The Vergecast - Nintendo announces Switch Lite, Apple updates Macbooks, and a wild email from Foxconn

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

Nintendo announced a new Switch! Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss what's different with the new model and what's being updated with the original one. But first, continuing coverage of Foxconn's factory in Wisconsin — this time with a cryptic email.Next: new Macbooks! Kind of. Apple updated the Macbook Pro and Air and got rid of the 12-inch Macbook and its butterfly keyboard for future models. There's a whole lot more like a Zoom security flaw, a new streaming service, and of course some FCC talk.  🎶This week's theme song 🎶Foxconn will only create 1,500 jobs, says Wisconsin governorNintendo Switch Lite is a smaller, cheaper Switch built exclusively for handheld playNintendo is updating the original Switch with a new CPU and storageApple is reportedly giving up on its controversial MacBook keyboard …Apple discontinues 12-inch MacBookApple is silently removing Zoom’s web server software from MacsApple Watch eavesdropping vulnerability forces Apple to disable Walkie-TalkieI’m Jad Abumrad, and This Is How I WorkA small notebook for a system administrator WarnerMedia confirms its Netflix rival will be called HBO MaxAT&T says it will automatically block robocalls ‘in the coming months Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about new MacBooks, we talk about the Nintendo Switch. We unfortunately talk about HBO Max. And we talk about a pretty wild email from Foxhun. That's the Vergecast coming up next. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for sure. 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. Neelai, I'm going to direct you to the meaning of AI, 8K, and 5G. But then you should leave us alone. Leave us alone.

Leave us alone. Leave us alone Leave us alone EI means new generation of ability and self-driving cars 8K means smart Safety and security through 8K technology 5G means pioneering medical solutions

and health cloud network Leave us alone Leave us alone Leave us alone Leave us alone Leave us alone It's just A.I.A.A.K.M. 5G. What makes that so hard to believe?

Leave us alone. Leave us alone. Leave us alone. Please leave us alone. Oh, my God. I didn't have... I don't think I've ever heard that part. Hello! And welcome to the Virgast, the flagship podcast of the Fox Control Society.

I don't know, man. I'm Neely. I'm your friend. Dieter Bone is here. Hi. Also, your friend this week. Sure. You can't trust that Wiley Bone.

Paul Miller is here. Hello. So that song was written for us by Jackson Hayes. You might remember Jackson. He wrote the CDA 230 song a few weeks ago. There's a lot to talk about. There's new MacBooks. There's new Switch.

I just want to start. I don't know if people listening saw my Twitter. from, I guess, a couple days ago when you're listening to this. If you haven't, you know, pull over in a car like a Twitter, that's healthy. But obviously, we've been covering Foxcon a lot, right? It's like, it's where I'm from. If you've been listening to this show, you know I'm very interested in what Foxxon is doing in my hometown of Racine and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. And it is just, it's reaching, like, absurd levels, right?

So last week, Foxcon's special assistant to the chairman, Louis Wu, gave this, like, interview in this like hazy campaign video. You know, Terry Gou is like running for president of Taiwan. He's the CEO of chairman of Foxxon. He's retiring to run for president of Taiwan. So he made this video that's like about how great he is. And this guy, Louis Wu was in the video. And he mostly talks about how great Terry is.

And, you know, the hint is like, you should vote from president. But in the middle, he talks about Foxxon, Wisconsin. And he's like, we're not used to working like this. It's like we're in a glass fishbowl. and we're the only fish, right? Like, all this scrutiny. And, like, guys, like, all we're, like, literally, the only question is, like, are you going to build a factory?

Yeah. Like, that's not the most scrutiny in the world. The problem is the answer is no. So, like, yeah, it probably feels like a lot of pressure. So I wrote this story, like, he complains that you can't just change their plans whenever he wants to, even though they signed out a contract. Yeah, it probably bothered some boss on people. Then this week, the governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, goes on CNBC,

and he's like, I have some clarity on what's going on with Foxcon. I've been to the site. It seems like they're going to make like tablets and phones. Maybe it's unclear whether they're actually going to build a display factory. But he's like they're pouring concrete. You know, we have some clarity. It's going to be 1,500 jobs. Okay.

You might remember that Trump promised 13,000 jobs and that the factory would be the eighth wonder of the world. And now we're down to like, so now we're probably assembling some tablets and 1,500 jobs. So I can write that up. Like, Wisconsin's governor says it's only 1,500 jobs. Foxxon has bought these empty buildings around the state called Innovation Centers for the AI8K-5G ecosystem. No one knows that.

These are like the jokes now. Like, I feel like when we write about Foxxon, I'm like a stand-up doing a bit. I'm like, it's been 90 days since Foxxon told us it would issue a statement and they didn't. And like... And you're on like the sixth city of your tour and you're just like repeating the same jokes again? Because nothing has changed. Right. And like when Josh Jeza, who's our reporter who's doing more work than me on the...

this story. Talk about it. We're like, the story is that nothing's happening. So we have to like make that interesting every time. So we, we've just started to like build these little, these little reminders of things like shorthand. Like it's been 90 days since they said the buildings weren't empty. The buildings are clearly still empty. They promised a statement. They haven't given it to us. Anyway, so I put that out. It's one of the shortest stories that written for The Verge this year. It is like maybe 500 words long. Like, here's the governor said. Yeah. It goes out and the usual suspects like tweet it and retweet it. Great. Like, Hours later, I get this email.

The title is just AI 8K plus 5G. It says what you heard in the song. It says, Nilai, I'm going to direct you to the meaning of AI 8K plus 5G. But then you should leave us alone. And then in all capital letters, it says, leave us alone. And it says, it's seen in the time frame and there's some timecode of the video below with a link to YouTube video. AI means new generation of mobility and self-driving cars. Why?

I don't know. 8K means smart safety and security through 8K technology. What? which is a totology. I just want to point that out. 5G, AK means AK, obviously, guys. 5G means pioneering medical solutions and health cloud network, which is incredible. And then in all caps, once again, it says, leave us alone. This is one of the two wildest emails I've ever received.

Now, you can't say who this is from. It's from like an anonymous. It could be a completely anonymous troll or it could be like from the president of Foxcon. You have no idea, right? The reason I just tweeted a screenshot, I have my suspicions. The reason I just tweeted a screenshot is from a proton mail account, which is like encrypted email. It's totally anonymous. I can't like look at the headers or anything like that.

There's a name here. The name is a Taiwanese name. So, you know, like it says us. This language is a little stilted. You know, so I just like have my suspicions that somebody is very irritated with me who works at Foxcon. You know, like my tweets delete. You know, like I would never put this on the verge and say like Foxconn is mad at. at me.

Right. Like, I can't, I can't support it to that level. Right, right. But I'm happy to, like, tweet it and say maybe Foxxon, which is my tweet. Like, I think maybe Foxcon is mad at me because this is hilarious. This is, by the way, the second email I've received in the past week that suggests I should leave Foxcon alone. And the first one, it was, that one was actually from a person.

I think they were just like a concerned citizen. So, like, to me, first of all, the video that they sent that says, we can explain AIAK5 is a video that Foxcon made. It's a rendering. It's a concept video. They wanted to show, like, the people of Wisconsin about how great the factory would be. This video is nuts, right? It looks like they're building an entire city from scratch.

The main office is a sphere, like a sphere in the middle of a lake. And the only way to get into it is to take a self-driving car around a track that goes into one tube. And then there's like a display plant behind it. And there's like, there's like schools and like hospital zones. Like it looks like a sci-fi movie. It is obviously not the thing they are building, which is one box in the middle of the field. Also, like, I just, if I worked in office and the only way out was to run through a tube and to get into a self-driving car, I'm never, I'm not going to work. Like, what if there's a fire?

Well, hang it. You're in a sphere in the middle of the lake. You just break the sphere and jump in the lake if there's a fire. Yeah. Come on. What's the big deal? So like, go watch this video. It is indeed fanciful.

And then, like, you get to this part where it's, it explains. And this part where he's like, as seen in our video below, this is where it explains AIK5G. It's just a series of icons. Like, it's not an explanation. It's just like icons show up on screen. And it says, like, new generation mobility. So instead of, like, telling the people of Wisconsin what this means,

you're supposed to find this video. on the Mount Pleasant YouTube channel, which has, at last I checked, nine subscriber. Whoa. You're supposed to get through this fanciful rendering to the end where these icons light up. And then you're supposed to be like, oh, it is true that AI means new generation of mobility.

And that, because I haven't grasped that, I should leave them alone. Other thing about this video, I just want to point this out, is the first time they published it. This is absolutely true. Someone pointed out, I believe it was like a Wisconsin State Assemblyman, was like, hey, those images of a park are just stock footage of a park in England. And they just like the city of Mount Pleasant just like left it up. Right.

So like they're pointing at this video that they had to like retract because it was fake. Anyway, I'm just leaving it with AI means new generation of mobility and self-driving cars, which is not what AI means. I mean, self-driving cars use AI. I'll give them that. Yeah. Yeah, and 5G, like, you could have pioneering medical solutions and a health cloud network. Those would involve 5G. Like, like, a health cloud network would be health information in the cloud, and you'd access it over 5G.

Pioneering medical solutions might be Dr. Telepresence, right? Yeah. What I don't understand is if you get an 8K Vizio, how does that improve smart safety and security? That's what stumped me. Well, then you can see the robbers and crystal crystal in their layers. And you obviously can hear them through multi-channel. I don't know. I actually don't buy that 5G means pioneering metal.

Like none of this means anything. First of all, they're just to build a display plan. Right. Stepping back just a little bit. I really wish we were building some of real things, not buzzwords, but real things in the United States. That would be a really cool outcome. So far, it does not look like that as the outcome of this situation. But I do really want that outcome.

Yeah, I mean, it would be great if they were do. I mean, it seems like they're going to do something, right? They're digging up a lot of stuff. I just don't think they're building a fanciful sphere office and a self-driving car system. Like, I just, I don't. Right. And the upside down nature of the whole deal with Wisconsin, A, they were not ready for the scrutiny that would come with.

Like, right? That's Louis Wu saying we're in a fishbowl. Like, they were not ready for, we're going to sign the biggest government economic development deal in the history of the country. And then people are going to pay attention to us. So in Foxxon side, that is ridiculous, right? Like, of course you're going to, people are going to pay attention to that. It's like every, like the local papers are doing a good job. Bloomberg is covering it.

The Wall Street Journal is covering it. We would cover it even if I wasn't from Wisconsin. The fact that I am is like, we're definitely going to cover it. But like, right? So, like, of course, it's the biggest deal of its kind. And then the second part is like they haven't lived up to it. So they signed a contract to build a Generation 10.5 LCD plant, which would make like 65 and 75 inch TVs. They're absolutely not doing that.

So they've already breached this contract. Now that, you know, the new governor has to like make good. They've spent billions of dollars in forward infrastructure investment. They've given them other kinds of tax credits that aren't tied to the job numbers. So, you know, like, everyone kind of needs this to work out. I just think they're ridiculous that instead of talking to everyone about what they're doing and making a plan and keeping to it, they're absolutely stone all the press. Like, virtually no one can talk to them.

And then clearly someone is so angry about the scrutiny that I'm getting all caps emails to leave us alone about their nonsense buzzwords. And I, so, Paul, it would be great if they built. I just think it's obvious the amount of incentives layered into this deal, right? The enormous biggest ever tax incentive package extended in America was still not enough to convince them to build the factory that they said they were going to build. They decided they would go the other way. And everyone should have seen that coming. Right.

Like everyone on both sides of this operation should have seen that coming. And I think, you know, like Wisconsin Republicans are like, see the deal is working. We don't pay them because they didn't do it. And it's like, guys, like, you don't say because the contract failed and we pulled the safety valve that this is a good situation, right? If you were, I don't know, think about sports. Like, if you are an NFL GM and you sign a player, you know, he's going to throw 50 touchdowns and get an X number of million dollars and we're going to win a championship, your goal is for the incentive to push the player to perform. Not at the end of the season, be like, well, we lost most of our games, but I saved a bunch of money. Right. Like that doesn't, that's not actually success. That's just like the safety valve.

Well, the counter or the opposite perspective on this is why would Foxcon get itself into a deal and buy buildings and buy property and pour some cement if it's not going to do anything with it? Like clearly Foxcon is going to look, look for its own profit. So that might, if it decides that it got partly into this and decided it wouldn't be profitable, it might stop doing it. Right. Yeah. But it's not buying buildings for no reason. Well, yeah, it's building that can't tell you what it's doing because it's building a portal to the upside down to some of the demigorgon to Mount Pleasant. Obviously. Smart safety and security through AK technology.

8K is a reference to the demigorgon. Those are the occult phrases that you chant to summon the monster. Paul, I'm with you. I think maybe some of the context there is, I don't know, there's a trade. war going on and they got to give Donald Trump a gold shovel and say this will be the eighth one of the world. And he's not a focused gentleman, right? Like, he had that moment. He thinks it's going to be great. He's going to keep saying whatever he wants to say about it. And the reality on the ground can be totally different. And that's a pretty good deal, right? They bought some land.

They bought some buildings. They get some goodwill from the president who is in the middle of a trade war. And that's like a pretty good investment. They can wait it out to 2020 and see what happens. Right now, they've only been, they committed to 13,000 jobs, and they're only going to do 1,500. Right, like the counter to your counter is they're going to do something. It is an order of magnitude smaller than I think they said they were going to do. That's a pretty big deal. Anyway, the point of this is, I got a deeply hilarious email that screams, leave us alone. It is the most forward communication from Foxxon we've received.

And Jackson Rose's a song, Jackson's incredible. Can we just play a bit of that song? 5G means pioneering medical solutions. and health cloud network. I think now that you've heard it again, you really get it, don't you? They should hire Jackson. People have been telling us that we should hire,

but I think Foxcon, they should hire, you know, come out there in the heartland, singing in bars, doing the college circuit. It'd be great. All right. Thank you, Jackson. Please keep making us songs because they're great. And anybody else wants to make a song

with the easiest mark in the world. So just give them to us, I'm playing on the show. All right, there's actual hardware news. It's pretty exciting. It is fairly exciting. Nintendo is making a Switch light, L-I-T-E. It is $200 instead of $300.

The controllers are not removable, right? The joycons, there's no more joy. And you can't plug it into a TV. It's significantly lighter. The screen is a little bit smaller. It's 5.5 inch instead of 6.2 inch, but it's the same resolution. It's supposed to have

slightly better battery life and it's not clear. So simultaneously Nintendo is also like doing a like an invisible refresh of the regular switch. It's a small enough modification that they can file with the FCC. It's just like, hey,

we just move some stuff around inside, but we promise you it works the same. So there might be like a new chip inside of it that is somehow more efficient. And also You know, like you're getting rid of all the complexity of the joycon charging and stuff like that. So that might just save you the battery life right there. So that's, oh, and no kickstand.

Well, is the kickstand really a loss? Let's be honest. The kickstand is not super useful on the current switch. Maybe they put a kickstand on and it just snapped off. Andrew Webster, like, they got to look at it and got one of the stories on it. He says that take one of the joycons off a current switch and you have a sense of about how, wide the switch light is. Oh, I didn't know so much narrower.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's pretty small. Do you want this? Who's this? Is this for the children that you don't quite love enough to buy a $300 switch for? Yes.

I mean, I want this because I'm a crazy person and I want everything Nintendo makes. Sure, sure, sure. And I also travel with the switch a lot last, you know, year and a half. and I've been trying to carry a smaller bag so that I'm less tempted to put more crap in it and so having the big switch really filled that bag up but I already have a switch so number one to be silly for me to buy this isn't for me

number two if I did buy it I just know for a fact that I would be in for a lifetime of pain and suffering trying to get games from my main switch onto my second switch and making sure my save files were consistent across them Do they have any cloud game save stuff? Sort of. Because I was thinking what I want is the opposite of this.

I want the $100 switch that only plugs into a TV. It doesn't have anything, any built-in controller or something like that. But in theory, I'd have that and I'd have a switch light. And I, you know, instead of. Why don't you just buy a switch? Because it looks. Okay. The switch is heavy.

and I think I had another reason. Oh, because if I buy a switch, it's $300, and then I'm going to want to get the pro controller for $60, right? So I'm paying $360 when with the $100 switch, well, we need another word. Well, switchbox. With the switchbox, I'm paying $160 because I get the pro controller and the switchbox, right? Because the switchbox comes with, it's just a Roke. But then you want to buy it.

$200 switch. You've quickly arrived at the exact same price point. Yeah, but now I have two switches. Got it. Okay. Right. I see what you're saying. And I do not like the wireless. I've talked about this. This is the smallest problem to have with a console, but I do not like the wireless connectivity of the joycons with the original switch. Yeah. So I never take the joycons off my switch. I never plug it into a TV. I only, yeah. It just. I've thought about it. Yeah. And then by the time I've like kind of like done things, I'm already playing the game on the switch. I'm like, I'm not going to like take it out of it's like, because it lives in my backpack. I'm not going to take it out of the backpack, take it out of the case, like unclip the joycons, put it in the thing. Like I'm going to just start playing, right?

Like it's a, it's a fun thing to play on. I know a lot of people plug it in TVs. I'm just like, for me, it's like I kind of want to switch light. But what I am a little nervous at is like it doesn't have motion controls, right? Like, yeah. And I do like the screen size of the switch. So, like, I don't, it's not for me. Like, I'm not going to buy another one.

I do think the inability for games, it's like particularly save games to go back and forth easily. I think Bowser told Andrew in his post that they're going to work on it. Like they, it's obviously not a problem they had. And now it's a problem they've created for themselves. So, like, it makes sense they're going to work on it. But right now it is, it is quite difficult. Well, yeah.

It's also, it's confusing because they're, they're, they're hanging. it on to the 3DS, that's fine. It makes a bit of sense. But going forward, you know, if I'm a game developer, am I really going to like work hard to come up with a cool, innovative way to use the joycons? Maybe. I think it all depends on, I mean, I'm sure Nintendo is going to tell its developers what the split is, right? But you want to hit the total, the biggest market you can. So I imagine, you know, like there's a lot of games that use it now. Nintendo's first party games are usually. pretty good at using all the stuff. That's what a lot of people like to buy. I can't imagine

like Breath of the Wild too or whatever is not going to not going to be pretty crazy with it. But yeah, the sort of like indie game renaissance we've seen on the switch, are those people going to target the big market? I'm sure they are. I just think the harbor, it looks cool, right? It's like, I think Andrew Set in his post, it's like, it's the refinement you expect of the second gen product. It's a little bit smoothed out. It's a little bit tighter. It just has that, Paul, I think you say this about Apple all the time. It makes the old one look bad. Right? It kind of has that vibe where it's like, oh, this is the way, this is the way I wanted to be.

I think that's really cool. And I think the price point is exactly right. Dan Seaford said it. It's the number that when they kid wants something for Christmas, apparently, like, yep, you can have that. Yeah. Right. It's like, yep, $199. That's exactly right.

Like, everybody gets one of these for Christmas. That's perfect on Nintendo's part, especially because Switch sales were kind of slowing down, right? As they would, part of the cycle. Yeah. There's also rumors of something like a Switch pro, right? Which I don't know what the Switch pro needs to be. That's your Switch box. Because that's a $500 box with an AMD processor.

It's going to sit under your TV. Run steve-OS. It's pretty clear that that Switch Pro is not coming this year at this point. Okay. Right. Especially if they're hardware cycling the original switch. Yeah. So, I mean, look, I think the thing's really, really interesting. It was way more controversial than I expected it to be.

I expected everyone to be like, this is great. It's cheaper. It's smaller. And then there's just like mass consternation. over whether something called the Switch that doesn't switch into TV mode can be called and Adida, I know that you had some extremely deep feelings about this. I'm not going to

just look. We don't record a podcast or you can hold back your emotions about the weird things you studied in college. Nintendo created a thing and they gave it a name. That name was inspired by a thing that that thing did.

It switched. But the name of the thing is the Nintendo Switch. and there's no like necessary connection between the word switch and the physical object or even the thing that the physical object does. They could have called it the Nintendo, you know, changeo. And then we'd be angry about the word changeo, right? Yeah. In the same way that there's like no like mystical connection between the word apple and an actual apple, there's no mystical connection between the name switch and a physical switch or the thing that the. Switch does. It's just a brand name. And what else would you have them do? Would you have them call it

like the Nintendo 3DS Max Max? Because then people, people would be confused. Wait, hold on. They had to call it the Switch. The Max Max Max. The double Max I'm Max. My poor daughter. You know, can I just say this before, well, I'm very eager to hear your point. I just want to say this for the record out loud. My daughter will outlive all of this bullshit. And that is very important to me. Okay, Paul, go ahead. I literally hadn't really considered seriously how much I would want a switch

box until this came out. Because I felt this liberated me because I thought, well, before, if I had thought up of a switch box, I would have thought, well, it doesn't do it. It's not a switch. Not that, and I agree, Dieter, not that

words are a binding like a brand name is a binding contract on, like the we I think was named after the like a motion you're supposed to feel but I played a lot of games on the we did not make me feel that great anyways I feel like my life has really been expanded now that I know that I could have had a switch box all along even though it's called a switch see okay this is the counter to Dieter's argument the word switch was confining your mind yeah right and now Nintendo they broke the barrier of what that word signified and you're

you're like, oh, my mind could have been expanded this whole time. Maybe now I'll lose focus, right? I'll come up with all sorts of crazy ideas. Like, what about a switch for Excel? You know? The only thing that matters about a word is if people understand what you mean when you say it and how it relates in the network of other words. Right.

Name one single person who is actually confused about what switch means when the switch light came out. Nobody was confused. Therefore, the word is effective and it means what it means. It means that thing, the switch light. No, it means that thing but light. What if they had called it the light switch? Does this cause a problem for you?

Because I would suggest the Nintendo Light Switch would have maybe not accomplished what you're suggesting the name accomplishes. I think that would be so good. I'd be 100% for that.

Look, if you're mad about them calling this thing the switch, you have to be mad that the Xbox isn't actually an X-shaped box. Hmm. But it was originally. Yes. But now it's not anymore. It's true.

All right. When Elijah Wood made the Xbox, he wanted it to always be an X. We're done. It's been another game console discussion on the verge cast. The thing is great. It's coming out soon. We'll review it.

The thing about not being able to, Paul, your Switchbox idea doesn't work until they build the software service to move games around the cloud, right? Which is hilariously the one place where Apple is better at video games than everyone else, right? Like, say what you will about GameCenter.

If you have an iOS device, it will sync safe states across games pretty well. No one else does a good job of that as far as I can tell. So one half point to Apple. But that's... The problem is Nintendo is, like way worse than everybody else. Nintendo builds its entire software stack as though you're

going to buy one console, it's going to belong only to you for life. And there will never be a problem with it, and you're never going to switch consoles again. I bought a used Wii U for my little brother. And it was the trial of my lifetime to hard reset it to be like a brand fresh console. I feel like that was, I forget why it was so difficult. I feel like it had. It had to, you had some stored state on it that I couldn't effectively erase because I couldn't log into their account. I don't know. It was bogg. Paul, can I just clarify? The trial of your lifetime was factory resetting at Wii U. Yeah. I have factory reset a Wii U myself to sell it and Paul's not wrong. Paul, but I just want to say, Paul is like our friend who quit the internet for one

year. I'm just trying to imagine. Was that the second hardest trial of your life? That was a breeze. It was. It seems now, in retrospect, it seems like we should all take a break. Speaking of taking a break, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We'll talk about some MacBooks. Support for the show comes from Framer.

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and required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Deiderbone. Yeah. There are new MacBooks. You have our two new MacBooks. Which one do you have? I'm reviewing the MacBook Air, the new 2019 MacBook Air. Dan Seaford is reviewing the new 2019 MacBook Pro entry Pro, little pro. We don't have a name for it. Here's what happened.

Apple updated the Air. They added a true tone display to it, and they dropped the price by $100. And then they took the MacBook Escape, which was the MacBook Pro, that had the actual button function row and only two ports on the side. and they put the touch bar and the touchpad on it, and they updated the processor, and they left it with just two ports. And that, I don't remember the exact price there, but it's like $200 more than the air now.

So those are the two computers that are new. Alongside those things, the most important thing they did, in my opinion, is instead of updating the MacBook, a little it-bitty MacBook, they just murdered it. They killed it. Brutely just destroyed it.

So you, I think I saw you say this in Slack. Okay. You were like, killing the 12-inch MacBook is Apple walking back its entire five-year plan for these computers? I think so. Can you defend that? So, okay, it all stems from the very first computer of this new generation of MacBooks was the MacBook. It was the first one with the keyboard, the new design, the new, you know, they like tiered the battery. and most of all, they just called it MacBook.

They didn't call it MacBook Air. They didn't call it MacBook Ultra, whatever. They're like, this is MacBook, and everything else is, like, MacBook Pro. And that was, like, meant to be, like, the default. And in the intervening years, the keyboards went sideways. Apple forgot that people like processor updates and, like, spec updates, and so just didn't bother making those. They very clearly, like, didn't know.

what they wanted to do with this lineup. And you could tell they didn't know what they do because their best-selling Mac was the one that was not part of this new generation. It was the MacBook Air forever. And so they finally updated the MacBook Air and just made either a slim-down MacBook Pro or a beefed-up MacBook MacBook.

Take it. I think it's more of a slim-down MacBook Pro. Called it the Air. Threw it out into the world. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's what we want. That's the thing we've been asking you for for five years. And so, of course, they're killing the MacBook because they're like, oh, well, people just want this thing. And this vision of the future of what Macs are going to be, we need to, like, turn that dial down a little bit, go back to the other kind of keyword.

And we'll do that stuff next year. In the meantime, at least we've got, like, a normalized lineup. So I think the main problem is that the Air brand name is too good. Like, people love the MacBook Air. They love the name. They know what it is. It's the default computer. It's the Joanna Stern for $200 more.

You can get a MacBook Air, right? Like, it is that computer. And so what they should have done was called that. Oh, my God, Deeter, this entire show is about what words mean. I just realized. Yeah. Sorry. The thing known as the MacBook Air should be the MacBook.

Yes, it should. The little baby should be the MacBook Air, the ultra-portable. That's correct. And then you have a MacBook Pro. But the word air is too powerful. It creates, it constrains your mind. And so you can't think to yourself, I would like a mid-range modular Macintosh without a screen. It's an Apple will never make it.

Like the mid-range tower will never happen. I mean, the Air brand is so strong. They had to bring it back to sell a parts bin version of the iPad, call it the iPad pro from last couple years ago. Call it the iPad Air. And they're like, oh, yeah, if we put air on it, people will buy it. So here. Yeah, completely confused the iPad, like, product lineup. There's, like, iPad, now there's iPad Air in the middle, and then there's iPad Pro and Pro 12-inch at the top.

It's like, did you need that? Like, why is that there? There's an alternate history version of this, right? Okay. Because I had the very original MacBook Air. It was $1,800, and it was a piece of garbage. The one with the fold-down ports and all the stuff, I had that. Yeah, it was the best.

But there was two generations of that. The first generation of it had horrible thermal problem. This is not a new thing for Apple to have horrible thermal problem. And so it would throttle the CPU, but it didn't have enough core, so it would just hard freeze until it cooled down. So the first MacBook Air was awful, but the second MacBook Air was good enough. And I feel like with this MacBook, RIP, the MacBook, if it started out where it was not powerful, enough to really do what you wanted to do with it. If a year later, a much better Intel chip had been on offer and made it much better in the

same form factor, do you guys think it would have become a popular and good thing that people wanted? Or was it just somehow weirdly too small? No, ultra-portables are a thing. People love them, right? And you can price them higher than an oral computer and people pay a premium for the size. Yeah. So I think the performance was just too expensive.

Yeah, it was too expensive. And the performance was bad. I mean, so I bought that original $1,800 air for Becky when we were dating. She stayed with me. So I really overcame that. I bought her that, you know, the second or third iteration of that second-gen MacBook air design. She loved that computer.

It was the only, like, she never wanted an upgrade. We wrote it to its death. And then I bought her a MacBook. And she hates that MacBook. She is never not complained about that computer. It is the only Mac of its size, right, until the new Air just recently came out. So now I might get her the new Air. But the size was the thing, right?

The MacBook Air, in its moment, was actually a very small computer compared to the rest of the industry. It was not priced with that ultra-portable premium, but she could, like, fit it in her purse. like she's like a big purse person she could like throw it in a purse so then I was like I'm going to buy this MacBook you can fit it and other things in the purse have you thought about that and so like all that is great

I think if they wanted to keep the MacBook around they should do the thing that we've been kind of predicting they would do forever which is put one of their arm chips in it right because we see that on the iPad Pro is like vastly more powerful than the MacBook I just don't they're not ready to do it

right like what if what if the arm laptop it revives this form factor but it's called the iBook see see that's like that's very powerful I'm super into that but yeah but here's the thing like why not just make a clamshell

iPad Pro because the iPad is for touch and the Mac is from Icing that they won't meet except for the fucking touch bar which we should talk about okay the touch bar is annoying mine freezes all the time I don't think it's because I've like tried I've tried a couple of utilities

everyone tells me I should use better touch tool and I'm sorry, that shit is just too complicated. At least it was the last time I looked. I'll try it again. There's another one called Pock that just takes your dock and puts it in the touch bar.

That's kind of cool. But I have gotten zero percent benefit. My life is zero percent better because of the touch bar. And not having a real escape keys or a huge hassle. So it's funny. So there's not a MacBook pro now

with a hardware escape key. Right. So all the pros of the touch bar, the air does not. And there's no MacBook. So that's what you can get from Apple. You can get a MacBook error with, you know, physical function and escape keys. Or you can get a MacBook Pro with a touchbar.

Yep. It is funny that we just came out of WWDC where Apple made a big show of like, we love our developers, we're listening. Here's this great MacPro, the whole thing. And what is the one thing developers can play out the most with the MacBook Pro is they want a hardware escape key? And now you, now you cannot get a Mac laptop, you know, suited for pros with hardware escape key. Right. I suspect this will change.

Right? We've heard the butterfly keyboard is going away. Like, now that Johnny Eye is gone, right, the whole Apple ecosystem gets to just admit a bunch of things. Right. We all get to admit that iOS 7 was a mess, like, regardless of how dramatic it was at that time. And I assure you it was very dramatic. Very dramatic to say it was a mess at the time. Everyone gets to blame the Butterfly keyboard on Johnny Ive.

Like, that's just what we've decided to do as a family, I guess. So the next keyboard will have scissors switches and be a little bit thicker because, you know, Johnny Ive, Lord of Thinness is gone. Like, maybe. Maybe that's the case. I think Apple just screwed it up for three generations, right? And they, like, they were like, we can make this work. We've gone all the way to, like, we made it out of a new material. Yeah.

And we covered it in a rubber. Like, whatever. Sorry, I find that whole, that whole re-evaluation to be very funny. But anyway, but he's gone. We hear there's new keyboards coming. But these keyboards are, they're still third generation butterfly, new material, rubber covers. We'll see if they're more reliable. But they're still missing the thing.

There's still no escape key for the people who have most loudly complained about not having an escape key. Right. If you want to buy a Mac laptop right now, you are basically faced with a bunch of really difficult choices. If you're just like the average consumer, go out, spend $1,100, get the air, and you're fine. Right? The end. Cool. as long as you're happy with that storage.

If you want something a little nicer, well, for $200 more, you can either, like, upgrade the air a little bit, or you can get that entry-level MacBook Pro, which, by the way, we need a better name for than entry-level MacBook Pro. Like the 2-Port Pro. Two-port Pro. That's what we're going to call it.

The 2-Port Pro. Which has a much, much better processor. It has a touch-bar. But it also has a better screen that actually can get above, you know, 400 Nits without, like, screaming. It actually is bright enough to see. Or, and if you're on the high end and you're a pro user,

you can buy either one of the MacBook Pros right now. It's fine. But you know that everybody that's plugged into the Mac rumor mill has been assuming there's a 16-inch version of the MacBook Pro, basically a 15-inch version bigger screen, so it fits in that case, with the Scissor Switch keyboard coming. I don't think we should expect it this year because they just refreshed a couple of MacBooks.

So I think they're done for the year as far as the Mac goes. But next year it's going to come. And, like, the default advice, whenever anybody says to want to buy a computer is, if you need one right now, buy one right now, there's going to be a better one next year. But, like, it really seems like there's going to be a lot of better ones next year. Yeah. And so when they start coming out with Scissor Switch MacBook Pros, how long are they going to keep the MacBook Air on the butterfly keyboard? Like, how long is there going to be, like, this weird decision matrix that you're going to have to make of, well, do I want to spend more and get the good keyboard or spend less to get the other thing? it's complicated.

Yeah, I mean, I imagine if they're going to do the big refresh of the pro, they'll just bring that keyboard everywhere, right? Yeah, but it's going to take them, you know, at least a year. Yeah. Yeah, I just, if it's a year out, then they're going to do it to all of them. I think the big question is whether the 16-inch pro will have an escape key, whether we'll bring back some of the physical keys that pro users have been complaining about not having. Because literally, there's like one person I've ever met who's like, yeah, I love the day. touch bar. And I'm pretty sure he had to deal with Apple.

So like, what do you want to be? Like, I don't know. I can't prove it. But, you know, like, it's one person. I think about like, literally, like, I, you know, this MacBook I bought, Becky is like, it's dying. I got to get her a new one. There's no way.

It doesn't matter what the other benefits of the MacBook pro are versus the error. If I put a touch bar in front of her, she'll be like, what is the shit? Right. And like, maybe that will be the end of it. There's also, like, a bunch of, like, like, givings that we bequeath unto Apple without thinking. A bunch of like, oh, yeah, we're not going to argue about that because we know Macs can't do that. Like, unlocking with your face.

Like, every Windows computer over $1,000 just has a version of face ID that's relatively secure, and you can just unlock it with your face. And, like, that is not on any Mac. There is no, you know, roadmap of it coming to any Mac, even though they pioneered really good face unlocking on the phone. and it's just like, yep, okay. Like, really? We're not mad about that?

It's very odd to me, like the things that will just grant Apple. Like, the bezels are actually like, they're fine. They're not that big, but, you know, every other computer manufacturer, except for Microsoft, just figuring out a way to basically get rid of them on laptops. Yeah. Something I've been noticing, because I've been shopping for a laptop for a while, but I haven't really found anything I really like. But a lot of the Windows laptops are a lot.

lighter than Max with the same specs. And, you know, they are not as rigid as a unibody aluminum laptop, but sometimes you're okay with that. I mean, I really, like, this is the moment where, like, is Johnny Ive the, the tyrant of thinness that everyone is making him out to be now to excuse all the problems that Apple's had, or is this just Apple strategy? Like, we're going to find out. It's going to take years to really find out.

But that's what I mean. Like, the idea that every bad Apple product. is like, because Johnny Ive is a person who loves thinness, it's just starting to take shape. You can feel it. And I'm like, no, this is, Apple made a bunch of these decisions for years. Like, the decision to kind of ignore the Mac for a little too long was that wasn't just like, Sir Johnny Ive decided that was what was going to.

That was like the whole company made that bet. And now we're just kind of like this place where everyone sees that we have to really rethink the Mac. There needs to be like innovation people actually. really want. Hardware innovation people really want coming to the Mac. So we've got the Mac Pro. That's great. You definitely did that. I'd like to see a little bit more of that on the laptop. The touchbar

just... Yeah. There's too much cool stuff coming out of the other divisions of Apple, and it makes the Macs seem doubty by comparison, except for the Mac Pro, which nobody should buy because it's seen grabbed. Look, if you have $14,000, I highly recommend Mac Pro. Look, I think the MacBook Air is going to sell

like any busters, right? It's still the default laptop. It's a good computer. If you have an iPhone, you can get your iMessage on it. What more are you asking for? Like, it'll run a web browser and I message. Go forth college students. It is back to school time. You can some free beats. Like that, I think that product is fine. I think it's this other end of the Apple ecosystem that is still coming into focus is they, is Apple itself like, rethinks what a pro Mac should be and re- like recommits to that part of the market that I think everyone always knew, but Apple didn't quite understand, drives so much of everything else that they need to have happen. Like, you can't write an iPhone app without a Mac, right? Like, until you solve

that problem, you should make some really great Macs for those people, because you really need them to, like, be happy with you and stick around. I think we're, Apple's finally, like, understood that. Also, you need, like, a special FPGA video accelerator card, because why not? That's super important. All right. Speaking of Apple, uh, they kind of put the, the cap on a pretty big security story this week, which is actually a number of, hey, we can turn your camera on without you knowing security problems this week. Do you want to walk through what's going on with Zoom and so on the other stuff? Yeah. So a security researcher had disclosed to Zoom that there was this thing that he considered a major vulnerability 90 days ago.

Zoom hasn't really fixed it. So he went public with it, which is how it works. and there was like a 24-hour period where people, like, Zoom had its take and people were freaking out. Basically, the short version is, it would be possible if you visited a malicious web page for that web page to open up a Zoom meeting with you and have your camera on. Like, that's the, the TLDR is like someone could open a camera on your Mac. There are a million caveats built into this. So you have to have allowed the default to having your camera on, set to on and you didn't uncheck that box.

Somebody has to figure out how to code the thing into an eye frame, you know, ba-da-ba-ba-ba. So that's troubling. Anytime anything opens up your camera, that's like red alert. Same thing with microphones. But then on top of that, it turns out that Safari recently, you know, changed the way that it handles URI handlers, you know, the things that open up other apps. So you have to like click, yes, I want to open up the other app every time instead of just

automatically doing it. And Zoom was like, oh, man, there's an extra click here now. People are going to be confused and annoyed. And it's going to cost us, you know, the actuaries tell us it's going to cost us another, you know, $500,000 per whatever for our 4 million customers. So we need a way to solve this problem. And the way that we're going to solve this problem is we're going to put a web server on every Mac that has a port open that listens for a call from us or from whomever, apparently,

and then can open up automatically the Zoom software, and that works around this problem. Okay, well, a web server on your Mac is not great. Well, no, a web server in your Mac is great. Installing a web server without telling the user that you have installed the secret web server is not great. Right. And an insecure web server that is able to take commands

from any website on its port is also super bad. So there's many bad things about this. If you are like, this is creepy as hell, and you uninstall Zoom, they just like forgot to build in the part that uninstalls the web server. No, no, no, they did that on purpose. I forgot, I mean they did it on purpose.

Oh, right, okay. Because as you click a Zoom link, the web server's like, oh, you want to open a Zoom link, but you don't have Zoom. Here, let me just install that shit for you again. And then pop up a Zoom conference again. So I will say, in the abstract, all of this is very clever. Let's just give them credit. This is a set of, like, video conferencing is bad and hard.

And most software sucks. Zoom is the most popular. We are Zoom clients. we use Zoom. I will personally say, I don't understand all the hype because it's still video conferencing software, y'all. It still has all the problems

the video conferencing has. But people love it. They just IPO. Part of it is they like solve these little hiccup problems. Like you get the link, you click it, you don't have to install the software. You don't have to like monkey around.

It just like happens. Great. Yep. So on one aspect is very clever. On every other aspect, it is incredibly stupid, right? super, super dumb and bad.

And to me, the heart of it is this is the tradeoff. The tradeoff of the open platform is a company like Zoom can say, hey, we have this problem that people have a video conferencing. How do we solve it?

And they did the cheapest, fastest, dumbest way of solving it, which was installing a web server on your computer that can itself install other software without you knowing about it.

That seems like a mistake. And it can also, if all that is set up, you know, the right way, can just light up your camera without you knowing. But the platform's open. Like, what is the...

You know, Apple has this, like, apps for an antitrust lawsuit. Like, this is the defense, right? We have to control the platform because it prevents this kind of thing from happening to iOS customers. Now, does that mean iOS is perfectly secure? It does not. But does this problem not happen in iOS?

It does not. Because Apple will not let you install a random web server without... Actually, at all. But certainly not let you... background processes without its explicit approval. What is, what is interesting to me is Apple did push the update to kill the web server to Macs.

So Zoom put out and up, Zoom was going to, they were like holding firm, like there's nothing wrong with having a web server on your Mac. Chill out. And then 24 hours of people going, what? I'll be like, okay, no, we're issuing an emergency patch. It will uninstall the web server. We're not going to use it anymore. We're sorry.

So all that's great. Except, remember, if you have uninstalled Zoom in any point in the past whenever, then the web server is still there. And even if Zoom issues an emergency update to their software, you're not going to get it because you don't have it installed anymore. So Apple had to go and finally patch all Macs to get rid of this thing because there is no way that Zoom is able to reach all the computers that have its silly web server installed on them.

How do you feel about Apple reaching out and silently updating a bunch of Macs? They've been doing this for a while. They do it for emergency stuff all the time. There was something pretty high-prime. I don't remember what it was. This is what you do for security vulnerabilities, which is what this is. I feel like Zoom has discovered a zero-day on computers in a sense.

Like it's a zero-day that involve you do have to install some software, right? But then you have what feels to me like a Trojan, on your computer running that is remote controllable by Zoom whenever you visit a random website. So really remote controllable, I mean, not unlimited controls, but remote controllable by anybody who can figure this out. It's terrifying and awful and it's a security hole. Like this is not like, if you try to build a website, right?

So you're just a regular web developer and you serve up on a local host, the local server, you serve up your website, right? And then you try to get resources from another domain. That's a cross-origin resource. The web browsers are specifically designed to limit that sort of cross-origin, because that's how you would get like a script injection attack, something like that, like a really rogue ad would try to mine Bitcoin on your computer or something like that. So this feels exactly like a security vulnerability.

and instead of reporting it, Zoom used it to add functionality to their software. And now that we all know about it, Apple is patching it out. That's what it feels like to me. Okay. I mean, Paul, I would say that is, I'm surprised that you have that particular view of it, right? Only because, like, one, the platform is open. The Mac is structured such that you are able to just install any application on it, right? The web search is on their application.

So like- Well, and that works, I mean, open software requires a, higher vigilance by the user and by the community in general. So, like, you know, like, especially, like, super open platforms. Like, Debbie and Linux, for instance, every package that's available from the command line because they have something that's like the App Store. It's like a package manager. And every package is audited.

The code is audited, not just the, like, oh, yeah, we trust these people to make good software. No, they look at the code because when you install packages, in an open source ecosystem, you typically compile it yourself. So the Mac is sort of in between because you're trusting a lot of binaries to do things. But I do think the Mac is doing a good job. What I feel like should have happened here is it's not typical for a desktop application to spawn a second process that stays open, that leaves a port open forever. I feel like that's a permission.

I guess I do it a lot in development. Like I start up local web servers all the time from the command line. But that's the sort of thing I feel like it should at least require admin privileges to like, you should have to enter a password. Yeah. To do that sort of thing because you're opening a listening port on your computer. Yeah. Yeah, I just think it's, I mean, like we, we have been talking about open and closed platforms

and, you know, there is this antitrust action around Apple. Like, we just talk, we talk about a lot. here's a case where Apple's own open platform, something that you can do, like, it wasn't hard for them to do. It was not smart of them to do, but it wasn't, right? They didn't have to jailbreak the Mac to do this. You just do it. They're a little, they're being a little clever here, though. Yeah?

Yeah. Something about, like, the local host, like, requesting image dimensions or something like that. Like, they're not just doing a straight web request to local host. I feel like they're doing something a little fancier than that. Okay. Well, I mean, but they could do it, right? Like, they didn't have to like, yes, yes. They didn't have to like find an actual vulnerability in the system.

Right. Which is what you like, to jailbreak the iOS. You have to like actually go through a vulnerability. And now Apple is saying, well, actually, we're still in control of this environment. So we're just going to flip the switch and remove this thing. That's like a pretty interesting hybrid approach. I think, Dieter, they might have done it before. This is the first time I can think of where this is like pretty widely used software.

is the subject of that type of control, right? And they're saying... I think they've pushed out bugs for like, oh, wait, there's a zero day or there's like a vulnerability and something, something. But I don't, I can't remember an instance of them specifically targeting an app.

SSL vulnerability or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. There's some other stuff that happened that. I mean, like Apple had to shut off walkie-talkie on the Apple Watch today because it could light up a FaceTime call

without you knowing. And then there, do you want to go through? By the way, I use them. hell on a walkie-talkie, so I'm very upset about this. I think I'm the only one. Yeah, I've tried to set up walkie-talkie with my wife on and off for the past six months, and we just are never in the same room at the same time to be like, all right, let's take 20 minutes and figure this out. And so we just never use it. It is not actually great to set up. Yeah. I think that's why, like most people, well, also it's hilarious because your wrist is talking to you. So that might be

a problem, but it actually takes a second for that request to go through. And, that delay is enough for you to be like, whatever, I'm done with this. Yeah. But, Dieter, there's like a Google Home scandal. I don't know. Was Scandal a kerfuffle? The kerfuffle is, man, okay, so it turns out that more than just servers listen to some of the audio that goes into a Google Home.

And Google contends that it, they have like, you know, 0.0 something, something percent of stuff. They have translators, listen to it, you know, real humans. and something, something, somebody leaked a bunch of this audio that they had been reviewing, and it had some scary stuff. Somebody, some Dane got it and it got on TV and it caused a whole thing. And one, I can't speak yet to, did Google actually, you know, break any privacy rules or do anything super nefarious here?

Except two, yo, you got to be way more careful about telling people what the hell is going on with microphones and cameras, right? if you've got humans listening to microphones, just tell us and make sure we're aware of it. Put it in a relatively visible pop-up box once people freak out about it. The whole internet goes, oh, yeah, there was that box. You missed it. Because those two things are red lines. Yeah. When Google accidentally put a, you know, forgot to tell everybody that they had a microphone in a nest box, complete and total freak out.

Right. When Google, again, had the Google Home Mini accidentally register touch and then record a whole whole bunch of like random, you know, voice snippets, complete freak out. We demand shutters on the cameras and all of our smart speakers, not because like they can, they can like move a switch that will electrically disconnect it and it's just as good as putting a camera shutter over it, but we don't trust that. We need a cover. Anytime anything touches a camera or a microphone, every single tech company on the planet needs to have like a, they need to have a giant pool of people.

And they can just call them up. And they can be like, we're doing this thing. And then that person, they'll be good to do this job for about two weeks, because after two weeks, you get a nerd to it. But that person's job will be like, what? And if they hear that person say, what? Then they need to either change what they're doing or fix their disclosures or fix it. And after two weeks, you hear like, oh, we're doing this thing with the microphone.

You get a nerd to it. And so then that person gets paid and moves on and they get the next person in the pool. But every tech company should just have a giant line of regular human. beings to call up and give him $500 and you say, we're going to do this with the microphone. And if they go, what, then you don't do it. Yeah. So the thing I'm stuck on, it's like a philosophical thing. It's like the first thing you brought up.

Everyone knows that when you speak to a Google home or an Alexa device, your voice, you know, gets sent to a cloud and then the computer listens to you. And then it turns on your lights or sets a timer or whatever, right? sometimes they're like don't do a good job they flag it and they pass it to a human being to be like what was this and that seems to trip this huge psychological like what is it you mean you're still having google do it what is it about a person listening to an anonymous voice file that like sets us off because i agree they should absolutely like this is so dumb this is if i think google's uh stat was like 0.2% of requests get passed to the people right if

It's actually a huge amount. Right. So, first of all, they hide behind percentages constantly, right? Like, Apple's like, only 1% of keyboards fail. You're like, that's a million, it's a million keyboards. So 0.2% is 2 out of 1,000, right? Yeah. Okay.

So even at the number, and they sell a lot of these things and assistance on, you know, every Android device. So, like, potentially a huge number, right? Yeah. But whatever. So if Google's that is that if, if, if they're, out there claiming it's just a small percentage point it's not that it's not that man to calm down then why can't they say every time you pass this thing why can't you know the assistant say back to you i didn't quite catch that do you mind if i send that to a human reviewer and you can say yes or no

that's what you're well that's what my laptop does if if a program crashes it asks me would you like to send a report yeah and and and if i was uh you know doing something that I didn't want anybody to know about that I don't. Or if I'm just not feeling friendly that day and I don't want to help these assholes who made a bad program, then I say no. If I'm feeling really magnanimous, like I might even describe what I was doing and send off the bug report. Yeah. But I have the choice, except for all the invisible telemetry that's happening anyways.

But I believe I feel like I have a choice. There's a great how I work with Chad Avanrat. You should find it. We'll stick it in the showdowns or something. I'll find it. But Pro Tools crashes on him all the time. And he's like, I spend hours a day just composing these like rants in the ProTool crash dialogue box. They're wonderful.

I'll find it. I'll give it to Andrew. Stick in the show. They're worth looking at because they're hilarious. But yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right? Like they've reduced the friction. There's no user interface. Like if you have an Echo Show or Google Home Hub, there is absolutely no excuse.

Right? They can just put up the UI and say, we didn't get that, click yes or no. If there's no display, the thing has to talk to you, but there's still no excuse. Right? Because, do you agree with you? This is like, this is the line. I know that onboarding on these devices is getting worse and worse, but sorry, like, you've got to put one more step in there that says, hey, if we detect, if we aren't unable to figure it out, do you mind if we send your audio to a human reviewer? And you can just globally say yes or no. And then everybody will say no.

I absolutely disagree. It should not be global. It should be per instance. Okay. Absolutely per instance. Because if it is the one, you know, this report, you know, it was like people arguing, right? It was like there's a bunch of stuff where it like accidentally triggers and it's like we didn't figure that out. We want to send it.

You do not want that to be a global yes or no. Like that is the heart of all these problems. That's fair. It was a Belgian public broadcaster, by the way. I got that wrong earlier. Yeah. focusing on people who speak Dutch and Flemish. I see.

Paul, what are you going to say? I think the thing to do is you run a nationally televised ad that says, okay, Google, and then you record everybody all at once and you spy on every, just think of how great a way that would be to spy on like an entire nation. I guess it's not everybody has one, huh? Everybody dumb enough to use a Google device. You could spy on everybody.

Because, I mean, that's the thing. I was so young and naive and stupid. And I thought back in the day when all these companies started wanting so much personal information in order to improve their products, one, I thought it would improve their products. And I don't really think, I think it's marginal, the sort of improvements we get. I think they're really overstated by these companies as of how much they benefit from the loop of spying.

But two, I thought that if they get. caught doing bad things with data or being non-careful, which is this scenario, with data that they gather, that there would be such a backlash that they would be completely punished for it and therefore even less likely to do it in the future. What would that backlash look like, Paul? Would it look like competition? I think that my big failure there was thinking that backlash is somehow effective. But what really we have is just outrage cycles that quickly cool off and people forget to still be mad. Because they have nowhere to go.

Just as a reminder. Paul, I think what you're advocating for here is a national search engine. I want it to be known at this very moment that I backed a open source, doesn't spy on you, a home voice assistant called MyCraft, like three years ago that's like Kickstarter dev hell. Like, they're still working on and I still get updates and I still believe in the project. But, yeah. Kickstarter. Okay, on that note, we're going to take a break.

We'll be right back. We've got some stuff to wrap up on. 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 job. your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning

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There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. Paul Miller. Every week. That's right. There's a segment of unparalleled consistency of deep repetition.

It's almost the, it has a harmonious. rhythmic rhythm as you as you overlap because of the deep parallels every week. What's it called? It's basically like meditating. It's called Adam and Book is Best Book. I don't know, man. So there was a, apparently the hottest posts on Theverge.com. I don't see the traffic numbers, but I'm a 165 comments.

This is a pretty big deal on Theverge.com, a website. Vio announces tiny laptop with tons of ports. Yeah. People love this stuff. So Vio is an independent company used to be a brand owned by Sony, but not anymore. So remember that. Made a laptop that looks like Vio is so good at moving very, very slowly with its design language. And so you get like these moments where it's like retro chic.

And this is one of those moments. So this is the SX12. It's like a 12.5 inch laptop. And what's cool about it is just has a ton of ports. And there's this top-down photo. And it's got VGA. It's got HTML. It's got SD-I.

That's kind of a some reason. That's a Japanese thing that they've really held on to VGA way longer than anybody else. It's got a bunch of like real USB ports. It's got one of those full-down Ethernet ports and stuff. But as cool and exciting as this laptop is, I mean, it seems like it's just for the Japanese market. So it can't be that exciting. But it's beautiful to see this many things plugged into a modern laptop. But there's a comment of the, that said that this reminded them of the admin book, which I had not seen. Have you guys seen the admin book? I have not. No, this is new to me.

The admin book is this concept this guy came up with for a small notebook for a system administrator. It is the most, it is a manifesto. It is a laptop that he's designed in like CAD. He's done the measurements. He's figured out the internal specs. He's figured out everything for this. It came out in like January. But it's a laptop for system administrators.

It does everything. It is, it sounds like a ridiculous wish list, but he's so serious about it that you want to believe that it could happen. So it's got stuff like you can plug. It's got HTML in. So it could be a monitor. You know, it's for people who are, like, showing up to, like, server boxes, plugging into them, like, fixing things. It's got, like, exposed SAT ports.

It's got a PCIE plug. It's got, like, a mount, you can mount on a tripod, you know. It's got, it's got, like, a real serial. It can emulate a keyboard, so you could plug it into a computer, and then it's your keyboard and mouse and monitor. it could work as an external drive. Like remember when Matt? And it just made me realize like how many things

laptops could do and they don't. And I think a big part of it, like nobody's probably ever going to make the admin book. But I do think a big part of it and it kind of gets back to what we were talking about before. I feel like we could have a laptop that is an inch thick that could be really cool. It doesn't have to be as heavy as old-timey laptops.

But it could be an inch. inch thick, which the admin book is an inch thick. And it could have, you know, it can have basically MacBook Pro-style specs, but it could cool them very effectively with a lot more room. It's got room for more battery, but it doesn't have to be filled with battery. It can have all sorts of wonderful ports that we miss. Like, you know, serial port sounds dumb. Like, who use serial port? Well, anybody who programs microelectronics uses serial port, they typically have to have an external USB port. And you could probably do most of the admin book by making some mega-dongle with USB-C.

Make a megadongle. But I don't know. It's just really cool. I was very inspired reading the admin book manifest. I like how you went from a real product that's shipping in Japan to I was inspired by this manifesto. And I, that's what we've come to expect from your segment every week. I do want to clarify one thing.

There is literally no correlation between the number of comments on a post and the traffic it receives. Really? Historically, even back in our Engadgett days, literally, like, it's just all over the place. I've never understood it, but it is true. Is comment number more like a metric for controversy? I mean, I think our commenters, Now, I'm going to lie with percentages. It's great.

Commenters represent 0.1% of our total audience, which is still a huge number because we have a big audience. But, like, if you think about that percentage, they can be very active on a post, but it doesn't translate into, like, overall traffic. Ah, so it's like if we write about Windows phone. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Tons of comments. Something that appeals to, okay, I get it.

But, like, it won't turn into it. But I think this, I think it did well because a laptop with the VGA port, like, anybody who's like, Driving by the verge, like, wait, I got to look at that. So I think it did well. But it is true. This is a true fact. I don't think we'd mention that very often, so I want to point out. Okay.

Some things to wrap up on. Dieter, you reviewed the Experia 1, and we saw a picture of the Note 10. It looks like it doesn't have a headphone check. No headphone check. We also don't know what the power button is going to be. There's a lot of confusion about the power button situation. There doesn't seem to be one. Maybe it's the Bixby button is going to devil's a power button.

I love the fact that if you screw up the Bixby button you turn off the phone. It's like, it's such a deep reflection of where Bixby is. It's like a metaphor. And then, yeah, the Sony Xperia 1 is a 6.5 inch 21 by 9 phone that I love and nobody should buy because it's $950. And for $950, you definitely deserve a better camera. I just saw that, oh, wow.

How does Sony make all the sensors, but they can't make a good camera? This is the first time I've used a Sony phone and basically ever where the camera wasn't like an embarrassment. It's pretty good. But it's not good enough for $950. It's just a software thing though, right? They're using the best hardware, right? I just saw the new Spider-Man movie, which I forgot that Sony's still on Spider-Man. But it's this great like alternate universe where people use Sony phones.

The new Sony earbuds, by the way, do look dope. Yeah. He was canceling earbuds. Pretty expensive, big case, whatever. They look amazing. They sound amazing in Courtney and Chris Welch. He made a video. You should definitely watch it.

The fact that they won't connect to more than one device at a time is what breaks my heart with them. Yeah. I mean, that's why any of that proprietary H-1 chip. HIPT. Welcome to the ecosystem. Actually, whenever, you know how Apple, like, Max used to boot up with, like, the big startup chime? They changed it over the years.

used to be like an orchestra. Now it should just say welcome to the ecosystem. Tim Cook, if you're listening, now that Johnny Ives out, you need a new experience designer. Think about it. I have spent this entire Vergecast waiting to troll Neely with the name of AT&T's new streaming service. HBO Max has nothing to do with Apple computers. I hate it. Most poor kid, here's what I thought about with, with,

Max. My daughter's name is Max. You don't know. A, she's going to outlive all of this, which to me is a victory. So that's good. She won't know about it. Like, there's a real chance she will never know that there was an iPhone 10S Max.

Right? Like, she just, it won't it'll be a glitch. It'll be like walking up to a teen right now. I mean like, Walkman, and I'm like, what are you talking about? I am walking. Let's you see what I did there? Okay. Wow. Anyhow.

And then there is like these words become trendy until like Max is super trendy right now and it means nothing

in the context of HBO. Like what don't you want from HBO more like like extra Walmart crap, right? And that's what they're doing with the service.

It's going to have like the fresh prints of Bel Air and friends. They're pulling friends off on Netflix. All these other classic like Warner properties. It's

deeply confusing why they're doing this HBO. The logo, go look at the logo. The logo is the worst logo in the history of the world. The HBO logo and then the word max with some gradients on it because that's cool. But the X is just wide.

It's just a really wide X. They're like, the word Max doesn't suggest more. What if the X was really wide? So you're like, yes. In theory, the negative space between the A and the X could look like a play button if you really wanted it to. No, no one was that thoughtful with this logo.

You have now spent more time thinking about this logo than any person who worked on it or approved it. It's also going to be like $18 a month. They're going to need to fit that HBO Max logo into a round wreck icon. And that's going to be the best. Oh, God. So, like, this is, this is the dark side of my calls for increased competition, right? Sometimes you get it.

And then you're like, okay, like, yep, there's a lot of competition in streaming TV, and it looks like a notable 18T streaming service HBO Max and Quibi. And like, oh, like, oh, yeah. I wish it was all Netflix and Netflix had a monopoly. Whoops. Like, sometimes you get what you ask for. This would be a scenario for one of like Peter Thiel's good monopolies, which is kind of hard to,

it's a short book, but zero to one is about making monopolies. They're good for the world. He forgets to mention the part where he like harvests the blood of the young and destroys media properties in that book. The trains run on time as sort of Peter Touls the house in his book. Because in a scenario with perfect competition where you had a billion undifferentiated competitors, right? None of them would be profitable.

So that doesn't quite work. But there is something that seems very, at least annoying, about how many different TV things there are right now. Well, I think the answer is some of them will shake out. I mean, Gone 90.biz is available. You recently updated it. Yeah. What's funny is that there is at once massive consolidation in video and intense competition.

So it's kind of like a worst of both world situation where AT&T now owns Game of Thrones and Friends, which is just seems horrible. Like, that's a, that's a dystopian sentence. I just wait for the crossover. Oh, I mean, they're, they're going to do horrible things. Like, they're going to make zero rated Courtney Cox friends spin-offs for mid-range Android phones. Like, actually, that sounds great. It doesn't.

It doesn't seem great. So, like, you see this, like, massive consolidation of, like, huge conglomerates owning these services and then trying to, but it's going to shake out. I think it will shake out very fast. like these things aren't going to this moment isn't going to persist for more than a year and there's already i mean i think new york mag ran a piece it's like piracy's back baby because no one's going to pay for all of it and that's just going to be a thing so anyway the point of this is my daughter will outlive hboh max i just want to say that very clearly it's so horrible last bit of news speaking of aty and t we're going to track this pretty lightly i'm just going to mention it quickly it's something we're

to pay attention to. I want to flag it for the listener. Robocalls are a huge problem in the United States. We had Jeffrey Starks on the Vergecast, FCC Commissioner Jeffrey Starks. He said it's the number one complaint the FCC gets. So the FCC recently passed a rule saying, okay, carriers are allowed to start blocking robocalls. We're allowed to start doing some stuff. There's some other FCC stuff happening. They want them to implement this framework called stir-shaken, which authenticate calls.

So you can't get fraud. You can't, like, spoof numbers. that's coming out of line. But right now the rule is, okay, we're allowing carriers to start blocking because there was some question

of whether blocking calls on the phone network would violate FCC rules. But the FCC passed this thing. Immediately the question was, you said they were allowed to do it. You didn't say they had to do it. And he definitely didn't say

they had to do it for free, right? So now they're allowed to do it, but they don't have to do it for free, which is like what people want. They just want it to stop. They don't want to like pay, like, okay. So that was our angle when the FCC passed this rule. Like I wrote the post.

I was like, it is unclear whether carriers are charged. The carriers didn't say much, which is a bad sign. And now we're finding out, okay, AT&T is rolling out its robocall prevention stuff. It is basically an extension of what it already has called call protect. I have call protect. Call protect is in two tiers. There's a free tier, which lets you manually block numbers after you determine that they're bad. I do it all the time.

And it says spam alert, right? Or suspected fraud. Like, that's what Call Product does. You can pay them, and it'll block those calls automatically. So now everybody's getting the free tier of Call Protect. You don't have to, like, download the app and sign up for it anymore. They're just rolling out the free tier and everyone. But if you want the actual thing, which is for your phone to stop ringing with bullshit,

you got to pay AT&T. I think that is absolutely back. Like, that's not the outcome any consumer wanted, which, which is now we're going to tell you about this bad thing that's constantly happening to you. We're going to tell you with spam. But if you want AT&T to push the block button for you, you got to pay the money. I think we're going to see way more action on that because that is some classic cell carrier, mobile carrier, upcharge bullshit. Right?

Yeah. That is, there was a very famous David Pogue article in The Times. I was just about to bring that up. Exactly. Yeah. Where if you push the wrong button on a Verizon phone and like made the automatic call to like Verizon service, it charged you, and people push that button accidentally all the time, and

Verizon was just dinged them. It's the same exact motivating idea, which is, there's a thing people want, it's really annoying, we can just scam money out of them because we'll tell them it'll stop because now we're allowed to do it. Bullshit, they should just turn, it should roll out for free to everyone. I mean, it's

crazy. So we're going to track it. I don't want to overdo it. It's the news. That's the back story. Starks, Commissioner Starks, has a pending order in front of the SEC saying it has to be free. You know, he's, you know, the, it's a Republican commission right now under Pye, so probably not going to go anywhere, but it's, there's already some movement. But I think people should be aware that Pye thumping his chest that he did something at robocalls. All he did

was give carriers permission to charge you to block them instead of actually solving a problem. Anyway, that's my, it's my final FCC rant. How, wait, what, I'm still a little confused because you could pay them already to block. You could. So yeah, right? So that Pye, again, he's like thump in his chest. He's saying, I gave the carrier's permission to block these calls. So they're going to do it now. And kind of the unspoken thing was like, they're already doing it. Did they really need permission? Yeah. But before, the way they were kind of getting around the uncertainty was call protect was free. But you had to go get it. I had to download the app. I had to sign up for it. I had to push OK. Now they're just rolling it out to everyone because they have this sort of like clarity in the regulatory space.

but to actually block it, you have to pay them, which, again, is complete bullshit. So, yeah, just end on an FCC. We kind of began on a Foxcon rant. We ended on an FCC rant. We had some VGA. Classic Vergecast. We had some VGA ports in the middle.

A classic, a classic verge cast episode. We want to hear from you. You can tweet at us, Dieter, you're at Backlon. Paul's future Paul. I'm at Reckless. If you're a Foxcon employee, you just want to express yourself to me.

I'm available to you. By the way, I did reply to that. email and say who are you, I'd love to talk to you. And he didn't reply, she didn't reply, whoever it was. And I said, if you don't reply, by the end of the day, I'm going to tweet this thing. So I just want to, I was, I try to be fair. There was no replies. So, but if you want to, if you work at Foxxon, you do want to talk to me and Josh and are available to you. You can listen to why you push that button. That season is going great. This week is about Gmail auto replies. It is very, very funny. You should listen to it. Liz Lapato, our deputy

editors on that episode. She's hilarious. You can listen to it. the Kara Swisher on Recode Decode. You can listen to Kara and Scott Galloway on Pivot. You can listen to Peter Kafka on Recode Media. They're all wonderful. We'll be back next week. We got some interviews. I don't want to spoil it.

Got a pretty good interview coming up. I think you're going to like it. That's on Tuesdays. We'll be back on Friday talking about the Week in Tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code.

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