The Vergecast - Microsoft’s Edge Chromium launches, NBC reveals Peacock details, and our CES takeaways

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

Stories this week: The Verge Awards at CES 2020: welcome to the land of the concept Eight big takeaways from CES 2020 These gaming PCs want to compete in the console wars Laptops were boring at CES, but there’s hope for the future The most important TVs of CES 2020 were finally for the masses Microsoft’s new Edge Chromium browser launches on Windows and macOS How to install extensions on Microsoft’s new Edge browser The browser wars are back, but it’s different this time Google is finally killing off Chrome apps, which nobody really used anyhow Google to 'phase out' third-party cookies in Chrome, but not for ... Roomba’s robot vacuum could grow arms in the near future OnePlus confirms its next phone will jump to a 120Hz screen Latest Galaxy S20 Plus leak shows off 120Hz display and no … Samsung’s Galaxy S20 and its many cameras revealed in leaked photos  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, a little bit of CES wrap-up, future of TVs, folding screens, all of it. We get into the browser wars. Microsoft has a new version of Edge Out, and we talk about the future of streaming NBC's Peacock launched literally while we are talking on the show. 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 back. 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 Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the ever-growing Vox Media Empire. It does. The sun never sets on it because the sun doesn't shine on the internet. Because the internet is a series of tubes. that are underground. He went in a different place than I thought it was going, but I went there with you. I'm glad that we went there together.

That's Dieter. Hi, Deeter. Hello. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Paul, it's been so long. You know what? It's good to be back.

I missed you guys. I missed you too. And I'm Nealai. I'm your friend. So we're back. It's been a million years. We went to Las Vegas. Deeter and I for, it was my 11th year.

What year? How many CSs have you been to, Deeter? 13. I'm too old for Vegas now is the thing that I learned. My body just rejected it. by the fourth day. It just wanted me to go home. And I did. And then it said, I'm still mad at you. And I was basically sick until yesterday. But it was at CS is always fun. It's always good to be with our team. It's always good to see all the people that we see at CS. The whole industry shows up.

You just see people floating around that you haven't seen in a long time. It's great. Yep. I know a person who knows a person who came back from CES with dengue fever. That's a lot. I don't know where in Vegas they went. But it's like at once, I believe it. And two, it's like fantastic, but that's like the Las Vegas spirit. Anyway, yeah. We haven't really talked, Paul, before we started the show, Paul was like, we haven't really talked about CBS overall. We did one episode there.

We did some interviews there. You're going to hear some interviews that I did with various executives come out over the next couple of weeks. I'm very stoked for AMD. Can you tease the AMD interview? I can tease the AMD interview. That one's coming out soon. So I interviewed CEO of AMD, Dr.

Lisa Sue. I will tell you that she's just one of the smartest, fun. coolest people I've ever talked to. It's super sharp. Very clear on what AMD's opportunity is and how she's managing the company to hit that opportunity and compete with Intel. And very clear that like, you know, AMD chips in laptops is a multi-year step-by-step process and they're at year three. And they think that, you know, year four and year five, they're going to blow out. At year four and year five, they're going to like blow it out and make a big splash. We talked about AL and ML. We talked, you know, like, we just got into it.

And she just knows it all cold. And she is also the CEO. So she's thinking more strategically than, you know, every time I interview somebody like this, I like, I'm not a total chip nerd. So I go on Twitter and I say, hey, I'm going to interview this person. Send me some questions. And some people are great. They're like, when is AMD going to compete this product category within video, which is like a high level strategy question? Right.

And then other people are like, I've got a 2010 gateway PC with missing driver. support for this specific video card. Can you ask about it? Like, I don't think she knows. Like, she's a CEO. Like, so it's always, that mix is always really interesting to me because it's a good mix of, you know, the people who are like interested in AMD as a company and strategy and people are using the products. And I think finding that connection is just for me personally in interviewer. Like, that's my goal is to connect the CEO strategy to the experience of using the products. But a great conversation. I don't mean to hype it too much. It's going to come out really soon. I've got to say I'm more hyped now. So, yeah. Just put a little bit of it.

out. Sometimes I talk to a CEO and I can't get there. I can't get to that connection between how does your strategy affect what people use? And with her it was like right away. It was instant. It was really good. Anyway, so CS stuff is coming out. But we haven't like kind of taken the step back. The show we did there with Ashley and Sean was like deeply in the weeds of stuff. I just wanted to like take a step back. Do you feel ready to take a step back from this experience? I do. Yeah. I mean, I have to step back in. I've taken this. So many steps back that I'm already trying to wash it from my memory. But, you know, I think relatively famously at this point, am not a CES hater.

I try to take a more nuanced view of what goes on at this thing, that it's about showing off technologies, not necessarily showing off like the next hit product in a lot of cases. I think that the dial was turned too far this year in terms of like, let's show off concepts. Like, I love a concept if there's a reason for it or if there's a specific technology or a specific future that you are, like, touting. That's, like, what a concept car usually is. The concepts at CES, a lot of them were just, like, innovation will happen. It's like, I need, like, something more than just, like, we made a, we made a crazy car. I need something.

Yeah. And there's just too much, too much of that. So let's just kind of go category by category. I always say CES is a TV show. The concept car TVs that we saw at C.S. This year took two forms, I think. one was 8K and the other one was like, what if a TV looked like this? And whether that was like a piece of furniture or a regular TV with a motor behind it,

it was like, what if we like make your rectangles different? And then what if the rectangles had more pixels in them? Like, those are the two categories. Can you give me like what a CEO's pitch for why 8K matters at all? Because I haven't really been paying much attention because, like, you know, we're so far from actual 4K high quality content in the living room that 8K matters. So I can give you the pitch. You actually hit on something that I think is very much happening right at the second.

But the pitch for why AK matters is 4K hardware displays, cameras, broadcast, all that stuff, is very close to, in the case of the broadcast distribution stuff, like very close to commodity ready for wide-scale deployment. The sets are already commodities, right? You spend $300, you agree to have some company you've never heard of track you for life. You can get a 4K TV. Fine. So, like, they're done there.

So their forward investment is an 8K, right? Sure. This is like now they're as close to commodity as you can kind of get. You know, it'll keep going for a while, but by that point it'll be completely uninteresting. So now they're trying to boot up sort of the 8K cycle. And that is where their next set of investments going. That's where the next set of R&D is going. That's where, you know, when Fox Sports upgrades all of its cameras from 1080P to 4K,

that's a lot of money to come in and they're getting ready for like 4K to 8K. That's that cycle that they're just way out in front of. For a consumer perspective, I think that part of the argument which some have made explicitly and some have not is that the processing power and their ability, to do really good and interesting things with the picture means that you will actually want to turn on their magical upscaling algorithms because it will look better,

whatever you're watching will look better, upscale to 8K using their algorithms than it would just at a normal 4K and a normal 4K TV. It's like a thing that they aren't like out and out saying, but like here and there you kind of get the hint that they want to, but you know, we actually have to see it to judge that. I mean, I walked by a lot of AKTVs on the show floor

and I am very picky, and I think I, you know, I believe I can see it. I'm an audio file. I can hear it. I will sound real warm. And I could not see it. Like, I just didn't buy it. Right. In the wild, I have yet to see a 4K experience in any home that is anywhere

as close to as good as the 4K that I saw in like, what trade show was. I was probably EFA 2010 or 2011, you know, that 4K. is better than the 4K that is in the home. My dude, we got a Mac Pro with a Pro Display XDR in the office. We've been, in addition to sometimes doing work on it, we've run a lot of 4K HDR video loops from YouTube on it. That looks really good. So come by and visit.

You can look at that. But to get back to the thing that I said, I disagree with you on, where 4K isn't ready, I actually think the TV industry is constantly hunting for an upgrade cycle. That's just the way they're organized, even though now the TV is. their computers and they do data collection and they have revenue bundles and all the other stuff that they've done to make your TV generate revenue over time. The industry is still organized around you're going to buy a new TV. That's the thing it wants you to do. It's the Super Bowl. You're going to buy a new TV. It's President's Day. That's when everyone bought a new TV.

Abe Lincoln bought a new TV every day on his birthday. That's just how they are. It's Black Friday. You need a new TV. Like, how many TVs can you get? Which I think this cycle should be variable refresh rate. And that's probably my, you know, my buy. Agree. That's not ready yet. It's not ready yet. It's here. It's in some of them. But what is really happening is a convergence of the harbor being close to commodity. So the actual sets are close to commodity, especially sort of the mid-range. The high-end sets, the OLED sets are getting smaller. The panels are getting easier to get. So you see more companies doing them and their prices are still dropping. And then a shift to streaming where you can actually deliver the stuff. The broadcast networks are not ready to deliver in 4K. The Super Bowl will be in 4K, but only if you subscribe to one Dish Network plan that requires you to stand outside your house with a whistle at 8 a.m. that will directly attune the saddle. They're not ready. They can do it, they're not quite ready. But if you have Netflix, you just get 4K HDR. Like Disney Plus, how do they

drive a lot of people at Disney Plus? They said Star Wars is remastered in 4K HDR. So there's this drive on the streaming side to remaster the content because they know people will appreciate it. They will sign up for the services. And then there's consumer behavior that's shifting to the services. And then there's hardware that can display it to you. That's kind of a series of coincidences. But I think it's actually driving an upgrade cycle. I do not know what part of the upgrade cycle 8K is going to get.

Like if you just like spin it out into the future, the first, I'm sorry, if you look at the history and then spin it out into the future, the HD upgrade cycle, was driven kind of by accident, by form factor. People wanted to get flat panel TVs, and they ended up with a 720 PhD display because that's what they were. And then that just kept happening. But they just wanted smaller, thinner TVs to put in the world so they could get them.

The 3D cycle didn't happen because no one gave shit. The curve TV cycle didn't happen. They keep trying, but now they're at a place where there's an abundance of content from streaming services. Consumer behavior is changing. You maybe don't want a bunch of boxes

under your TV. It's easier to just go by a Roku TV or whatever. And you can just get it. And it's like a big, beautiful 4K TV and Mandalorians and 4KHDR. It's all just like waiting for you to watch. 8K is like what's going to drive it? What associated massive shift in consumer behavior is going to drive it the way that I want a smaller, thinner TV, or I have cut the cord and now I have access to a library of content at higher resolution that seems really cool. AK is going to need that. I don't know where it is. I can't predict the future. Maybe something will happen, but I would say that's the problem.

I want it to be like the wallpaper style TV that LG does just becomes commodified. And like people will want to get a TV that's so thin. It's just like they can just like tack it to their wall with double stick tape. You know? Yeah. I think that's a ways off. Especially with 8K, which, you know, like if you walk up to some of these TVs, you're like, oh, this thing is beautiful. And then you like can just kind of sneak up to it and put your hand over on the side.

And it's like, also it could heat my room for the through the winter. Yeah, I walked, Samsung had the wall TV again, the modular one. I was walking by it with somebody. I was like, oh, they updated it. And they just looked to me and said, it's generating a lot less heat than last year, which one implies like last year you noticed the amount of heat, and then this year you noticed it was less because it was so much last year. So yeah, I think there's a way to go.

8K is the stuff they show off because they need to drive that cycle. I think they're getting lucky with 4KHDR. And I honestly think the HDR side is more important than the 4K side. I would rather watch 1080P HDR than 4K HDR or 4KSDR. Right. I'm not mad at anybody trying to drive an upgrade cycle. I'm just like 4K for me is visually better than 1080P. And I agree, HDR is really nice.

And a good 1080P HDR is probably better than bad 4K. But a 4K is already like diminishing, like you're not going to get a lot more. Like, 4K you already see a ton of the film grain. Like 8K, you can see compression artifacts better. Yeah, look, 5G is going to solve it all, Paul. Oh, thank you. That's where, see, I don't know if you've noticed it, but 8K, 5G and AI are going to come together.

Well, there's a lot of synergy there if you think about it. So, wait, can I take you guys on a little tangent about 5G? Yes. I'm thinking about it. What is the show about? Well, because it kind of sparked the, you know, you have your standing question of, you know, is 5G erase? And obviously for carriers especially, you know, like country versus country,

5G race, I don't know, that's probably a little silly. But the way I've been thinking about just recently is, actually, I listened to this podcast called on Software Engineering Radio about this infrastructure as a service, like trying to, like, instead of the cloud where you spin up a virtual machine, like this is like the cloud, but you can spin up real hardware. And it sounds like they're big client or something, that they're working with a lot are mobile carriers who are deploying 5G. And something this guy said is that 10 years ago, when LTE was deployed, the cloud didn't

really exist. But now that cloud is a very well-known idea. So they deployed LTE in a way people did old-timey computer things before the cloud. But now that the cloud is such a thing and now that the edge is so hot and they're doing this deployment, basically the long and the short of it is I think carriers view. the 5G deployment, like specifically the physical hardware that they have to put out into the world to support 5G, not just the towers, but the back end of it is a chance to build the next AWS. Yes, I have sat at dinners with every major carrier where they have given me that speech. And then I say things like, are you as good at AWS as Amazon?

And they're like, well, of course we are. And I'm like, well, you run yahoo.com, which does not suggest. or software engineering abilities right? It's like that. Yeah. Well, and one of the reasons why it's a bit of a race is you have to be able to show that, like, hey, you want to have your servers in our building because there's so much traffic coming through. So they kind of need the traffic to incentivize the people building on their infrastructure,

in a sense. Yeah, no, I think that's correct. It's a much bigger piece of the promised zero. latency 5G experience than is ever really mentioned. Like, 5G is going to have zero latency so doctors can do surgery, you know, like whatever. The cars don't have any latency. It is not, that is not so much a function of physics or speed of the network. That's a function of data being processed closer to you because data is being processed at the network level.

That is very much the, I mean, I've heard it from every major carrier in some way or another. We're going to bring processing to the network level. We're going to do it locally. It's going to happen faster. We're not going to round trip to wherever AWS is. I just think that carriers are less sincere than they often let on. Such a good way to put it. This is gently as I can say it.

And I think they are also interested in doing crazy carrier stuff, like tagging all your packets so they can track you more effectively. and build competitive ad solutions for Google and Facebook. They want to do all that other stuff. Oh, but, Neely, Verizon just launched a new search engine that promises not to track you. I'm 100% certain that they have found another way to track you and they want you to use that search engine so Google cannot.

Yeah. Like, I just know how they think. So I actually, I was with a, I would say, an infrastructure executive at CES. And I asked him if it was a race. and he was like, no. I was like, well, you're the person who should say it's a race. And he's like, it's a national security race.

It's a race against Huawei. Everyone needs American companies to win. Everyone needs companies like Verizon and Qualcomm to win. And then their preferred suppliers in Europe like Erickson, Siemens, to win so that the prices of their equipment drops and becomes cost competitive with Huawei. So Huawei does not build all of the 5G networks in the rest of the world. This is like a big topic. There was just a bill proposed this week.

It was bipartisan. It was like Ed Markey and Marco Rubio came together to start a 5G, like a billion dollar 5G fund. There's a rip and replace bill for the mid-size carriers who have already deployed Huawei gear to rip it out and replace it with other stuff. That stuff, we don't know if it has traction. We didn't like cover it. It's just like there's that noise. And the more I ask people why, what it's a race, it's a race kind of fundamentally for Qualcomm to win, right? For Qualcomm and Erickson Siemens to beat Huawei so that their corporate tentacles can define the 5G standards as opposed to Walweys.

Am I being tinfoil hat for every time I hear this? I was like, we want the NSA to spy on them, not the Chinese government. Yeah, you want the home team to be looking at you. Yeah. I don't think that's tinfoil hat at all. I think the more you talk to people, the more they would prefer that friendly interests are spying on Americans rather than hostile foreign interests, which is like, you know, I don't love it, but I get it. Like, it's hard to argue with that one. But, Paul, you look, you're going to get some Pringles cans.

They're going to do like your own private, libertarian mesh network. That's right. That's right. And cintifies through lightning. I think that for consumers, what all of this actually, what 5G means. for consumers is you bought a phone in 2020. Like the Qualcomm's, you know, the new high-end chips from Qualcomm that just are going to have 5G in it, whether or not the network is there to actually give you much benefit from it,

whether or not it's really any faster, whether or not you like manage to eke out a millimeter wave signal somewhere or if you're just on like T-Mobile's midband or whatever, it just means you bought a phone that maybe has slightly faster data from time to time. and all this other stuff is not going to get resolved in 2020 is my prediction. Yeah, you know, one of the things I do at CS a lot is I take a lot of meetings sort of in my role as like a Vox media person with a lot of Vox Media partners. And, you know, they always want me to talk about, what am I seeing? What are the trends, blah, blah. And this year, for the first year that I can ever remember, I was like, does anybody want me to talk about 5G?

and like the size of exhaustion that I heard, we're just like out of control. They're like, no, we get it. It's going to change our business. Like, who cares? And I think the industry has done so much to focus on, it's a revolution to try to get people hyped into this massive capital expenditure that's going to be required.

They haven't delivered a killer app. They haven't delivered a promise that's even slightly less esoteric than we're going to do faster computing at the, edge with lower latency, which is like not the most scintillating dinner conversation. Thank you, Vergecast listeners, for paying attention to us. I just, it's not on par with like YouTube works on your phone, which is like the LTE promise. So I think there's a ways to go, but I've come closer to realizing that what some people think

the stakes of the race are. And I've come much closer to realizing that it's like Dieter said, what's going to happen is you're going to buy a new phone and the network is going to get better around you. And you're like, oh, that phone's a little bit faster. And that's all, truly, that's all that's going to happen. So we've talked about AK. We've talked about 5G. We obviously have to talk about AI so that we can hit the Foxconne trifecta.

No, thank you. I didn't see any AI. The buzzword was dead at CS this year. Well, the only place that tried to make a hay out of it was neon, that weird Samsung division that was creating digital avatars that would talk to you. And it just flopped. Like, everyone just saw it immediately through it. It was like, this is awkward and bad and unfinished.

And everybody else had talked about AI. They no longer expected you to like swoon when they said that their product uses AI. It's just like our product has a microchip in it. Yeah. Okay. I mean, the default answer now from like every reasonable tech journalist when you're like, my product has AI in it. Like, everyone's like, how is it biased?

What bad data set did you feed your robot so it will do something horrible in the future? Which I think is a totally fair response. but I think it kind of dulled the sharpness of the buzzword. We got to talk about folding screens. We got about talk about PCs. Which one of those do you want to do first, here? I think we can knock PCs up pretty quick. I think that we are waiting to see what Intel's new chips really do in the real world.

I don't think that we're going to ever see from Intel another like Haswell level. Like, oh, my God, the battery life is twice as good now. But I think that we're going to see better improvements in their newest chips. have in the past couple years and be very interesting to see what happens with AMD on laptops. And Paul probably has more to say about this. But like I think that we're going to get just like a sort of fun, good old fashioned chip fight specifically on performance and battery life on laptops. And like that'll be fun. Yeah, that was the story of the show for me. Again, while I'm stoked about this AMD interview, because AMD, I mean, to be fair, they haven't shipped

it yet. So it's hard to say like, you know, AMD has been. promising, well, AMD basically promised to compete with Intel again on performance and desktop. And they really, really, really have done that as of like right now. Like they have price performance ratio. They're winning in most cases on like desktop, especially for enthusiasts, especially if you like lots of cores. Now they're promising to be maybe competitive on laptops, which would be huge. And The weird place my mind went, because AMD's so tied up in the next-gen consoles. And I'm sure you got, there's this really cool alienware concept of a PC Nintendo Switch.

I think it was one of your guys' best in shows. Yeah, yeah. It's great. It looks really cool. The concept UFO. And it got me thinking because I was like, when, you know, AMD keeps on, you know, innovating, just, you know, just working and getting better, AMD powers the PS4 and the Xbox 1, when do I get like a, like the PS2 Slim

is one of my favorite hardware objects in the history of the world. It's just so beautiful, it's so small, and it's exactly as powerful as the PS2, it's just way smaller. So when do you get one of those of a PS4, Xbox 1, and then I put myself in like the,

if you're like an executive at Microsoft or Sony, and you're thinking, what should we do next? Well, we'll definitely do a more powerful thing. But let's call up AMD, like, hey, AMD, could we make a Nintendo Switch that is a PS4 or a Nintendo Switch that is an Xbox one? And then I got to think about the Xbox series weird naming, like it's like multiple things. And Microsoft's like, we're not going to have exclusives for the next gen because we, you know, we want stuff that scales across. Basically, who is going to be the first to make the ultimate non-Switch? Fortnite machine could have 5G if you think about it.

5G Fortnite Xbox handle handheld. AI, AK display. With AMD, obviously, you know, that's the thing I don't quite know. Like, you know, the requirements would be a little less than an actual Xbox one because it'd be like a lower-res display. I don't know if AMD is actually there yet. It might be like until next year. And also, I don't know all the strategy.

Maybe you wouldn't want to cannibalize your holiday sales. having a portable up against your new next gen. But I think I would imagine both Microsoft and Sony are taking something like that pretty seriously right now. I mean, it makes sense for them to do it. I think, you know, they both also have a foot in game streaming, which is where 5G for all of its problems and promises actually could make a difference, right? Like, okay, we're going to do X cloud, but we're going to run it on Verizon's network.

That's going to lower the latency. it's going to stream at a high bandwidth to mobile devices. Why do we need to put a scale down Xbox one chip in a handheld? I think there's some dependencies along the way there or inflection points. But it's an interesting idea. And certainly the fact that they've picked PC parts to sort of build off of means that they get the value back of whatever's happening on the PC side. The chips get smaller and more powerful.

process nodes get smaller. They just get it for free in a way that when they were building custom chips, they didn't. And I think that's a cool outcome if they get there. I just think the whole 5G streaming stuff, like they're investing in it because it's a hedge, and that hedge might work out. Yeah, totally. Or it's Stadia. Well, Stadia just announced that they're going to have 120 games next year.

So in 10 of which I think are going to be exclusive. I still can't get over the fact that I have Google Fiber in like Oakland, California, like across the way from like Google's data centers, presumably, and I still have got like, you know, weird glitches and downresding. You have an Ethernet cable from Sundar's house directly to your house. Let's not out folding screens for a minute. I don't think they're ready. I think that they're too, like, they're too easily damaged.

Nope, but the main thing that I make the folding screens made you think is, man, there's a lot of pressure on Microsoft to figure this out. We're all waiting for Windows 10X, and specifically I'm also waiting for Microsoft's iteration of Android for the Duo. Duo is a small one, right? And the Neo's a big one? Yes, Duo's a small one, Neo's the big one. It made me a little bit more hype for the Duo, because even though it's not a proper folding screen, it will be a device where you don't have to worry about damaging the thing. The last thing I'll say, because I know you have a lot of thoughts about this, Neli, is I saw a galaxy fold in the wild in the hands of a person that was not a sim.

executive and so did Sean O'Kane. Yeah, I mean, we were at CES. There was a lot of, I mean, I also saw a guy driving a Lamborghini with a rap on it that said mudlife. So, I don't know what that means. Like, I just, I don't think we should take Las Vegas seriously. I think it was like a dirt bike company. It was very confusing.

So we're going to talk about Microsoft in the next section, but I just saw Satchanadella and he was using the Surface Duo as his phone. And I was so jealous. Like, you know that thing? Like, you know, we're in a big room, people are talking, and, you know, like, some people are looking at their phone. Every time he did that, he, like, pulled out this super hot, glossy white ultra-thing. He unfolded it, and he was, like, doing it.

And then he was time for him to pay attention. He would close it. And I was like, ah, oh, I want that real bad. Yeah. My read on it is that the technology to fold the screens is so close that people cannot help themselves. They cannot help but imagine the new form factor, even if the technology isn't quite there. They know what they want to build. They're taking practice shots at it. They're sort of collecting the market data around what works, what doesn't work, which way it should fold.

We talked about this the last time we talked about folding screens. But at this CES, the shots were a little bit bolder. Everything was a little bit closer. And like, it's just very obvious that the screen technology is not quite there. Everyone understands the problems. Everyone understands what it can and can't do. They're kind of doing it anyway and they're doing it more aggressively in the hope that, you know, Corning makes the glass. Yeah. Has anybody hinted that someone's going to... Everyone's hinting about the glass. Really? It's just like the thing that everyone's like, it's going to be great when the glass is here. Deider, I think you heard it a bunch of times too. Yeah, but they never say, oh, the glass is coming. They're always like, yeah,

Man, all we need is glass. It's like, you know, don't you? Yeah, they definitely know. That company Royale that made the horrible Android phone that folds. So like, this is like deep inside baseball of CES. To get floor space at C.S, you have to like buy it, right? And then there are some spots that are more expensive than other. It's real estate like anything else.

So this company, which makes nothing as far as I can tell, has put out one and, Android phone to get its brand out there, they spent all of their money to buy a spot directly in front of the doors to the LG booth. And then in that area, they just put every kind of folding display idea that anyone has ever had. Right? They made a tree out of folding displays that would like wave in the wind. This is not even exaggerating.

There was a folding display in a purse. There was a folding display on a top hat. Top hat. The top hat's my favorite. They're like, have you ever thought about a dehumidifier with a curb display over the front? We have produced one of those for some reason. And all of it is like definitely in the hope that some LG executive walks out of the door of their booth. And they're like, oh, these guys figured out folding screens.

We should definitely buy this company. It was just the most obvious thing I've ever seen. But I think the industry is there. Like, they figured out the hardware side at a level of confidence where they're ready to sell it to the executives of other companies at CES, whether or not the glass works. I really want that top hat. I'm sad we didn't do a post about the top hat. It's just a miss on my part. Are you, like, are you angling to turn into, like, the Monopoly Man?

What if I was a Monopoly Man, but, like, I had the price of Bitcoin on my top hat all the time? That's incredible. Coppats are the new fedora. One here first. One thing that did cross my mind looking at these pictures of the X-1, the ThinkPad X-1 fold, is these devices are thicker

than non-folding display devices. And if folding displays teach us to love thickness because thickness gives us more functionality that I'm totally into it. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I watched Nadella use the duo, which is just two LCDs that fold with a hinge. Yeah. But you could just, and obviously it was like an event for reporters and he was definitely doing it on purpose.

But just in that, you could see like, oh, this is a different way of using a phone. He has a different relationship to this device. And when he unfolds it, it's actually thinner in some respects and it like, it feels different. I didn't actually see what he was doing on it. For all I know it was a dummy unit. He was just like dramatically swiping for effect. But I was told it's actually his phone. So I suspect he was using it.

But it just made me want that future. And to your point, Deeter, even though it's not an actual folding screen, they're ready to take the shots at it and they're ready to like invent that moment. I think it's pretty good. Okay. We got to take a break. Let me actually speaking of Microsoft. There's a lot of Microsoft to talk about.

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All right, Dieter, can I tell the audience a story about your post today? Oh, my God. Yes. This is my post yesterday on the day you're listening to this Friday. The post on Thursday. The post on Thursday about the browser wars are back. So most days, the editors of the verge, get to get together. together at the end of the day and talk about what happened, what we got to write tomorrow.

We just have our editors meeting. And we sit down and we're like, look at what the audience is interested. And we're like, man, people are really interested in Microsoft Edge, which is surprising. Like, yeah, just like on its face. Like, Microsoft made a web browser is, that's a story from 1995. Like, I'm just going to be honest with you. But people are really, really interested in it because it's complicated. People are not necessarily happy with the current, like for a million reasons.

And then Dieter and I have been talking about. talking about the ad tracking side, the cookie side. We've talked about electron apps and why Microsoft, like on the show. We've done this forever. And I was like, Deeter, you got to just write the browser war piece. And he's like, and he made the Deeter noise. I made the Deeter noise. And then I said, I can't write it in under 8,000 words because it's too much.

And I said, well, somebody else can write it shorter. And I was like, I can't let anybody else write it. And then he did it anyway. I definitely tried to make Tom Warren write a shorter version of this. And Deeter got mad and did it anyway. And if you read it, the specific thing I did is I'm like, I want to write about all this other stuff, but I can't. So I'm not going to. I'm just going to say some other things instead.

All right. With that is the backstory, the browser wars are here. Yeah. Start with Edge and go from there. So Microsoft has officially released the Chromium version of Edge, which is built off Google's Chromium, but has all of Microsoft's stuff. So their bookmark syncing, Bing, blah, blah, blah, blah, their extension store, but you can still use Google's. extension, whatever. And, you know, it works just as well as Chrome. And so we're going to be testing it for battery, testing it for all this other stuff. But if you use Windows, your default

browser now can actually like render web pages again in a way that the old edge couldn't because, you know, web standards are broken and everyone codes to the browser now. And so it's out. We need to see if it's like better for battery life than Chrome is because that's one of the big questions. But it also leads to just a million questions for Microsoft in terms of how are they going to set the rules for tracking differently than Chrome does? How deeply are they going to embed the chromium engine into Windows 10 itself? Because there was a hot minute where, like, Edge was like going to be like the core rendering bits for a lot of parts of the OS. And the same way it is for Chrome OS and lots of other operating systems. Half of Android is

basically just Chrome rendering stuff. And so you like, you can spin out a bunch of new futures for Windows and for Microsoft based on the fact that they no longer have to spend cycles on making a browsing rendering engine. They have one in-house with their own stuff plugged in that is very extensible and has a big ecosystem around it. So they could try to get people to switch away from electron apps to progressive web apps. They could say, no, we still believe in the universal Windows platform, whatever it's called, so that there's more uncertainty and more opportunity for Windows, just more action than I've seen on the Mac in years. Really? Well, just there's not necessarily, I mean opportunity in terms of like moving the platform forward.

Like, what's next for the Mac? iPad apps are a huge bust. There's Swift UI, but that's not doing super hot. Maybe they'll move it over to Arm at some point. But in terms of let's take this desktop platform and move it into the future of the way computers are supposed to work, I think Microsoft has a few more, they've got more incentive because they don't have a mobile platform except for Android. And they have just, you know, like they've got more angles they could take. Now, that's a problem because then they're going to take them all and not do great at any of them probably. But it's more fun to watch at least.

So we were joking on Twitter earlier today. You said, we always ask for competition. And then I think your basic tone was, but not like this. Yeah. Because the competition is like sort of orthogonal to what consumers actually need or want. A lot of it is based on ad tracking. A lot of it is based on like default service lock-in. Kind of unpack that a little bit.

So, man, when we think of the browser war, what we think is going to happen is like, all right, We're going to have Chrome and we're going to have Edge and we're going to have Mozilla and we're going to have Brave and we're going to have Vivaldi and we're going to have, you know, insert other browser here. And we're just going to find out which one is the best. What has the nicest features? What renders web pages is the fastest? What doesn't kill your computer with, you know, tons of tabs? We'll just do that. But there's a little bit of parity there.

And so the actual competition now is convincing consumers that you want the data services that are associated with your browser, syncing it all up with Google or syncing it all. all with Microsoft or whomever, or you want the privacy options that are offered. So Apple Safari has a bunch of anti-figure printing, and it's using AI to block track trackers in certain cases. Mozilla is working off of a blacklist. Mozilla, by the way, just had to lay off 70 people, which is a huge bummer. There's a hashtag for it. I think it's a Mozilla Lifeboat. If you have a job in the web, please go look for these people.

And so we are now looking at this competition, but it's not a competition. that a thing that a consumer can, like, do much with other than, like, do a bunch of research on trackers? Yeah. Which doesn't sound like super fun. Or, like, pick an ecosystem, which is... Or pick an ecosystem, which is, like, the actual thing that's happening. And the pick and ecosystem question, again, you'd be like, okay, well, we're talking about desktops. And so you can just download the one that you like.

But desktops are secondary, not the most important computing platform anymore. They're phones. And phones are locked down. iPhone is literally locked down. You can't pick a different rendering engine. Apple won't let you. You can download another browser, but it's basically just a wrapper around Safari. And on Android, it's a little bit more open, but I don't think, I mean, I would be happy

to be convinced otherwise through some sort of data, but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people are just using the default. And even with the browser ballot coming in the EU, that most people are just going to stick with Chrome because it's like, oh, it's Android. I want to use the one that's native. And so this whole discussion about the browser. battle and which ecosystem you get to pick and who protects your privacy and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da ends up not leading to your ability to make a like conscious purchasing decision or browser

choice. You can't go and like choose what browser you want because you're probably locked into whatever ecosystem you've got on your phone. Well, I mean, only to a certain extent. I mean, I have an iPhone and I run Chrome everywhere else. Yeah. Do you use Chrome on your iPhone? I don't.

No. Because I mean, like, what if I click a link somewhere else? Who knows what will happen? Oh, I definitely know what will happen. Apple will take over. I think a lot of people live at least with, have the experience of at least two rendering engines in their life, right? Like, you've got sort of WebKit Safari on your mobile device

and you've got Chrome and Chromium on your laptop. And like, that's as much competition as most people experience in terms of like fundamental computing infrastructure. But at least it's there. Like, I appreciate that. The thing that kills me, there was a, I don't know, of that we wrote it up, but there was a good piece in Boing Boing on Friday, I think, last week, that the DRM extensions that let things like Netflix work in the browser have now all but

made it impossible for an indie browser company to exist because the license for those extensions are so expensive and so hard to actually contractually get a hold of that it's even cementing more power into the big players. And that is like, do you want to live in a world with 10,000 indie browsers, I do. Does that prevent an immediate, obvious security problem in our age of, like, widespread data breaches and leaks?

Like, there's a half and half there, but what is definitely happening is that the bigger players are getting more share. Nobody wants to let go of the browser, because it's like a fundamental gateway to their services. And I'm at least happy to see Microsoft join the fight

again in this way, even if, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of web people out there who are not pleased that the number of rendering engines is diminishing over time. Yep. The idea is like so much, he's so deeply ready to say so much more. Do you think we peaked people are most tracked ever in their browser and we are actually going to be getting better?

Like, I feel like it's really pretty easy nowadays to get your browser to stop tracking you. as far as I know, you know. I use Safari and with the default settings plus like an extension, I feel like pretty untracked. I broke most of Google fonts and I'm fine with that. You know? Like websites that use Google fonts, they don't load because I don't want that. I didn't want that to happen to me.

Other than that, the web mostly works. That's the other big news is Google finally announced that they also following Mozilla and then Apple, who followed Mozilla, want to end support for third-party cookies. So that's like, those are like the tracking cookies, right? And that is the source of a lot of the nightmare. And Apple last year, last summer, basically followed Mozilla and put a stake in the ground and said, like, we think of tracking as security risk and we are going to do everything we can to stop it.

And, like, bring it on, bring on the arms race. And so they have this intelligent tracking protection. they're trying to stop fingerprinting. Google says that this is bad because if you block all cookies and people just use even more terrible things. So it's this fight where nobody is really giving each other the benefit of the doubt in some ways. So if you are on Google side, you're like Apple hates the web,

they just want everything in the app store. If you're on Apple side, you're like Google hates people, they just want everybody to be tracked because they make all their money on ads. If you're on Mozilla's side, you're like, can we just have like an open web ecosystem? where lots of people can survive. That would be cool if we didn't just have two major companies run everything. How about that?

If you're Microsoft, you're like, you guys like Azure? Azure's cool, right? So this whole thing is like rolling out, and Google finally had to capitulate. I'd be like, yeah, no, we want to kill third-party cookies too. And so when that happens, like the ad ecosystem still needs some way to do some. tracking. And so now the fight has gotten to the point of, well, what new technologies, what new APIs are we going to create to allow some form of limited tracking with informed consent from the user and some way to ensure that, you know, like affiliate links work and, you know,

web stuff with a little bit less creep. How do you build that technology in such a way that it's just like an open web standard and not just, you know, one or two big companies like become the gatekeepers for all of that. That's a very hard problem. And the fight has gotten down to, I think there's one thing where Apple has a proposal where if you click an ad to buy a washing machine and then you go by the washing machine, how does the washing machine website that know to give the affiliate credit back to this website that had the ad?

Well, like, oh, well, we made this API. And so instead of a tracking cookie where they can track you forever, when you click the thing, your browser just hangs on to this little bit of information of where it came from and will tell the washing machine website that. Okay, that's great. And Google's like, yeah, that's cool. What if instead of like six bits of identifying information, there's 64. With 64 bits, you could basically identify a single person on the planet instead of just like a category of people.

And so they're fighting about that. Do they actually need the six bits? Like, I know they want the six bits, but do they even need those? Well, if you can come up with a proposal that makes sure that the verge. gets some piece of money and the wet washing machine website knows to pay it to the verge.com, please propose it. Please put it out on. Deere, please stop leaking our plans to cover washing machines.

What are you doing? I'm not saying it's great, but there was a, there were ads before tracking, you know? Well, actually, let me address that head on, Paul, because I think that's like a very common misconception, right? Like, how ads work and how people get paid? Like, traffic is not money. It just isn't anymore in that way. Like, the number of computing transactions and then literal auction transactions that happen

when you load a webpage is out of control, right? So you load a web page and within, like, one or two seconds, like, 45 auctions happen on various ad servers and interlocked ways to display you an ad. And those auctions are basically based on tracking, right? I know that you, Paul Miller, you live in a house, you've got some books, you've got a yellow microphone, you're very likely to buy a book about a yellow microphone. Someone is after that demo, they've got an ad for yellow microphones, they're going to pay a lot of money to put ads on a page that you see that someone else doesn't see.

That is like so complicated and so based on tracking that right now what we have to do is unwinded. And when you say ads existed before tracking, the market. for a small company to actually spend their marketing dollars and get returned from it didn't exist before. So, like, I keep joking about the fact that I buy, like, every wireless charger I see in Instagram. Like, those companies are getting more value onto their marketing spend, and they're allowed

to exist as companies that are selling products because they're targeting the ads. Like, that's actually a value. I don't think that we can ignore it. I think what's happening here is we're over-tracking, we're not disclosing where the data is going. the data is leaking all over the place. We're tracking with 64 bits of information. You've got all of my location date.

Like, there's some level of boundary here where the tracking has enabled new markets. And it's certainly enabled new businesses to spend their marketing dollars more effectively. But it has caused way more problems than I think that set of benefits. I mean, something we learned with the whole metadata thing is that if you have six pieces of data on me, And someone else has six pieces of data and then someone else has six pieces. Then you do some sort of multiplication, like the cross-referencing, and now you know just as much as if you were Google and we're tracking all 64 at once or whatever. So, Paul, like the thing that you're expressing is the core of the argument right now. Apple and Mozilla are like, this is a crisis.

And so we have to stop this right now and let the chips fall where they may. and if that hurts some businesses, so be it. Protecting user privacy, given the crisis of tracking, is too important. So we're just, we're locking it down and all of those people will figure something out. Life will find a way. And Google's like, yeah, what if we just took it a little bit slower? It's a crisis. We'll do some stuff here and there.

But let's like, let's try and not like completely kneecap this ecosystem in this moment. And, you know, the truth on both sides is like not as extreme as I just stated. but that's basically the outlines of the like the browser battle from like the cookie and advertising side. So it's like it's super tough as a consumer to like make that choice. You end up making your browser choice based on not thinking about just doing what the platform gives you or based on the reputation of the company. I trust Apple more than I trust Google or I trust Mozilla more than I trust any of them and I'm just going to use Firefox. And that's just, that's a perfectly valid reason to make a technology choice. You know, everyone has to take shortcuts.

But it's interesting because historically, for the life of computers, when we have talked about making a technology choice, we would just get to talk about like the quality of the product as like a user experience. Like, is it fast, right? Instead of, you know, if we're going to compare AMD versus Intel, imagine if the entire discussion was about, you know, which one of these companies has more tracking, you know, transistors, right? And, like, where do the transistors go? That's, that's basically what's happened here to the browser wars. Yeah. And I think what's the corollary to this, the good part is that with the browser, we get to kind of have it in the open. Right? It's, like, very easy for smart people to figure out what browsers are doing, what websites are doing, the interplay between them. It's not easy, but it's not hard. On your first, there's no way to know. Facebook has built this entire business inside of its apps,

and it is almost impossible to know what the hell is going on. And this also applies to like Apple's ad ecosystem, which is not big, don't get me wrong, but like how many of these rules and tracking rules apply to that? I don't know. And I don't know if that's because I'm dumb or what, but I trust Apple to like do the right thing. But with Facebook especially,

there's just, there's a lot of that stuff that is web adjacent or using web technologies, that's completely opaque. Yeah. And I say this again. Like, I think the sort of like Instagram story advertising marketplace has like pretty good qualities, right? I think people aren't super annoyed by Instagram story ads. They're not always great, but they're not like, they're not as bad as the other advertising that you see on computers all over the place.

They are effective, like people know they're effective. You can target them really well. Like, again, if you're looking for a dude, buy a wireless charger in New York City. You can like push all the buttons on the Instagram ad manager and I guarantee you I will see that ad, right? Like that is a, that is a useful loop for businesses to have. On the flip side, Facebook is like, knows everything about me and they can do, they can target so well that people believe that they're listening to them. And that's like a huge problem. We should ban all trackers, ban all targeting, except for once a day, every

computing device has a red light that turns on and that means the microphone is listening and then you just talk about the shit you want to buy and that's how you get targeted instead of instead of your uh your five minutes hate it's your five minutes commerce yeah you just say the keywords that you're interested in for five minutes i was thinking about this recently you know you can have an ad blocker on your computer right and you just reject traffic from known advertiser URLs but what if you had a bot that accepted all that traffic and put it into a sinkhole and generate a a profile of like, I'm a billionaire yacht owner who buys wireless chargers and I live in New York City. You know? Why do I have to get a bot to do that? What I could do it myself? Right. Create the most expensive possible ad profile for yourself so that when you do go to websites,

not only do you not see the website. You're costing the advertising. It's like an offensive approach to ad blocking. I like it. You should build, that's like, you know, there's that helm server where you get to run your own. email server. You should reach out of that company. I've got an idea to stop tracking even farther.

It's a honeypot that costs everyone money. Just like put that on your network. It's like a toggle switch. I block ads at the network level with my ERO. I do it. I block ads in malware. I especially do it for my parents because it is just like, please internet, leave my parents alone.

But if you had a third switch that was like lie, lie expensively. It's a free idea for the Eero people. I hope they take me up on it. All right, we've got to take a break. We'll be back, talk about some streaming stuff. Check this out. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront,

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It's been weeks. Oh, yeah. I'm just going to say this based on the day that we're recording this. We haven't done this segment in like four weeks and the president's being impeached. We didn't hold the country together, Paul. I did the, what you mean?

I'm sorry. Correlation is causation, man. That's how it works. I did the segment as, like a pre-recorded for CES. I forget which day it was. I talked about Intel's GPU. But we didn't do it together.

But now we're together. Now we can bring the, really solve all of the world's problems. It's called, if a Roomba had arms, who would it hug? Oh. Is it everyone? I hope it's everyone. Well. It's not everyone.

It's it. I just got, okay, so there's this story from CES. The apparently Rumba is, or, iRobot, the company that makes Roombas, which also makes like military robots. Like it's a whole robotics company. They don't just make vacuum robots. And apparently they're testing out arms on a Roomba. And they want a Roomba to eventually help out with more complex tasks around like any

robotics company ever wants the same thing. But they want the robot to help with like laundry, dishwashing, food serving. So that makes sense. Then they kind of walked it back. Like we don't really want to talk about future products. And so who knows how many arms or what is really going on with Roomba and arms? But I started thinking about it and who would Roomba hug. Does Roomba love you and your family and therefore destroys dirt?

Or is Roomba just hungry for dirt? Does Roomba love dirt or does Roomba love you? I feel like the addition of arms does not answer that question in any way. Like you can't be like, I'm going to add arms to this Roomba and that will land us at the answer to whether it loves you or loves dirt. Like, I guess you just have to find out. Like, is it right now hugging dirt with its vacuum functionality? Yeah.

Right now, what it's mostly doing is getting stuck in like the same stupid place every day, no matter how I set up the beacons. You are so committed to your Roomba. I buy Roombas and send them back all the time. Like, once a year, I'm like, we should do a Roomba. And Becky's like, we're just going to send it back. And I'm like, no, I won't. This one has more beacons. It has a laser.

It's got AI. My suburbs across the street neighbors have a room by a mower. It's pretty cool. That seems extraordinarily dangerous to me, just based on what I know of the vacuums. All right. It's streaming time. There's a lot in the streaming wars going on. My new favorite trend in the streaming wars is executives who are launching streaming services,

insisting that streaming wars is the wrong phrase. Yeah. They're like, people are going to subscribe to multiple streaming services, which I believe is true. I think the answer is also that they will not subscribe to some streaming services, and those services will lose and die. That's why it's a war, because of casualties it will happen. You could call somebody who subscribes to both Netflix and Quibi a double agent. Yeah, that's, and when we sat down with Katzenberg, he was like, they're double agents. So today, like, as we speak right now at this moment, NBC is holding the,

launch of Peacock in the S&L studios. We invited a bunch of media to sit in the fancy SNL studios and hear about their new streaming services. I will disclose to you for the one billionth time, NBC Universal is an investor in Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. That's some information you have now. I will follow up that information by saying their business model is to show you a lot of ads, and I think that's a bad idea.

Okay. There's three tiers. There's $10 a month for no ads. Okay. There's five bucks a month for ads. And then if you are, I think, a Comcast or a Cox cable subscriber, you can get free access to the ads or five bucks off the ad-free version. That's not complicated at all. Okay, so if you have Comcast, it's zero or five.

And if you don't have Comcast, it's five or ten. Yes. So one of the things I've heard a lot is you need to get people into the app, right? All these streaming services are now solving the same general challenges that, I don't know, photo management apps had a while ago or whatever other category of apps has been hot. First of all, you need people to know what the hell it is. Yep. That's hard. It's a lot of marketing money.

You need people to pick up their phone, open the app store, search for your app and hit get, which is a surprisingly like hard road to go up. You know, the average number of apps downloaded by the average person and average month is zero. So that's like one of my favorite stats. Like they got to cross that bridge. Then they, you got to download that app. Then you got to sign up for an account. Wait, average is zero? The average is zero.

Is that rounding down or rounding up? It's obviously rounding down. How would you round up? If you uninstall a bunch of apps. It would be actually great if most people in America uninstalled like half an app a day or something. That's a form of self-care. Correction, there is a free tier with limited programming. Okay.

So there's like one tier that's just Olympics promos and ads for the Olympics. You can do that for free. Okay. This is the first thing that you, so you're talking about, you got to tell people about it, right? Yeah. Well, the Olympics happened July 24th. Oh, yeah. And we're going to be inundated with Peacock ads around the Olympics.

Peacock launches on. That's a pretty great rollout, don't you think? Yeah. No, and I think the Mandalorian and Star Wars did a lot for Disney Plus. I mean, Disney had, like, literally ESPN reporters were on air being like, today is the day that everything changes. Disney Plus, like, Disney and ABC, like, they use their muscle to get Disney Plus out in a world. But it's also full of, like, Disney movies and Star Wars and Marvel.

Like, there's an element to the Disney Plus interface that is just its own marketing, right? That the top-level nav of Disney Plus is Disney, Pixar, Marvel, National Geographic. Like, I feel bad for that last box. It's like, it's the one that doesn't have a cinematic universe. It's just the actual universe. But, like, at the top level, they've got all those franchises. They've got all those studios.

They're just, like, doing it. NBC, Universal, like, doesn't. Like, Peacock isn't going to have, like, that stuff. It's going to have a lot of shows. It's going to have its own interface. Again, this is happening as we speak, so I haven't even seen it yet. But it's launching. It's coming.

And there, again, the pitch is, We have a slightly different consumer proposition, which is you can pay less money to see some ads. Right. And then obviously we'll have like the world of NBC content in it. I think that's like that is, to me, the most interesting part about that is it is not the same as Netflix. Like Disney Plus is really offering you the same deal as Netflix. Pay us a bunch of money. Don't look at any ads.

Watch this stuff you love. Right? And that's like very much the Netflix model. Hulu has had that ad tier. And I think it's a very popular tier. and I think NBC is going after that zone because I don't know if you know they divested out of Hulu

with the Disney Fox agreement Yeah although NBC shows still going to be available on Hulu until the licensing deals run out Of course It's going to be a fiasco So that's Peacock, it's happening now Julia's doing all the work

She's obviously, we'll have her on again soon to talk about that probably next week to talk about these streaming launches And then next to it is HBO Max And I just want to read This is like the point we're at where all they can really sell is the content. Like they can't sell like the interface.

They can't sell like, you know, TikTok is like, here's all these cool features. Here's like a cool filter. Instagram's like, here's all these like roulette wheel filters that tell you what Marvel character you are. Like these apps can't do that. They're just trying to get you to the content.

So the way they're talking about how cool and wonderful it'll be, this is an article in a Hollywood reporter where HVOMX executives are talking about how great HMOX is. Over the holiday, I'm just going to read the quote, over the holidays the exec told the room, he tested out an early version of forthcoming streamer HBO Max. On his watch list was a combination of HBO's watchman, classic episodes of Friends,

the Warner Brothers movie Full Metal Jacket, a Wonder Woman cartoon, and the documentary Andre the Giant. Quote, that was an amazing four hours of viewing that I did in such a wide array of things at my fingertips. That is the most insane four hours of content I can think of. Like, you're like, oh, I just got to settle down from watching,

Watchman by watching full metal jacket, going to bracket that with some friends and then hard shift into Andre the Giant. Like, what? Like, I couldn't be in that headspace at all. Everybody needs to have a show that they save that is their unicorn chaser. So if you're watching a show and it's dark and depressing and dour, you always need to be able to like, I need, I got to watch one more thing that'll make me feel okay about life in the universe.

and I'm going to watch just a real half hour of that and then I'll be done. So a chaser and like the drinking sense. Yeah, yeah. I strongly recommend Shira on Netflix as this thing. It's great. By the way, I got this order wrong. It was Watchman and then Friends and then Full Metal Jacket. Oh, which in terms of just jarring shifts between...

Watchmen needs a unicorn chaser, Friends. Full Metal Jacket needs a unicorn chaser, Wonder Woman. And then you end on Andre the Giant. It's just such an intense four hours. How is that supposed to be compelling to anyone? I want you to be in a state of complete emotional confusion at the end of your four hours with HBO Max. Anyway, it's just the thing that to me is like it's funny, I'm sure, you know, he's trying to demonstrate the breadth of the service. But that's how they have to talk about it.

That's the only move they have to get you over the hump of knowing about the service, going to download it on your phone, opening up a user account, giving it your credit card information, hopefully forgetting that you gave it your credit card information, and then incurring billing for the rest of your life. Like, that's the business model they're in. I think we're going to see a lot of attempts to mitigate it by saying it's free or cheap with ads, or to market moments like Baby Yoda where you feel like you're left out if you're not in the mix. Here's what I want. I want.

This won't work because some of these shows are staying exclusive, like especially like Mandalorian. but I want a service that actually tracks what shows I'm watching and tells me if it would be cheaper for me to bail on all of my subscriptions and just buy seasons from like iTunes. That's what I want. But it's not possible anymore because a bunch of these shows are just going to be exclusive to the streaming platform. Yeah.

I keep on hoping that only bad shows will be exclusive. Because I do like that idea of that buying media. I don't know. It's, it is like, so I was super planning on, I, like I said, I wasn't going to get Disney Plus, but then I got it for free because I'm on Verizon. So I got Disney Plus. I was not planning on paying any attention to Peacock, but they've got the adventure zone, which is like one of my favorite things ever that exists ever.

So of course I'm going to pay for it and watch it. And of course I'm not going to watch ads. So I'm going to pay $10 a month. And it's going to be great. But, yeah, it, I, I do. you think that calculator, if that calculator could exist, I think it would be, like, even if it was virtual, like, let's pretend that you could buy these things on iTunes, you know, like, you just pay $15 and you download a whole season of television that you like, and then you don't have

to watch, like, seven hours of television every night for the rest of your life. I do think you'd be saving money. Okay. Yeah. I really got it. Here's the thing that I, here's how I feel about all of these shows using like their nostalgia bait shows to get you to subscribe. The personal story, I need a hobby. And like I live in an apartment so I can't make the hobby like, you know, fixing stuff around my house. So I'm like, what am I going to do? I could take work, woodworking class or I don't know, maybe I'll be that guy that like builds like cool like giant Lego kits. A lot of people do that. They get a lot of satisfaction out of that. But every time you go to like Amazon.com and look at the Lego kit for the Millennium Falcon, which costs $800 and you

scroll down. Same thing with like the Aston Martin and the Corvette or any of those like super compact kits. The photo of the person building the Lego kit is like a 45 year old guy by himself. I'm like, oh no. Nope, not doing that.

Nope, too cliche. And that's how I feel about like, oh, I have to subscribe to this thing because it's got my, you know, favorite show from 2008 or whatever. Like it's just, you're better. Go watch something new. It's okay. Yeah. What's the line? Kill the past. Let the past go.

Kill it if you have to. Just forget that show ever existed. I forgot most shows in the past existed. It's fun. Yeah, I think that nostalgia stuff is like interesting. I also think that there's so much new content that needs to be made for these services to persist, that that inflection point will be super interesting to me. When HBO Max is not trying to sell you on the strength of the familiar names since library,

but it's actually trying to sell you on like the new teen comedies that HBO Max is going to, like that is going to be an entire. That's why the streaming war phrase is actually more apt. They're going to have to spend a lot of marketing money to cut through the noise and get you spend money in time over here. And that is, it is necessarily a fight, even if it ends up that half America subscribes to one collection and the other half subscribes to another collection and everyone makes money in the end. The fight for attention is going to be, I think, pretty bloodthirsty. Because the kids are going to be out there with their 5G PS4 switches. It's going to be amazing.

Dieter, you want to talk about some cell phones real quick before we go? Oh, yeah, real quick. So Samsung announced unpacked their phone event for February 11th. We've got a few weeks before that happens so we can get into the rumors. But XTA developers has basically gotten the goods on what to expect. The S20, there'll be an S20 plus, an S20 Ultra, which will be a spec machine. We're expecting 120 hertz refresh displays, which is the thing. One Plus is also promising to do.

So expect every major Android. phone to have that. And they're adding a fourth camera, a macro camera, Samsung is, which we also seen on like their light phones. So that's coming. There's going to be the Galaxy Z flip. We'll get into more of the rumors later when we got more time, but be aware that the galaxy machine is spinning up. It's spinning up. I've got to say macro camera to me is like the, well, now we're just adding like niche functions. Like next year they're going to be like, this camera is made for birders. Yeah. Birdwatchers only. That's how I felt about white angle at first, and now I love it.

But wide angle, there's like a utility with other people in the room with white angle. Yeah. Like it has like some, when I say social, like it has value if other people are around you. A macro lens is a very little value if you're in a room with other people. You're like, stand very still. I'm going to get extremely close to your skin. No, you take boca pictures of your food. And your cat.

Yeah, you can do that with a regular lens. Look, I love macro lenses. I'm excited to buy this phone just so I can take close-up pictures of sub-pixel layouts on the go. That's what I do with the macro ones. You really are in a glass house when you criticize macro lenses. They're going to follow the trend that they started with the Note 10, and they'll be the first GalaxyS phone without a headphone jack. Woof.

Well, it was a good run, and now our headphones are computers, and they have software updates that ruin the noise canceling. Yeah. That's a thing that really just happened with the AirPods Pro, actually. Yep. It's great. I'm happy that everything is a computer now. Actually, the worst part of the software updates with the AirPods Pro is there's no way to, like,

actively install it because it just sort of ambitly happens when Apple thinks the time is right. And that means there's no way to uninstall it. Yeah. It's just like, you just got to wait. True conspiracy theory. No proof. Just a true conspiracy theory. I'm going to say it.

It's like irresponsible. If you're in your car, just like pull over and be like, say to yourself quietly, I'm about to hear an irresponsible thing that I should immediately forget. Okay. What if Apple launched it with extremely hardcore noise canceling? Because they knew people would compare that, but they knew it sounded kind of bad. And then after launch, they're like, we're going to flip it back to sounding good with the noise canceling that we believe it. Why couldn't they just do both?

I said it was irresponsible. Okay. That's my, there it is. I said it was irresponsible and wrong. But, you know, you think about that. What about ad tracking at the headphone level? Do you think that's not going to happen? That's like already in Sony's terms of service agreement.

Like 100%. It's like we will send listening data back to our servers. It's gross. Everything's gross. At this point, find a way to buy final records in a bunker. Paul and I are going to be working on our Pringle Can Mesh Network. We'll talk to you again next week. But like a DVD box set of...

of McGiver. Computers aren't terrifying if you just think it's all really funny. That's the Vergecast. That's the show that we make here. All right. That is, in fact, the Vergecast. I'm happy to be back. We do have a bunch of interviews coming out.

I'm excited for you to hear them. Please give us feedback on that stuff. You can tweet at me on Matt Reckless. Dieter's at Backlund. Paul's at Future Paul. Deeter, tell them about your newsletter. It's a newsletter. It's a newsletter.

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