The Vergecast - Microsoft enters the metaverse race / Beats Fit Pro review / Apple’s software chief speaks out against sideloading

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Tom Warren discuss Microsoft's take on the metaverse at their Ignite event this past week. Verge editor Chris Welch joins to chat about his review of the Beats Fit Pro and Apple's third-gen AirPods. Stories from this week: Microsoft Teams enters the metaverse race with 3D avatars and immersive meetings Microsoft is planning 3D metaverse apps for Xbox and gaming Microsoft Loop is a new Office app for the hybrid work era Microsoft’s GitHub CEO steps down Beats Fit Pro review: sporty AirPod Pros with better sound Beats announces Fit Pro earbuds with wing tip design and $200 price Apple AirPods (third-gen) review: new design, same appeal The best wireless earbuds to buy right now ‘Sideloading is a cyber criminal’s best friend,’ according to Apple’s software chief Verizon and AT&T delay crucial 5G expansion over aircraft interference concerns Facebook is shutting down its Face Recognition tagging program Instagram and Twitter finally make link previews work again Zillow reportedly needs to sell 7,000 houses after it bought too many Ford’s selling electric crate motors based on the one in the Mach-E The 2022 Volkswagen ID 5 is a sporty electric SUV with over 300 miles of range Gobble, gobble: GE Appliances wants you to trust its smart oven to cook the perfect turkey  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week in the Verchcast, Alex Cranz, Chris Welch, and Tom Warren joined the show. We talk about Microsoft's Metaverse announcements. Yes, Microsoft go through Apple's new Beets Fit Pro headphones. It might be better than AirPods Pro. And a little lightning round of gadget news. That's coming up on the Vortcast 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. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all?

I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist. and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Ammom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of recording problems and the Metaverse. It's a two-for-one deal on the nation's favorite podcast today. Huh? Mm-hmm. I'm your friend, Neely. Deeder Bon is here.

I'm a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint and a document and a note in the Metaverse. Oh, boy. The Enterprise Metaverse is here, my friends. Tom Warren is here to talk about it with us. Hello. I'm in a Metaverse somewhere, but I'm not a spreadsheet. Well, I can't see your legs. So you could be in the Metaverse.

Oh, that's true. Alex Cranz is here. If Zoom ever does avatars for the Metaverse, I'll be one of those. You can do it in Teams. This is the news. So there's like a bunch of stuff happening this week that is all, it's all the Metaverse. All the time now. We're going to talk about Microsoft had an event.

They did their own Metaverse stuff. There's some new headphones. Chris Welch is going to join us. There's Facebook news. There's always Facebook news. There's electric car news. All kinds of things going on. But first, I just want to say this out loud.

This is it. This is the week that the Verge turned 10. Yeah. Deeter and I have been our roller coaster of emotions this whole week. It's been a lot. But we're done now. We're done having emotions for a while. For 10 more years.

We've had enough. A little inside baseball, the verge team is every time we do anything. First of all, our biggest strength and our greatest weakness is that we just move on to the next thing. Yeah. Like, we're just always like, great, we did it. What's the next thing? Which, again, is a strength and a weakness.

But we're also like, we're very good at what could we do better for the next time? So that's everyone's instinct, right? We did the 10-year package. We should take it down and move on to the next thing. I'm like, no, that's 10 years of work. Like, leave it. Just like, let it ride for a minute. That's good.

And then everyone's like, you know, next time we got to do X, Y, Z better. I'm like, next time is 10 years away. We're going to learn a lot of things about what we'll be in the metaverse then. We'll be. Yeah, we'll have no legs in 10 years. That's the goal. But I do want to say, once again, thank you for everyone for reading. We put up the package a very funny sort of inside joke that our design team didn't know.

They were previewing the package to me and I just started laughing. So the navigation of our big Verge 10 is a. riff on something called the Zoom quilt. So it's a huge image. And as you click around it, you like move around the image and see different parts of it. Yeah. In our like earliest Verge design meetings, our friend Josh Topolski, our co-founder, well, it's like the whole site should be a Zoom quilt.

And we like talked about it a lot. Yeah. So our old designers from that from back then were all like, you did a Zoom quilt. And it was just a confluence of events, which I think is very funny. And Josh thought it was very funny too. He had a very nice thread. All those emotions. 10 years, we made it. But like I said, our biggest strength, one of our weaknesses. We're on to the

next thing. And the next thing is an HTML table. We're going to slice up a JPEG and we're going to display it in TRs and TDs. And each one's going to be a full link. It's going to be great. Yeah. Our tables are not great. We actually make better tables on the site. That'd be a huge improvement thing. But thank you to everybody. He reached out, read the packages, read all the pieces. If you haven't done it, you're listening to this on a Friday. Pull over in your car and just spend the next couple days in your car on the side of the road. There's just a lot of stuff to look at, both stuff looking at the past. We have a great list.

Haim did a great list of the worst gadgets we've ever reviewed with amazing animations. We have some of our favorite stuff. And we have a bunch of stuff looking at the future. So you haven't taken time. This weekend's a great time. Read all that stuff. Thank you for reading. We've got, it's not over.

There's another decade of the verge to come. And I promise we'll apply some learnings from this one to the next to the verge 20. Okay, news. Tom, there was a big Microsoft event this week. What was going on? Yeah, so it was Ignite, which is the second Ignite they've had this year, actually. So they just keep igniting the Ignites. The big news is Microsoft now officially using the BuzzTerm, Metaverse. So they have their enterprise metaverse now with 3D avatars, immersive meetings, all this sort of stuff. So the dream is that you will jump into a team's meeting on your headset or your HoloLens or whatever,

jump into some virtual space and then start playing with PowerPoint in that virtual space with all your co-workers without legs. For some reason, all the 3D advertisers don't have legs. I don't know why. How mad are they at Facebook right now? Because they were talking about this kind of meniverse thing like four or five years ago. I remember I went to an event in like San Francisco where we all sat around and they're like, soon you'll wear a headset and you'll have all your meetings inside and we all laughed at them. And then Facebook did it. We laughed at them.

and now they're like, but we still want to do it. But everybody's talking about Facebook, but we did it first. We did the dumb thing first. Like, are they mad? I feel like they've been nervous, stroke, mad of Facebook's efforts to do stuff in the workplace for a while. So it's kind of interesting that they announced basically everything that Microsoft's kind of doing the other week.

Or like, you know, they showed, you know, future concepts essentially. And Microsoft's really kind of only showing that as well. So it's like they're both, they're both obviously really competing hard to deliver the same thing that does everyone want that right now? I don't know. Probably not. But yeah, they must be... The competition is on now between them too.

Because Facebook is very aggressively trying to get into the enterprise and into businesses, which is basically where all this stuff's being used right now anyway. Because Microsoft pivoted hard with HoloLens to the commercial space. Well, so one question I have is Microsoft's only headset is the HoloLens, which is cool in its way. It is not anything close to a... consumer headset. It's certainly not a VR headset. No.

So they're doing the Metaverse. You cannot, I don't know, I'm like, they're very sarcastic air quotes. That's what I want everyone to know. They're doing the Metaverse, but they're doing it in like, I don't know, it feels like you're going to be in the Metaverse with an Xbox controller on your couch, not in VR. They're doing it in a way that basically most people that will be participating in it will be, won't be wearing a headset, right?

So Teams is going to be updated. So you can basically say I was having this meeting with you guys now. We're all on video in a Zoom call right now talking to each other. But I could perhaps turn my webcam off and use an avatar instead, which would then take all the words I'm saying, all my audio cues, and then basically animate itself as if it was me, which is kind of weird. I just like the transition point of that is like, I'm in a meeting with a bunch of people and a cartoon of Tom.

Yeah. Imagine being fired by a cartoon boss. Like, that's what's going to happen, right? Somewhere, some place. You know, if I can predict what company will do that, what media company, that's actually a fun game. What media company will have cartoon layoffs first? I'm thinking of two. There's two front runners. I was like, I get some ideas.

Yeah. Oh, my God. That's a total media company. I apologize the audience. It is not deep on media Twitter, but six people are going to think that. That's hilarious. But that's like that is the weird transition point, right? Like if you look at the stack of things Facebook has, Facebook has the VR platform.

It has an operating system. It has apps. It has it's built all the stuff to put your computer in VR with you, which is like the ultimate dongle, right? Like an app that runs on your computer that shows your computer in VR is like a very funny concept. But it works. Again, there's a lot of air quotes here. It works. But they have no software.

Like, they don't have an email client or docs. Like, they don't, you can't actually work in Facebook's version of the Metaverse. Yeah. Like, they've built the hardware to enable. And Microsoft has none of the hardware, none of the application ecosystem. And they've got all the software that you actually need to use. Well, I mean, Microsoft does have their mixed reality headsets. But like, when I say they have them, it's like, there's like one or two left.

Yeah. But mixed reality is still, you're in, you're not in the Metaverse, dog. No. Like whatever that is. I don't know what it is yet, but I know you're not in it. I think we've seen them like, they did a metaverse because remember when they launched all these, these headsets and it was going to be the whole thing. And Satya got up and was like, this is the VR is the future of the workplace. And then we all got a little house.

And I immediately filled mine with like giant dinosaurs. And that was like, that was the metaverse, right? I just couldn't invite anyone in. It was like my weird little fort. So is Animal Crossing the Metaverse? Yeah, right. They also have AltSpace VR as well.

They acquired that, which is its own Metaverse, right? All right, I'm putting a line in the sand. Yeah, yeah. You got to be in VR to be in the Metaverse. No. Yep, that's my line. Everything else is just, it's just a rebrand.

It's just, they rename Verizon Media to Yahoo AdTech, which is a real thing that happened. Tech crunch and gadget are now owned by a company called Yahoo AdTech. They're just, we're like, screw it, we're going for it. It's just a rebrand.

You're just rebranding video games is the Metaverse, unless you're wearing a headset and doing stuff. So I think that a rebrand is right. You know how every so often, like, well, we need a new Gen. So that we can argue about stuff and we can complain about the kids. You know, we're Gen X, Gen Z and Gen Y and blah, blah, blah, blah. That's all the metaphors is. Honestly, it's like all that Web 3 is at this point, or crypto's like, oh, we've got

some new stuff and we need to have a metaphor to, like, lump it together so we can feel like it's new. And that's what the Metaverse is turning into. It's turning into a meaningless term very, very quickly. Disclosure, my spouse works for meta. That's true. You got to say it now. I would say that that places it fully in our strike zone on the show.

What's a computer? What's a metaverse? There we go. We don't know yet. So here's my little line in the sand. It's a singularity. Nade said this during his Ignite presentation. The whole point is the digital world will come into the physical world, and the physical world will go into the digital world.

Right? And you'll interact with them. on some level of equivalence. Sure. You can't really do that with HoloLens right now. You're not going to sit around at work wearing a HoloLens with like a cartoon of your boss in the tiny field division all day. Like you can't have a team's meeting in HoloLens to any realistic degree that you would want to actually get worked on in. Maybe you will someday.

Do you think that the HoloLens team actually has to do that? Like I'm imagining when he invented the Palm Pilot in the 90s, Jeff Hawkins carried around a block of wood and pretended that he had like a little hand computer. Like the worst dogfooding. Yeah, they all have to wear the headsets all the time and pretend like the battery hasn't run out and just imagine that everything is out there in front of them. This explains the very slow pace of HoloLens development. I absolutely think that Alex Kittman just probably does all of his meetings with HoloLens Headset. Yeah. I like to think that he does.

All I'm saying is that it's Facebook's making this big push to work, which, you know, maybe their rebrand to meta will make it easier to sell Facebook Enterprise software to be. people because if I was running a business, I would not be like, I want to use Facebook's work tools, given the baggage of Facebook. But now it's meta. It's a different company that has nothing to do with those problems. Sure. On the other hand, Microsoft already has the tools that everyone's buying. So if they're racing the same direction, they're starting from, they each have the thing the other one doesn't, and they're racing into the same place. I think the big question is, can Microsoft get serious about VR headsets, which at least in the short term are the thing that actually enable a bunch of the experiences they're trying to show you.

Like, why don't they just buy the ViVE? Yeah, you'd like to think they could just work together and sort of share the platform, but obviously that that doesn't benefit either of them, does it? But it's a similar sort of concept to the beginning of the iPhone, right? Like Apple obviously built the hardware and didn't quite have the software and the apps and that sort of stuff. And then it slowly, like, well, I'm going to say slowly, like quickly became a massive platform. and beyond anything that we thought it would be when they first announced the iPhone.

And I think that's kind of the same with potentially with whatever meta could be doing here. Some of the concepts they have are pretty interesting. And I'd argue that getting the hardware right is more important than the software straight away because you can build the software on top of it, right? You can improve that software. But getting the hardware wrong and rolling that stuff out is a harder thing to come back from. So Microsoft has obviously done the HoloLens. That hardware was not great to begin with.

It's improved and they've got some really interesting pain and some really interesting work going on there. But that's stuff so early, I think, whereas I just feel like meta's going to come in here and shape things up a little bit more than we might think they would. I have a deeply, maybe hostile question. Is this just Windows phone 2.0? that's the vertcast everybody you can send your notes to Alex she's Alex H. Kranz in Twitter yeah like obviously with Windows phone they didn't have the apps it's a bit of a different

thing isn't it because the way that their position is they're leveraging off of teams right which they have I mean if you're slack you will say that they just forced it down people's throats if your Microsoft you'll say that 150 million people use it all the time and they love it you know like it really depends on on your point of view of how well they've actually done with teams or if they're just

forcing on people with office. But they do have that office base. They have that enterprise base. So they have some leeway there to like experiment around with, whereas they also didn't have that Windows phone. Like they had to, all the decisions they made, they had to make right and they made, you know, some pretty wrong decisions in my eyes. But like I feel like they've definitely had a head start with the HoloLens and some of that

mixed reality work. it hasn't really gone anywhere. Like it's not as if they're known for that right now. Obviously they're known for the HoloLens, but definitely not on the VR side. And the stuff that they're trying to really push out with mesh and this integration into teams, like you're saying you like,

it does feel like a rebranding of VR in a way and to really fully participate in it in the vision that they're trying to sort of like lay out here, like surely you can have to use a VR headset, right? Like, do you really want an avatar just running around as you without you really being there. Yeah, I'm looking at some of these screenshots. I'm like, this seems like it would be horrible.

Like, you've got a browser window open on your laptop and you're like, your little dude is like running around a room with a light. It's like, why would I, I would just, I'm just going to call you on the phone, man. Like, I don't need to do this. The only slight argument against that is like there's a company called spatial, which does a lot of this work already. And I don't know if you guys have used it,

but it's super interesting when you're doing like meetings with people you haven't met or like coworkers. and stuff, and you, like, do little huddles in a virtual room, and then you can do, like, the side chats and stuff. That sort of stuff is really interesting. So I think if they do basically what spatial's doing, then it could be kind of interesting for teams, for sure. Do you know the coolest spatial feature is?

They started this. This was like their thing, and they moved to huddles and all this other stuff. Yeah. Their whole idea is that everyone in it, if you have an office and you have remote people, their whole idea is that everybody in the office in the meeting room will have their laptop open and spatial open. And they'll use all of the laptop microphones. to finally make that sound good.

Which, I mean, like, we, it's what everybody complains about. When, like, six people in a conference room and one person is remote, like the one person who's remote has a bad experience. So I think that's up school, but it's still just like laptop stuff. To Microsoft's credit, every VR headset that isn't the quest basically runs on Windows. Right. So, like, there's a little bit of a connection there. Like, I mentioned, like, the high-end vibe, the high-end Oculus headset runs on Windows.

So they've got the literal connection there, if they want to take advantage of it. I think it's just weird they haven't done what Sony is done. Like the Xbox is a very powerful console. They could make a headset for it and kind of jump into it. And Nadella kind of hinted at like the fact that obviously Minecraft is considered of Metaverse and... Here's the quote. The quote is very good.

It's very good. Deeter, to your point about rebrands. You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming. said. If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Yeah. Minecraft is a metaverse. So is FlightSim. In some sense, they're 2D today. And the question is, can you take that to a full 3D world? And we plan to do so. Absolutely plan to do so. Everything's a Metaverse, guys. I'd love to know how Halo is a metaverse, but red versus blue. But like, flight sim is like super interesting in that. And obviously, Minecraft's as well. But Flight Sim has the fact that you

can just basically be flying in the sky alongside other, you know, players in a real world essential environment. So that's like, I don't know, if they can make that into more sort of metaversy. That could be interesting. The thing we're also not talking about is HP, who's like the largest, I think, right, largest provider of PCs to the enterprise space. And they're also still very much in the VR headset game. Like they just released one earlier this year. And so it definitely seems like Microsoft as low-key got a plan, they're just not sharing all of it with us. They're tying all the dots together.

Yeah. Yeah. So here's the biggest criticism of all these metaverse plans that I've encountered online. They require being in the metaverse? We have to keep saying metaverse. It's a real problem. And I'm just sort of curious for everyone's take on this.

All of these visions are just tremendously boring. Like, we're going to build all of this technology, and we're going to, all this stuff, and we're going to change your relationship to the digital world, and we're going to do NFTs so your clothes can follow you from one, from the Halo Metaverse to the Minecraft, whatever. It'd be amazing if you were wearing the same clothes in Halo and Minecraft, by the way. But at the end of it, the killer app that they're putting forward to you is like,

you without legs at a conference table doing something, like doing some work. Like Excel in the metaverse is the end goal of all of this. and like great. I understand that we've all spent a lot of time in the pandemic. And like there's been a lot of remote work for a lot of people. We're like rethinking our relationship to screens and meeting. Like I get that there's all that pent up energy. But I'm also just like, yeah, at the end of all of these visions, it's like people do an office work.

In a different way. Yeah. In a different way. It's kind of horrifying because I worked at a job one time where the great vision of the person in charge of CEO. We'd, like, we'd move to being a fully remote company. This isn't Fox Media. We'd move to being a fully remote company.

And the great vision of the CEO was to have giant TVs in every, like, space where all the workers were, so that remote people could always appear on the giant TV and participate. And I'm like, Galaxy Brain, that's a little like Microsoft. Yeah, it's Microsoft's Metaverse. So this unnamed CEO, who's no longer CEO, like that was their vision. And Microsoft is like, yeah. And part of me is like, that almost makes sense. But then the other part of me remembers when that was like discussed.

And everybody said, no, I don't want a giant vision of my distant co-workers hovering above my head. Do you remember when we had James with that telepresent robot thing? And he was going around the office? Yeah, the iPad on the Segment. That was the Metaverse. That was my vision, by the way, was iPads on a segue, just floating around with like British people being like, boy. How'd you do, governor?

That's your impression of a British person. That's all you got? I had this pure moment of like, am I going to get canceled or my British person? And so I cut it down. I was like, oh, this is it. This is what cancels me. You just get canceled for the worst British impression ever. No, but we did.

There's a great video you can look at it on our site. We were like, James Vincent, we've got an iPad on a segue, a telepresence robot. That's fundamentally what it was. Just like spend a week trying to work with us. And the week was like, I don't know, the thing just kept bumping into things falling. And him having to shout to people to unlock doors and stuff. It was very strange, but... Well, so this is why the Metaverse is in advance.

Instead of being on a Segway, now you're just legless. You could just float. Yeah. Just float for the door. It's just very clear where in this like early height period with all of this stuff, everything's just getting rebranded as a Metaverse. But the core of the idea, I think, is between Facebook and Microsoft, it does have a set of boundaries, right? You're going to do things in a virtual.

space instead of a physical space and actually spend like meaningful time in those virtual spaces. Yeah. And I think like this is definitely going off at the deep end. Like this is the extreme of like us trying to figure out exactly how we're all going to work remotely and stuff, right? Like for years, I've obviously worked at the verge for nearly 10 years now and jumping into meetings remotely is always a pain. There's a time zone. Like you don't always feel part of the team sometimes because of that. I don't feel like this will necessarily improve that but I feel like if we got to the point where these companies started using

some of like Discord features where you can just sort of chill out in a call like Slackcars those things actually do have an effect like you feel like you're connecting with your team more on a daily basis you should talk into them more so like gradual things like that I prefer to you know legless in some 3D avatar talking to me

sort of future landscape so yeah I don't I I I feel like we've got a long way to go until this vision's fully, you know, actually here and fleshed out. But they're all trying to basically get you to the point where you can, like, remember when you're sitting at a desk and you can just tap someone on the shoulder. Like they're trying to basically trying to bring that back to life, right? These interactions and keep people focused and everyone doesn't really want to be jumping in and out of Zoom calls with their webcam on every five seconds. You might get up late. You might not take a shower.

you don't want your webcam on, like, all that sort of stuff. This is how you end up getting fired by a cartoon. This is why my webcam's never on. I mean, the big thing is we didn't know what smartphones would do, but we knew that there were one or two things that they were great at, that we definitely could tell we wanted right away. And so the question for all of these companies is, what is the one or two things that are going to be sticky,

there will be your quote-unquote killer apps that people are going to want to do, and then will you luck out of it? when all of the emergent behaviors from the relentless iteration of technology arise. So, like, Apple had, like, an incredibly good browser and an iPod, and it got those things, and then everything else emerged out of that, you know, cameras, et cetera, et cetera. So all these companies want to, like, have that moment, that smartphone moment. That's fundamentally what this is. It's like, oh, we want another giant trillion-dollar business like the iPhone was for Apple.

Oh, and Tuckerberg was explicit about it. He's like, I can't live in a world where Apple and Google are in charge of me. Exactly. Yeah. And so, like, the thing that I think a bunch of these companies are missing is they're describing the vision of what it will be in five to ten years, right? And in the way that you would have maybe wanted to describe the vision of what a smartphone will be in five to ten years when it first happened. But they're not telling you what you could do with it tomorrow that's actually compelling enough to make you be like, yep, I need that thing tomorrow. And so that's the problem.

Yeah, they're not telling you the problem that is fixing straight away. Like it's the, you know, in five years we might be doing this and that is definitely the problem. Like you need to have a solid foundation and something that clicks with people, you go, oh, yeah, that's a great idea, you know, like the slack stuff that they basically copy from Discord. Like that is a great idea. Like it genuinely does improve things on a day to day. It's a just small little thing, but it does actually make a big difference. And just having like, I don't think Microsoft has a solid sort of VR headset foundation for. for this work yet.

Obviously, the HoloLens is, you know, an exception. But, like, that thing is like, what is it, $3,500 or something? And do you want to sit there all day with that on? No. I mean, this is, like, the main thing that the solution to Zoom meeting fatigue is not putting a headset on your head. Yeah. It's fewer meetings.

Yeah. Like, that's all that is. It's just, like, have fewer, shorter meetings that are better, not make the meetings more like meetings in a corporate office building. Like, that's what everybody's rebelling against right now is like, oh, I didn't, we didn't need to go to the office. And I don't want to go back and you can't make me. And it's like, okay, Microsoft is like, all right, you don't have to go to the office. What if you wore this headset all day?

Like, I will say, Alex, we, I think we recorded this last week before this news came out, but I know this will be of interest to you. I think the killer app for VR is fitness and in particular supernatural and meta bought Supernatural last week. Yeah, right after Supernatural announced that you can do boxing in it, and it's really good, and I love it. And I converted to Addie. Oh, you did? Oh, yeah. My wife loves supernatural boxing, and every time she is done with it, she comes down and announces to me that she is so good at boxing. And like, are you, do you want to fight me? Also, it's dance boxing, but okay, it is very fun. But on the flip side of this, Zuckerberg is buying every popular VR app that he can get his hands on. anything that blips above the mean on the Oculus store, the Zuck will buy. And so, you know,

I had Chris Milk, the CEO within the company makes VR and Decoder, you know, I pushed him pretty hard. I was like, there's only one platform right now. Do you feel tied to this platform? And he was kind of hinting, you can go back and listen to it. Like, everyone knows Apple's going to make one of these headsets. Yeah. And it's like, we're going to be ready for that. And you could see that the plan was, like, be an indie VR thing with two platforms. There's another big market that's going to open a when Apple has a headset. And I am pretty confident Zuckerberg just wrote a big check. Like, he was just like, what if I just stopped that idea?

I will say that I've been told that the meta deal of Supernatural was in the works way before the boxing announcement. I thought it was weird that they happened the same time. Like, it was a surprise. Like, Zuck jumped out of a helicopter with bags of money and like, crap, we have to do this. No, it works for a long time. And I think they timed it to this. But that's where I think meta versus Microsoft is interesting, just,

just in the context of this conversation. Yeah. We don't know what the killer app is going to be. But anytime anything looks like it, Facebook meta is, we'll just buy it. Like they don't know what it's worth. They don't know. I guarantee you they don't know how much money to spend. Like their answer is like, oodles.

We'll pay oodles of dollars for this app. But Facebook, well, meta does know. Like they will, they will know because they own the platform. And we know that they use that sort of telemetry to acquire companies. That's been their playbook. So they will keep doing M&A And I'm sure of that Like I think Microsoft will plug the gap

Where they can which is always just the enterprise And Facebook's going to try and do that and fail probably So what's funny to me about all that MNA Yeah they're doing it and they did Beat Sabre And they bought it what was the other big one they bought? They bought another really popular game The population one which is like Fortnite and VR Those things are like if you believe that Halo is a metaverse

Those things are metaverses right you have a character, you can see other players, you're wearing clothes. Supernatural to me is hilarious because it is all about you. It has, like, you think about Facebook and the Facebook files, and they're like, you know, Facebook needs the kids, right? Chris Millett told me, Supernatural's user base, 50, 50, 50 men and women, 60% of users are over the age of 40. So it's activating this entire user base that is not what you would think of as like tech early adopters because it's fitness. But it's just you in there. Thinking about your body. Like no NFT clothes, no avatars, no other people.

Like, you're just working out. And so it's like the opposite of the metaverse in like a very real way. But it's the thing that is selling the most headsets. And there's some collision there is bound to happen. It's definitely interesting because like I feel like whenever I've used stuff like VR chat or space and got into any of this, it's just always full of kids. Like I very rarely come across anyone my own age. So it's like. Yeah.

Because they're in supernatural. Yeah. Boxing away. They're like, I got to fix this old body. Young people are like, my body's great. What if I make a new digital one? Old people are like, hold on. There's a real time limit I'm working against here.

I'm trying to push that out as much as I could. There's a little bit of other Microsoft news. They made a notion competitor called Loop. Yes. I was talking to one of our designers. Here's a little inside baseball. We're redesigning the whole website. It's going to come out next year.

So talking to one of the designers. and he was like, everything is Google Wave. Actually, that was TechCrunch's headline is Microsoft releases Google Wave. Very good. That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty good. We use a product called Slab with our product team.

It's Google Wave. This Microsoft thing is Google Wave. Like, if you don't, if you're new to us, Google Wave predates the verge. It was this very, you should go just go look at screenshots of Google Wave. It is the most bonkers idea for software ever. They're like, what if we reconceptualize email and every email is a living. that you can embed quicktime files in. There's not a better way to explain that.

That was honestly better than any. I used it for years and had no idea what it did. I was just like, I'm here. I'm on the wave. So all these things like Notion and Slab and like even Google Docs, to a certain extent, the whole concept is you have living documents that multiple people can work on and you can like, it's like basically imagine if email was collaborative. It's like the only way I can really think about it.

It's interesting that Microsoft finally got there. It's funny because when they first announced this stuff, it was fluid framework. And it was like, okay, yeah, this sounds kind of like notion. But they didn't have like a hub app print and all that sort of stuff. And now it's like, oh, yeah, no, this is like notion now. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And now it's called Loop.

So it's like, yeah. Okay. And then Tom, can you give us the five-minute version of this GitHub drama? Yeah, it's not less drama and just more. I don't know. So basically Nat Freeman, who was there for, I think, three years as the GitHub CEO. He's stepping down later this month. He basically joined Microsoft when they acquired Zamarin

and then they obviously acquired GitHub a few years ago. So he's stepping down. So the more interesting part is that the guy who's taken over, Thomas, he's reporting up to Julia Luson, who has just been promoted to the president of Microsoft Developer Division, which is an interesting promotion because she's basically at the center of a really controversial decision basically on dot net that happened about two weeks ago.

And it basically triggered a bunch of open source community backlash. And then Microsoft was like basically a force to do a U-turn on this decision after like 24 hours. So it's kind of interesting that she's getting even more like control of like Microsoft developer sort of focus products, especially like GitHub is like a massive platform for Microsoft. And it's been it's grown quite a lot since they've acquired it. And there's a bunch of sort of questions going around about like their whole dot net. and the foundation that's supposed to oversee that work and how committed Microsoft is to open source

and actually keeping it open source because the decision that was made was basically to restrict a feature from being open source essentially and being a paid part of Visual Studio, which obviously didn't go down well with people because people had been testing it and it was in something called a release candidate, which was like essentially we're finished,

this product's done, it's in bugs, you know, test the bugs, and we're shipping it. then they were like at the last second. We're not shipping this really key feature that you want, which is hot reload, which I'm going to go too deep into it. But basically when you're coding, it allows you to make changes and it's sort of like live. So it's like a really big feature for developers. Like it is a huge feature that Microsoft's been really slow to adopt. So a lot controversy around it. We'll see what happens. But like I think fundamentally, Microsoft has obviously been pretty good with the open source community. But at the end of the day, they're there to

also make money. You know, is a revenue-driven companies. Everyone has to remember that. So as much as they want to be seen as stewards of open source and participating in it, it's decisions that that, like, that they did a few weeks ago that I think we're going to see more of, you know, like this isn't going to be a one-off. So wait and see, I guess. Yeah. I only brought it up because, you know, we had an end up on Decoder and he was championing how Microsoft is open and they're the open platform and the other platforms. And then like the next day, Windows did a bunch of weird stuff with Edge. And a couple months later, this happened with the open source community.

And like, that is a real dynamic between how Microsoft wants to perceive itself. And then the things that make sense for its business or aggressive moves for its business. Yeah. And the problem of this very particular one is that it makes a tool, visual studio code, which is actually free. It makes that, like, more powerful or like on a level with Visual Studio in a sense, which is obviously mainly a paid commercial product. So basically if they keep giving away stuff for free and improving it and open source,

then where are they making their money there? So it's very complicated, very complex thing, but I feel like this is one of the straws that bloke that camels back between the dot-net community and the open source community. And I feel like this is going to be an ongoing thing. We're definitely see a lot more of this with Microsoft open source.

for sure. I mean, it's like fundamentally opposed philosophies on everything. Like, they can't coexist for a lot. It's impressive they've coexisted as long as they have. I would give them that. They, Microsoft pivoted to supporting a lot of this stuff. They have coexisted, but like, it's not tenable. Yeah. Well, I mean, it could be tenable if Microsoft can figure out different business models. But, I mean, the reason it's worked for Google is because Google has a literal firehose of ad money that they're very good at making bigger. And we're not going to get into it, but there's a whole bunch of Google ad stuff that happened. And there was like the Chrome stuff.

But like Google can like afford to seem like really good open source stewards in a lot of ways because like they just have a giant funnel of money that is tangentially related to all of it. And Microsoft doesn't have quite that big a funnel. They need to make money in other ways. And at some point, it feels like that could get in conflict unless they can start changing some business models. It's definitely the business models is definitely the key thing. But like Google does questionable stuff as well. Of course. Yes.

When it's pretending to be open. We have to take a break. We cannot get into Google's questioning stuff. I promise. Dieter and I are very focused on some of that story. We'll come back around to it when we actually publish a story. But yeah, the reason I brought up is we're seeing all this Metaverse stuff. we're seeing all these companies talk about interoperability.

We're seeing the gap between how Microsoft wants to be perceived and some of their actions. It's only going to get weirder as like the quote unquote metaverse. Like the idea is that you will move freely between all these digital spaces and your stuff will come with you, which is very complicated. So it's interesting that like, yeah, high, highfalut and metaverse stuff on the ground. It's like we made a feature to visual studio and dot net. and everyone got mad and we had to change our minds. Like, the things are still happening. I think it's just so funny because it's like they,

because it's such an open way, they wouldn't have, if they've made that decision before they open source. dot net and I wouldn't have even noticed. You know, it's just, it's going to be an interesting few years ahead. Yeah. All right, Tom, thank you so much. We got to take a break. We'll be back with Chris Welch.

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Hey, Chris. Hey, everybody. Good to be back. All right. There's like head fun news. Do you want to walk us through this? I mean, Chris reviewed a bunch of stuff? I mean, it's all Chris's bag.

He reviewed the Beats Fit Pro, which I find very fascinating. We also reviewed the new AirPods, which we talked a little bit about last week. And concurrent with all that, updated our wireless earbuds guide. But let's start with the Beats Fit Pro because they were announced and reviewed. And I find these things incredibly fascinating. And I find myself incredibly unhappy that I bought a pair of AirPods Pro a couple of weeks ago. So what's the deal with these Beets Fit Pro? They're so good that I don't know why people would buy the AirPods Pro anymore, honestly.

Yeah. Same Dieter. What's the basic idea behind them? So they're 200 bucks. They got a sporty design with these fins that kind of sit in your ears to keep them in place. And a lot of these have been kind of like uncomfortable before. And like they get annoying. But these ones actually, you can feel them there, but they don't press into your ear in any way.

So they can kind of just sit there for hours and they're still comfortable. They've got the same noise cancellation as the AirPods Pro. So that's just as good. The transparency mode is just as good as the AirPods Pro. Maybe like a hair not quite as good, but it's still better than most earbuds you'll find. The sound quality is a lot more punchy and better. They don't have wireless charging. So that's one advantage of the pros.

And the case is a bit large still. a bit chunky, but it's also, the earbuds sit, like, in that case, more certain, whereas you have those times where you, like, go to use your AirPods, and, like, one of them is dead because they didn't charge perfectly. Right. So, you don't have to worry about that. But, yeah, as a whole, like, there have been, like, all these questions about beats, and, like, does Apple really care about beats anymore?

Why do they buy beats? And now they've just kind of come roaring back with the Fitz for, Fitzpro, which... So here's my question. If this is a metaphor that's going to make everybody very mad. Oh, boy. But if AirPods Pro... are like Camaros. Are these like firebirds?

Are they basically just like another like a rebadging, rebranding of the same thing with a slightly different feature set? I guess so. I mean, if you read some of the reviews, it seems like a lot of people are saying like these are the sporty AirPods pros that I always wanted. So it seems like Apple's not going to make these themselves,

but they're happy to let beats kind of fill that zone. But do you think they're like fundamentally like the same internals or just like in a different body with a different set of things? Or are they like completely different headphones that just happen to like share the, you know, W1 chip and some other tech. H1 now. H1, excuse me. Yeah, they share the H1 chip. The drivers are custom.

So those are different from the AirPods pros. They sound a bit better, like I said, Fuller, more base. But otherwise, like, they do share a lot of features. They have all the usual, like Apple tricks, like automatic pairing and all that stuff. But, yeah, I mean, as a whole, like, if you want Apple earbuds, like, if you read a lot of the headlines on these, like, people are saying these are the best ones they make, period. It's like the AirPods Pro. Why is the case so big?

here's the thing about AirPods that like is their best feature is it the case is small yeah right like they're great but like you know these have all the same feature so like you've got the actual buds in your ears these might win i'd be like yeah but the the case is still gigantic compared to AirPods well he's got the form factor's part of it yeah because the hooks the fins are there so they've got have room for those like the power to beat's pro case was like enormous because they had those hooks on that so it was like like what else could they really do because like the earbuds needed that space. So these ones are kind of the same story. You've got to have room for the fins in there. But otherwise, you know, it's still like, you know, fit in the pockets. Not the small pocket of your

jeans, but the large one, it fits fine. I have to say this purple is very striking the photos of your photos of your photos of your videos. They're very pretty. The photos are fantastic. What's like, if you had to compare the fit to any earbuds out there right now, are they like, do they fit like the AirPods? Like for those of us with tiny, tiny ear cadales, that it's surprising we can hear things. I'm one of those people. Yeah, so my friend has really tiny ears in those photos, actually, and they fit her pretty comfortably. She was kind of surprised, honestly. Oh, that's interesting. But yeah, they feel kind of like the pros. I mean, you can feel the wingtips, like I said. They're kind of there. But otherwise, they're super lightweight, super

comfortable. And they're pretty, like, discreet in your ears. You can't really see them sticking out that far. So they've got that going for them, too. Yeah, and they don't have the stupid stems that hit my bike helmet strap. It's very annoying. You mentioned that they aren't quite as good at supporting Android as beats used to be. What's the story there? So the studio boats that came out a few months ago that some people on our staff actually loved quite a bit. Those actually didn't have the W-1 ship or the H-1 ship in there. So they supported features like fast pair on Android and things that these don't. So like these are back to being like an Apple tech inside. But the studio boats were fine. They were comfortable. Their sound was okay. The noise cancellation was pretty mediocre, I think.

So they've done a lot better there with these. And the other 200 bucks, which is a pretty good deal. When you put them next to the AirPods Pro that cost more money. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the loop of wire that enables wireless charging. We know that that costs $400 to make. So it is ridiculous that there's not wireless charging on these. So here's what I'll say. You reviewed the new third-gen AirPods, which are very close to the AirPods pro now in terms of design minus the in-ear and minus noise cancellation. So now you've got the third-gen AirPods at 180.

You've got the Beats Fit Pro. You've got those at $200. And then you've got AirPods Pro at what, 2.49, but they're always on sale for $2.29. Right. So, like, literally in $20 increments, you have all of Apple's headphones. How on earth do you make that decision? Oh, there are people who, like, love the open style of the AirPods. I'm not one of those people.

Like, they let in way too much outside noise for me. I mean, I live in New York City, you know, like, I hear plenty of noise as it is. So I don't want to have that always, like, just engulfing my ears. But there are people who swear by it. Just, like, they're aware when they're, like, running outside or, like, on a bike ride or things like that. They just want that awareness of what's going on. So I think that's an easy decision for those people. Having just been back in New York, the number of people I saw who were just wearing AirPods,

I could tell they weren't listening to a goddamn thing. They were just like wearing them. Or just like wearing one. I can't, hey, right, if that's like your vibe, right? You're just going to leave these things in your ears all the time. You can't sit everything out. Okay, I buy it. But it's still just like crazy to me.

Right, right. So the open style is like an easy thing for those that set those apart. But as far as like the AirPods Pro and the beats go, it's kind of hard to pick between them, honestly. It depends if you want like the sporty vibe. These are great for fitness. They're standard ears, the runs and the gym and things like that. Their IPX4 water resistant. Same for the AirPods pros, actually.

So there's no difference there. But the sound's better on these. Battery lasts a bit longer. So there are like several reasons to consider these over the AirPods Pro. How are the Zoom calls on it versus? Not quite as good as the pros because there is no STEM. Okay. Which ones are better for the Metaverse?

Oh, my God. God. Good Lord. Sounds like the AirPods pros. Yeah, the pros. So I guess if you're on Zoom all day, that's another reason to go for the pros and the third gens as well. So the voice calls on here are good, but they're not going to be quite up to that level. Do they support the...

You and I think share the same opinion of spatial audio, which is like... Yeah. Why? It's just like a question mark. Are these... These are doing spatial audio? Is it the same basic confusing experience? Yeah, it's the same head tracking as the AirPods pro, too.

So they have that. You know, I see more and more people saying that like, oh, I love spatial audio. And so I think those people are all plants. I'm sorry, that is just a coordinated AstroTurf campaign. Who are they? People in our YouTube comments. Yeah. No, those are, that's, that's pure.

That's just like the head of universal music is like telling his interns, like, get on Chris's reviews on YouTube. Say you like it. Yeah. Show yourself. Spatial audio. Like I say in the review, it's good for video. So, so for music. I think more and more artists are starting to use it a bit better.

But on the whole, it's still super hit or miss as far as it's going to be good or way worse than the stereo version is. If you're doing a lot of movie watching in headphones, yep, you want some headphones that support the stuff. Apple is far in the lead. If you're not, I would just like cross it off your list of things to consider. Like, yeah, it is just not there yet. So we're, you know, we're cruising into the holidays. It seems like we know all the headphones that are out. Where are your picks right now for iOS and Android?

So the best overall are still the same? Sony's, the 1000XM4s. Chris, I trust you. I believe you. I know that you're right that they sound the best and they have the best set of features. But the fact that moving them from one device to another requires 20 minutes of repairing just kills me.

That has not been my experience, but to each thorough. So yeah, those are at the top of the heap still, just because they're sound quality and they've got the awesome A&C. Then we have Bose is also like another good option for noise cancellation. Then if you want to spend less, the best earboats under $100 are the new Jabras, the Elite 3. Those are 80 bucks.

Yeah, those seem great. Yeah, those are terrific. They lack pretty much all the frills you'd expect from other. But it's like wireless charging. And there's no auto pause when you take one out. So they cut like a lot of corners. No spatial audio. No spatial audio.

Tragic. Yeah, of course. And then for the sports and gym stuff, the beats fit pro have now finally beaten the Powerbeats Pro. That were our pick for a long, long time. And yeah, I mean, well, there's still a place for the AirPods Pro if you love Apple stuff. Samsung's Galaxy Buds 2 or like a nice overall pick on Android. Are they? Deeter's just shaking his head.

It's like I was watching Deeter shake his head. The nightmare here is like what's the best one to get for the holidays? And it's like, well, it like depends a thousand percent on like 15 different factors. What phone does the person you're buying for half? Exactly. And part of me feels, especially with Apple stuff that they actually don't, they're not worried about cross shopping anymore. They're just like, you know what?

We're just going to flood the zone. And people are going to roll in. they're going to have an amount of money they want to spend, and we're going to make sure that we've got something at that price point. God, it's a good thing there isn't an open hardware interconnect that enabled competition between platforms anymore on these phones. Yeah. Just a thing I think about all the time.

It's a good thing. Our headphone ecosystem has not been restricted by arbitrary software features. Okay. Well, I'm glad our headphones are locked in. I'm just going to do one more dunk on spatial audio. The head turning thing, right? So my initial was like, spatial audio is like answering the question,

no one asked of what if Jimmy Page was sneaking up behind you? Right? The head tracking thing is like asking a question no one answered of, what if you were at a concert with Taylor Swift and you turned around? And it's like, no, I don't know. It's the metaverse. That's an awful lot of technology to answer that question. It's just so confusing.

Anyhow. This doesn't always have to be a concert in my ear. What if it's all prep for their AR headset? So you have that really good audio when you turn around. Yeah, but why are we forcing? these poor artists to like creep around. So when I put on my little glasses, I'll be able to watch them physically creep around and it'll be worth it.

That's all right. I'm pretty sure the wave of artists talking NFTs is coming for a decoder and I'm very excited about it. And I'm going to ask every single one of them on spatial audio. Just you wait and be like, did you have any part of this? Or is this all just like a weird music industry accounting scheme? Because that's what I believe it is. Have you even heard your special audio mix at all? Probably not.

All right, Chris. Thank you so much. We'll be right back. Thank you. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job.

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all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. com. We're back. This is kind of like just a grab bag of weird stuff, but I'm excited for it. Yeah. It's a bunch of weird stuff.

We're all cyber criminals, I think, right? We're all cyber criminals. Excited to talk about it. There is a conference called Web Summit. I believe, Alex, you've been to this. I have not in quite a while. And they had a surprise guest, Apple's Senior Vice President, Craig Federer,

Ghee rolled up to talk to the folks at Web Summit. Ooh, what's Craig want to talk about? Turns out, Craig is real mad about the European Commission's proposed Digital Markets Act, which would require Apple to let user side load. So he got up in front of this crowd after like a very, very excited host was like, yo, we got Craig, hold your iPhones up, turn your flashlights on, it's going to be amazing. Pull it out. Yeah, that's right.

Let's light it up. And as our next guest loves to say, let's dim the lights. Let's set the mood. Craig Federigi, come on out. This is what Web Summit is like. Yeah, this is it. It's the most amped European tech people you can think of. And Craig rolls out on stage and is like, hey, everybody, side loading is evil.

One security firm found more than 5 million attacks per month on its clients using another mobile platform. But there's never been this kind of widespread consumer malware attack on iOS. So what's the difference? Well, the single biggest reason is that other platforms allow side loading. He gave a whole presentation speech running through all of Apple's arguments about how it is very, very dangerous and bad in the end of the world if side loading happens on the iPhone, that everything needs to go through the app store. Crucial to do that at a conference full of, like, young developers learning to develop. That's the place to do it. Side loading is a cybercriminals best friend.

and requiring that on iPhone would be a gold rush for the malware industry. Now, I would just remind you that Google, by default, does not allow side loading. Like, and they don't want you to do it, right? Like, you hit that switch. Google's like, are you sure?

You'll die? Yeah. And then you, like, try to do it, and they're like, ah. You sure? Yep, we got a knife to your throat and we're going to stab you. And then, like, they don't want you to do it.

So it's like, it's a weird comparison from the jump. Yeah. Because it's not like it's happening a lot on Google. And in fact, when Epic tried to get people to sideload Fortnite, it failed and they had to go crawling back to the Google store. So just putting that out there. Second, Apple makes the Macintosh. Like, you remember those? Yeah.

And like, are they saying that everybody just like install software on the Mac is just a honeypot for cyber criminals? Because that's weird. That's a weird position for them to be in. I don't know. It's like he was at the, he was at the epic trial. He was asked this question by the judge. The judge didn't buy it in the opinion. she kind of didn't buy it.

He was like, Craig had to walk that fine line of like saying the Mac was less safe than the iPhone, but the iPhone is in your pocket all the time. But we should do better on the Mac, but we're not going to lock down the Mac. Apple's just in a weird place. Sightloading undermined security and put people's data at risk. That's, that's his position now. Yeah. Well, no, it's always been their position.

And like lots of supporting arguments, too. If side loading is allowed, then a certain social network might require you to side load if you want to talk to your friends. And that's dangerous, which is, who, it's a lot. Maybe it's true. I don't know. You know, you might be smart enough not to sideload, but that doesn't mean grandma isn't, and that's the end of the world. You know, a bunch of stuff like that. Grandma's not sideloding.

That's a lot of steps. So I made a bad tweet about this. I was like, look, there's other, like, it's possible to protect your phone, you know, without the app store that they could like scan. apps in the way that Google does. And like, lots people are real mad at like, like, it's a bad tweet. There are ways to scan for malware with that, you know, without the app store. The real point I'm trying to make here is it's a false choice. It's not all computer security has to happen for the app store or Armageddon, right?

There's that, that, that's not the only way to set up a model to protect a computer. And to say that the app store is like the best way. and the only way is, well, I would say it's disingenuous. It's like they spent over 20 years talking about how good Mac security was to the point that you didn't need, like, antivirus stuff, right? Like, they spent years doing that. And now they're like, but you do if it's a phone. If you hold it in your hand and not on your lap, like, that seems to be the distinction. And I just want to say, like, there's one arguments we made, which is you carry your phone around on you all the time.

it's the camera you take to the bathroom with you. Yep. Like I think we'd all have a different relationship with our phones if we just started referring to them as the cameras that go to the bathroom with you. I'm never, never bringing it with me again. It's just a weird thing that you do with a camera. You're like, I'm going to this bathroom. Bring in four cameras with me. Right.

Okay. So fine. Like, yep, there's a higher threshold. And, you know, the United States government just blacklisted the NSO group, which is the most famous purveyor of zero day hacks against the iPhone. Like, there's a lot. lot of reasons you want to be more protective of a phone. But then there's a lot of reasons. The phone is also most people's primary computer, only computer, in many, many cases. There's a lot of reasons that you want to give people out from corporate control.

So I will say another person who spoke at Web Summit was Spotify's chief legal officer, Horacio Gutierrez, who has been on Decoder. And he gave a speech about protecting the digital economy from gatekeeper platforms. What do you think the green room is like those two hanging out? Oh yeah, like Craig Federi is just like running up to the Spotify guy being like, you're creating a wonderland for cyber criminals. And the Spotify guy's like, we're just trying to stream music. And he's like, have you tried our spatial audio?

That's my impression. I'm over here. Right? No, no, just kidding. I'm over here. I can't hear you. I don't think they saw each other. But Harassio's got a long tweet thread.

I'll just read the highlight. The apocalyptic wasteland that Apple says would ensued if they're forced to comply with competition laws is a fiction. there's nothing in the digital markets act or any other proposal that will prevent Apple from setting privacy and security standards for the platform. So that's just like that's the other side of the argument. The one thing I'll point out, and we should move on, is Apple doesn't, like Facebook's in a lobbying place right now. Right. There's all the regulators and there's Mark on Capitol Hill and just a lot.

Nick Clegg works at Facebook, just a lot of lobbying and politicking and whatever from Facebook. And that's why they're rebranding and trying to do all this other stuff. Like they live in a world of regulatory pain. We do not perceive Apple as being a political operator in that way. But the amount of lobbying coming out of Apple right now is at an all-time high. It's speeches like this. It is lobbyists on the ground in various states pushing back against competition laws. It is my personal vindication about buttons and links.

They filed for a stay on that order. And they said these buttons and links are a real problem for us, told you so. All over the world in all kinds of ways. They're, whatever you think of the build back better bill, whatever that looks like now, whatever chaos you think that is, they're against it, right? They're pumping millions of dollars into, I think the business roundtable. That's their lobbying organizations, actively lobbying against that bill. Like, Apple's fully in the political game in a way that we do not perceive them as being in the same way that Facebook is. Facebook is just more public because it's Facebook.

Because there was a whistleblower talking about the files. Yeah, exactly. So it's just like, I would just remind everyone that you think Apple's above it all, but they are, that's the speech. They are in the mix. They're lobbying and cease proposals. We'll see how goes. Yeah. Should we go to Facebook or do you want to talk about this 5G situation? We should talk about the 5G. I mean, the, okay, well, I've already disclosed, but the two Facebook things are Facebook jettisoned some of its like facial recognition data, but I think it's still hanging out of the models. So, So, you know, it's not, they don't get quite as much credit as maybe they've, they've gotten in the initial wave, but they get some. And then speaking of lobbying and policy, Facebook is pulling a little bit of an epic, just a little bit. They are letting creators put links into some Facebook stuff to get paid directly by users to get around Apple's tax.

And so it's sort of a, well, you'll, you'll ban us if we have a, if we try and get around the 30% tax, but are you going to ban the individual creators to whom we are giving the tool to make a button to get around your 30% tax, which is a very interesting stratagem. Yeah. And they, Mark Zagberg announced this in a Facebook post where he was like, Apple sucks, but we don't. Like straight up, like the first sentence is like, Apple's tax is a problem. Yeah.

But we're getting around it with this thing, which is interesting. I think it's the face recognition is really interesting in the context of the Metaverse is one of the things, Metaverse adjacent technology is AR glasses that show you people's names. You're talking about killer apps. That's the killer app. Yeah. Facebook had all that data and they're throwing it away.

So we'll see what happens. Why are they throwing it away? Is it just because everybody said, oh, that's terrible and horrifying? Yeah. I mean. Yeah. They say they don't want it, which like I wish more companies said that. But I mean, again, they are hanging on to, I believe they're hanging on to some of the models that

they used some of the stuff to build. So, like, a very, very cynical take would be like, yeah, they can't make the model better with what they've got. So they might as well dump it and get the PR win from it. Yep. And they got this quote. Looking ahead, we still see facial recognition technology as powerful tool. But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful needs to be weighed against the growing concerns about the use of technology as a whole. So if you've done all the modeling you can do with the data you have, you can just exit quietly from one gigantic regulatory fight about facial recognition and just like focus on your other gigantic regulatory fights.

Sure, I'll take it. Yeah. Also, it's still, they still own Facebook. Yeah. Do you know where all the pictures of people's faces are? They can still just go do it again. They're just like, they just like hit start on the program. I don't know how that works.

They just, they reboot and they forgot that it was in like the startup files. So if they reboot a server, also they're just doing it again. They do a configuration change. Yeah. All right. Wait, one more, one more configuration change. Yeah. Instagram will now.

if you tweet an Instagram thing, show a little preview card inside Twitter. Yay. That nine-year fight is over. The dumbest, stupidest fight. Got to protect the images. So they initially fought because

Instagram didn't want Twitter building off of its user graph. Yep. Which is fascinating. Casey Newton, by the way, by the time you're listening, his story on how this deal to put the previews back

will be up on the website happened over some wine and sausages at the back of the Twitter ad execs house. It's a real boy. Yeah, it's very good. But that story will be up by the time. I just love a little deal TikTok. Like, they were just hanging out.

And they're like, man, we should fix this decade-old problem that everyone hates. And I fix that. But I think it's also just very telling. They don't think those user graphs are growing against each other anymore. Yeah. Right? Like at the heart of it. It's not a completely different story from the facial recognition story.

Yeah. They're just like, we're out of Twitter people. Also, we only care about teens now. This one is very interesting to me. Verizon, AT&T, they both bought a bunch of mid-band spectrum. The phones now support it, and they are delaying, rolling out that network because of aircraft interference concerns.

Which seems like one of those cliffs you should have seen coming. Yeah. In fact, I believe they, I think it's more like it was a game of chicken. Yeah. And they blinked. Like at the end of the day, like the FCC had a Trump card. Or not the FCC. The FAA had a trump card.

And they played it. And so everybody else had to blink. So this is the second kind of like 5G radio frequency controversy that has erupted. The first one was scientists, weather scientists, were like you're going to interfere with our weather collection systems. And I think the industry just sort of ran over them. Yeah. They saw Elon Musk do it with space internet.

Like, well, let's just see if we should do the same thing. Yeah. So we have a story about that. It's from Justine. It's from November 2019. But that was a real thing. And, like, people cared about a lot. Wireless industry just ran over meteorologists.

FAA and the nation's airlines a little bit harder to run over. Because they're above you. They're literally, you can't run over them because they're flying. You know, special audio, they fly right over to your head. So the aviation industry has been talking to this for a while. They brought up in August. Major disruptions to the use of the national airspace system can be expected with a rollout of C-Band-5G.

FAA released the thing. So this week, it's working to better understand their concerns. Yeah. And it's like the concern is you're going to interfere with their equipment. And they're only delaying it by a month, which is interesting because like we didn't know when they were rolling it out in the first place. So it's sort of funny like, yeah, we're going to delay it a month. By the way, we were planning on launching it.

It's like, oh, okay, great. However, there are other countries where the stuff is rolled out. We'll just see what happens. It's very funny that AT&T and Verizon for all of this hype. By the way, their argument is if you don't let us do this, we'll lose the race to 5G. Yeah. And it's like, guys. We did.

We lost it. super lost. Also, no one is leaving America because there's better 5G for us. Just a reminder. There's never been right. There's at least one verge reader who will leave America because the 5G is better. And that boy was me. It was you.

I have to what to say. All right. Here's a little lightning around. The Zillow story is nuts. So Zillow, which, by the way, had a great business model, right? Which is like, access the public real estate. database, show you the listings, and then take cuts on both sides of the, they're like, what if we buy the houses?

And then use AI to price them. It's just a cautionary tale. They bought too many houses. The AI didn't work. They need to sell 7,000 houses that they bought at two high prices. They're laying off 25% of their staff, which is 2,000 people. Oh, my God. Don't, don't build AI business.

Like, it's a boom market for real estate. they're like every my entire TikTok me like every fourth video is like I'm like here's how I make a million dollars a day flipping houses. Yeah. There's an entire television channel that's just like people flipping houses and Zola's like the robot's gonna do it. Yeah. It didn't work for them. Who's gonna buy all the houses?

Also fundamentally like if people think that your app is there to help them buy a house and you're actively making it worse by like buying houses and flipping them maybe maybe maybe you're bad. It's just a weird, like, the story of the digital economy is not having any inventory, right? Like, where's a taxi company without taxi companies? Airbnb is a hotel company without hotels.

It's like an old meme. Gazilla's like, what if we're a real estate company that owns houses? It's like, did you not see the tweet? That's the whole. Okay. Ford, the car news. Dieter, are you into this Volkswagen ID5? I am.

It's not that much smaller than the ID4, but it's like a sportier, slightly. you know, cooler looking version of the ID4. I'm just incredibly angry because they're not, they're only releasing

it in Europe. They're not going to release it in the U.S. Same thing with the ID3, by the way, their, you know, replacement for the golf. I would just like to buy

a small car where I can, you know, see over the hood and, you know, fit it into my garage. Those are, those are things that I would like like to have.

And in America, I can't because we're, we're racing to fight. instead, I guess. I don't know. All cars in America look like angry robots. Yeah, that's your only choice. There is a pilot program, I believe in the Netherlands right now, for Tesla to start sharing its supercharger network. And it works there because there's like regulations that make sure that the charging plugs work and are compatible. But maybe someday we could have decent charging networks for cars that don't have Tesla badges on them in the U.S.

That's another thing that I would like. Anyway, I have emotions about electric cars. Not the least of which is this new Ford crate thing, which seems amazing. This is, we've done a lot of stories about old cars, like classic cars, but who can turn into electric cars. There's a big scene. We did one on like an ultra fast Mustang, like years ago. I think it's very cool. Like Ford is the, Ford has always sold crate motors.

And now they're just going to sell you the Mustang Machese drive train and you can just like put in anything. And they announced it with a classic truck restoration. it's neat. If you're going to actually get to full electric cars, you need to let people tinker and, like, build weird stuff. And I think Ford has a long history with that. So I think it's very cool.

That said, I would not, I'd be like, this truck probably doesn't, like, have a great crash rating. So there's limits to it. But I think they recognize that you have to get the hobbyists and the car enthusiasts on board. And they've even, they've been doing it in weird ways which is fun. There's a lot of Tesla drive train swaps that happen. It's cool at Foresa Mac. Like that was the kind of the primary one until now, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's the one you could get. Yeah, that was it. Nobody's doing a vault. It's like, I made a slow car. Put a Chevy vault in my Shelby. Looks great. We'll see. It's not particularly fast. The Maki GT is out. And that is like a rocket. But this one is a little, it's a little deep powered. But I'm sure the whole point is you got to give the stuff to people and let them build a community around it. Okay. I really want to talk about this oven. So GE has a line of smart ovens and it has a new thing that will, uh, it'll handle cooking the turkey for you and like make you worry less about the million variables that go into cooking a turkey. I only put it on the rundown because I was like, oh, okay, yeah, sure, whatever, smart oven. But no, people are really excited and into it.

It's a software update is the, is honestly the neat part for me. I, I think that like smart ovens are going to be cool in next year. I think that they added like an air frying feature via a software update to some of their smart ovens. Like it's time. It's time for ovens to get even smarter and cooler. We need to move beyond pod-based food technology into ovens creating insane new ways. I want my oven to turn into an instant pot via a software update.

I'm just going to say it. Just the whole thing. Just seal it up. Pressure cook it. I'm sending this whole audio clip to my landlord so I can move a little. away from the gas. I am extraordinarily skeptical of this entire oven situation. Come on.

Come on. Just going to be honest. Like, I don't know, man. Like the whole, there's like a lot of smart grills, right? Where you like put the probe in that every trigger can do this, right? Yeah. Monitor is a temperature of feed and you can walk away. This is doing that for a turkey.

So it's like, first of all, the model is proven out by all the outdoor cooking companies. Yeah. But the whole reason that cooking turkey is hard is because. the white meat and the dark meat cook at different rates. Well, you spatchcock it. You'll be fine. It's just like this quote that's like, you don't need to do any other work. You just like throw a raw turkey in the oven and let this commute.

It's like, no, you probably still need to do this. You should dry the skin out. You should have brine. You should do the stuff. You don't even need to unwrap it. The robot arms that appear via software upgrade. I will say this. When it's done, the oven timer app says,

gobble, gobble. Which is perfect. It's great. Somewhere at GE, there's someone who had to go source the gobble-gobble audio file and then like package it into the software update. If you are that person or you know that person, I will give you a full hour on this show to talk about how you selected the gobble-gobble sound and the meetings you had to go to.

Like, did you present it to the board? How many gobble-gobbles were there? Yeah. Was there like a fun one that you really liked, but it was deemed too edgy? Like, I just want to know. Find me. All right. That's it. It was a weird week. A lot of things happened. But it's like we're entering the kind of pre-holiday lull after all of October. But we'll be back next week. We're going to be here. We're here for you. We've got another 10 years to go. It's a long. It's a big promise. But we're going to do it. Another 10. Starting now. On Decoder this week, we had a very special guest, Dieter, Dieter, Deeder Bone.

Hey, I know that guy. We talk about Springboard, your documentary. On Monday, on Decoder, Alex Heath, talked to Meta's CTO, Andrew Bosworth, about the name change to Meta and the Metaverse. Go listen to that. Alex did a great job. There's a Tuesday episode of the Vergecast coming next week, which you're going to want to listen to because Andrew Marino has gotten together with Liam and I to make a special episode about everybody's favorite port. Oh, boy.

Not the wine. I was like the Tonny. I mean, yeah. Lots of podcasts to come. Very exciting. Thanks to Tom. You can tweet at him. He's at Tom Warren. Thanks to Chris Welch. He's at Chris Welch. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Dieter is Backlund. I am at Reckless. Dieter, by the way, if you listen to that

Vertcast Live, explains what Backlon means. Only a little. It's an abridged version. It's a very long. That's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Get a shot. Unlike Aaron Rogers. Oh, my God.