The Vergecast - Jack Dorsey’s Square, Inc. buys Tidal / Microsoft Mesh and the future of Microsoft Teams / Apple not switching to USB-C iPhones

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk to Billboard's Micah Singleton about Jack Dorsey’s Square, Inc. buying a majority stake in Jay-Z’s streaming service Tidal. Verge senior editor Tom Warren joins the show to discuss the announcement of Microsoft's Mesh mixed reality platform and the various updates to Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and more. Further reading: Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine backed by independent FDA committee Long COVID patients say they feel better after getting vaccinated  Vaccine centers embrace stickers and selfie stations  Countries are polluting like it’s 2019 again: Global CO2 emissions came roaring back as pandemic-induced restrictions loosened Jack Dorsey’s Square, Inc. is buying a majority stake in Jay-Z’s streaming service Tidal Square Is Acquiring a Majority Stake in Tidal for $297M NFTs, explained Microsoft Mesh feels like the virtual future of Microsoft Teams meetings  Microsoft Teams will soon let you pretend to be a news reporter during meetings Microsoft’s new Intelligent Speakers deliver its promised meeting room of the future Microsoft Teams is getting end-to-end encryption support Microsoft’s new Outlook calendar board view looks a lot like Trello Microsoft Edge gets a speedy startup feature and vertical tabs Microsoft’s Windows 10 UI overhaul continues with new system icons Google Workspace picks up new features designed for remote work Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Plus review: built for business A folding iPhone could be coming in 2023 Apple not switching to USB-C iPhones in the near future, according to Ming-Chi Kuo iPhone 13 might finally bring a smaller notch and faster screens Arizona advances bill forcing Apple and Google to allow Fortnite-style alternative payment options Epic Games is buying Fall Guys creator Mediatonic OpenHaystack is a new open-source tool that lets you create DIY AirTags on Apple’s Find My network Exclusive: this is the Sonos Roam, coming in April for $169 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Micah Singleton from Billboard joins to talk about Square buying title. Tom Warren talks to us about all the Microsoft news this week, and we get into some Apple rumors and what is going on with the App Store in Arizona. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. 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 and your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Rochast, the flagship podcast of high-end streaming services. Great. I'm excited. I'm your friend Eli. Dieter Bone is here. I'm your non-fungible friend. It's true. You're irreplaceable. We have a fun show. Tom Warren is here.

Hello, that. We have a lot of Microsoft news talk about. And for our first segment, Notable Verge expat, Michael Singleton is here. Billboard reporter, Micah, how you doing? I'm good, man. How you doing? I am doing all right. I'm excited to have Mike on for the first segment because I'm just going to say it, SquareBot title, which is just a nonsense phrase. And Micah's going to explain what's going on. But first, as always, I want to start with COVID and vaccine news, the most important story in the world. Our science team continues to do a great job of it. As you probably know, I hope you know, the FDA has authorized the one dose Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine that can be stored at room temperature. That's a big deal. The FDA authorized it. An independent FDA committee authorized it. We've got that story on the site.

If you're interested in knowing more about that vaccine, I encourage everyone to get vaccinated. That vaccine is a big deal. It can narrow some of the gaps in the vaccine. vaccines that we've seen. We have a long story about that and how that might play out. COVID long haulers. People have had COVID for a long time. There's a surprising number of them. They're starting to say they feel better after getting vaccinated. We have a story about that. I always talk about second order effects of the pandemic. One of them that I think is just really interesting and sort of clever is vaccine centers are starting to embrace stickers and selfie stations and make getting vaccinated a cultural moment. That's a big change. We've got to start about that. As the pandemic comes to a closed, people are getting vaccinated, CO2 emissions are coming back to 2019 levels. That's something to keep an eye on. And lastly, on the platform front, Twitter is going to start labeling COVID-19 vaccine misinformation enforcing a strike system against that. That might get kicked off Twitter if you're a repeat offender. And Facebook has a bunch of COVID-19 misinformation policies. The oversight board, they're like Supreme Court of Facebook, said you should loosen them. Facebook said it will not,

which I think is probably the right choice. Okay, science team doing a great job covering COVID. Still the biggest story in the world. Hopefully, as people get vaccinated coming to a close, I'm hopeful. All right, Michael, let's talk about Square and Title. And I'm just going to force you to talk about NFTs as well, because it is, it all seems together. So this morning, I think you were among the first reporters to break this news. Jack Dorsey, who owns Square, and Jay-Z, who owns Title.

announced a beautiful partnership. What on earth is going on here? So this has been in the works for some time since last summer. Jack and Jay-Z have been gallivanting around the world on vacations together for a little bit, you know, getting this deal together. Square is acquiring title, not really for the streaming service. They're really doing it to get access to musicians and build financial components around that. So there's a lot of synergies here for Cash App.

There's been a big sort of push in the music industry recently to support indie artists and get direct-to-consumer. Recently, SoundCloud changed their payment structure to go to user-centric. So what effectively that means is who you listen to gets paid by that. Currently, that's not the structure in the music industry. Right now, it's based on market share. Your money goes to Taylor Swift, whether you listen to Taylor Swift or not, because she pulls them in the most streams.

That structure is slowly and quietly changing on the independent side. The end point of that is you going on title and saying, I want to listen to this artist, and they say, we'll give us $10 through cash app and they'll all go directly to the artist. That's the end point. That's the end goal here for this. So that's what they're trying to build here is sort of the next phase of streaming, the next phase of independent artists getting paid for their content,

getting paid for merchandise. And that's where Square can really sort of leverage titles, you know, streaming service or lack thereof to build a better ecosystem. Wait, walk me through that really quick. So you would, right now I paid, I don't know how much money, I pay $15 a month to Spotify. Yeah, so your $15 right now is going to Drake, is going to BTS, is going to Taylor Swift. It really doesn't matter who you listen to because it's based on market share.

So, BTS, you know, whenever they put out a new single, everyone, all their fans on Twitter get together and do a streaming push. They all stream the song a million times. That takes up market share and your money is going to them, right? You could be listened to an indie band, but they're only getting a percentage of that market share. What SoundCloud has done with their independent artists has changed that structure. So if you're listening to, you know, Beyonce and Kings of Leon, they'll get five bucks and five bucks, right? They'll get your money. That's not the current structure everywhere.

And that will slowly change over time because the industry's been pushing for this for a long time. And so the next evolution of that is just paying artists directly for music like we once did, cutting out the middleman, Square gets paid off their fees. You can just cash out people for songs, for merchandise, for things that can sell through title. and then Square can build an ecosystem around that that will far exceed what they could do with the streaming service. And so, you know, the long-term strategy here is to build an ecosystem, a financial ecosystem around musicians that, you know, will pull in more revenue than what they're currently getting through streaming service. Right. So this is like the longstanding criticism of how music works now, that songs are worth nothing. Right. Right. The best thing you can do before the pandemic, if you're an artist, you're making a lot of single.

in your hotel room before the tour, you're always on tour because the tour is where the money is, the streaming services are making you nothing. This is a way to flip that around. Right. If you can change that and if you can make it so that if you go on title, you can pay, you know, your favorite artist, 10 bucks for a song or for an album, they can get that money directly today through cash app. They don't have to wait six months to get their royalties back. They can sell you merchandise directly and get paid for that today. That sort of upends what we're currently dealing with in the music industry, which is, if you have Olivia Rodriguez, she put out her huge single driver's license, which has been number one on Billboard for a while, she's not going to

get paid for that until the end of the year. That's a good plug for Billboard, Micah. I'm right. Thank you. I've been working on it. So, okay, this is a stupid question, and I think I know the answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because that's my job here. Why did Square have to buy title to do this? Couldn't they have just made, if they just made the, like, music licensing, pay the artist's service and just offered it to everybody, nobody would use it. So they had to buy title to like make it happen to force everybody else to follow along. Or like, it seems weird that they need title to do this. They don't need title to do it.

But when you buy title, you get the relationships. Title has been late on payments for multiple years. I mean, I just reported today that they're late on payments once again. We reported that at the Verde in 2018. The only reason that stands is because the labels, can't do anything to Jay-Z. He has too many connections. You don't want to piss off the guy

who's married to Beyonce. That doesn't really work out for your business. So when you have those relationships, that speeds up the process. You don't have to deal with, you know, getting along with the music industry and figuring all that out when you can bring him in-house

and you have Rock Nation coming with him in relationships, and you can build off that and get big artists to jump on the platform and build that up quickly. It speeds up the process. And, you know, for square, $300 million, it's a rounding error. So let me make a comparison to another streaming service purchase that was a rounding error.

There's this company called Apple, and they bought a streaming service called Beats Music, which was run by Jimmy Iveen and Dr. Dre and Trent Rezner. And none of those people got titles at Apple. They were just Jimmy and Dre, which was the best part of that whole announcement. And the idea was Jimmy Iveen would come in with relationships and they would build Apple music and they would get exclusives and they would do something. Instead, what you have is Apple music is like a rounding error for Apple that they like music. It's great. The beats headphone business is, from what I can tell, just a group of perpetually unhappy people who get nothing. And Jimmy and Dre and Trent are gone from Apple.

Like, that's a direct comparison to this same idea, right? You're going to buy a famous musician who's successful in the industry as a business person as well as an artist. They're going to bring you the connections you need to grow a new kind of music industry. Why will this be different? Well, it depends how you're looking at Apple Music. If you're looking at it as, you know, it's not the biggest streaming service in the world. Sure. If you're looking at it as a key component of Apple I, a subscription service that Apple is focused on growing, then it's working, right?

They're the second biggest streaming service out right now. If you're focused on just subscriptions, and it doesn't matter where those subscriptions come from and you're building an ecosystem based off purely subscriptions and you're building a bundle effectively that you're trying to grow rapidly, it's working for that. Apple Music is making money. They signed Drake, which really helped grow that platform. They're the number one streaming service for hip hop. But The Verge reported multiple times how Apple Music consistently outstreamed Spotify when it came to hip-hop releases on first weeks.

Every single time, despite Spotify being two or three times bigger than them at the time. So they built an ecosystem around that. They're the most love service by artists. They get to maintain that. And so from that aspect is working. Do they want to be the biggest service? probably. Is it there? No. But is it a key component of Apple One and the reason people are subscribing to it and a reason why I just paid Verizon more money to give me free Apple music.

Yeah. So, but let me, so brings us back to Title, Title, JZ, another, a host of owners largely represented in the hip-hop community. They make this deal with Square. Is the goal to grow title to compete for that second or first spot in streaming? Or is it to say there's a new, there's a different better way for artists to make money. It's more direct connections to fans. Square is a financial services provider. We'll be the financial services provider on any platform. Or is it about title?

So I asked Jesse Duregskar, who is going to be the interim head of title this question, and he said they want to make title much bigger, but he said it's not just about streaming. It's about the artists. And that tells me they're going after touring revenue, right? If you can pull in artists merchandise through touring and everyone's going through Cash app and everyone's going through Square, and you can pull in that market, which they don't have right now, right?

They don't control the marketing and, you know, touring merchandise market. They can grab that using title. They can grab that using Jay-Z's relationships. They can grab that using Jay-Z, who Rock Nation is through Live Nation. There's a lot of connections there for them to really go in and say, hey, we're going to build this product. We're going to build a streaming service that's paying you the most per stream compared to any other streaming service.

We're going to give you better rates than you're getting currently. And we're going to take that market. and make a lot of money from it, because touring is going to come back over the next couple of years, and it's going to blow up again, and that is going to be a big market for them. So they're looking at ancillary opportunities here. The streaming service, yeah, they want to grow it, but is growing it in service of building better financial products around the music industry. Okay, so I get some of that.

Like, that actually makes sense. The touring thing is a really interesting component. Because artists just have one company providing a bunch of their money, the stuff they sell online and the stuff they sell out their tours. Okay. I'm trying to think of it from, like, Jack Dorsey's perspective. because, you know, Twitter owns a little bit of SoundCloud. Twitter just announced a way to pay people directly with super tweets.

They bought review. And so there's like a whole like pay creators directly thing happening on Twitter. And Twitter is also involved in SoundCloud. And then over on the other side, he has Square by title. Like, what is going on in his galaxy brain? Well, when you talk about Twitter, I mean, Twitter is not, they don't have a good relationship with the music industry right now. Yeah. I reported a couple months ago that the music industry is very much.

at Twitter, they don't have a content ID system. They take very long times to remove copyrighted content. And so they've been in a back and forth for a while. This will not smooth that relationship over because the music industry is not that fond of title either. So there's going to be some issues there going forward. But what Jack is trying to accomplish is unclear. It seems that this is going to be a good move for the title space and growing that space around the touring industry and run the merchandise industry. But overall, his music strategy has been scatterbrained, said at least. I mean, SoundCloud has done decent recently.

It's sort of improving now. They have a new CEO over there who's sort of helping turn things around. But, you know, they've not been great. Twitter has obviously had their issues. And Square is sort of jumping in this with the lead, you know, the Jesse Dorcasker who's going to lead title. He was the guy that led development on the Lightning Connector at Apple. So his background is not anything close to music.

So it's going to be really interesting to see how this develops. And that will help them on the high fidelity side, which title's being good at. They have more high-end speakers support title than any other streaming service in terms of high-fidelity audio. So they'll work out for them in that aspect. But there are questions around how the core streaming service will be led moving forward. That's sort of the biggest question. I think what people in the industry see as a positive is the incillary products that can be grown around this. But no one is expecting title to blow up over the next few years and, you know, pick up 20 million subscribers.

Really? No one's expecting title to blow up? No, no. I haven't heard that. I've talked to a lot of people today. No one's really expecting that. They're not expecting to blow up. They're expecting to do the opposite thing to implode, right?

I mean, implode to where? Yeah. It's harder for them to further implode. Micah, you've done, like, an excellent job of presenting this as a rational deal that makes sense. What's the opposite case? Right? It's just Jay-Z-conject orcy into buying his failed streaming service. Like, that's the opposite case, right?

Sure. Yeah, that's the opposite case. I mean, you know, Square bought this at a lower valuation than Tidal had a couple years ago when they took the investment from Sprint. Sprint invested $200 million for a third of the company, volume in at $600 million. This was a $297 million deal for a majority stake, which means it's worth less than that. So, you know, they took a hit.

But Jay put $56 million into his company when he bought it in $20,000. 2015 from Espiro. So he's going to make a profit. The artists are still involved. But the question around the main streaming service is it's not, they said it's growing, but growing is relative. Spotify is growing by leaps and bounds. Apple is still growing.

They're approaching 100 million subscribers. Amazon is growing rapidly. Spotify and Amazon have both introduced high fidelity tiers, which is the sort of the direct competition from title and sort of where they got the idea from. I was talking to one music executive today and they said, Title is the reason that Amazon made that play. They saw the market was viable. They took it and ran with it, and they did it better than that.

And now you're seeing the fruits of that. So, you know, the distinctions of title have sort of fallen away. The only thing they really have right now is artists are still involved, and they pay the most per stream. But that doesn't matter to the majority of people. So there's going to be remaining questions around how do they sort of develop and elevate the core streaming service? I think the inciliary products will be good. But that main streaming service is falling behind. And they're going to have to do a lot of innovation to get that up to par if that's their goal.

So let me ask you one last question, and I got to run. Next to all of this, there's just been a flurry of chatter about NFTs, non-fundable tokens, things that you can buy in the internet that are less copyable than other things. We're going to do a whole episode next week because Liz Lapato is writing a long, a long NFT story. So we'll do all of that next week. But a lot of people this week have been saying NFTs, basically selling digital items on the blockchain, is the future for artists. Kings of Leon actually just put out an album as an NFT this week. I know Jack is deep into Bitcoin, Square is deep into Bitcoin. Is there a connection here? Or is that just, I'm taking the two big news topics and mashing them together?

I would be surprised if they don't do something with NFTs. That would be more surprising to me. I would definitely see something there. Jack and Jay, I think they just, invested $50 million in Bitcoin and Africa to develop sort of music companies there. They're into Bitcoin. They're into cryptocurrencies. It would shock me if they don't do something with NFTs. The labels are sort of scrambling to figure out what to do with this. I'm hearing some stuff around the labels not understanding how this works yet.

So there's going to be a lot of scrambling from music companies over the next couple of months. A DJ named Blow just made $11.5 million selling his album through NFTs. So that market is rapidly developing, and it would shock me if Title and Square did not get involved in it. Yes. This is just all the keywords it was. Like, ultimately, I feel like what happened here is Jay Z acquired Jack Dorsey. Right? Like, I'm just like proud of Jay for just like pulling this off.

What happens next year? Is there something people should be looking for? The question is how fast can Square spin this up, right? Live Nation is expecting the touring industry to sort of rebound this fall late. winter. And so it's going to be really interesting to see if title can get something going by then. They're also having to repair relationships. Those relationships have been strained and no one has liked title for a long time. And Square is going to have to repay that. Now, the great thing about Square is they're a payment company, so they should be able to pay their bills on time

and like title. But those relationships are going to take some work to repair and for labels to get back in good graces with title. And so those are the two things I'm looking forward to see if they can really rebuild those relationships around the time. industry and see how fast they can spin this up when touring comes back because turring's going to come back soon and when it comes back it's going to come back fast every major artist is in line to get dates at arenas right now because it's going to be a backlog so expect next summer to be very busy in the touring industry and i would just point out jZ has a has a pretty big stake in live nation like from his perspective he's just bringing it all together

yeah live nation is a co-owner of rock nation so there's the tie-ins everywhere here Nothing like the music industry to be simple, direct, and not based on current capitalism. All right, Micah. I miss you, man. It was great talking to you. We'll have to have you back soon. Thank you so much. Good time for you, buddy.

Talk soon. All right. We're going to take a break. We'll be back. We've got to talk about all this Microsoft news. There's so much of it. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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They did. They kept me busy. We're all going to be working in VR. We're going to be floating around as avatars. What happened? So I guess the big thing, the VR floating around in avatar stuff, Microsoft Mesh, that was their big announcement. They held basically Microsoft Ignite this week, which is kind of their IT admin enterprise-y sort of conference. And mesh was the big thing. So I'd like to say it's the future of AR, the future of VR or whatever they want to call it.

But really, I think it's like a rebranding of some of the stuff they've already been doing and a meshing together, shall we say. Of like the VR and AR stuff that they want to do. So essentially it's kind of like a platform that underpins a lot of the work. Like when they first introduced HoloLens, one of the things they really wanted to do was the idea of HoloLob. portation so you could basically teleport yourself into a virtual world and have a meeting with someone else and see them and you'd see each other in real time you know sci-fi sort of stuff and now it's feels like it's closer to becoming that reality but it's not quite there so they're using avatars instead at the moment so it's like we're nearly there we've got this mesh thing

but we still need to do avatars um and that's basically the basic gist of it's a lot more complicated and that. This API has this platform stuff involved. But they basically want this experience to span across a bunch of devices. So HoloLens obviously being the one where you get the most, you know, AR sort of experience. And then you get your VR headsets, Oculus, you know, all of the sort of leading ones that will be supported there. And then the 2D experience on the Mac on Windows PCs and Android.

So it sort of spans every sort of device out there. And I guess they really kind of point out there as a platform. for developers to build on top of pretty much what they do with HoloLens and some of their Windows mixed reality headsets. The real question around is people don't own these headsets really in a mass volume.

We're not quite there yet. And it's whether they lead us there to wherever there is, AR and VR, wherever the future of that. It feels like that's going to be some sort of future. But it's whether they lead us there or if Apple comes in and shakes things up. So I want to start with

just a very, the thing you're talking with the headset. Just to attend this meeting, you had to do a lot of work. So just describe what it took to attend Microsoft's announcement. Yeah, so Microsoft, despite I have a gaming PC that's capable of VR and everything else, Microsoft still wanted to send me a laptop that was capable of VR, a VR headset, and a HoloLens headset, all to do an hour meeting, basically. Like, this is how we do meetings in the future. apparently.

So this giant pelican arrived in my house, like last week sometime. And it came with all these instructions and how to set it all up. And like it took, I guess it kind of highlighted like the experience of VR and AR at the moment. Like AR, yeah, the HoloLens headset,

you'd sort of switch it on, you click an app and it's there, you know? Like it's a lot more. They've done a lot of out-of-box experience stuff that's pretty good there. But like the VR experience is is a lot of like, you know, plug in all these sort of crazy cable things, it's no single cable.

So I basically set the HoloLens up, did a meeting with Alex Kippman, who if you don't know who Alex Kippman is. He's the inventor, essentially, of Connect and of the HoloLens. And he basically appeared as like an avatar form in my living room. Like his body or an avat, like a cartoon version of his body? A cartoon version, yeah.

And then he like started handing me jellyfish, as you do in meetings. Were they non-fungible jellyfish or could you? Yeah, do you buy and sell jellyfish? So wait, let me, this is one of the things about AR, particularly in the war context that I, I've just trying to be puzzled. So I think most people think about AR and the immediate thing I think of is I'm going to put on some glasses, I'm going to go outside and like, I'll get walking directions overlaid

on the real world or I'll walk into a party or a conference and people's names will appear above their faces, which is, I will buy that headset the second it comes out. Surveillance state that is required to build that functionality, be damned. If you can just help me be better at names and faces, I will buy that headset tomorrow. That's what most people think about when they think about AR. That's just my guess, right? You're going to be out and about doing stuff. Microsoft's vision of AR or MR, whatever they want to call it, with Hullens, like,

very focused on work, right? So you've done the demo. I've done the demo. I think Dieter may have done the demo before. where they're like, you're going to change a spark plug on a motorcycle. And the motorcycle's in front of you. And there's like arrows and instructions. And it's a cool demo.

And what has always struck me out that is it is premised on the physical space around you being controlled. Yes. And I just like, if Alex Kippman was in my living room right now, like, it would be so weird because he wouldn't know what my living room looks like. So what's he like, what's he do? What's the value of him there? Yeah, he'd have no way of seeing that either unless you like enabled the camera sensors

on the headset so that you could see it, but then it's kind of defeating the point of the whole thing anyway. Yeah, like, I think the way that it's swayed for them with HoloLens is like they had this grand vision of like connecting people in meeting spaces and just this shared collaboration sort of stuff. And it kind of swayed very enterprise heavy just because, you know, those are the sort of customers that could afford it, right? And those are the sort of customers that were finding value in it.

Like, no one really wants to walk around with this headset on outside at the moment for these walking directions and, you know, to get someone's Facebook profile know their name when you're walking down the street or something like that. That is very far, far in the future. Once these things shrink down, but for now, it's like, it's very enterprise focus because it kind of has to be, right? That's their market right now. It's the only people that are willing to invest and to spend the money right now. Apart from, like, I'd say there's a large sort of growing learning and education sort of market, I think. maybe not for AR, but definitely for VR, that they're sort of like trying to tap into.

But yeah, like, it's the enterprise stuff is the key. And this kind of spawns from that, right? Like, it's all to do with getting, you know, architects and designers in a virtual space together to collaborate, which obviously during the pandemic is particularly relevant. But so the thing that's interesting about the way Microsoft thinks about AR, but especially like these virtual spaces, disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, vision of Facebook, etc., they're not trying to build the Metaverse, right? They're not doing what Epic done or

what actually Facebook is trying to do and create a single space. They've talked about like they want to have like AR location stuff all around the world and they like they've talked about that. But for this like this Microsoft team stuff and mesh specifically they really want to like

they want to make the platform and then have every single company on the planet to create their, figure out how they want to use it for their own virtual spaces. Yeah, they're basically trying to create the plumbing, right? They want developers to feed into their apps to base meshify their apps essentially and make them collaborative in AR.

That's their vision, right? Because then they own that platform, essentially. The vision is world domination. It's a very subtle vision. Do you have a sense of how seriously Microsoft takes this? I'm just thinking of the kitchen of the future CES demos that Bill Gates did for 10 years, right? You never really knew how much if they were showing off or if they were like, no,

this is real, we're doing this. This seems like on the scale, like, it's as real they're doing this. Yeah, I think it definitely is, like, I think they haven't talked a lot about Hololence over the last year or two, and this feels like, you know, a reinvestment. But I think Satya and Adela sort of put it in the, in the Nike, you know, he compared it to Xbox Live, which I thought was kind of interesting. So he said, like, how that changed, you know, cooperative play and the ability to have single multiplayer gaming and sort of over the internet.

And he thinks that it's, you know, going to unlock the potential for AR with mesh in the same sort of thing. So I don't know if I fully agree that it's that, you know, it's that significant. But I feel like that's the way that they're viewing it, right? Like that's, they feel like they're putting a big investment into it into this. And they are. They're doing a lot of research. And they're doing a lot of stuff that, you know, competitors aren't quite there yet. So they are definitely ahead.

But like I said earlier, they're going to have some really strong competition, once this stuff matures and the headsets get to that point where, you know, the price comes down a little and they're less clunky. Well, that to me is the thing, right? So there's a bunch of other teams in Microsoft at work news that we should talk about. Like in the pandemic, like a lot of people are working from home. Microsoft is in a prime position to capitalize on that. Other companies like Slack and Google have tried to capitalize on that stuff too.

But right now, like the biggest competition for HoloLens and Mesh is just teams exist. And you don't have to put a thing on your. head and like monkey with any, you just like push the button and you're in the video call and then when it's over, you close it and then you just like go back to work. And that like, you know, some of it works better than others and, you know, it's a very competitive market. I said, we only figured that out that out like this year to like have a video call tip be click a link. But before this year, it was still like. It was still clunky. Yeah. Yeah. It was. Zoom kind of really made that a lot easier for sure. Through a series of security problems.

But like, but that's the competition, right? Is, yeah, we're just talking right now. None of us had to put on headsets and like figure out why your avatar is like misaligned in my room that you can't see. And if you're going to pay that cost, right, that's a cost. You got to wear the headset. You got to set it up. It's got to work. You're going to have some weirdness in the early going.

There needs to be some corresponding value where you have to get something out of that that you couldn't get otherwise. What is Microsoft's perspective? on what you would get out of that. I think it is like, so when I did the keynote, I don't play around with a bunch of VR stuff a lot of the time. So for me, like the value like of going into that keynote is that I almost felt like I was a Microsoft event

because it was kind of like they literally had people like, like, you know when you take a meeting, you have like PR handlers and they kind of like just float. But that was in VR, right? Yes. Yes. This was in VR. And you know how you have like they have PR handlers

that kind of just float around. they're not really doing anything. They're just kind of, you know, shuffing paper. They're just happy. They're just around. Yeah. Taking notes, they had those people in VR. Like, there was PR people in VR doing that. So, like, it all felt like very strangely real in, in that sense.

And I think that's, that's the thing. Like, if they can pull this off in a collaborative space where it makes sense. And, like, they obviously acquired all-space VR, which is powering, like, a lot of the avatar work here. And they acquired them, like, I think it's, like, three years ago, someone. If they can pull that off and, like, meshify. this collaborative space across all the apps and make it that it is like plug and play and that you do feel more immersed

when you're doing these meetings and stuff. I think that's the payoff, right? Because they talked about bringing this into Microsoft teams. So it's not like they are competing with teams because eventually it will be part of teams somehow. And I think that's the payoff. It all feels a bit more immersive, I guess, because they've done some pretty neat work with teams

where like they will cut your silhouette out and put you side by side with your colleagues and stuff. And it looks a bit like gimmicky and stuff. But it actually does kind of make you feel a bit more like interest in the meeting, a bit more like you're not just looking at a grid of people. So it's a lot of that like a lot of that work that I feel like would be a payoff to make these meetings a little bit more bearable, especially when you're doing like, you know, 10 of these a day. I guess my question comes down to you. Is that a VR payoff or an AR pay? That's the big question, right? Because we are at the point where, like, Microsoft's calling it mixed reality.

They don't care. It's like they don't care whether it's VR or AR. They're just, they're targeting both, right? They've obviously really invested in AR. And I think pretty much if you ask most people in the industry, they can probably see AR winning out once the technology is there because it just, it makes sense in a broader spectrum of applications, right? But at the moment, VR is way more immersive and works a lot better than a whole end,

says that. So it's that interim period, right? But I think it's going to be both. Yeah. Like, I don't, I don't think it's particularly one's going to win out, like, straight away. But if they, if they can get, like, a common sort of app across the, across the two, then. I just said the conventional wisdom for the longest time. And I think we, we kind of heard this around, like, Apple rumors, right? Yeah. VR's great, but it's kind of niche. The real thing is AR. We're going to put all of our effort into that. And it's like, well, now I've just spent a year in this goddamn house. Like, I don't need you to augment this reality. Like, please take me to a different virtual reality.

That would be great. Yeah, you almost want to just teleport somewhere. I don't know. Nothing about this reality is important to me, actually. Yeah. And I, you know, I think we're even seeing some of that with the Apple rumors lately, which is their first product will be a very expensive high-end VR headset. Yeah.

Because you are able to control, like, literally you're able to control that entire, like, space. Yeah. Like, virtually. And do things with that that are interesting. Whereas, unless, you're out and about adding information to reality, like might not be that helpful or useful or even doable. Could be distracting. Yeah. It's like this huge tasks. And they've overcome quite a few of like the very basic like gestures and stuff. Like even when when Hollins first came out like just grabbing objects was was really clunky. Like there just wasn't a really easy way of doing it. You had to like air tap, which was like your finger in the air and tap down. Silly things like that. But now you can actually grab objects as if they were there. The hand and eye tracking stuff that they're working on has obviously come on over the last few years and progressed.

But there's still massive hurdles of understanding the world around you for a computer. Just in basic computer vision and AI. And that stuff just, you know, Google, Microsoft, a bunch of other companies are working on that. And it's not solved yet. So I think, yeah, like Apple, they'll do their VR headset. It'll be, you know, expensive. But it'll be like a single cable. It'll probably be 120 plus hertz, you know, displays, really fluid.

And it will teach the VR market a big lesson. But it'll also open it up to, like, these people who are selling the $2, $300 headsets. It just creates that interest in the market, like broader interest if Apple comes in. Yeah. If they do it right. We'll see. It'll be a single cable.

Would it be like a proprietary? Oh, yeah, for sure. Thunderbolt 7 to Lightning. Yeah, amazing. Let's talk about all this other Microsoft. They announced a bunch of other team stuff. Let's go through it. Yeah.

So speaking of meetings, they did the new intelligent speakers, which the Della sort of came on stage in, I think it was Build 2018 or something of that. And they did like this meeting room of the future where it basically identify anyone who's in the meeting, transcribe what they're saying, even translate it. So pretty good if you're a remote worker and you're sort of dialed into a meeting. and you don't really know who's talking and all that sort of stuff. They've actually made that reality now with these sort of like small puck-like devices, essentially. But, I mean, we're at the time when people aren't in meeting rooms now. So it's like awkward timing, but at least they delivered on what they said to it were going to. So at least that wasn't like some weird prototype research projects.

Yeah, I was in the room that they like set up on their campus two years ago to show off like the first iteration of this. Yeah, you did the behind the scenes. Yeah, it was very, very cool. and I was really impressed with all the, especially the auto translation stuff. Like, this is great for accessibility. Cool, cool, cool. When you're going to ship it?

And, you know, I'm glad they actually did it. Yeah, we just have to see how good it is now. But I don't know when we're going to be able to test that because, yeah. So that was that. And then teams is getting end-to-end encryption support. It's only like one-on-one. And it's very limited for enterprise customers. But pretty good that they're getting that.

and then Outlook actually got a new calendar view, which doesn't sound that exciting, but kind of is because if you've used Outlook or any calendars, they're pretty difficult to manage a combination of tasks and goals and lists and all this sort of stuff. So they're making basically a Trello board in your calendar, where you can just drag and drop stuff, files, whatever. It looks kind of neat.

I mean, my big takeaway from all this, and then a bunch of stuff they announced in the interim is, I'm not saying Microsoft wasn't doing stuff before, but it really feels like, especially with teams, they've got some real momentum and some like actually really interesting things happening in a way that they didn't before. When they first launched the version of teams, I was like, oh, you made a Slack clone, okay, ha ha.

But it really feels like they've got their head wrapped around their like strategy for, it's not the office suite anymore, but for like productivity and collaboration software. And they're actually doing interesting stuff. and there's just more sort of, I don't know, juice. There's more momentum there than I've seen from them in a long time. Yeah, I mean, they're basically trying to create, trying to basically put teams as their hub for everything, right? Like, for everything, especially for everything, office.

Like, you can basically think of, like, the office brand as teams now, really. Yeah. That's the way I kind of look at it. And, like, they're doing, like, for me, it's been really unusual to see them the pace that they're working at. because it's really unusual to see Microsoft just push out stuff on a monthly basis. They always promised that with Windows, but the reality is it's like, you know, buggy patches. But this is like new features. Like I can't keep up half the time.

They'll be like, hey, here's a beta feature. Like this week they announced you can like float above your slide deck when you're presenting. Or you can pretend to be like a reporter like kind of like the side. Yeah, yeah. They kind of took that from mm-hmm though, didn't that? they? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people do it. But I think the together mode. Oh, everyone's like in a stadium or whatever. That was really cool and like kind of unique. Yeah. And I think they're probably working on a bunch of stuff like that. They showed like some sort

future. You know, you remember they used to do these like future of office videos every couple of years. Yeah. They kind of did a similar one during, during night. And it was like, the future is like your apartment. and every screen on it is teams. So, like, your TV is suddenly teams. You go to, I don't know, the screen on your fridge and it's like your co-workers. Like, that's the way they see the future now because everyone's obviously stuck at home.

Yeah. But, like, it's interesting to see how they're extending teams everywhere and just all the stuff that they're bringing into it. What's fascinating to me is we have seen big companies make big efforts, like, all right, this is our thing now and everything has to integrate with it, right? there was a little bit of that with maybe Office 365. We definitely saw Google try to do it with like Google Plus.

And so this is another one of those efforts. We're like, all right, this is a central thing. Everything needs to be part of the strategy now, and everything needs to connect to it and vice versa. And normally that's a recipe for just an utter disaster. But it seems like Microsoft is not screwing it up right now. They're holding it together. I'd say that the app still needs some work for performance and stuff like that.

It's still a little clunky, but like the service overall and all up is is is pretty decent. And I think they benefit and the reason they have like over 100 million people using this thing every day is because it's free as part of your office subscription. Right. So if you were already in that ecosystem and particularly going into the pandemic, we've seen schools like flip up flip over to teams, whereas they probably didn't really use it before because everyone's in the classroom. Right. So it's just a natural way. because it's so essentially like bundled into the rest of their office suite that they've kind of sort of led people straight into it at the perfect timing. Like it couldn't have been more perfect timing for them to have made this big team's investment

for then the pandemic to hit because it just it just accelerated. The user growth has been pretty crazy for a service like this. All this focus on new features and building teams. And yep, it was bundled with office and that is why Salesforce owns Slack now, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. It just happened that way. I was just looking this up. This week, actually, a company called Around took a $10 million series A investment from Venture and also the Slack Fund.

And their big trick is that everybody in the meeting room opens around their video conferencing app, but then it sinks all the microphones on the laptops. Right. So you get like a full spread of conference microphones from everybody's laptops. Oh, interesting. Which is just like a feature level improvement to video conferencing. Anybody in the room can talk and the people who are remote can hear it well in a way that like, when we were in our office, like we had polycom microphones and it was just always a disaster. And actually when those microphones would fail, we would make a talking stick. We would make everybody in the room turn off their mics and then one person would join the meeting from their phone.

Turn off the video and then the phone would be the microphone. and then we'd pass it around the room. And if it wasn't that, can you please move closer to the mic? Yeah, that was the usual thing. But like, you know,

like the amount of competition in the space is such that there's a startup here that's focused on, let's go real deep on the basics. Right? And like, there's a lot of microphones in this room because everybody has a phone

and a laptop. What if we just use all those microphones to make video conferencing better? And you can see exactly why Slack now with the salesperson money behind them is like investing in this. Yeah. Because definitely this,

press release mentions one-click Slack integration. Yeah. But is Microsoft doing that stuff too? Like this HoloLen stuff and like a Trello view and the calendar, like, yeah, they're just like they're attacking with features, which is the Microsoft way. So it's like very hard to leave. So they've been doing a bunch of like, they do like a bunch of basic stuff like noise suppression, but like nothing like linking up everyone's microphones in the room.

Like if you want that sort of thing, like they're offering now is the intelligent speakers. and so that thing has like multi-array mics and there's a speaker in itself and it should pick up you know a direction of people speaking and stuff but as in terms of like how that integrates into teams on a software level like I don't think they're quite there yet on on some of that stuff so yeah there's always like room for these these startups with like really great ideas the only problem with those startups is that yeah like typically they're going to get acquired by someone who wants them or they just get copied like that's that's the that's the that's the that's the big problem because they don't have the platform like the breadth right and i think that that was

a problem with slack is that slack didn't have video and audio calling so they kind of like i mean they technically did yeah they did but like it was it was i was on a slack all today and it was like why are we on the slack hall i don't yeah why do we pick this but that's like a very pandemic experience like yeah i'm let's try skype today like we're all bored let's spice it up Actually, at the beginning of the pandemic, Stuart Butterfield was on the Verchast, so you can go back and listen to that episode. And he was like, our focus is on text. Like, yeah.

Video and audio is like not where we need to be. Our focus is on this thing. And it's like, it turns out, actually, video calling is a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. And they promised like this Slack promised this almost Discord like open audio room. Like they haven't rolled any of that out yet, but they did promise it last year. Like, I feel like that's one thing where.

teams and Slack really fall back on like Discord. I use Discord a lot. Um, for like, more personally, like, just to chat with friends and connect. We all just jump on a call. We don't say, you know, are you free at 8pm or like, let's jump on a call at 9 or you just see someone who's in the call and you just jump in. Like it's, it's so seamless. There's no like, it's not a meeting, you know.

It's just you're hanging out chatting to friends or whoever's around. Um, and like, I think teams and Slack really miss that, um, that ad hoc meeting. because you do that at your desk. You go over and start talking to someone. You can't really do that in these tools because they're very rigid and structured for meetings that happen at a certain time of the day. So I think that's one thing that I think

we'll see a lot of experimentation of ad hoc meetings and just pinging people at the desk and stuff. That's the next thing that's coming. From this point on, we're running the Virgin Clubhouse and that's the way it's going to be. Oh, no. Last thing, we reviewed the Surface Pro 7 plus. That is a name.

It is, yeah. it's basically the Surface Pro 7 but with LTE and removable SSDs. Okay. That's pretty much the quickest way I can describe it. It's good. Like it's faster. You know, it's got the latest Intel chips.

The better graphics as well, the XE graphics from Intel. But yeah, I still want to see a redesign. I feel like the Surface Pro is at the stage that the MacBook Air was. You know, like it kept that design for so many years because it worked. And fair enough,

it does work the Surface Pro. It doesn't really have a, a big, it's the best two in one, I guess, really, out there. But I still want them to do something that pushes it closer to the ProX, because that hardware is so nice.

It's going to be years. I mean, they might push it close to the ProX, but I have to believe that Microsoft, in particular, is as angry Intel now, as Apple was, like, three, four years ago, right? Yeah. Like, Qualcomm's not getting it done for them. Windows and Arm and, you know,

that whole fiasco, I love the Surface ProX. I deeply love it as a Chromebook, not as an actual laptop. No, I think it's great. But, you know, if Microsoft has lots of interesting ideas for what to do with PC hardware, like they do. We saw it with Surface. They got the little Surface Go. They could just be cranking out all sorts of really interesting, cool form factors and stuff.

But right now, they're just like they're waiting for slightly better iterations than what Intel can do until Intel can figure it out. and Intel's roadmap for figuring it out is a while. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they are literally, and like, Qualcomm isn't really stepping up to offer something that's competitive of Intel, let alone the M1, right? Yeah. Like, who knows how long it's going to take for them to catch up as well. So it's like they're kind of battling a boat with both for their partners. And now they're kind of getting a little bit deeper with AMD, which is interesting. So the next surface laptop that's coming in the next few months, it's going to be AMD as well.

well, which the last one was as well. But it's interesting to see them sort of spread that surface hardware through the different chip makers. But I think the big question hanging over all the surface stuff and all of that is how they compete with the M1. So especially when Apple starts cranking on the next chips. And is there going to be like a five year gap here or what? Like what's, what's going to happen? I mean, there's that rumor of the next MacBook Pro that has an SD card slot, no touch bar and a mag. And it's like, and that, not have an M1, right? That will have a more powerful MacBook Pro class processor. And it's like, that thing is just going to blow, it's going to blow up. Like the pent up demand of people who just

want like a useful MacBook Pro. Like it was already there at the previous 16-ish one, which like fixed the keyboard and it does all this stuff. But like that moment, I think is going to be a inflection point in the laptop industry because it will show. Here's a pro laptop with a close to all day battery life. I'm dying for this laptop. Apple, can you just announce, can you just call me and tell me. That would be great. Speaking of Intel, by the way, if anybody listening, we're trying to get Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger

on Decoder, so. Yeah. Because he's the new guy. It's on him to figure this out and potentially outsource production to TSM and other fabs that can get to the node sizes they need to be competitive. That is what I want. What I really want, though, is for him to come on, so

we can just ask him to give us one piece of advice. For the next couple of years, when we're talking about a laptop, and we say, yeah, but the M1 or the M2 is, like, way faster, and it's going to just be driving everybody crazy. What can we say to, like, not have that just turn into, like, an exhausting, yeah, but Apple's chip is faster. Yeah, great.

We've now guaranteed that Intel CEO, Pat Gell Singer, will not come into code. Amazing. If you work at Intel and you're listening, just delete that from your mind, get the CEO on the show. He's already smacked all Apple, though, hasn't he? Like, a little bit. It was pretty gentle. Yeah, I love that.

actually. That was great. Well, so what he said was, we have to do better than this than the lifestyle company in Southern, in Northern California. And it's like he's the new guy. Like, of course he's telling his chip making team that they have to do better at making chips than the iPhone company. But I think he was excited that got blown out of proportion. If I was him, I'd be excited with that. It would be great to have him on. So I feel like he's, he's well respected, I think, at Intel as well. So it's like, yeah, he'd be an interesting person to speak to about. how he's going to clean it all up.

Well, Pat, if you're listening, ignore what I said. And then come on and we'll definitely ask you that question. All right, we're going to take a break. Speaking of Apple, there's some Apple rumors talk about and some crazy app store stuff going on. So we'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.com. A.I. 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 vergecast. All right, we're back. Deere, you want to run through these rumors? So Ming Chi Kuo has come out with another slate of analyst predictions. So the rumor that Apple is considering a folding iPhone persists. There's like now a year on it, 2023. It seems like they're aiming for a thing that folds out into a tablet instead of a flip phone style thing. So that exists. There's the rumor that the iPhone 13, not the 12, what are we even on now?

We're on 12. 12. Is it going to have a smaller notch and faster screens. They're finally going to have a high refresh rate. They're going to do something to get the notch smaller. And then my favorite analyst note of this group is write. we believe that USBC is detrimental to the MFI's business profitability and waterproof specification is lower than lightning and MacSafe.

So no plans for USBC to come to the iPhone. It's much more likely it'll jump to a portless iPhone someday. Or maybe a pogo pin, I don't know. Wait, can I just stop? Can we just live in that for a second? Yeah. Uh-oh. The MFI program, it might be very profitable for Apple.

I'm sure it is. They saw a lot of cables and a sticker on them. Great. overall as a consumer, it is just a failure. We've talked about this so many times. Like the state of accessories for any Apple product is like, ugh. Right? Like, where are the iPad keyboards?

That connector is open. Where four months in, is it four, I think it's four months. Where are the MagSafe chargers for my car? Like the easiest product. I would spend $50 today. Just tell me where to give you the money. I'll cash app it to you on title. Just put it, put an ad on Instagram, and

Neil I will definitely see it and just spend the money. All of Facebook's AI is waiting to target the MagSafe charger to me in Instagram. Where is it? It's almost as if proprietary stuff is bad for Xishishishol. It's just like, I understand, but also just like, the stuff you can buy around your phone, around the iPad, to even a pretty huge extent around the Mac, although that adds nothing with NFI, it's just a bad,

they're just bad ecosystems. Like it's hard, it's hard to see MFI as a success. It might be making a lot of money, but it hasn't built great ecosystems. You know what you can do with the Mac now? Thanks to some security researchers came out today. You can make your own air tag

with a little BBC micro, whatever it's called. They hacked, they didn't hack. They like figured out how the public-private key system and find my works. And so you can create your own, open source,

you can create your own air tag, And then Apple will think it's an iPhone, and then Apple's find my network, we'll track it for you. Wow. This is like Apple is going to arrest these people. When are they doing these air tags? Like this thing's been like a persistent room. It's like a VR headset. It's ridiculous.

But like it's in the OS. We've seen like, you know, little icons for it. Yeah, it's all there. Why are they just not releasing it? Are they that afraid of like Tile yelling at Congress? It's very confusing. It's very, yeah. The timing's strange.

Yeah. I will say, though, in defense of the lightning port on the iPhone, is that don't forget where that came from. Like, that arrived when USB was a bit of a mess. Yeah. I think micro-usb was just happening. Like, it was so good when it first came. Yeah, there was a bunch of mini-USB in the time. It was reversible.

Yeah. But yeah, they have kept hold of it a bit. It's outstayed as well. Yeah. I mean, I will say even the MacBook Pro I have, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, it draws a lot of power. Over USB. So I needed a special USBC cable and a special USBC charger. And both the SMC, the system management controller on that does all the charging on the Mac.

And the charger will crash. Which is like the most. I don't believe it. USBC is perfect. It is, I'm like, why isn't my computer charging? It's like I have to reset both. I have to unplug and plug back in the charger and reset the SMC on the Mac. Pro.

I think this is related to the fact that I'm making that charger also run my video conferencing cameras. This is definitely my fault. I should just have multiple chargers, but it is not the promise of USBC in any way, shape, or four. On the folding phone, I've been thinking about this a little bit too, because do you just want an iPhone that opens up to an iPad UI, or do you want something in between? And it's just also the iPhone 12 Pro Max has, is just, it's such a big screen, and they're

They do nothing to help you do more interesting things with the big screen. I get that it's awkward to use a S-21 Ultra, you know, big screen or, you know, folding phone or whatever and like some of that UI needs work. But, yeah, Apple needs to be way more flexible, no pun intended, and it's thinking on how software can work on these larger portable screens than it has, I think. I just, I don't know that I want an iPad mini, just like an iPad that turns into an iPad mini. I think I want more interesting ways to like manage Windows and that kind of thing. Yeah, and that's the biggest problem with the foldable phones in general at the moment, right? It's literally the software and the UI. It's just not quite there.

It's very clunky, especially like on the surface duo. It's really clunky. But yeah, I still feel like I'd rather it scale up to an iPad interface, but be clever about it. I mean, it's the be clever part I'm worried about. Yeah. Last big sort of Apple thing to talk about. We talked a few weeks ago about the bill in North Dakota that might have forced Apple to allow multiple payment services on the iPhone. Failed in North Dakota, advanced through the Arizona House, needs to go to the Arizona Senate and signed by the governor of Arizona.

But I will tell you this, here's a really interesting realignment politically of this. Bill advanced in Arizona, mostly by Republicans, opposed by Democrats. The Democrats are saying, hey, there's already all this antitrust action. going on, hold off. Also, this might be unconstitutional because of the commerce clause. There's a lot to unpack there. Republicans, I think, are saying, hey, we have been mad at big tech for about a year and a half. Here's some bills we can pass that will actually address some big tech problems. Lots of small businesses and startups kind of interested in this. David Hannah Meyer Hansen, who CTO of Basecamp is saying, if this passes in Arizona, he will relocate Basecamp to Arizona so that, because then it will be an Arizona

a company. Yeah. And then the law will apply to them. And Apple to do business to them would have to allow these multiple payment services. The bill also specific carve out after a long argument in the Arizona house specifically exempts video game consoles and other specialized computers that connect to the internet, which has long been Apple's argument. Yeah.

We will see. It's still got a ways to go. But this bill or similar bills are in lots of. States. Apple is like deploying lobbyists. There's a great article in protocol. The open app, whatever the lobbying system is from the companies that are anti-app store has been very effective. You mean Spotify wearing an eye patch and a hat? Yeah. Well, they were the one. When I asked who's behind the North Dakota stuff, a bunch of people reached out and said, yeah, it's that lobbying firm, like explicitly. So they have gone from zero to 60 like that. Yeah, but it's definitely

like Spotify and a handful of other companies and epic in disguise. Yeah. Like the coalition for app fairness. The language, by the way, is other special purpose devices that are connected to the internet. Yeah. Which is like if you're going to parse it, right? There's like computers and not computers. Another hour of the birth chats coming up after this, folks.

Yeah. But this is happening, right? Like interoperability, multiple payment systems, all the stuff. Like, actually Apple announced a tool this week that lets you transfer your iCloud photo library to Google Photos, which is just a data portability thing that the EU, US regulators, they've all wanted for a long time. And I think we've talked about it sometimes. A little bit of heat, a little bit of regulatory attention, these companies all just start doing the right thing. So I'm very curious to see how these state level bills, like the conversation about whether

or not they are constitutional because they touch on interstate commerce, I know the people who are going to tweet me about this. I welcome your tweets. I'm still learning. I'm excited to learn from you. That's a big conversation. The real answer will be like probably hashed out in court once one of these bills passes. But these bills are passing. There's heat on them. And it is not the political alignment that you would expect. All of the antitrust action happened in the House antitrust subcommittee chaired by David Cicillian. Like that was all Democrats. He was on the show. He's a Democrat. All of this action is happening with Republicans. So there's not a lot of bipartisanship in America right now. But let's be angry at tech companies.

Very bipartisan. Totally, still totally polarized, but very bipartisan. Actually, speaking of just hating app stores, what do we think of Epic buying Fall Guys or the creator Mediotonic? I thought that it was kind of interesting time because Fall Guys has kind of had its little moment of growth. But I think the broader way to look at it is they're buying, I feel like Epic's buying up the Fall Guys developer. And obviously they've got Rocket League. So I feel like they're building towards a time where they can have exclusive content in their store that they own. Right. They obviously have Fortnite and all the sort of stuff.

But they need more. They've been trying to push that store on the PC for quite some time now with free games. But for some reason, gamers just hate epic games and they just hate the epic store. Like they want everything in Steam. So I feel like they're trying to build towards some exclusive. content at some point. I look at it the other way, right? Like, Fortnite is the phenomenon it is, it is big enough to allow Epic to fight Apple head

up in court because it has this internal marketplace where you're like, you're buying sins, you're buying all the stuff, you're buying dances. Fall Guys has that potential, right? People spend a lot of time in Fall Guys, it's fun. It has a sort of, if you squint, it has that like a Fortnite kind of experience. Like you drop in, it's a bunch of people, you all do something, you start over. and then you can customize your character. Rocket League is somewhat the same way.

Like Taylor Liles and I have been talking a lot about the F-150 that you can buy in Rocket League right now, which is very funny. I think they're buying marketplace. They're buying these like metaversey game experiences where you can do a lot of transactions for digital goods inside the app. But I feel like they're buying the talent, right? Because Rocket League is still huge.

Like full guys, I don't think it's particularly huge, but the talent behind full guys and their visual. for it and like just the culture that company has. They're buying their creativity to have come up with new ways to sort of spin that basic Metaverse model. I think that

they want to have multiple cracks at that idea. Yeah, they're going to have a bunch of talent that will create the next Fortnite. They'll be in the best position to kill Fortnite themselves. That's where you want to be.

All right, last little thing. Chris Welch had a great scoop. today, actually. Sonos, moving into the portable speaker category, something called the Sonos Rome. I'll be $169 come in April, direct competitor to like the ultimate year's boom, all that stuff.

I'm into it. It's got Wi-Fi, so it'll work with the Sonos system. I guess maybe you can make surrounds out of it. That would be hilarious. That would be amazing. Yeah, I have no idea how it sounds, obviously, it's pretty small. I think it's like a $50 dock,

wireless dock, which hopefully it's just pogo pins, who knows. $50 is way too much for a dock. It's basically just a USBC pass-through, pass-through, but whatever. I don't have a good Bluetooth speaker. I've been waiting for it, and, you know, I was going to buy a U.E Boom. It's, like, been in my, like, Amazon buy it later cart for a very long time. But then it turned out I didn't need to leave the house and didn't need a Bluetooth speaker.

But that time is coming. Like, using me in parks is nice. I think this is probably going to be the thing I buy. Yeah. And it's not just because I'm not a Sonos super fan. We've got Sonos in the house. I like it. but it just, I don't know, I prefer this to like an Airplay 2 speaker.

I definitely prefer it to Bluetooth. It just gives you, you can do all that stuff, but it gives you like one nicer, more convenient way to start your music. I had one of those, it wasn't an echo, but it was like the Amazon Bluetooth speaker, forget what they called it. The echo tap. The tap, yeah, yeah. Except I think it was just the Amazon tap.

It might not have been the echo tap. You're right. It was just. I don't know why. It sounded like hot garbage. It was the worst. I had one too. And mine died, which no Bluetooth speaker I've ever had has just been like, you know what?

Fuck it. Yep. I give up. But it had a little dock you could set it on. And like, most importantly, you know, if you took it to an Airbnb or something, you hook it up to the Wi-Fi and then you've got Lexa in your Airbnb or in your wherever you are. And then you can talk to the speaker to get stuff or get music.

And it's way more convenient than like, like, why. in the hotel room, but the phone, but... So that's why I'm interested in this thing. If it sounds good. For $170, who knows? I'm interested in it because the name makes sense. It's good, it's a good name. It's like, Sonos has like a speaker that's called 5,

and a speaker that's called ARC, and a speaker that's called Bean. Like, the only other one that really makes sense is sub. Yeah, well, there's the move, which is hard to move. Yeah. I like our move a lot. I didn't even consider the possibility of dramatically producing my battery power surround speakers in various rooms of the house. And if that is possible, I'm in.

Yeah. Like, hang on, it's movie time. Let me go collect my surround speakers. Wait, what if they made it easier to dynamically move them from room to room? So that when you want to watch, you got the Sonos and the little arc, you know, in your bedroom, you carry the speakers in and set them behind the bed. And then when you want to go watch them in the living room, you carry speakers down there and they know where they are.

What was if you could get a couple of the rooms and just tack them to your seat? ceiling and then have Atmos. Yeah. This is great. We all need to get the hell out the house. It's like what we are clearly demonstrating. Oh, wait. And they're kind of cylindrical.

You could build one of those like male vacuum tube systems like they used to have at the banks, you know? And then you could like shoot around the house. We need to leave our homes. That's what I got for. Maybe it could son or swish. Amazing. That's actually a good name.

All right. That's it. I want to call out on Monday in the feed, we got a special episode. We had an event this week with Senator Amy Klobuchar and a bunch of panelists talking about the future of tech regulation in Section 230. We'll have a highlight episode coming for you on Monday with Russell and Addy. That's very exciting. Twitter had a product, Kavon Bakeport on Decoder next Tuesday. That's going to be a good one, I think.

We'll see. I've got some ideas for that one, too. So that's coming on Tuesday. We'll be back next Friday with more Verchest. Thank you to Micah. You can tweet at him. He's at Michael Singleton. Tom is at Tom Warren.

Deeter is at Backelon. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. That's it. Rock and roll. Wear a mask. Europe.