The Vergecast - More Galaxy S10 leaks and Sonos headphones

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

The Samsung Galaxy S10 continues to leak, indicating that it may have a headphone jack, a hole-punch display, and a cryptocurrency wallet. But that’s not all. We also saw some new concepts for foldable phones, a rumor about Sonos headphones, and theories on Google’s secret Fuchsia operating system. So this week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller run through all of that and then some, which you can listen to right now. Thanks to Microsoft Azure for sponsoring this episode. Get started with a free account and 12 months of popular free services at Azure.com/trial today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 Skylar 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 the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. There's only one of us right now because why just push that button is their season's over. They're going to start another one though.

That's going to be fun. But for now, it's just us, solo flagship of technology news. Still counts, though. It definitely still counts. I'm your friend, Nelai. How are you? Paul Miller is here.

Hello. Dieter Bon is here. Hi. Wow, Deeter. Don't know what's going on with Deeter. We're going to figure that out. That's what this hour is going to be. Anyway, this is a show, as you might know, about technology news, some jokes, just three buds having a good time.

We got some phones to talk about. There's some S-10 leaks. Mobile World Congress is coming up. There's some Sonos rumors. Some Netflix stuff going on. I got a whole Fortnite copyright thing I want to talk about. But first, Better Worlds is the Verges Science Fiction Project. It's huge.

It's massive. 11 stories, five podcasts, five videos. It's going on the site right now. We put one of the podcasts in the Vergecast feed this week and placed the interview episode. I really hope you liked it. I know it's something different. But please check it out. Go to the Verge Extra's feed if you want to hear more short stories.

We've rebranded at Better Worlds. You can look on our YouTube channel. There's amazing animation. And the stories are on the site. The great John Scalzi story this week called The Model Dog. Please check it out. I implore you. That's just my plug.

I'm so excited about this. The news is so dark and this is such like a positive, uplifting thing that's about science and technology, which we're not getting enough of lately. Check it out. I hope you like it. Paul, have you been reading it? I've read the first one with the spaceship, but I want to catch up. We do it.

I'm excited about it. I just want to remember and think about it. Okay, that's it. That's enough plugs. I'm going to be honest. It's been a quiet week. Kind of quiet. Yeah.

But a lot of stuff going on. We're in the like, CES happened. And now, you know, most of that stuff isn't real, but some of it is potentially very exciting. And then everyone has taken a breath. And then mobile world Congress is going to be starting up in a basically a month from today. And so like that's starting to ramp up. the leaks are starting to ramp up.

But in this zone, it's just a little bit quiet, at least as far as direct gadget news goes. And, yeah, so it's, you know, it's fine. There's plenty of stuff happening for us to talk about, but not so much that it feels overwhelming. We can just sort of spread out and relax and talk about notches for as long as we want. Can I tell you my favorite little bit of news?

Yeah. It's not on a rundown. It's not even news. It's just my favorite thing that happened this week. The government, as you know, shut down. That's my favorite bit of dues as well. No, it's not my favorite. It's generally horrible news.

But 800,000 federal employees aren't working. The FCC is shut down. But our friends at Motherboard, who are great, they wrote a story about location tracking. We talked about this last week. The cell carrier is selling your location data. And they wrote this follow-up piece by this company called Zoom ago, which had this presentation for why the rules should be even more relaxed.

And so they email the FCC, Motherboards reporters, email the FCC's press line for comment. But nobody works at the FEC. FCC. So the person who just started emailing them back was a Jeep pie. He's just the only person left in the building. It's like you email customer support at Apple and you're just like, oh, my iPhone screen is broken. What do I do? And Tim Cook replies. He's like, hey, what's up? Yeah, it's incredible. Tim Cook here.

I laughed very much about it when I saw the tweet from other words editor in chief. Okay. Dieter. Yeah. There's exciting notch developments or anti-notch developments in the world today. the S-10 and S-10-plus are leaking all over the place. Yeah. And we should talk about this whole punch. We should talk about the double-wide whole-punch display that the S-10-plus has. But first, can we all just celebrate the fact that Samsung is making flagship phones in 2019 with headphone jacks?

People, like, I literally, I tweeted out just the word headphone jacks with a link to our story about the leaks. And people are, like, excited. They're like, I'm going to buy an S-10. It's amazing. This might be the last one. There's a rumor that this is the last time Samsung's going to. leave the headphone jack in the phone. Wasn't that the rumor the last time?

Yeah, but then I think Samsung sees the market demand. They're aware. They know it's up. But look, phone sales are slowing down. The upgrade cycle is slowing down. This phone will probably be on sale for three years. That's three more years of high-end headphone jack. It makes me happy.

Now, am I going to get a Samsung phone? Is the question. You really ought to. You know. Vote with your wallet. I need to have an iOS phone and an Android phone. That's a thing in my life. It's also really nice to have.

I have a vanilla Android phone. That's not the Samsung. A Samsung phone is like a Rocky Road situation. All right. Let me make the case for why you should buy one of these Samsung phones. We don't, it's not a good case. We don't, we've never seen it. We haven't seen them, but like, okay, make the case for why you should be hype about the Samsung phones.

Imagine Dieter's wearing a red polo and he approaches you in a Verizon store. All right. Oh, God. Don't punch me. All right. Think the first. Headphone Jack. That's it.

I think that we're going to look back at 2018. If you survey all of the notches on all of the phones in two years when we're beyond the era of the notch, the notch era. And you have to pick what was the duffiest, stupidest notch that was made on a phone. You could make the case that it was the pixel 3x. Oh, without question, right? It's not even make the case. There's just a fact. Well, there are some phones with like the dumb.

And like the double notch is like pretty out there. Anyway, this thing has an elegant looking front of the phone. It has, you know, a little bit of a bezel at the top and the bottom because they didn't make you, they're not spending the extra however many tens of millions of dollars to do the engineering to fold the screen underneath. They already spent all that money to fold the screen on the left and the right. So it is relatively proportional. It has these little hole punch notches, which again, I think that just a full cut out proper notch would be just as fine. You don't actually gain anything by having that extra screen there, but aesthetically, I think it looks good. You no longer have to deal with a fingerprint sensor on the back that's super hard to reach.

Instead, it's right there under the screen. And if you, you know, maybe they'll do the IP to the Irish sensor, but I don't think there's room in those notches for that. So that's gone. So it's just a very simple unlock process. And you get to try out one UI, which is Samsung's latest attempt to make a clean version of its software. You get to... That's in your plus call. Yeah, no, I think...

I'm interested in seeing what OneUI is like. I really am. I missed out on the beta, but shifting everything down. And you know what? I'm not even mad about the cryptocurrency wallet. I was prepared to go on a full rant about how dare they. And, you know, I don't care. Fine.

Like, it's a thing that people want around the world. And, Nilai, for you in particular, you are the man who... We use Slack every day for our internal chat, and we have to use it all day. And most of us do the same thing and customize the way Slack looks and feels to match our preferences so we don't have garish, ugly colors.

But you have said that you like to leave Slack at the defaults because you want to experience what most people experience when used software. I leave almost everything at the default. So if you leave everything at the default and you want to experience what most people experience, you have to, for your job, buy a Samsung phone. I understand what you're saying.

Now, to be fair, there are defaults that I change all the time. for example I think you all know how I feel about motion smoothing which is the default of most things change that one I do change the color tuning on phones because the super crazy right but I'm talking about like your general muckety muck settings and people are like you can just change that I'm like most people don't I think that's important how things behave you got to leave at the default but I hear what you're saying and look I got to

I always have to have an Android phone I haven't had a Samsung phone in a real long time maybe this is the one maybe maybe maybe this one UI is going to convince me I mean, you don't have a pixel three, right? I do. I mean, I have the little guy. I mean, usually. Yeah. Just imagine a world where one UI is so good that people start switching in droves.

They're like, Sam's like, whatever. But then they try the one UI and they're like, oh, this is what I always wanted a phone to be like. And Samsung cracked it. People are finally like, yes, I want this dog with shoe. I want Clippy to be on my phone. No, you know, I was talking to Dan C. for ages ago. And I think we're at the point with phone UIs where the value of experimenting

actively cuts against their ability to capture customers, right? So Dan, his wife's phone had broken and he gave her some Android phone, and it was like two different and she didn't like it, right? But you give the phone that has like just aggressively cloned the iPhone UI and people will like make the transition. and I've noticed this several times too because I have some friends who switch to Android phones and Samsung aggressively cloning how the iPhone looked

and felt like captured customers for Samsung. So we sit and we're like, we want to see all this competition, we want to see all these crazy ideas, all these new paradigms, and then real people. Right, and then real, I'm like, give me a windowing system and a stylus.

And then real people out there in the world are just kind of like, I know how to use a phone. I'd prefer this other phone to be similar to that. And I think that cognitive switching costs is real high. So everything is converging. That's true. I would be very surprised if Apple's swipe gesture ideas

don't just become the default everywhere in like the next two or three years. But at the same time, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. You know, the one UI, every time you swipe up, it just screams one at you. Instead of the bleep bloop noises that Samsung used to it. Look, I'm surprisingly hype about Whole Punch displays.

I'm super, we saw some more foldable display concepts. Yeah, Jami's got a really good one. Jami's is really good. There was a Motorola, a patent drawing of the new Razor that might have a foldable display that leaked this week. Which, oh man, that patent drawing is like, it will never be that good. But anyway. Yeah, that patent drawing is, I don't,

I don't know if you can file for like an aspirational patent. It's very aspirational. But we're like entering an era of extreme hardware innovation again because the display technologies have like taken another leap. That's usually when you see it. So the displays are getting thinner. You can bend them and curve them. You can punch holes in them.

I am super down for all of that. And I think we're going to, we're with Deeter. I think we're going to look back on the notch era as being just like, aberration before we did more interesting things with screens. Like the notch moment is very much this is the most you can do with this category of screen. And then we're going to like move on and see all the foldy stuff, all the stuff where the sensors are integrated directly into the screen or under it.

I mean, that Jami, I, like, I'm a sucker, you know, like I love extremely futuristic prototype demo things. But I looked at that and I was like, this is the closest to CGI in rare life that I've seen on a phone in forever. Right. It literally looks like they're folding, just like a floating image. Yeah, the first time I saw that video, I thought it was on CGI Macca. If you haven't seen it, two sides of it fold in. I think like TechCrunch nailed it. They said it's a triptych.

So like two of the sides fold under and behind the thing. So that's what gives you the phone shape instead of it just folding in half, which for some reason just adding an extra fold makes it more impressive. I don't know. But, you know, they actually managed to make Android responsive and work with that little thing. So good on them. I'm actually a little bit surprised. I want to know more about what Google is doing to support folding displays by default because they said they're going to do it. But it's like what exactly does all of that entail?

Because I highly doubt that the prototypes we've seen so far are using aren't all just, you know, some custom thing. these different companies made. Yeah, but if you're Johnny, you don't give a shit, right? Like, you forked Android, you're in China. You're like, screw you, Google. Like, have you heard of Memix? That's our operating system. It has nothing to do with you.

My guess is that folding phones are just as well supported by Android as tablets are. No. In the sense, it's conceptually the same. You have, you need apps that can adapt to different screen sizes and ratios. Yeah. But do you? And so people who build apps with using the modern toolkits that Google provides and don't do anything custom or interesting with their app can support tablets and probably support folding phones just fine. That's my guess.

My sense of the folding screen, obviously it's happening to Android, you know, that platform has its own dynamics. My sense of what it's good for is consuming content. Right. I don't know that I've never sat down in a coffee shop with my phone and looked at Twitter and been like, man, I wish this was bigger. Right. Like that's not it. But I think I'm going to unfold this and like look at a bigger picture or watch a video full screen. It's that stuff. And I don't, that doesn't really, as long as the video players, right, in like content views scale, I don't know that this is the thing that makes people want to use Microsoft Word on an Android phone. Oh, right. Right. Yeah. It's mostly for view. I mean, I could imagine. Imagine, especially with this Jamie phone, like you're scrolling through YouTube, you find a good, a good video. And so you unfold it, watch it automatically goes to full screen. You watch the whole video. And then when you're done watching the video, you've tucked the sides back in. And now you start scrolling through YouTube looking for your next fix, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of. That's pretty seamless experience. I just history suggests that the word seamless should not be applied to this experience yet. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it'll be, it'll be weird, but in the best way. In a way that just like, you know, processor improvements will fix it in two generations.

Like, it'll be like that. Think about how much handwork is involved when you've got a phone in portrait and now you want to go full screen. And so you tap the full screen and then it like it turns. And now the operating system starts turning like 90 degrees at a time trying to find which way is down with gravity. So you shake the phone so it gets the landscape just right because you're on Android and it's not as perfect as it is on iOS. I will say iOS is real janky with rotation lately. Oh, really? Yeah.

Almost. Maybe gravity's messed up. That's probably true. Look, the government shut down. No one's getting the gravitational signals they need from the government network of gravitrons. Is that how that works? Can I just say the rumor about LG, by the way, is not a folding screen? it's that they'll just have a second screen

that you can plug in. Yeah, you just like carry it around and plug it in. I love this idea. Just like, you just have another like thing sitting in your bag and just click it in. Or like you can maybe unclick it

and like stick in a little pocket behind the phone. Yeah. That's great. You like get all the benefits and then if you just want the skinny little phone let the weird bend on it, you throw,

you leave the second screen behind. Well, one, I don't think that you yet articulated the benefits. This is only for like, like real estate people. We're like, let me show you some specs. You can plug in the other screen.

You're like scrolling on your phone. You're like shoot a picture. I've been trying to figure out what you would use this for. And it's definitely for the kind of people who give PowerPoint presentations in Starbucks. I mean, you use it like all this, in theory, all the stuff that you do on an iPad you could do on, you know, your phone. There are lots of people that still, you know, want the iPad mini. And like a dual screen or folding screen device is essentially an iPad mini, but it folds up. Yeah.

That's cool. Yeah. I'm into it. I said, I'm, I'm, this is what, it's, people who are listening to show, no, like, I'm usually very much like, but what is it good for? And this is the one place from, like, I don't care. I just, I just want a folding phone. Like, it's, with a headphone jack. Can't have it all, Dieter. And then the honor view 20 is out. It's got a 48, 48 megapixel camera, which makes me happy. I mean. Well, and that camera is, like, Sam Bifert wrote a really good piece. Like,

that camera is actually not bullshit. Like, it's actually, there, there are, they managed to have real benefits. And there have been very, very, very few smartphones with super high megapixel counts that haven't actually just been objectively worse than like a standard eight or 12 megapixel camera. And this one, you know, manages to be as good and in some cases better. And that's rare. So that's why I'm excited about that phone. Yeah. I mean, I just, we're just in this period where a bunch of threads that have been brewing for some time are starting to land and shipping devices. Like there's a Vivo Apex that'll be at MWC where the entire display is a fingerprint sensor.

Like, come on. Like, that's super cool. It's a prototype, and who knows? And I think we've seen enough Vivo weirdness to know that they just, like, having ideas just for us to look at them. Like, the camera pops up. Like, that's fine.

But I just, we're in, I think this MWC, which is coming up sort of mid-February, is going to be full of extremely weird phone designs that sort of make last year. seem like an aberration. Yeah. Can I throw a curveball that's not on our topic list?

Yeah, that's what we're here for. Paul, have you been keeping up with Fuchsia, Google's Skunk Works OS project? More from like the programming language side. Why? What's that? Well, okay, so two things have happened since we last checked in.

One, the UI that everybody has seen for Fuchsia has basically been yanked and put into private repositories. It was called Armadillo. So you no longer can like track and watch how they're thinking about what the user interface looks like publicly anymore, or at least not easily. So that's one. And then this week, Google hired

this Apple veteran named Bill Stevenson, who worked on a lot of macOS releases. And what's interesting there is two things. Well, I'll say there's three things that are interesting there, but I'm only going to say one of them on the verge cast because I'm saving the other two. But when Bill Stevenson posted about it, he said, I'm excited to share that this February, I'll be joining Google. Here's the important part. To help. bring a new operating system called fuchsia to market. Whoa. To market?

To market. Like the real? Which is the first time, to my knowledge, like Google finally just up and admitted, yes, we're doing, this is a thing. And there have been lots of other little developments. So we've seen some pretty clear indications that they have been developing versions of fuchsia that can run on things like smart clocks and smart displays. So even like that Lenovo smart clock, we think that that could run fuchsia.

And that's, yeah, I've got a couple other, like, conjectures and thoughts and ideas, but they're, like, too sketchy for me to, like, put my name behind, even on the Vergecast where I'll say anything. So, I think that Fuchsia is going to be an exciting thing to watch in 2018. I don't think anything's going to actually get released this year, but I do think that we're going to start to see more stuff become, like, secretive. So if you haven't, like, poked around if you're able to look at, you know, GitHub and understand even a little bit of code, now's the, the time to do it because I think they're going to start pulling more stuff back as they get ready to like turn it into as something real. What is it going to turn into though? See, this is where I think I know, but I don't want to say it. I think it's Google's everything operating system. If it can run Android applications, it can and it can run on really lightweight devices. It's like it's

Google's like Darwin at the kernel, right? It's instead of having like its own special variant of Unix as its main kernel for all its operating systems, Google will have fuchsia and whatever the actual kernel of fuchsia is. And then it can toy around with making more user-facing operating system stuff. Like they could ship an Android phone that would have fuchsia stuff as the innards of it, but it still works and operates just like your current Android phone. Or they could go crazy and you know, replace all the UI with Flutter and stuff. Like they, they have a lot of flexibility, but I do think they want to get away from Linux.

Or at least have, my original think was that they wanted to have a very viable replacement for Linux if something goes bad with Linux. Right. Now it seems like they're investing enough in it that they are fairly confident that they can pull it off. If you're listening to this and you're in your car, I'm just going to tell you, Dieter is completely stone-faced right now.

You're getting nothing, nothing from this man. Like, Paul was just saying every word he can think of, and Dieter's like, uh-huh. But go ahead, Deere, you're going to say something. I was going to say, I remember once when I was trying to understand Docker, and I couldn't figure it out, and then Paul finally explained it to me, and then I went, oh, oh, yeah, that makes sense. That's really obvious, and that's, like, really smart,

And that's the way that, you know, software in the cloud should work. And I feel like there's a not precisely analogous move that they're doing with, like, a consumer or like a device operating system to Docker. But it's like sort of analogous in the like, oh, yeah, everything, everything should be, should, the internal parts of software and a computer should communicate that way. So when Paul says it's like the everything operating system, like, I feel like they're building a kernel. and they're building a system that instead of having a bunch of virtual machines or instead of having to report stuff that it's flexible enough that it can run like apps. Flutter apps built with the Android SDK. And there's even like code that's like Swift. Like let's see if we can figure out how to get Swift to run on this thing.

Right. They've got they've got Swift in there. They've got like a lot of rust code. One way to think of it. Like the invention is not the not like they came up with this concept. But what makes FUSA different than a typical operating system is that it has what's called a micro kernel. And so the idea is that most of the drivers, most of the functionality of the operating system is not in the kernel. Whereas Linux is more of what's called like a monolith.

It's big. And when you write a driver for hardware, right? You want your hardware to be able to work with Linux. You have to write code that interfaces directly. with the kernel, so you basically have to contribute to Linux to make your hardware work with Linux. Whereas with a micro kernel, the kernel is much more self-contained, and so therefore it's much more portable and stuff, like a lot of the drivers can be much more sandbox, much more like basically like apps, and therefore a lot more portable. And so you end up with a lot

more modular of an operating system and a lot more portable of an operating system. People were thinking about this even back in the 90s, the thought will, is that maybe it's not as fast. But they're pretty sure that they can make it fast. Yeah. It's funny that we've come this far with Google and its OS. They're going to make their next OS. Like, Android isn't that old.

But the idea that they're going to completely re-architect a new kind of OS from the ground up is actually kind of remarkable. And it's especially remarkable if they're hiring people to bring it to market. Well, and it's also remarkable because they just spent quite a while mucking around with some of the core privatives of like what ChromeOS is, right? Like ChromeOS is now basically like half Chrome, half Android bits,

right? And like there's a, there's some stuff that like, they're debating whether or not they should be in virtual machines or blah, blah, blah, blah. But like there's like the way, they're messing with Chrome and at the same time they're developing this thing on the side. And so then the big question is like we used to be like, what are you going to do?

You get a bet on all on Android or on Chrome OS? And why do you have both? And it's so confusing. in two years we're going to be having the same argument about like ChromeOS slash Android hybrid and Fuchsia. And then people are going to be like, no, no, you don't understand. Fuchsia's for this, this, and this and this. And Chrome OS is for that, that, that, and that. And then Android is, you know, that other thing. And so I don't think they're going to kill off any of this stuff right away.

And it's not going to be a one-for-one replacement, which means we're going to have a whole lot of, like, confusion about what is for what thing. in the same way that, you know, like, why is there both a cast platform for smart speakers and an Android thing's platform, right? Like, Google just as a company is not worried about having, like, a single unified, you know, thing that runs everything in the way that Apple basically has, everything is iOS. And, like, Google sort of doesn't care. And in some ways, that's a little bit more honest. Because to say that, you know, everything is running iOS is, like, rough, right?

It's like is the touchbar on, you know, my MacBook Pro, it's like some variant of watchOS apparently sort of kind of like, it almost like becomes like meaningless terms when you talk about like what are the operating systems that run these little gadgets. My dude, wait until they launch the app store for the touch bar with subscription pricing and that is their next great services play in the Mac. I mean, come on. That's what's coming. You can feel it in your heart. If you want to tell me that everything I just bloviated about fuchsia was wrong, I actually want you to tell me. And my email address is Dieter at the verge.com and just talk to me. I really do want someone that gets it a little bit more than I do.

And 9 to 5 Mac has been doing the series called Fuchsia Fridays, and they've been doing really good work. But in general, I feel like we're getting to a point where it's no longer like random skunk work projects. It's a thing they're bringing to the market and we can actually start defining what it is. You know, here's the two things I will just very broadly listening to you talk. One, it feels like Chrome OS is going to end up the odd one out, right? Because it's the most broken right now, even though it's just it's just not, the thing they're trying to make it, like, become is not good. Like, I don't know what to say about that.

Like, I love the ChromeOS laptops I have, but only when they're doing the very narrow task of, like, browsing the web. everything else Google wants ChromeOS to do is like a mess. So like if they, if their intention is to extend under the desktop, it seems like ChromeOS is the one that they should more immediately replace. The second thing I'll say is that the attitude you're describing at Google, where they just kind of don't care,

is the thing that scares me the most about buying Google hardware. Right. Right, where it's like they don't really care, they're not invested in it, they're not going to keep it up, they're not going to maintain it. Like, I have, you know, I have this Home Hub, and I'm just like, is this product going to last? Like, are they going to care? Are they going to release a Home Hub too?

Or is it just going to sort of like disappear into the ether? Like so many other Google things disappear into the ether. And that, that to me is they got to solve that problem. I think more people perceive that with Google than that company wants to admit. Yeah. It is my biggest problem with Google other than the fact that they spy on everybody all the time. I say another way to put it is that I feel like way Google thinks about products, like instead of aggressively dog fooding things,

like instead of telling us employees like, look, we built this one thing, you better use it. Google has more of like a vibe of like, hey, we built this thing. You're not using it? Oh, should we make a different thing? So then you will use it, you know? Like that's kind of like more of their attitude about it. Like they want their employees to be using their things,

their components to build the new things. And when their employees choose not to, Google thinks, well, maybe we need to make a different thing, so their employees will want to use that. Everything seems, I mean, Google is, like, the whole vibe of the company is a college campus. And it just often, it often feels like they're like, they come together on project teams and then the quarter ends,

and they, like, move on. So, like, everyone took the class where they built the Google Wi-Fi. And then, like, built one. And they, like, passed the Science Fair. And, like, does anyone work on the Google Wi-Fi anymore? It's just like deeply unclear to me. They made some lasting memories. Yeah, exactly.

Best vacation ever. It's like they're all at the robotics fair. Remember that time when we worked on a Wi-Fi product? It's like that product exists. Like lots of people have that. They made all these promises about AI doing band steering. Like, is there an AI researcher at Google who's still thinking about channel allocation on the Google Wi-Fi? Or they just like handed it?

over to the cloud monster? Like, that's the cloud monster. I don't know how Google works. I don't know. All I'm saying is I'm sure there's lots of people at Google who work on all of these products. But the company's outward communication about that process gets lost in this flood of new things that are half built. Or it gets lost in the flood of not having anything built, aka the Google messaging story and the death of hangouts. Yeah, what's going on there?

Dider, you're the only one who understands. So Hangouts is turning into Hangouts chat. So enterprise users that use Hangouts are getting converted to Hangouts chat, which is like a slack alike. And also Hangouts Meet, which is, I don't know, Skype alike, I guess, relatively soon. And then concurrently, Google once again is like, well, we're not, we're consumers and regular people. We're going to transition you to. And something will happen October, probably. We'll see.

I don't know. You know, it's like, it's probably going to, like, I don't know, we value you. You're great. But we're going to switch you over to chat once we sort of figure it out. In the meanwhile, a recommendation for what you should do if you want to talk to somebody is, well, eventually we'll roll out RCS, but that's not really on computers that well. So I don't know, man, you can figure it out. There's lots of other companies, I guess. It's cool.

We're cool. Everything's cool. By the way, Hangouts chat is coming, I guess. But it's not really for consumers, but if you want to use it, sure, I guess. They maintain Hangouts just so they don't have to use Slack, right? I mean, that's what's happening here. Like, they use it internally. Yep.

So in, like, other big company, like, Twitter uses Hangouts for all of its video calls. So it just seems like, okay. Like, we need this product, we have it. We can keep sort of developing it. Right. Like, the interns will fix it up every couple months. they got to do something and then we don't have to like pay Slack

or we don't have to use Microsoft Teams. It feels like it exists as a consumer product just because Google needs it to exist or I'm sorry as an enterprise product just because Google needs it to exist for its own enterprise. Yeah. It's like just very much my sense of it. So when does RCS come out, Deuter?

My best answer to what is going on is that rambling insufficient non-committal thing I just gave you. And I could give you that again if you want or, you know, we can move on to things that aren't awful and terrible. Like, that's it. Like, RCS is going to come out when it comes out, carrier by carrier, phone by phone. The rollout there has been not quite bungled, but it's certainly not, like, being handled well.

There's still a lot of confusion out there. And, like, what they should do is, like, AT&T now supports RCS Universal Profile, done. But instead, it's like, this one carrier has this one phone that will let you talk to other one carriers that have that other one phone. sort of. So there. It's like... It's like MMS back of the day. Yeah. It's like MMS. It's exactly like that. I sort of get it like to not to defend our nation's wireless carriers. It's not something I usually do. But I get, they can't break message. They can't just

like roll it out without some small scale deployment to make sure it works, right? That's what I'm assuming is going on. But I don't know. In the meantime, it's just like, well, whatever. And like also, I kind of am happy. that the RCS rollout is happening slowly and haphazardly. It's a much better story outside the U.S. to be clear. It's actually quietly just like happening in a bunch of countries. But it being messy, it just means that Android users are forced to like make a decision now

to switch to signal or wire or WhatsApp or whatever. So I don't know. I can't. I get the feeling the true RCS rollout comes when the 5G phones hit, right? Oh, that could be. That, you know, that's like a good time to, like, break everybody's habits and be like, your 5G phone now has better multimedia texting. That's part of 5G. Like, you can, you can feel how there's, like, this consumer benefit that you can tie into this intangible network change.

Maybe. We'll see. That seems obvious. Okay. Let's take a break. Let's read some ads. I kind of want to talk about the Google and Oracle lawsuit going to Supreme Court. And then I'm just basically going to ramble about the Fortnite lawsuit situation.

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If you don't remember. Corical. Paul, I think you might find this interesting. So Android, once upon a time, was built with the same API calls. Java and there was a deep relationship between Android and Java. Still build Android apps with Java. Still do. They were built with API calls that worked the

exact same way as the Java API calls, but they were not the same API calls, if you believe Google. They just worked and smelled exactly the same and happened to share similar names or identical names in some cases. Java was developed by a company

called Sun Microsystems. You might remember Sun Microsystems for its famous CEO, Eric Schmidt, who was once the CEO of Google, became the chairman of Google. So Google, he's like, hey, this thing I made Java, maybe. And they're like, yes. And so they used a lot of Java or a lot of Java-ish things to build Android. Some Microsystems purchased by Oracle.

Oracle CEO, Larry Ellson, notably famous for being Steve Jobs' best friend. It's a fact. Oracle now owns Java. They sue Google. This is years ago now. Sue Google for infringing the various copyrights in Java and the various patents in Java. We covered this lawsuit ages ago. We went to the trial.

It was crazy town. We went to the first trial. We went to the first trial. This is the case that won't end. So the specific copyright infringement is the API called names, the words that were used, the structure of the APIs in Java, were replicated in Android, even though the underlying code was not the same. This is the infringement at risk. The judge, who we've actually profiled. Sarah Jong profiled Judge Alsup for us.

He is the judge who codes. Basically said, this is nonsense in the Ninth Circuit. That got overturned. Then they went to a jury. The jury said, this is an infringement. That got overturned. Today, Google announced they're asking the Supreme Court of the United States to rule whether the structure of API calls can be copyrighted and protected.

Because they say this threatens. the future of all software development. If a coming at Google cannot build a compatible operating system by using the structure of APIs, the structure of names of APIs. So can a small thing that's a piece of a larger thing, can that smaller thing be copyrighted? Yeah. The larger thing could probably be copyrighted. Well, let's get to it.

This is the theme of this section of the Virchcast. But Paul, just having laid out what I've laid out in knowing what you know. What do you think? I never understood this at all. I never understood. Okay, if you want to use an operating, like a programming language to build an operating system, that you use all the functionality of that programming language.

And if it happens to be that, so like if I took, I don't know, some imaginary program, if you take the programming language Swift, which has been explicitly open-sourced, right? But it doesn't work on all platforms, right? Or it might be partially ported to another platform, right? So Swift has a lot of functionality, but not all of its functionality works on all platforms.

So let's say I'm going to do it on... I'm going to bring Swift to fuchsia, right? And it's going to run on fuchsia on arm, and it's going to make your fridge talk. I could write some arm code to support the Swift functions, right? I could write that backing code so that now I can use more of Swift so that I can make my talking fridge really responsive and great. That's just like how you port software to different platforms.

If Java was not available for making software, I feel like Oracle should have said, this is not for making software. This is just a thing that you look at. This is just code that you can read a book that we published about Java, but you're not supposed to make software with Java. It doesn't make any sense. Paul, I can simplify this for you. Have you ever heard of Bickram Yoga,

which is the hot yoga? The yoga you do in a hot room. Yeah, okay. I've heard of hot yoga. In 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Bickram Yoga isn't copyrightable because it is an idea rather than an expression. Hmm. Okay, so, wow, you are really poking at me.

It relates. It sort of relates. This whole section is just me trolling, Eli. He's killing me. The thing is like, I'm going to get it wrong, and the copyright lawyers are going to yell at me, but I'm going to try. I'm going to try to remember what I learned ages ago. Yeah. So the idea of expression dichotomy is foundational to the notion of copyright law.

So for something to be copyrighted, the right that you're getting is the right to copy it. In order to copy it, it needs to be fixed in a tangible... If you have an idea for a song, you're singing out loud, you don't get a copyright. You record it, now you get a copyright. Right. You get this tangible fixed expression. So the idea doesn't count. So the Bickram Yoga people, if they wrote a manual for how to do Bickram, that manual can be copyrighted, but just doing it is not.

So that's like a whole thing. With Google and Oracle, the main thing is that Oracle did. write down the structure, sequence, and organization of the Java API, right? So how it's structured, the sequence of those elements, the organization of it. And Google is saying, yes, in order to use Java for our operating system, we had to reuse that structure, but none of the technical implementation of the API is the same as yours. So you write a app in Java and you call some API. Android is doing something totally different.

It's like, right, you call the API, you say return this data. And the way that Java, as Sun implements it, does something to return the data. The way Android does it does something different, but all that's really happening is you're pushing the API, right? You're saying, give me this thing that I want. Literally, Oracle is saying to use the structure sequence organization of the Java APIs. Is it not, like, that's copyright infringement. And Google is saying, well, no, this is how. how people know how to code.

So if we don't, then everybody knows that you use Java won't be able to write an app for the Android phone, and Java was open source. So this is like, this is the debate. It's not so much idea and expression. That's the other thing. Yes. Yeah.

Why is this copyright set of patent? There was a whole set of patent claims, and they were tossed out. The heart of this is structure, sequence, and organization of the API in copyright. It's actually been to the Supreme Court once, and it was denied, and now it's going again. The Supreme Court denied to review the case.

There's a long history of you have to copy the structure, sequence, layout, whatever, of a machine if you want to be compatible with it, right? So when you made IBM compatible operating system, you know, you had to make it like, I mean, this is actually one reason why a lot of people can't forgive Microsoft is that Microsoft has been. extorting companies that have used Linux for decades over the fact that Linux implements the fat file system, right? FAT, the dumbest, simplest, simplest file system of all time that's been around for 30 or 40 years. Microsoft has a patent on it. And so Microsoft extorts money out of companies for using Linux because they have a

patent on fat. I mean, this is why we should abolish patents a copyright. right. The end. Thank you. Problem solved. The patent's one expired, so that's fine. Yeah, but it's still hard to forgive Microsoft for being such an asshole about it.

Yeah, fair. I mean, I disagree with you on that. But we can move on to the next thing. Yeah. Because the next thing is about the expansion of copyrights in digital spaces. Okay. Which troubles me every time. So I've been thinking about this lot.

I've been tweeting about a lot. I should probably just write it down, but I'm talking about the podcast and stuff. So there's all these people suing Epic. There's now four cases, I think, about the dancing emotes in Fortnite, right? And we've done some good coverage on it. I think Nick wrote a great piece. He talked to a lawyer who had been a professional dancer, like the single best analyst that you can find for such a thing, right? Like the copyright lawyer who's been, who actually is a dancer.

And there's great coverage out there. I don't think anybody has really thought through the public policy implications. So here are like the facts. So you've got 2Milly, the rapper, you've got the guy to the Carlton dance, you've got the Floss Kid. They're all represented by the same law firm. They're all suing Epic because Epic, you know, like lifted their dances into these emotes. It's actually kind of complicated how you buy them. You have to like buy the Battle Pass.

They come and pack. You can maybe buy them individually. But basically they say you're selling our dance and we deserve a cut of that, right? That is a lot. So then you have a lot of people saying, well, that's true. They made this thing. They put this culture out in the world. Fortnite is selling it, like a version of it.

They're making tons of money on Fortnite, just printing money with Fortnite. It only makes sense that they should have to pay these people who made these stances. You can't just boost stuff out of internet culture and resell it somewhere else. It's only fair. And I think that fairness argument is very powerful for people, given the scale of Fortnite's success. Yeah. But what I think is extremely dangerous. And so, Paul, I don't think we should abolish copyright basically because I was a copyright lawyer.

And it's very dear to me. But every time we, every time we could keep it. But every time you expand the realm of copyrightable subject matter, you run into insane side effects that we see over and over again. So this issue has never really been litigated before because quite frankly, there's not a lot of money in dancing, which is. just a real thing. But Fortnite has a lot of money. So this law firm is out there. So you can copyright a work of choreography.

So the single ladies dance that Beyonce does in that video. If you just like do that whole thing again and sell it for lots of money, Beyonce and choreographers can sue you for like lifting her choreography. If you want to put on a Broadway show at your high school theater, you can buy the choreography to the Broadway version in a book where choreography is written down. And you can like redo it, right? You can buy these rights to choreography. So, like, a long piece of choreography is a copyrightable thing, especially if you write it down, if you, like, notate it or you, like, make a video of it expression.

It is not clear whether a sequence of dance moves is copyrightable. The Copyright Office, not the law, but the Copyright Office says no. Right? Like, the law says, but when you look at, like, just sort of the guidance of the Copyright Office, they're like, no. Their example is the hustle is not copyrightable because that's just, like, a common dance move. But that's not the law. That's just the copyright office has gotten. So these cases are going to create precedent for like the quantum of dancing that is

protectable under copyright law. And that quantum of that unit of dancing is not yet. We don't know where the threshold is between what is not protected because it's just the hustle. Everybody can you do the hustle? Or it's this like larger piece of choreography. Well, and what about what about like simultaneous dance invention? Like do you have people rushing?

to like, like, they put an SD card of a video of them, like, doing a new dance move and then mailed to themselves, like, the trick with copyright. So that you have, like, a time stamp of when you invented a dance. So now you can sue everybody, whoever

does that dance move. Yeah. Okay. So that's like, there's your first. I mean, you can, like, fairly say, like, the Carlton dance guy, he's first. Like, he invented it on the fresh prints. You probably, you know, like, the Millie Rock, like, the dude's name is too Millie. It's called the Millie Rock.

Like, right? But that unit of ownership doesn't exist. Like, it's not clear where the boundaries of the unit of ownership are, which is a very hard concept to get your head around. Right. You can own a song. You write a song. You can register, copyright, and a song.

You can own the sample of a song, right? And you can own a riff as well. But you can't own the song title, right? No. See. That's a whole different thing. But you can't own some notes, right? So, like, the difference between these are just some notes, and this is a riff, and this

is me quoting your riff in a transformative work. those are all things to get litigated case by case. And we do it for songs, so songs make lots of money. You can't just reuse the riff. Like, you can't just, like, take the satisfaction riff from the Rolling Stones and, like, make satisfaction again. Like, you will get sued for that. I know. But I've said that's pretty close to a dance.

It's timing, right? It's what you're doing and how long you do it. So very famously, Robin Thick and Farrell got sued for blurred lines. Right. Right. And the court ruled this is too close to the, to the, to, you know, to the, you know, to another song, even though they're not the same. So there's a lot of that precedent out there in the law.

But here, I think there's that expectation, right? Like if blurred lines had flopped, I don't think they would have gotten sued. So you make this hit, you know, making lots of money, authors who think they contributed to your work are going to come for you. None of that expectation is there culturally with dancing. Right? Like, you see Michael Jackson moonwalking, you can moonwalk. No one thinks like, oh, if I moonwalk in a bar, I hope this bar has a jukebox license,

which is how that would usually work. So here's my worst case scenario, right? There are dance music trolls. In firms start up that buy up the rights to dance moves on the internet for cash payments, right? You just like need a million dollars. You're going to go buy 100 dance moves for $10,000 each, right? Like, you're just like, didn't do it. You're going to just buy a lot of money and then you use the rest of your million dollars to file lawsuits against other people who do that dance move.

Because who's not going to take the upfront cash payment for their dance move? This hasn't been a problem or a thing until Fortnite, right? Until Fortnite. The only reason that people go after it in any copyright situation is if there's money in it. I'm saying this unit of ownership has never existed before. Sure. It's never existed before. There's no cultural heritage.

Right. But there's, there are a million places where the law around owning a thing is complicated as hell. We did the super long podcast with Sarah about Mechanica Rights way back, whatever it was with music. You know what? What's one more super complicated, vague area of law for people to sue each other over? It's not going to burn anything down and, you know, Epic is still going to make money. Are you worried about stifling dance move innovation in the world? Is that what you're afraid of?

I'm absolutely worried about stifling dance move innovation. Wouldn't you be worried about sifling dance move innovation? No, dude, I can't dance. Well, I think you should be worried about siphling dance movement innovation. My point is this set, this thing, which is very strange, which is digital representations of dancing for your avatar, has created the opportunity for there to be a new quanta of ownership and copyright, which is crazy. Right? Like, to create a new thing that you can own does not happen very often, that you can go sue somebody else just for doing in a YouTube video. Right? So, I don't know, like some YouTuber flosses for eight seconds in a video.

The floss kid can, will now have the right to go sue them for whatever portion of YouTube ab revenues they get if they're not demonetized. YouTube has to develop a content ID system to make sure dances are not infringing in their videos because they don't want the secondary liability. This is one I pointed out yesterday. All kinds of NFL players do dances on the sidelines when they score touchdowns. A lot of money in the NFL. Do all these people get to go sue the players, the NFL, the broadcasters, if you accidentally do a dance that you didn't know was copyrighted? This is like the Pandora's box of crazy that these lost.

So I think everybody's very focused on the unfairness of wealth transfer here. But I think the nightmare scenario of like Nathan Merveld being like, well, this worked in patents. I'm just going to run around buying up dance. moves so I can just go I mean they do this music samples happens there are companies that will scan for samples I am worried about

dance move patent troll organizations dance move troll organizations yes buying them all up the next great villain that's bad for Marvel to defeat however if we can if we could stop that from happening and we just allow these like quanta of movements to be copyrightable then

we have a massive source of non-governmental funding for the arts. Choreographers don't get paid jack. And now here's a way for them to make some money. It's great. It's a poorly monetized profession.

Look, it's just in my head, like, I've been thinking about it because there's a fourth lawsuit file this week. So you can go listen to Function with a Neil Dash, also on the BoxingMead Podcast Network. He did a whole thing about sort of the inequity of the wealth transfer. He actually had two million on his show. Goes to that.

It's, it's fine. It's all fine. But I just, I want listeners to also think, like, you're creating a new thing, you're creating a new thing that people can sue over. In like the history of platforms being overzealous with knocking down copyright infringement, the history of DMCA complaints, the histories of unscrupulous law firms, trolling because of intellectual property rights. I actually think there's some value to like, to Paul's point, something's not being copyrighted. It's copyright not existing in some places. Because it lets people just do stuff.

It lets culture spread faster. And so if you start adding money and rights to something that has historically not had it, you will necessarily crush it. And I think everyone's so focused on the unfairness aspect that the knock-on effect of kids on YouTube getting sued is like not there. Like there's a whole fight in Europe right now over Articles 11 and 13, where Google and Facebook would have to pay a link tax, where they'd have to, every online service provider has to have aggressive content.

filtering IDs. Imagine if you added dance moves to that mix because you can own them. That's nuts. Okay, that's it. My rant is over. 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 building. 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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by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Sonos, rumored to be making headphones.

Yeah, so this is a report from German over Bloomberg, and it seems like he's got sources, but in addition to that, Sonos has recently told shareholders, quote, we plan to push our boundaries by investing resources to make the experience of Sonos outside the home a reality, which is the worst quote ever. But got me thinking, like, why would you want Sonos headphones? Number one, maybe they'll sound good, right?

Like, that seems like a good reason, right? But is there any other reason you would want in particular Sonos headphones as opposed to just good sounding Sony or Bangun Olson or whatever headphones? The ideal with the SOTOS headphones, this would pay off. If you're walking home, you know, you just got off the train, you walk home, and you listen to a song, and a song's about to get real good. And so you take off your headphones, you put them on a Sonos dock, and then your BAM, your SOTOS system comes alive, you know, and like the song's climax. It's really exciting. That would be the SONOS experience for headphones. Otherwise, I don't really get it.

Yeah. The only other reason I could think of to want to have Sonos headphones is if you somehow think that Sonos's software of like queuing up all, like integrating all the different music services that you listen to into a single app and letting you like queue up things from like, here's the thing for my podcast app. And then I'll play some music next. And then I'll play this thing from this, you know, radio app that does the news and then blah, blah, blah, blah. And you just want to have like a central repository of everything that auditory that you've got. and then you'll be able to use that with your headphones in addition to using it at home. So you can just have like a cue.

But then you've got to like route all audio in your life through the Sonos app, which is just deeply depressing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, from Sonos's perspective, that is exactly what they need to be doing. Because otherwise other apps are theoretically going to get better at routing your app audio

and they'll also work with home speakers that aren't Sonos. Yeah. I mean, I think they just need more products. What Sonos is effectively saying is like our product line is limited to these experiences inside your house. People are only going to buy so many speakers. We need to sell them one more thing. Or we need to bring them into our ecosystem in a way that is additive.

Like it would be cool if you put on your Sonos headphones at home and the audio switched from your Sonos beam to your headphones. Yeah. Like that would be neat. But that doesn't mean your Sonos experiences out of the home yet. Yeah. I don't know. To me, I feel like they, we reported at CS on a survey they were doing. across a bunch of platforms

where they're like, what products we make next? Headphones were not on that list. It was a bunch of other stuff, like a cheap persona sub at most rear-firing speakers. Yeah. I think that stuff will take them farther.

Rolling out Google Assistant, which Deere and I saw, will, like, accelerate them. I just, I'm very curious what they can offer for headphones. In that same report, by the way, it was very interesting. I think I remember mentioned

that Apple was making headphones with their own high-end. cans and AirPods too. That rumor's been around for a while, yeah, yeah. Apple owns beats. Remember the original super premium expensive headphone brand? Nobody at Apple remembers that.

Has ever an acquisition been so bungled? Most acquisitions. No, it's just like they bought beats. I get that Apple Music exists. There's no reason to spend a billion dollars to buy the core of Apple Music. They definitely could have gotten those deals and built that service themselves.

It's been re-architected along the way. It's not like Jimmy and Dre and Trent Reznor are doing anything, right? You don't know that? Trent Rezner is not doing anything in it. I just, I promise you, he's not going to work every day and being like, I think we should fire 200 car engineers. Like, you don't

you don't think, I mean, I feel like they probably already gotten their money's worth from beats just in hardware sales. Yeah, I mean, that was part of the deal, right? It was like, this is like, this is an acquisition they'll pay for itself. But they didn't do anything with the products except put W1 in them and then inconsistently add lightning ports. Yeah.

It's just amazing that there can be rumors in the world of Apple making headphones when they bought a dominant headphone company. Yeah. I just feel like a lot of acquisitions go that way. Yeah. I think that's... Cultures don't mesh. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, how long is Google owned Nest? Oh, Nest. Right? So there's that story this week of people's passwords getting reused. Like, people had bad passwords. So they're nest. People are logging into their Nest cameras.

where they reused passwords and then people logged under our Nest accounts and then we're issuing like fake warnings of impending war with North Korea. Do you see this? Yeah. And support Nest, it's like not really their fault, right?

Like everyone's like, Nest cameras get hacked and you're like looking to what it really is and it's, we reused their password. Well, Nest could have like kept a closer eye on, I don't know, you could make the case that at some point Nest should like look at its customers that don't have two-factor

and I don't know, is he own a sudden nest to let their customers know, like, hey, you're on, have I been owned? And we notice you should change your password. You know what I mean? Right. I don't know. But you could make the case that they might have had some responsibility to, like, try and keep an eye out for some of their customers that might have had passwords compromised on other sites. Maybe. I don't want to, you might want to say that, but sure.

Sure. Anyway. Maybe. Especially because they make cameras and thermostats. Like, they have a higher duty of. care. Right. Right.

But Nest is owned by Google and you can't log into your Nest account with your Google account. Right. And Google does all that stuff. Like, that is just a crazy situation to me that, I mean, I literally, when Matt Rogers was a CTO, he's gone now. I emailed him and I was like, hey, I just bought a Nest thermostat. Why can't I log in with my Google account? And he just replied with good idea, smiley face.

And it was like two and a half years ago. What do you? I don't know. So you're right, Paul. Maybe the solution to, like, antitrust in the world. This should actually just let everyone by each other because it will inevitably fall apart. Does one? Thank you.

Thank you for joining my team. I'm not on your team, Paul. I'm just interested in your literature. My team has sensible antitrust regulation and somatum of copyright laws. All right. Can we end real quick on what's going on with Netflix? Netflix and Hulu and then wrap this thing up. Only if we let Paul do his weekly segment that we never forget about and that he does every week with the same name all the time.

Paul, I'm sorry, buddy. You are going to love this week so much. Like always, the segment is called My Heart is a Low Frequency Oscillator. Yeah. And teenage engineering is the greatest company on Earth. They just came out with this like what's called the OPZ. as the European say, or OPZ, which is the follow-up to the OP1.

So it's like a little synthesizer thing. It's really cool. It has no screen. Very hard to use. Very exciting. But just now, I guess because it's NAM, they announced another product, which is this line of pocket operator modular sense.

So I don't know. I didn't hear about modular synthesis until like six months ago. But imagine this, Nilai. Imagine a gadget. that is only headphone jacks. Yes. Right? And sometimes volume knobs.

Yes. So then you plug... Are there LEDs? Cable? Sometimes, often, actually. Yeah. So basically, it's just a money sink. So you get into like the Euro rack system is 3.5 millimeter.

There's also modular synthesis with quarter inch jacks. This is... Teenage engineering is trying to make a very affordable modular synthesis setup. And it's, it just looks awesome. And it's, I mean, it's not cheap. It's $500, but that's cheap for modular synthesis. And it's got a lot of stuff to it. Anyways, if you haven't ever heard of modular synthesis and you like spending thousands of dollars on gear, it's, it's, it's so much YouTube waiting for you out there.

I'm ready for it. I love teenage engineering. It's my favorite. By the way, I should note that it's NAM this week, it's big music, trade show. and Danny Deal and Vlad are at NAM and they're reporting on a bunch of wild stuff. This is a big focus for us this year. I want us to do more tools coverage for creators

because there is an explosion of neat podcasting stuff, neat video streamer stuff, neat cameras for YouTubers. Instagram is like Renaissance to photography equipment. So I want us to do a lot more of that this year and connect the tools creators are using to the platforms they're using and the work they're doing. That's like that's the verge.

That's like the thing that we do. So look out for, if you're into this music stuff, look out for Danny and Vi this week because I'm not am. Danny's got some wild interviews lined up, actually. I'm excited for it. Okay. I was going to do Netflix and Hulu, but here's the news. Netflix is going to cost $2 more and Hulu is going to cost $3 left. So it's a wash.

Yes. That's kind of it. Netflix makes a ton of news with its shows all the time. It gets, you know, Oscar nominations and it, you know, blah, blah, blah, join the NBA. Who has the Handmaid's Tale? Yeah, Netflix's join the... APA, which just makes me so sad. Yeah, Hulu.

And, like, Hulu has a Handmaid's Tale, and, like, they're just, like, still around. Like, that's... I hate to say it, but, like, Hulu is not making the splashes that they need to, and so it makes sense that they're, you know, dropping their prices, lets them kind of needle Netflix a little bit, and good on them, but... There's good stuff for you. I don't know where they're going. There's, like, some wild.

Yeah, like, they have some good originals, and they have, obviously, the first-run stuff from the major networks. What I will say is that I like assigned out like we need to do a Netflix versus Hulu piece, blah, blah. It's like looking at it today with Chris Welch, it'll be up by the time you listen to this. So pull over in your car and read our Netflix versus Hulu piece. But so, you know, one of the things, so they have different content, obviously. But they're also like technically very different, like worlds apart. Netflix technically is way ahead of Hulu, right?

Netflix supports 4K. They support Dolby Vision. They have some stuff in Atmos, they have lots of stuff in surround sound. Hulu is like 1080P stereo in most cases at most. So I was like reading this and I was like, Chris, you didn't mention surround sound. He's like, actually, Hulu supports surround sound but only on certain devices. And it's the, here's the truth. Hulu, you can get surround sound from Hulu on a Nintendo Switch.

But you cannot get it. This is true. But you cannot get it on the Apple TV or Roku. It's like the Xbox won, the PS4, the Switch. you can make some stuff on hulu will have surround sound but not roku or the apple tv it's absolutely bonkers i don't understand what they're doing and thus i'll pay them two dollars less a month my question is what why is there a service for people who like movies that already made you know what i mean like i want to watch dr strangelove it's called voodoo or iTunes movies yeah you have to buy them you have to like rent and

Yeah, it used to be called Netflix, but they lost all the rights to stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of movies. They lost all the rights to the stuff and the junk. What you're describing, Paul, is HBO. Yeah. You just get HBO now and you get HBO's library of movies and you're fine. They have a very small curated selection of films. You're looking for every movie.

Well, right now I'm looking for Dr. Strangelove, which, by the way, there's not a very good, I know there are a couple of websites that help you find which service a film is on, but there's not a very good one. I think, Paul, you should go full on into owning physical media. This is the next step for you. Into like criterion collection Blu-rays, into like walls of books.

Like I would like to come visit you and enter like a plush mahogany media space. Yes. Okay. Here's my thing. I would buy, well, one, physical media is not great like archivally in like a last, for 100 years. Neither is digital media.

No, but at least you didn't buy. Wait, so your, your quality, wait, your criteria is it should last, it should outlast you. Yes. Okay. If I could buy like a holographic cube, right, that stores a film for over 100 years.

That's my criteria. Paul's criteria collection. Over 100 years. Oh my God. The show is going on too long. and you've got like 30 seconds left. It needs to be 8K, minimum. Because 4K is not equal to the resolution of 35 millimeter film.

And if I'm going to get an archival set, anyways, that's when I'll move to physical media. All right, get on it. Sony. I don't know. Who's going to make a weird format that lasts for 100 years in 8K? It's Sony. Yeah. So if anyone at Sony is listening.

Memory stick 8K. Memory stick cube. That's what... That's been the Vergecast, everyone. Worst of the year. It's only January, so that's fine. We'll be back next week. We'll have another interview episode, you know, another Verge cast on Thursday.

Listen to all of season three of why did you push that button. It is, you know, a good podcast that you can listen to. It's well-produced. It tells a narrative story. It ends on time. So listen to that show. Ashley and Caitlin are great. You can listen to Pivot with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher.

I mentioned Function earlier. You can listen to Function on the Niel Dash, all great shows on the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can also follow us on all the social platforms. But honestly, shut it down, read a book. But while listening to this. Okay. Rock and roll. Paul.

Email me about Fuchsia. Dr. Strangelv is available on Archive. But is that legal? I don't know.