just put your hand in front and click your fingers together and I'll register a click. I'm going to do this to you so much when I see you. I can't wait to do this.

Assuming that I'm wearing the headset. What a good prank. It's a good prank. It's a screw with people. Like, when I say the thing is lonely, it does not contemplate anyone else being around you who is not on their best behavior, which is all the time. All other people are not on their best behavior. Is it just assuming that like the pass-through will suddenly pop on and you'll see David being like, youink? I assume the noise that David's going to make.

That's what I do when I type, yeah. The only AR feature is in it. Specifically, it recognizes David Pearson makes that sound. So anyway, I thought this is all really interesting feedback because people who have been working on this stuff for a long time were like, we like to review, here are the things we think you got right and wrong. And the camera base pass through as a replacement for true AR feels directionally correct to me, right? This might be the ceiling for that. Eye tracking, they're like, yeah, you know, people are going to react to it differently. We will see this is the first big eye tracking at scale that will happen.

And then they're like, you're just wrong in hand tracking. So, see, the fact that, like, it just misregister's input to me is, again, people are going to, by the time you're listening to this, people will have them. By the way, Ijustine has already worn a Vision Pro in a cyber truck. Just immediately. Yes. Like, as soon as the embargo lifted, she was walking out. I mean, she's funny as hell. So, like, I appreciate that she did that.

But, like, some other kind of YouTuber, not I Justine, who is wonderful. Some other kind of YouTuber is going to do the actual thing with the cyber truck and the Vision Pro. And the clock is just ticking. Unsafe. Don't do that. Don't do it. They're not going to listen to us. They're doing it for the views, man. Don't do it for the clicks.

Do something else cool. So we'll see. I'm excited for people to actually get their hands on this outside of just experiencing other people's experiences. And I'm very curious to see how people react to hand and eye tracking in particular. Yeah. Also, if you got one, as you're hearing this on Friday the second, it's the day this stuff is coming on. If you got one, call us and tell us about it. This will be a super fun thing to do on the hotline for the.

next few weeks. I just want to hear people's experiences with the Vision Pro. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us what's cool. Tell us what sucks. Give us your like 60 second review of the Vision Pro literally whenever you want. Call the hotline, send his emails. Yeah. Vergecast at theverge.com. I'm dying to know. You can tell me, tell me I'm wrong,

whatever you want. I'm dying to know how you feel about this product because it is new and that's what's exciting about it, which leads me into the score. So a lot of people have asked me of the score and I will tell you and David in particular will tell you that I drove myself crazy trying to give this thing a score after I'd written the review. Confirmed.

Bonkers. Because I'm the one who says World of No Sevens, and I gave it a seven. So if you don't know World of No Sevens, the thing I say all the time, which is seven is just the default score. It is milk toast. And so if you say World of No Sevens, it forces you to make a very hard choice between six and eight. And I am the person who says this, and I definitely gave this thing a seven. and I tortured myself over that seven. And you got it wrong.

And David thinks I should have given it. You got it wrong. I tend to agree with it. I was genuinely shocked because I didn't participate in the review, but, you know, we did the Vergecast. And so I went as soon as it posted and I click and I scroll down and I saw that seven. And I was like, but we, it felt like a six in the Vergecast that we recorded. This is interesting. Yeah.

And I sat on the Vergecast and I have to own this. Yeah. point deduction. And at that moment in time, and this is 100% true, the score that was entered into our little score database was a six. And I said that knowing that I'd already typed the six into that database. What pushed you back up to a seven? I had a conversation with Viren and Becca, in particular Becca, our wonderful video directors who made this whole review with me and used it a lot in the course of that review. And they reminded me that it was really fun. So it lost a point for inconsistency, gained a point because it's fun as hell.

It lost a point for Incaviren was, we were, like, we were in it. We were like, we opened up our own how we rate page and, like, read our own definitions of the numbers. Like, you're in and obvious with the people for hours upon hours arguing about the dumbest thing. Like, you just, like, fall down the rabbit hole completely. We discussed bringing back decimals, which we got rid of a couple of years. Like, the whole thing. and Viren's line was

we need a number that means fantastic but useless because he's like this is fantastic I have no idea why I want to use this What about the number

that says it's $3,500 $300? Do you know how many you want fun buy a Nintendo Switch and you'll have $3,200 left

isn't that cool? So look like I was at six for a long time it was a six I swear to you was a six And Beck, it was like, but you have had, like, the thing you are doing, the, you were constantly talking about, this thing that you keep coming back to, like, I'm lonely in here, is because you're having fun and you want other people to have fun with you, which is not how I feel about the meta quest, which is like, this is fun.

Like, I'm swinging a batter at. Like, there's not a point where I'm like, look at this thing that is wild that I want you to see, like, the art gallery of web pages that I made in our cafe. It's like, this is great. Like, nothing else can do that right now. The MetaQuest can sort of do it, but they're kind of shape. Like, this is like perfectly locked in place windows, and you can just leave the room and come back. That's your point. It was fun.

It was a full point deduction for the stuff I complained about, and it earned its way back into the seven zone. Because it's not an eight. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say it was never an eight. There was no point was this thing getting an eight. Did it ever go to five? So I was texting with Dan Sefer. Yes.

Wonderful reviews that are number one Dex fan in the world, Dan Sefer. Trader. Dan just left the first. So he was not part of this review. We wish him well on his new journey in life. It's going to be really fun for him. But Dan texted me after the review and was like, seven, huh? And I was like, dude.

And literally, people are jumping out of the woodwork to quote Dan at me throughout this process. Because Dan's quote is, you never regret giving something a lower score. Ever. Like, if you just instinctively pick the lower score and you won't, it's five years from now, you won't have regretted it. You might be like, ah, I gave that stupid thing in eight. Why did I do that? You'll never be like, I judge it too harshly. Like, literally, I'm like walking down the street and people are like, you know what Dan would say.

It's like haunting me. And I will say that's not a like judgment decision. That's not saying like we reflexively hate products. That is like a decade of hardworn experience. Yeah. And this is the mistake that you made, Neelai, is you got sucked in by the thing being fun. Like that's a stupid reason. It's just a stupid reason.

Like this is a $3,500 computer. You don't judge your MacBook on whether it's fun. You judge it on whether it does the things it is supposed to do. And this fundamentally doesn't. There are a lot of things that it is supposed to do that it either doesn't do or doesn't do very well. And it is $3,500. Like, I take the criticism and I, look, I knew what I was buying. I was buying a bunch of people telling me that I did give in a high score, including David on this very podcast.

I knew how this Vergecast would start today when I gave it that. seven. You did. But wait, I just want to point at the tension of this, which I think is both the tension you felt in reviewing this and the reason we all think the Vision Pro is so interesting, is that it is objectively cool and new and interesting, right? Like the Joanna Stern, a friend of the Wall Street Journal made a video and there's a moment in it where she sets two timers and puts them over two different things on her stove. Like, that kicks ass. It's so small and so silly, but it's so cool. And people really responded to it. That is not a reason to buy a $3,500 product or to wear a headset on your face all day.

Which she said. Right. But it is cool. It is undeniably cool. The shortcuts thing you're talking about is like undeniably cool. And I want to live in a world where that is part of my life. I will not wear the headset and I will not buy the headset in order to get that thing. But like that's that tension, right?

Where you have these moments where you're like, oh, this is it. Like they did it. This is it. And then you have to weigh that against. What is this thing I have on my face? What does that mean for like my life? Is this worth the cost? And you even said in the review, right, we review things not just based on like what they might

be someday, but what the thing is in the box. But that is so... But that's not what got at the seven. That's my rule. It's a good rule. It's the right rule. But it's so hard to do, especially in this case, because A, Apple has a longer history of being right about these things than most. So like most of the time, you genuinely should not assume this thing will ever get better for any reason because most of the time it doesn't with Apple it usually does and so you have to believe that more than with most companies but then also it's 3500 times okay so here's how i've been that price thing also wait on my mind another good argument for six if it's a phone review and even in phone reviews now it's like you're just reviewing iPhones for people who buy iPhones you're very rarely

writing a review for somebody with an Android phone except for like blunt curiosity if the camera's good bad. My assumption going into this was that I was not writing buying advice. The people who are buying the Vision Pro buying the Vision Pro whether or not I think it's good of bad. So what was that score speaking? So the score was like, okay, like however many they sold, 80,000, $120,000. The vast majority of people are going to try this thing on.

And my guess is after a while, they're like, yeah, it's seven. And like that is where that came from, right? It kind of works a little time, but oh, man, sometimes I have really a time. Like that exact thing, the reason it's world of no sevens is that. That is why I got there. Because sometimes you're like, oh, this is great. And then sometimes you're like, I'm looking at the, look at the, right? And like that is like a real challenge in there.

It's not broken. The last Apple product I gave a 6 to was the Apple Studio display, whose webcam basically shipped an unusable state. Right. And I was like, this is 6 because this display technology. The panel is fine, but the backlight technology is steam powered. And this camera is effectively broken. and six.

And that was, what, $1,200, $1,300? $1,600. I should have a $1,600. I should have. That's what I was about to say. You scored that thing too high. Yeah. All right.

Maybe I'm just wrong. But I will say a bunch of people pointed out the similarities between what this thing is and what the original Apple Watch was, which I think it's really interesting because you give both a seven, and I think you were right about the Apple Watch

and wrong about this. And I've been trying to figure out what it is. Interesting. I know what it is. Wait, wait. I want to hear what David's theories. I have two theories. One is $3,500. And the other is, I think the first Apple Watch got the form factor almost right

and hadn't quite figured out the use case. But it was like still a nice thing to where I got furious at the first Apple Watch because it didn't tell the time. The screen wasn't on all the time. Like how are you a watch if you don't tell me the time when I look at you? But it like the thing was there, right? It was close enough to being what the thing should be. and it already did some of the things you would want it to.

So it was like, that felt closer to me than this in which the thing itself is nowhere near what it's supposed to be. Not even close. And so that's where it loses me. Like I deduct a full point for absolutely no one thinks this is what this is supposed to look like. Yeah, I will say I feel very vindicated by the modern rereading of the Apple Watch reviews. I got raked over the coals for giving that thing a bad score.

Yeah, it holds up. It really does. And I was like, this thing is a, I believe I used the word bobble. I was like, this thing is a bobble. and you will buy it. And if you buy it, you will like it because people like bubbles. But it is not fashion. It is technology that looks like fashion. And they need to figure out what it's for.

And it took them three generations to get there. And they totally rebooted the software. And I was like, no one will ever. And like for a long time, people were like, you were just unnecessarily harsh. And this time, like literally are screenshots comparing my two reviews. Yeah. Being like, oh, this is the same exact thing. And the only thing I will remind everyone of is, one, I was.

right. I'll always remind you that. No, but two, the path wasn't set when the thing was launched. Right? So being like, this thing happened to the Apple Watch means it will happen to the other thing. They had to adjust. Right. And actually the review is like it adjusts them. Like they take the feedback from the market, from the customers, from the reviewers, and they like make decisions based on it. And one of the big decisions they had to make along the way was we are totally rebooting watchOS to make the interface different to completely decrease our reliance on third-party apps in an app store. You're just telling me your watch review should have been a six. But also Apple with the Apple Watch, and this is true of a lot of Apple things, right? Apple starts by getting the hardware pretty close to right.

And the software is further away. Alex will be joining Dan Sievert in the world beyond. Yeah. Can we just re-review every Apple product we've ever done right now? Let's just rescore them all. I give a lot. Yeah. The watch hardware was very close.

And then the question is, how do we make this thing into what it ought to be inside of this box? And Apple usually gets the box right. In this case, neither one of them is right. Yeah. Well, like, the watch shipped to people and they could use it and they could set it up and they didn't have issues with it. And lots of people bought one. Wait, famously, Karl Lagerfeld could not set his up and wore it around. Do you not know about this?

This is like an old Verchest joke. Carl Lagerfeld was photographed. You know, they gave it to all the fashion people. Yeah, yeah. They photographed Carl Lagerfeld wearing, proudly wearing it with the setup screen on the face. And that's like, we started calling a Lagerfelding where you're just like wearing a dead Apple Watch just as a fashion accessory. That's awesome. But again, that was another reason to give it a seven because it was like a fashion thing, not necessarily a good one, but it was fashion.

And this is just like such a developer kit that I keep them like, I keep thinking about that a lot. Like, it feels like such a developer kit. They just won't say it, man. There was a story in Vanity Fair. A beautifully photographed story in Vanity Fair. It was. Stunning. A photograph story in Vanity Fair.

Tim Cook is wearing the headset. He's blinking. Did you notice this? His eyes are closed. His googly eyes on the front of the headset are closed. He's blinking in the photo. That's very funny. It's fantastic.

They should put that on the website. Anyhow, there's a story in Vanity Fair, and it is, I mean, honestly, a story can be from 10 years. I know Nick Bilton, who wrote it, Nick is a very nice guy. I've had a taco at a party at his house before. Like, he's a very nice guy. But it could have been written 10 years ago about VR. Right. Right.

Like, the line is like, Tim Cook saw himself on the moon. He knew it was the future. Like, that line has been written about Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer. Yeah, you could have just like done find and replace Magic Leap for every time they say Vision Pro at that review. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember a Magic Leap?

Was it wired that ran the story where it? Roni Bromitz was like, I'm hacking the GPU of your brain. Yep. Like, we've just been here, man. And so I think Apple can't say it's a developer kit. They can't place themselves in the long line of companies that have been doing this for a long. They have to say it's finished, which is why they have to have to have entertainment. And they have to do this.

James Cameron is in that many fair piece. Quoted as saying, this will change everything. And it's like, dude, you have done more scuba diving. are than anybody. I have been thinking about that quote specifically more than anything else that's come out of this whole situation because James Cameron is like not generally a guy. I was going to say he's not generally a guy prone to hyperbole, but he did once declare himself king of the world. I don't know if that was hyperbole at some point. At that moment in time. Yeah. But when it comes to technology, he's not usually a guy prone to hyperbole. And so when he's like, no, this changes everything.

And he's specifically talking about the display technology, like, which sounds really, really incredible. I was like, is there something there? Like, have we missed something that James Cameron is seeing that we're not besides like the inside of the headset? It is legitimately amazing display technology. I have nothing but admiration for how hard it was to build those displays. They are genuinely amazing. They are available apparently on the market. The same person who told me at hand tracking being something he believed in was like, you know, META could have bought those. Like they, that was a thing that META had the opportunity to buy. But META's version of headset would have been even more expensive because meta doesn't have M1 chips or M2 chips.

They would have had to go and buy chips with more power and more battery. And they're like, this is, we can't go this way. Right. So Apple uniquely was able to make use of these displays, which are, again, an engineering Marvel. But like, James, they're just better than what you have now. Right? They're just like linearly better than the thing you have now.

Yeah. And that, if you're James Cameron, like, you should be able to see, like, this is the step change that changes at all is like not the thing i really want to like sit him down and be like did they just like cherry pick your quotes here they run apple tv plus man i know like i need i just need to know more from jim jim call me i know you listen to verge cast he does yeah we'll talk about the the sub too jim was a guy i told me about meta he's the source if you're listening to him cook that's not true at all not even like the slightest but true uh a little bit it's it's by the time you're listening to this it is we'll be out i'm sure

some of you are driving your cars wearing it right now. Stop it. Pull over to the side of the road. Apple today, a little bit more, Apple announced, along with the launch of Vision Pro, 600 apps will be at launch, which seems like a good number. It's a lot.

For a new platform, it's a good number. Is it? I think so. I mean, it's fine. It's some apps, but like this is the company that spends a lot of time talking about hundreds of thousands of apps and millions of apps. 600 is good.

I'm going to point out, I once got really roasted for complaining about how few games launched with the Nintendo Switch. Yeah. Granted, I did say it when Zelda came out and it was one of the best games ever made. But like, here's the 600 apps. 600's impressive. 600 is great. 600 is Vision Pro built for spatial computing. It's also going to have all the iPad stuff.

Yeah, 1 million apps, 600 Vision Pro apps. Sure. Which I will just point out is 999,000. $900,600, $900,99,000. $400.400. $400. Yeah. No, that's $100 that's a million.

Yep. Okay, I'm going to do this math. May. Please leave this in. No, do not leave this in. Leave it in. Everyone's going to find Dan if we leave this in. All right, right, right.

Which I'll just point out is $999,400. iPad apps. That's a lot of iPad apps. It's a lot iPad apps. Anyway, among this. 600 is not bad if it's the right 600. But I'll just point out, among the 600 they announced, compatible apps from top cable services,

including Charter Spectrum, Comcast, Xfinity, Cox Contor, Sling TV, and Verizon Fios. Yeah, that's what I want. If you're rocking the Verizon Fios app in space, like, what are you doing, man? Paying your bills. If you buy the space computer and take it out of its little marshmallow

and put on your head. you're like, let's open the Charter Spectrum app. What are you doing, man? Well, you got to pay your bill so you can keep downloading stuff. That is the funniest. And that obviously you're trying to point out. Entertainment. It's entertainment.

It's not Netflix. It's fine. Do you know what those apps stream in? 480P that they lie is 720p. That is the lowest bitrate video you can get, which is hilarious to me. Because this is all buried in the review. I should quick post on the side just to break it out. It will not support VR video on YouTube.

It just like won't do it. Right. And they're like because the VR video on YouTube is too low quality. Apple. So it doesn't have a YouTube app. And if you go try to watch some 360 video on YouTube, it just won't work. The end. Can I say one more weedsy thing and then we can break out of this?

Go. Yeah. It's very weedsy. But people asked us this question a lot and I didn't know the answer when we did the old episode. How does it smell? How does it smell? Okay. It smells like the future, obviously.

The faintest whiff of roasted marshmallows. People ask about the Mac display sharing, and I finally know how it works, which is very complicated. It is basically a 27-inch, like, studio display or iMac display. So you tell your Mac you're sharing to it. Your Mac imagines a 27-inch 5-K display. It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440,

which is a perfect 2-1 scale. That's how a 27-inch iMac works by default. You cannot change it. So a 27-inch iMac display, you can run it at other resolution. and it'll be fine. This one, it says it gives you a low resolution warning. So it wants to run at this 2 to 1 scale.

Then it takes that 5K display and sends it as a 4K video stream to the Vision Pro, which you can then resize it will. So it is not pixel perfect at all. It looks great. I have no complaints about how it looks. But the thing that is happening is that it is imagining a 5K display that a Mac knows how to run at because that is the 27-inch IMac, the 27-inch studio display. It runs the inner.

interface at 2560 by 1440, but if you're running something 4K, it has enough pixels to just do it because it's 5K display. But then the thing that is happening is streaming at 4K to the Vision Pro. So it compresses that and it makes a smaller. It sounds both technologically cool and also like I just hate it from in the same way I hate when people say, yeah, this is 720P streaming. Yeah. When it's secretly 480. Yeah. Or if they're like, this is HD and it's 720.

Lies. Fox. Just putting that out there. Anyway, everyone asks me that question, and that is the answer. And so it is correct that they keep calling it a 4K Mac display. It's actually a 5K Mac display, but it's actually running a 25, 60 by 1440, and whatever it looks fine. And you'll use it unless you need pixel perfect accuracy, in which case, take your face computer off and just look at your screen. There we go.

Six out of ten. That's it. We've got to take a break. We'll be back. We're going to talk for the rest of the year. Come on. We've got to take a break. We got all this stuff to talk about.

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It's been such a long week. The cinnamon toast crunch crash is real, man. It's happening in real time in front of me. Just melting over here. No, it's big news. This may be bigger news than Visionboro. It's bigger news. It will impact more people more directly.

Okay, yeah, that's true. Cause more damage to the economy than you can imagine. Josh Hawley is going to write a bill about it soon. The Universal Music Group, in a fight with TikTok has pulled its catalog from TikTok. Its catalog includes Taylor Swift, Drake, Olivia, Rodrigo, Bad Bunny. Basically, I think you two

is in the mix. Billy Elish is on here. Harry Stiles, Justin Bieber, Adele. All of them. Universal CEO, Lucian Grange, who, by the way, was profiled in the New Yorker this week, talking about his worries about the music industry in Generalade Valley, obviously ahead of them pulling their music on TikTok. They said TikTok has offered them horrible terms and is trying to bully them.

This is bad news. And it's gone. If you go look at Taylor Swift on TikTok right now, her catalog is gone. All those videos, all of those TikTok videos that have Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodriguez and all those other arson, copyright notices. Yeah. And there's just a huge portion of TikTok that is now silent. It's nuts.

And I assume this is ultimately just a negotiating takatik on both sides. And this feels to me sort of like a carriage dispute with cable companies where it's like, It's actually in everybody's interest to resolve this and they will, but Universal is clearly trying to prove that it is willing to pick this fight. Because I think TikTok has reached a point that, like, I've been thinking a lot about Roku reading about this, because there was this long period of time where Roku was like every streaming company's favorite streaming platform because it didn't have competitive content. It wasn't an advertising business.

It was just the place, people bought hardware to go to apps. and that was perfect for all the apps, right? And so everybody worked with Roku, even when they wouldn't work with each other. When Apple and Amazon were briefing, they still both worked with Roku. And then Roku got big enough that it said, we are going to start selling advertising on our own,

and we're actually going to start making our own content, and we're going to start competing with you, but we're so powerful now that there's nothing you can do about it. And Roku started sort of just eating chunks of that market away, and it had gotten so big that there was nothing any of these players could do about it. And I think TikTok believes it is now that powerful. That TikTok grew so much on the back of essentially like goodwill and free marketing for all of these record labels and all the music being out there and became this like center of culture. And now is turning around and saying like, look how powerful we are.

You're going to play by our rules now. And I think Universal is one of the few companies probably in a position to actually hold fast against that. Especially because of its table of artists. And Universal, to be clear, is a big old-school bully record label. Like, Lucy and Grange is a very good operator. He has led the music industry through Universal, through many shifts, and he gets what he wants. He's the one who, when fake Drake showed up on YouTube, it's Lucy and Grange who pushed YouTube and Google into being like, here are a responsible AI things.

And here's a new monetization system for AI-generated music on YouTube. I don't know that's great for the world. It's great for Universal. music. Yes. Right. And that's his job and he's going to, but he has shown the ability to bully platforms using his gigantic catalog of artists.

And the artists all like him. And there's hardly anybody with that specific kind of leverage against these platforms. And he's, he's going after AI in this. Yes. Specifically, he wants protection against gender of AI on this platform just as he has it on YouTube. I think the difference between TikTok and YouTube in this context is that YouTube is a music listening platform. And this is long confused, like YouTube itself. Like YouTube, Google,

very data-driven organizations. Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, used to say things like, we're a music service. Because if you look at the data, the thing people do the most on YouTube is they listen to music. Right. There's literally a stat on YouTube that is most watched non-music video video on YouTube. Like that's how big music is. It's like Mr. Beast keeps breaking the non-music video record. Yeah. Because that's YouTube is music videos slash everything else. Right.

Oh, right. And like the lo-fi beats girl. Like people turn on YouTube and they just like get access to music. Yeah. And so YouTube is streaming and they, you know, YouTube music exists and they've grown this thing. And YouTube knows that, you know, Google executives now will tell you YouTube is a licensing product.

Google searches a fair use product. YouTube is a licensing product. They know they need these relationships with the labels to preserve the existence of YouTube, especially because what people do the most is they just listen to music. TikTok is a discovery platform, right? And that is where their power comes from. Yeah, but I think, I think music is still, like, intrinsic to its success to where it has to listen. But TikTok to Spotify is the pathway there.

Right, for music. But I'm saying for TikTok, the reason people go watch this stuff is because it's music. Right. But if you're TikTok, what the data is showing you is people discover. new songs on TikTok and then they go to Spotify and listen to them. Right. And you're saying to the music industry, you will not be able to break new artists to a younger generation without us. So you believe that you have all this. Whereas YouTube is looking at its data and saying, if the music goes away, all of this is gone. Right. But I think UMG is saying you need us

because otherwise the kids won't have any content to do their dances too. But they will have other, this is the TikTok bet. Right. If you're TikTok, right, if you're TikTok, this is how you end up here. You're saying there will be other music. Yeah, they're hoping that somebody else is as big as Taylor Swift, which is like, bold. Travis Kelsey is going to start his own record. Right. The Super Bowl is in two weeks.

This is a bad time to not have Taylor Shift on your platform. Well, it's an interesting one, though, because like the three names we put in our story, which I think is sort of fascinating, are Taylor Swift, Drake, and Olivia Rodriguez, right? I think Taylor Swift obviously does not need TikTok. TikTok is more in need of Taylor Swift than Taylor Swift is TikTok. I don't think that's arguable. Drake, same. Olivia Rodriguez,

interesting case. Olivia Rodriguez, very famous artist, came up on Disney Channel, had lots of things, but also her music broke in a big way on TikTok. Would Olivia Rodriguez be as big as she is now without TikTok? Who knows? Right?

And she's huge. And I think you're right that the bet TikTok is making is that everyone who is not an A-plus-plus list artist needs TikTok more than TikTok needs them. because there is just an infinite supply of up-and-coming musicians all over TikTok everywhere. Are you going to break the little boothing guy without universal music? Like, maybe you are, right? What's the other, is TikTok just going to do sea shanties?

Yes. Maybe. You know, like, do you remember Ricky Desktop? We did a profile. We did a profile to see Ricky Desktop. The DJ guy. He did the dice beat, the boat beat, the chicken wing beat. And then he was like, now I'm a real producer.

And he won't talk to us anymore. Ricky desktop, if you're out there, man, I hope you made it, dude. Chicken Wing Beat was fired. It was. But like, that's TikTok's bet is there's an infinite supply of new things to discover. And Universal's bet is you need our art. Like, we have the stars. That's why I think this is fascinating.

Like, historically, I just thought it was really interesting, both because what David said earlier about how this is like the fights with the carriage fees, it's the same thing. Like, oh, we're in a new entertainment age where now these. fights are no longer happening between TV companies and big studios. They're happening between music companies and big social media platforms. And that's just like, we're in a whole new space. And it's still rapidly developing. And now you have this whole generation of kids.

And it's like, okay, they're going to stay on this platform that is doing their girl Taylor dirty, which is certainly a messaging that UMG can and has pushed. Yeah. Or are they going to? Are you going to protect Taylor Swift against AI? That's what all universal has to say. the TikTok's right answer right now is like no well and given i mean a taylor swift is taylor swift but also what's been happening with this like the the images the non-conceptual

generative i stuff of taylor stuff on twitter like this is uh i i would not purport to say that universal timed this intentionally and perfectly but boy if they did did they time it perfectly their contract was up on january 31st they they the contract was right ages ago yeah the timing just worked very well for them but uh But it did, and I think it is all of these things are very much coming together. And also one other wrench to throw in here is TikTok is relentlessly trying to close the TikTok to Spotify pipeline with TikTok music, which it is continuing to work on and continuing to test and continuing to roll out all over the world.

And so TikTok is becoming this thing where if it works and if TikTok music works, it's going to just like take the whole music industry inside of it. And so if you're universally, you're like, okay, if we sign a, bad deal now and TikTok music hits, it suddenly becomes a really bad deal. Because now there's no, there's no out, there's nowhere to go because we've lost a whole generation of music listeners to this one app and service. Can I just, can I offer you some very, I just realize this, a very funny media inside baseball drama tidbit. Sure. The New Yorker this week has a profile of Lucien Grange, Connie Nest. Wired's cover this month is Z-show, the,

CEO of TikTok. And they're just like battling it out across the covers of Conday Nest. It's pretty good. It's very good. But that's like where we're at, right? Like these people are out in public trying to advocate for themselves. I think TikTok is in danger. Look, I've called the top on this episode on camera pastor and eye tracking. I feel like we're close to calling the top on TikTok. Wow. Really? Yeah. If you, TikTok, you know, it's a pandemic phenomenon. They didn't just grow through like good vibes. They bought billions of dollars. of Facebook advertising to get app installs. And that really pop, was it musically?

It was music. They bought musically. And, you know, they've got AI on the recommend. But, like, this is a pandemic phenomenon that felt really good in that time. Everyone's together. We're all doing these dances. Like, we create cultural moments. We need to escape life and all we have to do is flick.

Yeah. Right. And here's all these people talking. We're all baking bread. The kids are doing call and responses in department stores. Remember, you know, like they would all yell the thing. And they yell the other thing. Like, what was it?

It was dirty. Which is great. That's what I love. Yeah. It was just fun. Like, kids are terrifying their parents with this app is like, that's what we're here for. That's why the Verge exists.

And now it's in the middle of what Corey Doctoro would call the inshittification cycle. Right. Right. So TikTok is no longer full of organic, wonderful content from people who are bored in the pandemic. It's full of people trying to sell you stuff. Right? Including TikTok.

More so than you. YouTube, right? YouTube, you can have AdSense and you can just make videos and YouTube runs the pre-rolls and you get some money and that's the end of that. The TikTok creator fund does not work that way and it like doesn't even pay that much money. So if you get success on TikTok, you immediately start looking for a brand deal. Right. And you just see this thing happen so fast. And so it has just become like less good feeling in the same way that I would I would say Instagram has had the exact same. problem. Like, Instagram is influencers. It's a catalog. Yeah, right. And TikTok is just headed that way and they've added the TikTok shop. Now they're doing this thing where they're incentivizing horizontal videos that are over a minute long to compete with YouTube and they're going to add this music service. And you're like, you're getting farther and farther away from the thing that made it worth spending billions of dollars sheet app installs. Well, they're doing the Elon Musk. I was trying to do an everything app. Yeah, maybe. I just think like when you open it, it's no longer like,

Like, here's a bunch of delightful things that are, like, it, and maybe I just need to reset my algorithm or something. No, it's, it is what it is. I mean, and now, like, I think the TikTok shop is the thing, right? Like, if you want to point at one thing, if you want to call the top, it's the TikTok shop. By the way, to be clear, I'm not, I'm saying, I feel comfortable saying we might be close to calling the top. No, Nelai called the top.

You heard it here first, everybody. Done. Four out of ten on TikTok from Eli Patel. But, no, the shop, not only did the TikTok shop. come in and all of a sudden two out of three videos you saw was somebody trying to sell you something from the shop. John Herman and New York Mag wrote a really good piece about he did a live stream after putting a used pencil in the TikTok shop and got thousands of viewers because TikTok just

absolutely boosts engagement through the roof as long as you're selling something. And now TikTok is running a test we destroyed this week where it's actually identifying products in videos with AI and offering purchase links to them. So not only is it incentivizing everybody to deliberately sell you stuff, it is going to sell you stuff even when you don't mean to sell stuff. And all of the incentives on this platform now are going to be to sell you stuff from the TikTok shop, which by all accounts is being wildly subsidized and everything's very cheap and it's all sort of sketchy and weird. But like that is going to break this platform faster than anything else. I have a question about the shop. Do you guys like when you see the little orange button, do you just scroll past it as quick as possible?

When I see the live indicator or when I see the TikTok shot, I'm gone. Except there's one that gets me every time and it's wrecked my whole algorithmic situation. It is constantly trying to sell me off brand DeWalt batteries. And you're like, ooh. I get so many TikTok shop live streams for like, you can buy five DeWalt, six amp hour batteries for just 20 bucks. Look at how well they are. And it's like, those are going to light my house on fire? And I just keep watching.

They'd be like, are they going to light on fire in this video? And it's also just QVC feel. Like any time I see the live ones, I'm like, I don't watch QVC when I had like television. Why am I going to do it on a TikTok? I got to buy some batteries. It's in my brain. You're thinking about it.

Yeah, they got you. It's not even QVC. It's just a guy being like, look at these. Look at how cheap these batteries are. Yeah, it's not even as good as QVC. Like, QVC tries a lot harder than this. But I also think like this is the same thing. This is TikTok feeling itself, right?

I think Instagram, somebody wrote this. I think it was John Herman, but if it wasn't, I'm stealing this thesis from somebody else. So to whoever it was, I'm sorry. I forgot who you are. but Instagram has sort of identified this same thing where it's like what if we made everything for sale but has done it very slowly and carefully because there is a sense of like we don't want to ruin the experience or at least not ruin it very quickly TikTok doesn't give a shit about that TikTok is just like oh you like our app shopping now and there is this sense of like TikTok I think feels like it is inevitable now like it has won in a way that it can now turn on anything it can change the algorithm, it can say, oh, we're doing horizontal videos now. It's literally going 90, Nilai.

TikTok is going, literally going 90. Oh, my God. I'm not ready to do that at all. No, I'm not even saying in reality, the app is going 90. They want you to make horizontal videos. So one of my favorite things to do, this is going to make me sound very pretentious when I'm saying. Whenever I leave America, I like to read books about America. It's just like a thing.

I also tuck into some Tocqueville as soon as I leave. like that. I'm imagining Neli just like unfurling the Pledge of Allegiance on the plane. Not like that. So one of my very favorite books is called The Conquest of Cool. It is about the American advertising in the 60s after all the GIs came home and they got money and that's when the counterculture started. And it is if you like Mad Men, you should read this book because it is the thesis of

madmen, right? We're going to take the counterculture. We're going to take rebellion. We're going to repackage it and sell it to people. And that means Americans, just our culture is like kind of sarcastic and ironic all the time. Right. Like we sell rebellion here in America and like selling out it. This is the most sellout our culture has ever been.

But it's still like, ah, you sold that. Like, we're just not a sincere people here in the United States of America. Other countries are very sincere, which is why I always read about our culture when I go. Because the contrast is real. And so you can see a little bit of that over commercialization because Instagram. is an American company that feels very American. Like, it understands the thing that it is, and it knows it can't just slam shopping into your face culturally.

The designers, the product managers, Adam, like, there's all people who live here. Like, it's an American product in that way that's American. They try to be very global. Like, Instagram is huge all over the world. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying there's a cultural aspect to the product's design that is reflective of the fact that you cannot just walk up to an American and be like, buy the shit. like it just kind of does it sometimes just doesn't work right like there's there's a little bit of

ironic detachment that we accept here that we expect here TikTok is just it rep it is a Chinese company and I think there's a little bit of that like the reason there's everything apps in China if you go to those places are ultra commercialized in a very different kind of way and I think I'm not even saying it's good or bad I'm just saying that it's a different culture no you you can feel it because I think I also see it with how we're very reviews driven in this culture. Like in America, you go on Amazon, you go to places. You still are checking like, okay, does this have a good score? Am I going to get this?

And that shop app is like... So there's none of it? None of that. It's just like, you want to buy it, right? Yeah, there's just a different vibe. And again, I don't... I really am being careful. I don't mean to say, like, in a xenophobic way,

I'm like literally just identifying a cultural difference and how the commercial content is presented to you in this app that I think is reflective of something else. When you look at apps like Shian and Timu and like Wish back in the day and like that vibe is a lot of that comes from China and is very much percolating all over the US now, right? Like there were all these years where all these different kinds of companies tried to make this influencer driven shopping work, which has been huge in China for years, right? Like a person will get on camera and just talk about products they like and they sell millions of dollars. And that has never been a thing in the U.S. And it is like rapidly becoming one because that portion of culture and commercial life is very much been exported to the U.S. And I think it's happening really fast.

Yeah. But it's just QVC. Sort of. So it's just like sort of. Yeah. But it's a really different generation, right? QVC is different actually. I think it's fine.

I was watching QVC in the lobby of. a hotel recently. It's a rock in life. Highs and lows. So much excitement. Sign in the Apple security NDA for the Vision Pro watching QVC in the hotel lobby. Right. Hyes and lows.

And they were selling electric snowblower with a cord. And the poor woman had to be like, this cord is so convenient. And it was like just amazing. It was like some of the most amazing performance I've ever seen. I was like, screw the Oscars. like, find this woman. This is the best actress in America. And like, yeah, TikTok has some of that element to it.

But a lot of it's just like showing you stuff. Like there's, there isn't that. That performative, like, isn't it the best? Like Amazon has more QVC in it. And I'm telling you that I think that is like reflective of the sort of just like detachment you need. Yeah. Like it's authentic, right?

It's like very American authentic in its way. Oh, but it's not. It obviously isn't. But that's what I mean. Yeah. There's, you have to build a little bit of artifice in our culture to go dead into selling. Right. Right.

In other cultures, you don't. And that's just a cultural difference. And it's interesting to David's point to see that come through in the apps. What's really interesting is meta doesn't operate in China. So we have not sent that back the other way, which is just like also fascinating and it's good. I think for good reason they don't operate in China, right? Like they don't want to give data to the Chinese government. Google doesn't operate in China for the same reason.

Apple does. Interesting. So this moment for TikTok where I'm saying close to calling the top, I wonder if that will be part of it too, where their arrogance about what they are and what they represent to this culture is going to run into their ideas

about what will work. Yeah. I think that's right. Right. And to run into sort of the essential nature of like how Americans wish to consume advertising is going to be really interesting because it's not like the TikTok users

aren't already complaining about TikTok shop. Right. Like they already don't like it. And now you're going to take Taylor Swift away and her label boss is going to say they won't protect her from AI clones of her voice. Like that's a, it's a dangerous position. And there are so many. Yeah. Okay.

That's enough TikTokin. Yeah. Killing it. This is the worst. I hate it. I hate it so much. I have been on such a good, healthy, clean eating diet and exercise. And this is last week just reviewing this thing.

I'm just like, give me the sugar. It's a real. I think, like, everybody, there's a version of this that is very much like when you had like finals week in college. Yeah. And like the whole rest of your life just sort of collapses around you. That's what Neli has been through for the last seven days, except in a headset. That was like, you would see him and the rest of the team that worked on it.

And you, yeah, yeah, it was like, oh, you guys are in finals. Yeah. And now I have senioritis. Let's drink some Miller. I'm never doing any work again. All right. All right. We got to take a break.

We're right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era.

Say goodbye. to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics.

But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means?

to the elected officials and what it means to the people. So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin.

Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain drops every weekday

afternoon. Okay, we're back. Lightning round. sponsored by Cinnamon Toast Crouch. Do we have any individual sponsors to let me around this week? I got some emails last week. Individual listeners who wanted to sponsor letting around, Liam. I've asked our sales team to reach out. Oh, my God. If you're an individual listener of the show and our sales team reaches out to you,

set the highest price you can think of. $50 million. But also, if you just Venmo Neli $10, we'll do it. It's fine. I guess it's the other way around. Our sales team should set a high price. I don't know how advertising works. That's why I haven't been able to sell the lightning around to anyone.

Give us money. I'm handing her, I'm giving it away to Smeg, left and right. You want a weird old fridge? Smeg. Yeah, it's weird that smeg has not reached out yet. So strange. That's a weird name to choose. Actually, one of my favorite TikTok videos I've seen recently is a guy I refurbished his fridge.

Really? And I think they know, it's like they're listening to me. So, show them some fridge videos. They're listening. All right, Kranz, what you got? I'm going to be mean. and do two. I haven't reviewed a giant headset this week, so I'm going to be selfish. We'll allow it. And do too. So my first one is streaming stuff, which is Hulu is cracking

down on password sharing. It's been a while, but they said, yeah, we're in on this too. We also want more of your money, which means more of you need to use your passwords, sign in. David, how are you feeling about that? This sucks. So I forget where I first heard this. I think it was on, somebody on the town podcast, which is a very good podcast that everybody should listen to, who was saying that we as society screwed up by not being angrier when Netflix did this, because we all just kind of rolled with it. We were like, oh, yeah, Netflix isn't going to let you share your Netflix password. That sort of makes sense.

And then it worked. And everybody else is like, oh, dope, we can do that too. We should have been so much angrier at this because this sucks and is bad and is just shaking users down for every penny they can get from them and we've just all kind of allowed it to happen. And I can't get mad now that Hulu's doing it because I didn't get mad when anybody else did it, but I wish I had.

I should have been angrier. We all should have. Can I tell you a text I got literally as we've been podcasting? It's from my sister. It's a screenshot of Netflix and it says, looks like our Netflix jig is up.

This is real. Alex is looking at it. It's amazing. My version of this specifically is Hulu. I have an incredibly insecure password on my Hulu because I haven't changed it in probably a decade because there

I mean there honestly must be 30 people out there in the world using my Hulu account including at least one ex-girlfriend I've been married for a long time now like it's it's bad times coming for a lot of people Sharing Hulu passwords is how I found out a friend had a baby

because I was like where's all this baby content coming from this is too much and I was like oh she still got my password that's rude stop watching baby stuff. Make a new account. So Amazon also launched ads this week, right? Yeah, Amazon, like it really feels like it really feels like between last week and this week, we're really like fully swung into the dark ages of streaming. We're fully in that moment where like it sucks because it sucks. This is when the cable bundle just like comes roaring back. It's here, right?

No, it's not here. You can't just be like, I'll, I mean, this is why Apple's announcing the charter spectrum app and the vision. I was like, you can. If you like, I, I like, I like, I like, Verizon, is like, would you like Disney Plus and Hulu? Yeah. For like a little less money. And maybe we'll throw in Apple TV. No, I want like an old school cable box app now. Give me a grid guide, start playing stuff as soon as I open it.

I mean, this is just Tubey. We're about to have the CEO of Tubeb undercover. So I'll just ask her if this is what's happening. It is. But man, I wish one of these services would be like, all right, we're just doing it. All the contents in 4K and it's everything. The Apple TV kind of does that. But it's not everything.

They don't have a lot. Even baseball on Apple TV Plus isn't in 4K. And they own it. That's because they're doing sports. If they weren't doing sports, it's everything. The MLS isn't in 4K in Apple TV Plus, and they literally own it. They're going to get to doing 180-degree video of soccer before they stream it in 4K to a TV. God, that's real.

I 100% believe that. By the way, Addie called this out yesterday, and I didn't mention it in this review. Sorry to talk with the Vision program. Apple keeps on them 360 videos, and they are 100% 180-degree videos. If you turn around, it's just black. And they're like, but it's a 360-degree. It's like, no, you have to go all the way around. Did you show them the Michelle Obama video?

I can't. Why do you think I was trying to watch YouTube VR, dude? Relive the moment. I was like, again, a million years ago, a little baby, Eli Patel interviewed Michelle Obama at the White House with VR cameras. I was so jealous of that video. And we're just reliving it again. We're just reliving.

They're like, well, a new frontier of immersive entertainment. I was like, no, I was with the first lady in a circle. You look all around. You could watch Trey Shallahorn, our executive producer, being like, ramp it up, just like our current producer is doing right now. Six out of ten. It's great. Alex, what was your other one? But yeah, my other lighting round is, so Amazon was going to buy I-Robot, the RoboVat company, and the EU said no, can't do that.

Yeah. So they pulled out. The CEO of I-Robot, Colin Engel is gone. and 350 people are getting laid off. Oh, no. The companies like, and it sucks. And Jin Tui, our incredible reviewer of everything smart home, wrote a really lovely piece this week just being like, they were doing it. They were doing all the cool stuff.

And they're having to compete with companies like Ufi, who is owned by a bigger company. Like all of the other big robovaks are owned by companies in China with lots and lots of money behind them. And I robots out there being like, we're going to figure out robotics in the home all by ourselves with no money. But yeah, so it's kind of a bummer. It's unclear what's going to happen with IROBOT because it seems like they really needed that acquisition for the influx of cash because in order to compete with their competitors,

they either have to make their already very expensive robovacs more expensive or they have to knock or like they need money. Okay, so I'll say two things about this. One, the reasoning that IROBOT and Amazon gave was we see no pathway to approval in the EU, which is now whatever. everyone says.

Yes. And, you know, the EU's argument was Amazon sells these vacuums. They're going to buy this vacuum company and prioritize their own vacuums against other vacuums. You can feel about that however you want. Amazon, just like every other company, is doing layoffs and cost cutting. And Dave Limp, the old head of hardware is gone and Panas Penae for Microsoft is in, and they're cutting that whole division down.

There's a part of me that says blaming the Europeans is a very convenient excuse to not randomly buy a robotic vacuum company. It's certainly possible. For a smart home strategy that has not panned out for Amazon. Yeah. Like, it doesn't, their strategy just doesn't make sense. So I'm just saying, like, it's great to blame the EU, and I encourage you to blame the Europeans at any given time.

The EU culture is so broken, they have no apps. Just putting that out there. Well, there's also, there's a weird thing happening where, like, the Roomba was a genuinely, like, groundbreaking thing. I robot has made a lot of really good products for a really long time. That thing, to your point, Alex, is becoming completely commoditized, right? Like you can get a pretty good, it's not as good as the best Roomba, but a pretty good robot vacuum for like less than $200 now. Yeah.

These things are getting cheap really fast. And then the other thing was, I robot's whole idea was like we are based on the knowledge that we're getting and the understanding that we have of your home, literally because we have a thing that's in there mapping where your chairs are. We're going to be able to understand your home in a uniquely powerful way. and we're going to be able to do things with it. Like, remember when this got announced and all of a sudden, everybody was panicked about Amazon having the literal floor map of my house? Like, that's a real thing.

But there's also a ton that a company like Amazon with its resources can do with that. If, like, Nila is saying, you believe that Alexa and robots and ring and all this stuff. Like, you can see how it all comes together. But it seems increasingly clear that Amazon has just decided that's not a winning strategy for Amazon. Well, we have not heard a word from Panas Phenay yet.

Yep. He's got to do it. He's not a retiring man. He's a very aggressive personality. He wants to win. I'm dying to hear what his vision for all this is. We know what Dave Limps' vision was. He has been on Decoder.

We've talked to him lots and lots. But he never actually brought Ring and Alexa and all this other stuff together in a cohesive way. They're very separate ecosystems. One of my favorite things on Amazon is they run Ring and Blink, two different home security camera systems that don't talk to each other. It's such a mess. It's just utterly bizarre to me. Talk about QVC. The Blink QVC commercials are incredible.

If you ever watch one, it's just like, these cameras are run on batteries. Like what is happening here? I think you have a beautiful future. It's a QVCOS. I would do so well. I can speak directly to the American psyche. By the way, the Europeans have one app. It's called Spotify.

Apple hates it. That's what I got for you. By the way, the other thing I want to say, I feel very badly for the people who are going to lose her jobs. And I hear an argument on the world that's like, if you don't allow these exits, all these people lose her jobs, I will just remind everyone that what happens when big companies by smaller companies is that they lay everyone off and the companies fail and they go away anyway. Yeah. It's one of those things where I don't know, like, it seems like IA Robot was always kind of like not do when great. This was probably always going to happen regardless of who bought them. And now it's just like, well, we don't have to hide.

We can't hide behind that anymore. We're laying these people off. The CEO is leaving. The Amazon I bought this company six months or nine. they would have laid off 300 people. Yeah. Warner Brothers, discovery about Warner Brothers.

They just keep getting rid of them. Yep. Mergers are bad, is my general argument that I will keep making. The Europeans have it right there. They're good at that. But I do think there's a little bit of opportunistic undoing of this deal. Like, that's a good theory. I like that theory.

Yeah. All right, David, what's hers? There's so many I want to talk about, but I will avoid talking about top-level domains for one day. That was going to be mine. Okay, you can have that one. I'll talk about. Snap, which I think today, Thursday, announced that it is recalling and refunding every single pixie drone that it sold because of a problem with the batteries.

And I just want to sort of briefly mourn Snap interesting hardware company, which I believe is dead. There was just one drone, right? Yeah, it was called the Pixie. It was like, we had a great video about it. Alex Heath made a really cool thing in like a weird carnival looking building. His joy as it like flew out of his hands. It's delightful and it's such a cool idea. It was essentially like autonomous little yellow drone that could land in your hand and fly around and take pictures of you.

And like it makes perfect sense for what Snap is trying to do. Snap also sort of relentlessly trying to make spectacles a thing but has been very quiet about that for a while now. I just there was a there was a minute. That's not true. There were a lot of minutes where I believed Snap was like a sneaky company that was going to in a lot of really big ways. And I am mourning the end of that thesis a little more every single day.

But RIP The Pixie, which flew apparently too high and too hot and too fast. And its batteries explode. It's amazing that Instagram and meta got there faster with the Raybans than Snap did it with the spectacles. Well, I think money had something to do with that.

I'm sure money had something to do with it, but people are lining up for those spectacles. Like Snap was. is a big platform and it never made the turn out of teens messaging to whatever the next thing is. Like they invented the filters. Yeah. I mean, do you remember how long the joke went that Evan Spiegel was the chief product officer at Facebook in addition to being the CEO at Snap?

Like, it was true for a long time. And it turns out the product he needed to invent was advertising revenue. That is still much better at that than Evan Spiegel. All right. Mine is top-level domains. Yeah, buddy. Yeah. I'm so excited about this story, especially because it's such a bad top-level domain.

It's not great if you know anything about the internet. So if you are a huge nerd like me or Kranz, you have a lot of local- Not me. David. David's not nerdy enough. Absolutely. There's one thing I know is that Krans and I are navigating to more local devices on our network than David can even contemplate.

David's out there being like, this pixie. drone's amazing. Right. I'm outside, you know, driving cool cars and picking up chicks and you guys are just like 192.168. Let's go. So if you have configured

a router, if you, like me, have a little Raspberry Pi Tomogachi doing a home bridge situation. If you're like Kranz, and you operate a questionably legal flex server. It's legal. For the local community. I still don't have the password. I'm just

I feel like Kranz and you've been ripping Blu-rays to your flex server. Over a decade. Very legally. You know, you got to type 192.168. Whatever to get to your, right? And sometimes you can fudge it with a dot local domain. There's all the stuff you can do. And sometimes it doesn't work.

So I can. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, incredible name for this organization that we do not talk about enough. Did not know that's what that stood for. That this company, It's a long story, but it's just amazing. They got themselves to I can, you know? They just reverse engineer the acronym.

The Internet Corporation for Sign Names and Numbers has proposed a new top-level domain for devices on your network. So instead of typing 192.168, you will type whatever. Dot internal. Nil. Not enough. Hard pass. Not too much. The other choice, my friends, was dot private.

They should have put a pearl on there. They ultimately chose dot internal, as it found, quote, dot private may carry the unintended imputation of privacy. I don't know, man. Yeah. I'm just saying dot local was sitting right there. Dot internal. Get out. Like my home bridge is homebridge.com.

You can't, I'm happy to tell it to you because if you try to go to it, you'll go to your home bridge. This works. I'm so excited to hack, that's like a hack. That's like a, that's like a bonjour hack or whatever. Yeah. This is like a different, like an actual top level domain that will mean this thing on the internet. And they went with dot internal. Because dot private.

Yeah, it's too much. The implication would, is privacy. Not the other thing. I think we found actually we're. not the nerdiest people, it's ICANN. Anyway, it's not done yet. It's not happening. You can go to the I can't website and leave comments. Please behave yourselves. Wink, wink. It's ridiculous. I love it. I like that people have so much stuff on their own networks

that this is a thing that people used to insist that no one would ever have anything on their own network. You know what else you could have done as the TLD? It's dot network. What a crazy idea that would have been? Yeah. My stuff. My stuff, I think is the one. My dot stuff. My dot stuff.

Yeah. Behind firewall. David. Behind firewall. No girls allowed. That's my local network. It's very good. Someone's going to write in and correct me on how dot local actually works, but I know it's

not an official TLD. That's why I'm saying it. I will say in the abstract, I love the idea of having a name for your local stuff instead of all of the IP address nonsense. I memorized all of those IP addresses so long ago. It feels like a U problem. I don't want to have to go back and redo that. I need to know where my doorbell is at all times.

I'm sorry. Here's how dot local works. Dot locals, a special use domain named reserved by the internet engineering task force, the IATF, the rivals to ICANN. I don't know. Sharks and jets, baby. I think they should fight.

And it is not allowed to be a top level domain. Oh. It has been reserved by the IATF. And if ICAN comes and takes it. That's a task force, baby. All right, that's, that's, I, I'm sorry. It has been a very long week for me. The cinnamon toast crunch, knee lies.

It's in the house. Look, I love you all. Thank you for listening to the Vergecast or watching it. I'm sure you have some complaints to leave in the comments. Just do it. Just engage. Come back and engage again tomorrow. And next time you're in a meeting, if there's just two of you there and then a third person

joins, just say, that's a task force, baby. I'm sorry, but you knew it. you were getting. That's it. That's the Vergecast. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.