The Vergecast - Nintendo Labo, Detroit Auto Show, and Facebook's transforming news feed

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul have returned from CES 2018 and are all together in the New York City office for this week’s Vergecast. As I was typing out the timestamps on here, I realized there’s a lot of news this week. So check it out! We’ve got highlights from the Detroit Auto Show, the changing algorithm of your Facebook News Feed, and the most gadgety gadget we’ve seen in a while, Nintendo Labo. There’s a whole lot more discussed in between all of that — like Paul’s weekly segment “Win or Lose 2: the secret to winning” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 02:31 - YouTube is taking down Tide Pod Challenge videos and oh my god don’t eat laundry pods 03:40 - YouTube tightens rules around what channels can be monetized 12:00 - Nintendo is making a bunch of weird DIY cardboard toys for the Switch and they’re awesome 17:30 - The best, worst, and weirdest cars from the 2018 Detroit Auto Show 19:40 - Apple’s CarPlay is finally coming to Toyota and Lexus vehicles 23:13 - Is BMW going to make you pay for Apple CarPlay every year? 24:43 - Tim Cook says the next iOS update will allow users to disable intentional battery slowdowns 32:55 - Facebook’s startling new ambition is to shrink 44:54 - Paul’s weekly segment “Win or Lose 2: the secret to winning” 47:59 - Project Fi creates its own version of an unlimited plan 51:12 - Half of US Senate supports reversing FCC’s net neutrality ruling, but it still won’t be overturned 52:23 - Verizon’s streaming TV service might have standalone app ‘channels’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Vergecast is sponsored by Caviar. Where's your next meal coming from? Try caviar. Caviar delivers the best restaurants. You can order on the caviar app or online. You can just go to caviar.com and check it out. Get the food you crave delivered. There's pizza, Chinese, and much more.

Indian, sushi, barbecue, all from local restaurants. So order today and pay no delivery fee on your first order. Plus, you can take $10 off that first order of $30 or more with code Vergecast. Offer is valid until February 28th. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. The flagship podcast of the Fox Media. Wait, no, of the Verge. The Verge, which is the flagship verge of the Box Media Network.

There's no better Verge than the Verge. Yes, that is true. Correct. I am Nealai Patel. That person's Dieter Bone. Dieter is in the studio with us. I am. The jokes are going to be 10% more dad.

The in-person theater experience is very intense. Paul Miller is here. Hello. So what I'm going to tell you the listener is that this is the week after CES. It does not feel like enough time has passed. Like, I got really sick after CES. Deere, you were sick before CES.

I was sick before CES. I was home for a grand total of 30 hours before I came to New York. Yeah. We're still very tired from that show. By the way, claps to our producer Andrew Marino for putting together a great CES edition of that show.

Yeah, it's sound effects. I loved it. I listened to the whole thing. This is a horse coming to you. Wow. We're doing... Dieter's in studio. We're doing Foley today.

It's going to be great. But we're back, and I'm just letting you know, just up front, I'm still very tired. And I'm a little bit sick. And my voice gets a little weird. It's because I'm literally falling asleep. It's been a week. I'm still dying.

I've got a great job hyping the show today, man. I feel confident in promising 80% quality today. Yeah. Those are often our best episodes. The ones are real sleepy. Tell the people the truth. You're sick because you are gnaw are gnaw on those tide pods.

Let's get right into the biggest news in the world today, which is teenagers are eating laundry detergent because they are stupid. Intrepid Verge reporter Danny Deal has made Tidepod cookies. They look exactly like Tidepods so much so that it's like a little bit scary. I don't know. Danny's great. That was a mistake. Don't make things that look like poison.

Also, don't eat poison. Also, she's very good to make, she made verge look at cookies. Yeah. Excellent of cookies. This is actually a story. Our team is, like, digging into it. But YouTube today had to, like, put up videos. Like, they're blocking Tidepod Challenge videos because people are dumb.

I don't get it. Censorship. The biggest free speech issue in the world today. I mean, look, if you listen to a broadcast, you know, free speech and platforms. Yeah. It's a whole thing. And Tidepods, I think, is the breaking point. If the founding fathers didn't want to state Tidepots.

YouTube has reacted more quickly to people eating Tidepods than they have. to Nazis, which maybe, I mean, eating tidepods could kill you, I suppose, so it is appropriate to react quickly. I'm just pointing out that there is a weird disconnect. So YouTube's changing a bunch of rules about what channels can be monetized. There's a whole YouTube kerfuffle happening, but you are right. The tidepods issue garnered a swifter reaction. Yeah.

Which is funny because you would, you know, you could roll out the string of, well, of course, there's no controversy there. to just be like, don't do it, but fundamentally the issue is that people want to do it. Yeah. I don't get it. Anyway, that's just like stupid news. The new monetization rules are, it used to be you needed 10,000 public views, and then you could start monetizing video. Now it's you have to have at least 1,000 subscribers, and you must have tallied at least 4,000 hours of overall watch time across all of your videos.

and I can't tell if that's a super high bar or medium bar or low bar I imagine if you're trying to make a living at YouTube you've probably crossed that bar but there's probably a bunch of hobbyists who hadn't, who are sad about this but I also know how much money they were making in the first place.

So I'm like, I'm pretty dumb about all of this. The thing that I'm... It's harder to game, first of all. Yeah, that's true. So that's like an important... I think YouTube understands their platform is not easy to game, but gameable. Yep.

This is a little bit harder to game. Yeah. So you can't make a million channels. And like, there's a, there's a certain kind of abuse that I think this is targeted at in terms of making a bunch of channels, a bunch of bad content. And then, you know, some of them cross the line. And once you get those views and, you know, you can start racking stuff up. So this makes that harder. But the big problem with YouTube lately has been, you know, Logan Paul.

Right. And there's actually been a bunch of other creators who've had their videos demonetized. They're not really sure why. Yeah. And so I don't, like this seems like, I don't know, like tangential to the actual like main show what's going on with YouTube drama right now. And so it's like, is this just a thing they're planning and doing anyway and they're rolling it out and it helps with these other problems? Or do they actually think this is a direct address to some of the problems on YouTube? My most favorable interpretation of this is that this frees up YouTube resources to focus on the higher echelon of monetized videos.

So there's fewer channels that they have to go through. Right. But they really desperately need very, very clear rules of what is monetizable or not. Because people are just freaking out. So you're right in the sense that now everybody in the preferred platform as human beings are going to watch their videos. So, Deidre, I think you were right, though, and the first wave of YouTube problems was like weird algorithmically generated horror videos that were targeted at children. Yeah. Right. So you can like wipe those out because these are bars that are hard to

harder to cross. Right. So you've removed the monetary incentives. Wait, which ones are you talking about? You're talking about Elsagate? Yeah, there's that. Those had millions of views. Right.

But you can't just like start that. Like they can go kill the ones that exist. But you can't like, it's harder to start a network of garbage, which is a thing that they were doing. You've got to rack up these total amount of watches. You've got to hit people, a thousand people up to subscribe. Like, right, there's like a little bit harder of a bar to than just like total number of hours. Right.

It's not, I'm not saying it's great. If you put a video out that has Elsa in it, you're over the bar. I'm saying right now. Maybe I just think this is targeted that one set of problem. And then the premium content YouTuber problem, we're going to start watching all the videos. That's this set of resources. More broadly, I think the way I'm. would put it as YouTube is this is the year that YouTube is at a breaking point.

Like the way it's worked forever is not the way it's going to work in the future. So many people are focused on YouTube now in like a massive way. They're stars, celebrity creators, are getting themselves into different kinds of trouble. Google has to realize like they now run a very prominent content platform, editorial platform for people. Advertisers are staying away from YouTube. It's like a real thing. Like major advertiser. Yeah.

So Google has to figure out. how they can navigate themselves back into the money without irritating all the people, and that's going to be tough. And I would say there's no bigger story in this sort of like platform space than this one this year. And I would say that the current status seems to be that the YouTubers have already given up on YouTube. Like we hear that story every year. Not that they don't put their videos, but that they've given up on YouTube providing their living.

Oh, sure. I think that there's like a there's like a subsistence level for a lot of people there and like some people are making way more money, but everyone's looking to diversify how they make money beyond just, you know, YouTube money. They're like they're selling merch and they're like certain patrons and they're doing a bunch of other stuff. Putie Pie who gets plenty of views advertises phones and a chair. A lot of like the League of Legends gamers I watch will have their own, they'll have like the video. will start with a little bit of gameplay and then they'll cut to like an advertisement for some like a mobile game. Yeah. And then yeah, Patreon is huge.

Like they do not trust. Deer complains about all the tech YouTubers and their D brand deals all the time. I do. Like it's a little, there's like some makiness there. Like there's another way to monetize the stuff. And there are a lot of tech YouTubers I love, but like it's this pervasive layer of brand deals. It isn't always transparent. Right.

The lack of transparency is like that's always the thing. Well, and YouTube needs to figure. out a way, not just to monetize PG videos with no controversial ideas in them. Because there's things like HBO exists,

you know, things like Netflix exists. Hey, people pay directly for those things. Right. So, you could move it on YouTube Red. I pay directly for YouTube Red. Great. So, I mean, like, that's another strategy. YouTube needs to do a better job

keeping 12-year-old safe while also realizing that its platform is not just for 12-year-olds. A problem, by the way, that HBO, for example, has not solved. Like, this is a hard problem. But YouTube's not for, or HBO's not for 12-year-olds, and they've been pretty upfront about that. Right, that's what I just ignore that. I watched me a lot of pirate HBO when I was 12. I went over my friend's house.

Peter. Peter's, like, crawling over the neighbor's house, the cable splier. His dad had the big giant satellite dish, right? And like, you know, the channels come in and they're fuzzy, and then you, like, you buy the illegal, dad buys a box and he scrambles it. Ultimately, that's not. My friend's name was Jeff Weimer. He had to, you had just like ham radio store in his base. You just docks some poor kid in Wisconsin.

Hopefully he remembers me. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Jeff. Your house is cool. I mean, but also, that's not 100% HBO's fault. I disobeyed my parents as a child. I went to a friend's house, and I watched Titian. What?

Wow. Wow. Right? The most boring rebellion that has ever taken place. And I will say, credit to my 12-year-old self, I averted my eyes. Wow. Yeah. That's the most Paul Miller thing.

Because I, while disobeying my parents still, honored them a little bit. I understand. I thought you said you inverted your eyes the entire time. No. You were just like in the room with Titanic. It's like, I'm king of the world. Wait, what world is the king of? world is the king of, I must know.

Can I look? Dare I look? All of this, heavy digression in Paul's eye version strategies was a joke about tidalds. Because Deeter wanted to start with something fun. That was, I mean, I did want to start with something fun, and then we got diverted to tiepads. Here's the thing.

I just killed your transition. I'm sorry. Have you tried a tide pod, though? No. Don't eat tidepods. I don't even know where we're having this conversation. It's a really funny joke. That's why.

I think kids are actually doing it. I know. That takes it out of that zone. But kind of doesn't. When I was, so my mom always fell for like the local news. Kids are doing dumb things. I remember the most. Those are the local news in Wisconsin.

Kids were drinking so much water. They were dying. It's the thing you can do. Yeah, you could, yeah. It's like, it's happened on like one or two like radio morning shows or something. Anyway. Yeah. And she was just like, don't drink too much water.

Anyway. It's one of those things. If somebody offers you a jug of water, just say no. Run. Tell an adult. Speaking of 12-year-olds. There's a good transition. Nintendo had a surprise, quote-unquote, interactive announcement.

Our man, Andrew Webster, was one of three publications to get to try this thing out before the announcement. It's called Nintendo Labo. Labo. Labo. Labo. Labo. Nintendo Labo. And it's impossible to describe what this thing is without sounding like you're crazy.

Go for it. That's what I'm here for. That's why the listeners show up. It's a piece of cardboard with little cutouts on it. And then you take your switch and you follow the instructions to fold it up into stuff. And then you take your switch apart into its little controllers and whatnot and stick it into the cardboard thing you built. And then you play games. Yeah.

Yeah. Doesn't sound great. That sounds awesome. It does sound awesome. So there's a piano. There's a little car that, like, moves around because the JoyCon vibrates. There's a house. There's a dope.

It's actually really expensive. It's like, first of all, it's launching on 420 for $69. Of course. It's just Nintendo, man. There we go. You build a backpack with strings on it that go down to your feet and hands, and those strings operate levers, which then operate the controllers. and then you put on the switch in a giant cardboard VR headset and then you get to stomp around as a giant robot breaking things.

That's one of the projects. One of the projects. There's also a piano. There's other stuff. And there's a fishing rod thing. And like you go fishing on the screen of the switch. Yeah. I think it's genius.

And of course how it works is that there's a Bluetooth chip in it and you put an app on your phone, right, Deeter? No. No. Isn't it amazing? It's so great. Somebody made a gadget that doesn't involve putting it. app on your phone and connecting to it over Bluetooth.

No, you have to just disassemble your switch. No, it's not. The joycon has like a camera, like the way the piano works is the joycon's piano sensor, or no. That's a lot of over-reaching. The Joycon's camera sensor is seeing the keys on the piano move. Whoa. Yeah.

Where's the camera on the joycon? It's the same one that's on the end of the right joycon. Oh, okay. The little thing for the, yeah. I was on a higher last. Our gadgets have so many sensors in them. Like, they could do, like, data transfer over, like, audio. Sometimes AirDrop even works.

John Boyce. John Boyce. Over at SB Nation had a good tweet about the Switch earlier. How many buttons are there on a Nintendo Switch? Physical buttons, are there on a Nintendo Switch? Okay. Yeah. Power button.

Oh, God, we're going to start there. Well, you guys start. That's the first. It's the only one in the two volumes. Which one did you say? Powering volumes. That's three. on the main unit.

Yeah. That's all that there is. Uh-huh. Unless you count the kickstand as a button because you're always pushing it back in. So three in the main unit. Yep. Four, seven, if you count those there. Eight.

The four on the left joycon, the button underneath it. The left and the right joicon have an equal number of buttons. So you only need to count one of the joicons. Yeah, but I got to an odd number with seven. So now I can't do math. Okay. Just clicking the joystick sound as a count as a button. So there's five there.

So that's eight, nine, ten, fifteen. What? Twenty-five. Eleven on each joycon and three on the main body. Oh, because they're the Z and, oh, man, I forgot all those. 25 buttons on this thing. It is such a gadget. The switch is the gadget-east gadget.

And then now you can take it apart and make other gadgets with it. And the thing that I just can't get over is just how playful this is. just how it's custom designed for a kid to craft their own world. Right? And like they got to follow the instructions or whatever, but they're going to like, they get to make their own thing. And then they get to take this video game system,

which already feels more personal to them than a PS4 ever will, because they get to carry around with them. When you hold it, it's like right up in your face, and it's your games on the thing. And like the world building sense of this, like the extension from the physical to the video game of the thing that already feels personal to you, it's just like,

it's cosmic brain to me how well Nintendo understands play and understands the mind of like a 10-year-old. I'm only at 23. I'm just sitting here counting buttons. Okay, JoyCon. Two triggers, one, two. Three, four, five, six with the four buttons.

Yeah. Wait, I did this the other day. Plus and minus. Oh, plus and minus. Those are ones I missed. Plus and minus. Yeah. Two more on the left and the right.

Yeah. And then the home or the select button or the screenshot button. Yeah. So like add all that stuff up and you get to 11. I miss plus and minus. There's 11 on each joycon. 11 on each joycon. That's 22 and then there's three in the top.

Okay. Yeah. I miss plus and minus. Man, the switch is great. Mm-hmm. I'm thoroughly enjoying one. I'm very excited for Nintendo Labo. And again, it's just like, just looks like fun.

Yeah. I love that Nintendo just hates the idea of a control, like a generic controller. Every, everything Nintendo is like, what if we totally screw at these? controllers. Yeah. What if the way that you control these like virtual worlds on screen is like just a little bit more insane than last time?

That's great. We also have known here that 3DS is doing great. Yeah, I didn't expect that, but it's doing fine. I think Metroid probably helped with that a little bit. I think people are like, I can't find a switch. I guess I'll just buy this other thing. Other big news going on right now. Auto show is happening.

I would like to start with Nissan. Not a company that we mention often on this. They make the rogue. They make a number of cars. Uh, Nissan has a new SUV. It's a concept, the X-Motion. It has like 900 screens in it. It has its own custom assistant that takes the,

it takes the form of a coyfish that leaps about the car helping you. It leaps about? It leaps about the car. It goes from screen to screen and like, it's so it's clippy, but a coyfish? A quayfish, a quayfish clipy. Uh, I, there's, there's not a, uh, universe in which I think a car maker is going to make a good animated assistant.

But I'm willing to take the shot on the coinfish. That's really the story. It was a story at C.S. It's a story at the auto show. All the carmakers are trying to, that self-driving moment when, like, you're in a world of screens inside the car. Yeah. They are relentlessly focused on how they can own that platform.

Yeah. Also making big trucks. And the Ford Rangers coming back. That's something. Just saying. A lot of pickup trucks. The new RAM truck, I think this is cool. The Tesla moment has at the industry, every car slowly going to giant vertical screens in the dash.

Yep. So the new RAM truck, 12-inch portrait display in the dashboard. And then the top half runs carplay and the bottom half runs FCA's UConnect thing. I feel like I overheard you complaining at CS that you can't. What's that standard slot that cars? DEN. Double den. There's a din and then there's a double den.

And that's like going away. And it's gone. Yeah. A 12-inch screen is like a quintupled in. It's like... So when a new technology comes out, you can't... No, like the... What if I want to listen to MP3 CDs?

Yeah. You're on your own there, friend. My last car had a six-gig hard drive in it so you could rip CDs to it. It also had an MMC slot. Ooh. Like a PCMCA slot. Like, it was crazy. It was just a crazy car.

Like, the last of its kind. Speaking of car play, CarPlay, always big news at auto shows. Toyota broke, which I think is really interesting. Toyota was like the last major holdout. No, car play in their cars. A bunch of people, actually, I was tweeting about this. People were telling me that they had chosen against Toyota.

Same. I didn't even consider a Toyota because I knew I wanted both carplay and Android Auto. Yeah. And I think they just finally had to give in. I think they were like in that Apple moment. You know how like sometimes Apple doesn't do with something because they just assumed people buy iPhones. Yeah.

We don't need wireless charging. Yeah. It's an iPhone. You're just going to keep buying it. Oh, now I have it. Whatever. Great. So have you heard the audio of the CEO saying we've added carplay?

No. It's amazing. I wish I had it. He's like, whatever, whatever. We know, we know. We got it. Hey, look, it took so while, folks. Whatever, we got it.

Whatever, we got it. So then here's the official CEO keynote statement on CarPlay and Toyota's. Perfect. But no, so to finish the Apple comparison, Toyota makes Camrys. People are going to buy Camrys. Toyota will sell Camrys forever. And I think they thought they could put out some other system in the meantime.

Yeah. But I think actually buyers wanting car play, it became obvious that people were choosing against the Toyota Camry, which is wild. All right. So help me out here as someone who doesn't like cars. You're saying that someone who doesn't like cars to help you? No, me. I'm the person who doesn't like cars.

The coming default is that most cars will support carplay and Android. Redado? Carplay. Mostly car play. Toyota's supporting car play. Yeah, they have not said a word about it. How many are supporting both? Like the majority support both.

Okay, so that is the majority. When they pick one, they tend to pick car play. Right. So Toyota has like only said car play. BMW pushes car play because BMW owners tend to an iPhones apparently. Because I want devices that can do both. Like I wrote up that smoke alarm thing. in at CES and they're coming out with three different versions.

One was Alexa. One was Google Assistant and one was Airplay capable. An Airplay, no. Yeah. And so like, but why, I want devices that can just like, I know, I don't. So the way these things work. So I want to be able to Chromecast to it, Airplay to it, mirror cast. To mirror cast.

The way that the assistant stuff works is different. Alex and Google system have slightly different SDKs, if you don't like slightly different hardware requirements, like you end up making different things. CarPlay and Android Auto are not that. They are just apps that run on the existing head unit that the carmaker generally builds and then certifies with Google and Apple.

Those apps don't do anything. They just mirror your phone. Well, like Chromecast and the Airplay. Why is my Vizio only Chromecast? Because Apple won't give them airplay. They would do it if they could. Audio manufacturers get Airplay. What I'm saying is

the decision to support CarPlay and Android Auto comes down to who you think your customer is. Not quite as much how does it work? Like the technical requirement because all it's doing is mirroring your phone. Your phone does all of the work, the processor in your phone.

Which is why, so on some cars, if you use your phone while CarPlay is active, you can see like CarPlay doing stuff. Or if you use CarPlay and hold your phone, you can see your phone doing stuff because you're just mirroring the screen. Yeah. But what's interesting is,

Okay, so it's driving a lot of purchases. BMW, BMW, is a horrifying move. They are now going to charge $80 a year to keep CarPlay active. Aw. Cute. It's horrifying.

That is a horrifying move. Right. They don't have to do anything. It's not like they're shipping you GPS updates or keeping your radio subscription alive. It's literally they're just allowing you to connect your phone to the screen. They were already charging you $300 to do it before. But now they'll charge you and it'll become a subscription.

I'm horrified. It's, yeah. The app is there. So the argument that has been made. Uh-huh. Is it most BMWs are leased. Uh-huh. So over the course of your, like, two or three your lease, you actually end up paying less.

And then you sell the car back and then they can charge the next person because it's, yep, that's, right? It's terrible. God. It's like, also the car is going to go leased again. So like only the, right, like you give the car back in the lease, that car just gets sold. And now that person is stuck paying $80 a year. Horrible. Unacceptable.

Yep. Everyone, I don't know. Buy something else. Don't buy a BMW. But BMW also the only one that has wireless charging and wireless car play. So when you do the iPhone 10 review, we got a really nice PMW-5 series. Yeah. And then like, not so much.

It was awesome. Like you got in the car, you like put it on the pad, start charging, connects to the thing. It was like the dream. $80. That will be $80, Neal. Pay up. Well, speaking of Apple, this one's, I think, important, actually really important. Tim Cook told ABC News, you know, there's iOS battery.

Kerfuffle. Yep. Do you call it? Kerfuffle. Shenanigans. I think someone would say scandal. Cur, scandal. No, just straight scandal.

Skentfuffle. Scandal. Yeah. It's a scandal. Although, again, I think they're a technical solution. It's actually still cool. Yeah, absolutely. I think just blew the messaging.

Next iOS update. We'll give you more transparency in the health of your battery and allow you to disable the slowdown. But they don't want you to. Yeah. Because, again, for one's life your battery and probably prevents your phone from shutting down. The fact that they didn't say that right away. Like, is they kind of said it. Like, we'll give some more battery management.

But this is the thing they should have always told people. It always let people do. I feel like Apple really messed up by, like, they're like, hey, we're sorry, kind of. No, even this appearance, Cook said, quote, maybe we should have been clearer as well. So that's fair. That's good. And then he did the, we deeply apologize for anybody that thinks we had some other kind of motivation, which is not saying, I'm sorry, you're mad. I'm sorry about your feelings.

But it's close. But we apologize for like, it's fine. Like he didn't, they didn't, their very first line was, we're sorry you're mad. I'm sorry you're so dumb that you think we're bad people. But so they had this opportunity though to give a lot of people $30 batteries That's what it sounded like Apple's going to make this right by giving a lot of people 30 dollar batteries and then you show up and like That's not bad enough really no they they they walked back from that oh they fixed that they they clean that up I think their biggest part right now is the backlog is just massive

Yeah, I have an iPhone 7 and the battery is terrible after a year because I use it every day because it's the smartphone. And, yeah, I don't know. So we had Kyle from I Fixit on the Sugar Breakers show at CES. He basically was flat out. Like Apple cannot keep up with this demand. He did some crazy math. Like, they had like 45,000 storm employees or something.

Yeah, you add up all the storm plays and all the hours it would take to replace everything one of those batteries and they'd be working from now until the heat death of the universe. If we zoom back on this a little bit, right? you can't, a typical person cannot send their phone in for an upgrade or repair, right? Right. Because you're completely dependent on your phone. And I notice this when a software update comes through, I'm constantly procrastinating it.

Because if I'm looking at my phone, I'm using my phone. Yeah. Right. Like, what would a world look like where you'd have like a reasonable backup where it's easy to, like, go to your second-tier phone for a little bit? while you get your other phone repaired. So you could send your phone away for a week, get a new battery in it. Second-tier phone. That's not a reasonable choice for most people, right?

Like, now you own two phones. Most people lease their phones to begin with, right? A lot of homes have two cars, right? So if one of the cars needs repairs... That's not why you have two cars. You carpooled together, like it's a husband and wife. They have two cars. Right, but you have two cars because two people need to go separate places.

Right, but you can make it work with one. Because you only have one phone, you can't make it work with none. I see what you're saying. But I don't think it reveals anything. I'm with you. Some people have two cars because they need the utility of two cars. Yeah. No one has two phones.

Here's what I want. No one except us. Here's what I want. I'm going to confess something. The reason we don't have two phones is because sim cards are stupid. Yeah. I used to be a huge SIM card fan. Don't let the, don't go.

don't do e-sim, it's just going to give more control to the manufacturers, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think the even more radical solution is your phone number should be as portable as your email address, and you should be able to access it from whatever device you damn well want to. Preach it. Yeah. Preach it, so.

I'm with you. Ah. Is your SIM card still broken? Yeah, not only is my SIM card still broken on my iPhone 10. Later on, there's this whole movement, Farha Maddieu and Ellie Bowls over the New York Times, like, oh, people want their phones to be dumb. they're too addictive and they got to make them less addictive.

Sure. I think most of this is a notification suck on iPhone problem, but whatever. There's other things. So like make it black and white because then you won't, your lizard brain won't be, not lizard, because lizard seems like. Your monkey brain won't be enamored of all the colors. And if you make it black and white, you won't start it all the time, blah, blah, blah. The other solution to this is like have a dumb phone that's cheap that like you use most

of the time, but you don't, you do need a smartphone. You can't live without a smartphone. So you'd like leave your smartphone in your bag. But nobody does that. because you don't have the same phone number on it. You could charge extra to, like, put a SIM card in a damn Apple Watch. So you can't have the same phone number

on multiple devices. But if you could, if it was freely available for you to use on whatever device you feel like as your email addresses or your Twitter handle or any other authentication thing you have on the internet, this is my online identity, then you could have a dump phone and a smartphone

and you could go to the Apple store and you could say, yo, fix my phone, and they'd be like, okay, here's a loaner. Or you'd like, oh, well, I've got this dumb phone, I'm good for a couple of weeks, or whatever. This is a carrier lock-in problem. Yeah. So you get an app called LifeRafft.

LifeRafed gets your most important things together. You get your most important contacts. Wait, is this a real app? No, I'm making up an app called LifeRft. you on your smartphone, you assemble your core functionality that you have to have, your required phone numbers and stuff. And then you're like, okay, we're jumping off Titanic. Wow.

Into the life raft and you push that button and now your, your dumb phone comes alive. It's like, we're going to get through this together. You're going to get through this together, right? Right? Your dumb phone is the door. Can it be an auto-inflating thing? like it actually like you hit a button and yeah I cannot wait absolutely

your life raft is hacked you know what's going to happen Google's going to buy that company they're going to call it Google LifeRafed and then they're going to forget about it for a while and the UI is going to get really really bad and then it will either die or get like integrated into some other weird random chat app I'm just going to play out by the story

of Google Voice the the solution to your problem by the way is the Apple Watch LTE because it has her phone no it's a little tiny dumb phone Neil is acting like this wasn't my idea. It was your idea. I was taking it from you. I had a great idea.

Watch is our phones. I invented the Apple Watch. I don't know if you guys knew that. I was like, Timmy. Timmy. There's somebody stuck in the well. Also, Apple Watch. Have you ever seen Dick Tracy?

Let me tell you about this. Great, classic character. We should read an ad. Cookie. All right, this episode of the very, Our podcast is sponsored by Mattress Firm. Mattress Firm has one question for Alvi. I'm going to listen to a podcast to help me fall asleep people.

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assuming that's cool with you. All right, what else is going on, Deeter? I don't know. There's a bunch of stuff Facebook decided to try and ruin the news again. I don't know that it'll be successful, but they're turning down the number of posts

that you're going to see in your news feed from publishers like The Verge. And they're going to, presumably turn back up your friends and family and, like, I don't know, racist cousins or whatever. Yeah. And disclosure, my wife works for Oculus as a division of Facebook, etc.

But at the same time that Facebook is, like, their promise, Zuckerberg's new year's goal is to, like, be the CEO of Facebook. and they're trying to turn down, you know, video and post from publishers and turn up your friends and family. And everyone's really worried about Facebook and what they're doing to the news feed. Instagram is just taking, drop an acid and just throwing stuff at the product. Yeah.

You can use the giffy GIF keyboard, throw it into your stories. There's a test of a text-only option, which is making people very angry. Yeah. And you can also see when users were last active in the app. So what is... So we've often said Instagram is like the last happy place on the internet. Yeah. And they're just...

Turn it into Facebook. They're messing with it. Some fierce right now. I don't know why. It's not like people aren't using Instagram enough. Yeah. It's strange. Like, what do they need?

What is it? I don't know. It's very odd. It might just be that they want to kill Snapchat once and for all. That could be. That's very much how they're. feel about it. Yeah.

And Snapchat is certainly in a somewhat vulnerable position. Yeah. The excellent reporter Taylor Lawrence of the Daily Beast, was it last week. It was CES. It was CES, yeah. Published like an internal document showing all of Snapchat's user numbers across every feature they have. Turns out people mostly just send each other Snapchat's.

Yep. Do a lot of other stuff in there. The places with the money aren't really, the screens of the money on them aren't really opened a lot in Snapchat. Yeah. Well, I think Snapchat is even like kind of shying away from it. like, are trying to disassociate its stories from the newsy story, the brand stores. Yeah, they're redoing their whole interface.

So anyway, they're Snapchat's trying to reboot itself, basically. They're literally going to change the entire interface. So Instagram, why not go for the kill? But Instagram to me has gotten, it's just the algorithmic timeline, the changes to the feed, all these crazy features. Like, they're fun to play with. Yeah. So I don't look at Instagram as much they used to because it's just something. So what's interesting is I don't look at Instagram as much as other people. And I actually feel weirdly guilty about it because I look at Twitter when I should be looking at Instagram.

Instagram theoretically would be more relaxing and less stressful to me. Also, there's a few opportunities to make dad jokes on Instagram and so everybody else would like me more. But since I don't use it more than once every couple of days lately, when I go there, the algorithm is great at showing me stuff that I will want to have seen. Like, I don't know, someone, you had some adventure and you were talking about it. And people like, oh, yeah, I saw it on the Instagram. And I was like, I want to see it on the Instagram. And I opened it up, like, when we got done talking, it was right there at the top. Yeah, because it's listening to you all the time.

Yeah. That's right. Oh, my gosh, the ads on Instagram. Such a good shaggy dog set up and you nailed the punchline. Oh, my gosh. I'm not a conspiracy theory. But the ads on Facebook and Instagram make me disbelieve. the mood landing.

It's not listening to you. Don't eat Tidepods. Please everyone stop it. Oh, well, you know what I realized recently? Maybe I've already talked about this. My Tinder account's associated with my Facebook account. What? Yeah.

So, because you use it, like, Tinder won't put your job description. You can't just write your own job description. It has to pull from Facebook. Okay. Can you enter any job description in a Facebook? Yes. I feel like this has. They didn't prevent anything.

Tinder's trying to create some quantity of safety by associating with what is most likely to be your realist online identity, which is Facebook. Yeah. Well, guess who knows that I am swiping right now? Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. So they're all over me on Instagram and Facebook with all these ads for, like, new dating apps. Wow.

And it's just like, I'm looking for a therapist right now, right? That's like a pretty personal thing. Now, I just shared all the versus case, so whatever. But she's just us friends here. But I don't want Facebook advertising therapists to me right now. Like, that's not the mood I'm in for looking for a therapist. You know? Are you sometimes in that mood?

No. My favorite thing, you know, the best thing I've done, ad related in the past month, is I saw the ugliest shirt of all time on a bad ad, and I clicked it. And they started following it. me around. Yeah. So I clicked it again. Now I get these ugly shirts everywhere.

It's wonderful. It doesn't feel like a personal attack. Yeah, yeah. It's like this ugly shirt company thinks they're going to get me. Oh, man. That's a really good idea. There's somebody in a background miller. I got two clicks on this dude.

Yeah. I just, we should all as a form of protest, click on stuff that like we think looks kind of funny, looks nice, but we would never buy. Always click on stuff that you think looks nice, that you'd want to see it as an ad, but you would never buy it. Why don't you do that? Okay. Before we command our listeners to do that.

And then report back to us in a week. Yeah. And then we'll just see, we'll just before the podcast listeners. I tried it once and it's working great. See, that's all the time that you need. I'm very excited. I'm very excited about this Facebook thing. Yeah.

What I really wish, and I hope that they are thinking seriously about is trusting their users enough to eventually give them the sliders to the algorithm. Like, I think in Facebook's minds, like, if we gave you the sliders to the algorithm, you'd just crank up friends and family and you never see the news or the funny viral videos or like this magician who lies, this liar magician that goes viral on Facebook all the time. Wait, what? Yeah, these magicians, they'll do this like. Even in your heart that all magicians are inherently liars?

No, they're illusions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's clever tricks. There's like an Ocean's 11 heist, and then there's just like a blunt force armed robbery. You know what I mean? One of them's pretty cool. It's the armed robbery. One of them is only violence.

Wow. All right. So anyways, I'm going to go with you on this. Just look a bullshit Facebook magician. You'll definitely find this. But Facebook, but we. That it's so off the rails right No no no I'm getting to the I love this

Facebook algorithm change right Yeah but I think the ultimate thing Is that people should be able to control their own Sliders for their own algorithms I still miss like remember when Netflix launched And it like it's like okay we need to like create like a profile for you for what you want to watch Yeah it was like ask you what's change yeah yeah What it recommended after that was not perfect

But I felt like I had some agency in that I felt like oh you know these are these aren't the perfect recommendations but if I want better ones, I know what to do. I'll go rate a bunch of things that I've seen. And it made me feel involved in what was being shown to me. Twitter's algorithm really pisses me off. Instagram, to me, is completely confusing in a mess. And I don't log in every day on Instagram.

Facebook is a meaningless mess. Just give me some slider so I feel like I'm involved in the decision-making process. And maybe I'll do it bad. And then that can be an ongoing conversation between me and Facebook. Maybe Facebook could pop up once a month and like, how is this algorithm feeling to you? Like, do you want to see more of something? You want to see less of something? Let's work on this.

But just Facebook in the sky like God deciding how you should feel today is weird. I want there to be a button on Facebook news posts where when they get me and I pause and look at the auto playing video for three seconds. I want a button that's like, no, I didn't mean that. Stop. Stop it. Yeah. I just want to like. No, I'm sorry button.

I didn't mean to eat the cookie button. Obviously, I did because my hand went in the jar. But I want a take back button. Take back. Don't learn this. Yeah. Please don't learn this from better. Do as I say, not as I do.

I'm a lurker on the internet, so I mostly just scroll through things and read them. But news articles on Facebook, you need to click through to see the whole thing. So the only thing I'm engaging with on Facebook is news articles. Right. Because I'm not liking my friend's posts. So I'm not doing extra work to convince Facebook that I actually prefer the posts for my friends. Because the only action they see me take is clicking on news articles. Anyway, the lesson here is you should go to Facebook.com slash Dieterbone and like and subscribe to my page.

Yeah. That's a good lesson. Yeah. I mean, the most important lesson that I think the Birchcast can deliver. Yeah. Ultimately, I think Facebook knows it's like really broken and they don't want this responsibility. I think that's a huge change for that company. Right. Like they thought they were going to change the world, right?

Like they thought they were going to connect all the people in the world and it would be great. And they're like, wait, wait, we weren't prepared for this responsibility. We don't want it. So we're just going to go back to showing you funny things or friend share, which is funny because they also own Instagram, which is where that is already happening. So a question of what does Facebook become is really interesting. Like our reporters today, I was talking to a couple of them, Caitlin and Lauren, and they were saying Facebook, for them is overrun by like multi-level marketing schemes. Hmm.

Oh. Which is like terrible. But like it's perfect for the multi-level marketing because it's like a social network of people who are connected to the neck around. Facebook for me is overrun by Minneapolis Miracle Stefan Diggs' touchdown celebration videos. And it's the best. I hate you. I hate you.

You know what I don't see though? Is anything about the Packers? Weirdly. This is an ad for Hallow Fresh, which is a meal delivery service that has, graciously sponsored the verge this week. HelloFresh is a meal kit delivery service that shops, plans, delivers their favorite step-by-step recipes and pre-measured ingredients so you can just cook, eat, and enjoy.

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Classic veggie and family. Classic is a variety of meat, fish, and seasonal produce. Veggies, obviously, vegetarian recipes, plant-based proteins, and seasonal produce. Family is quick and easy meals with all the yum-worthy flavor your whole family will love. There's a bunch of notable recipes. We're just talking to Minnesota. There's a juicy-lucy-lucy salad. How do you feel about that, Deitor?

I wonder if it's good as a juicy-lucy you could get at Matt's bar. You would have to try HelloFresh to find out. Wow, you really brought that one back. There's a premium selection for dinner time. There's lobster ravioli and shrimp, tomatoes, tarragon cream sauce. There's kid tested recipes. Made specifically families in mind like easy ravioli, grating with spinach, time, and Parmesan bread crumbs.

Sounds delicious. So for $30 off your first week of HelloFresh, you will visit Hellofresh.com and enter the promo code Verge 30. That's V-E-R-G-E-0. So that's $30 off your first week of HelloFresh. Just go to Hellofresh.com and enter the promo. code Verge 30. Okay, Paul.

Every week, buddy. You do a thing. What's it called? It's called, win or lose two, the sequel to winning. All right. Okay. I'm ready for it.

This week we're talking about the GPD win two, which is basically a Windows laptop that is the size of a 3DS. It's got little joysticks on it. got a little, look, video game buttons. Also has a very, very tiny keyboard.

God, this thing is crazy. It's $650. It runs Grand Theft Auto 5. Wow. It runs Overwatch. It runs Skyrim. There's very specific frame rates. They've got 38 frames per second.

It's got a 720P screen, by the way, so that helps. But it's got 38 frames per second on Grand Theft Auto, 50 to 70 on Overwatch, 53 on Skyrim. So I guess you can decide if that's good enough for you. I mean, none of those games are, I guess Grant that Dotto's great with J. Oh, it's got a M3, 7Y30 chip. That's actually not the worst thing ever. It's like MacBook class. And it's got 2,4,900-m-amp batteries, so maybe you can do this for more than 30 minutes.

Yeah. I don't know. It's cool. Just make this my work laptop. Please do. Okay. I would love to see this. Yeah, I just love weird.

form factors and there's like really obsessive communities about this specific form factor and here they are more more winning. Indiegogo we saw a lot of weird form factors at CS actually Yeah my favorite there's Was it Dell made the keyboard

With a maglev? It was like magnets holding the keys up? It's amazing Yeah I heard about that but is it There was magnets provided the force feedback on it Dang right I do magnets we're going to cut through What you want is a keyboard full of magnets It just like doesn't seem like

I was raised to keep magnets away from That was just because of hard drives. Yeah. Hard drives really. Right, they were magnetic. Yeah. But it's still like, it's still built into me. Right.

Like I'm still like, I don't know, magnets and computer is not a thing. But maglev keyboard. Yeah, why not? And then there was a little Android. Oh, the cyan alike. Yeah. Yeah. I love that thing.

That's cute. That's my new phone. Laptop. Phopopopop. And Project Linda. Everything was great at Tia. I'm clearly just exhausted now. It's like PTSD sitting in.

I'm still looking for a laptop that's the size of a full-size keyboard, but doesn't have the track part. You know what I mean? So full-size, my hands can really spread out and get some real typing. But, like, Sony had one of those. What was that called? The IOPP.

We have one sitting in a little library over there. A little bit more of that. Yeah. You can get an iPad Pro, 12-inch iPad Pro, the keyboard. or that. That's what you want. That's what everybody wants. That's what cookie wants.

Wow. All right. Two tiny pieces of news. I wanted to have a whole rant about Project Fi and how they used to be morally good and true and you could trust them, but now you can't trust them at all because they introduced an unlimited plan, but they didn't even have the decency to call it unlimited

and said they called it Bill Protection and all carriers are evil and screw those guys, but it's not true. It's just actually a pretty good plan. You can't spend more than 60 bucks worth of data per month. So basically between 6 and 15 gigs per line, that's like free data for you. It still costs 10 bucks per gig. And then above 6, it's free.

And then once you hit 15, they throttle you to 256K. But you can pay them 10 bucks to unthrottle you again. And like, just keep running. I don't know. They don't provide quite as much fine print as I would like. which is the thing that feels very weird to say, but it's true. Anyway, it seems like a pretty good deal. I just wish that I was actually talking to a guy who works at FI yesterday.

I just wish that it was easier to take FI and put it in any phone to start the plan. Not like once you have a Nexus phone, you put the FI SIM in, you can like stick it in other phones and everything's basically a wonderland of T-Mobile experience for your data signal. but if I want to just get Project Fi, you can't really start it without Nexus or a MotoX4, which is a bummer. I would like this plan if they also had a T-Mobile style experience where you can like toggle. Like I want unlimited Twitch streaming. But when I'm using my mobile data, I don't need 1080P Twitch. Right.

Yeah. So they're not throttling video resolution at all. Right. Which I appreciate. The thing I like about FI is it's just this is what it costs the end. It's $10 per gig. It's $20 per phone line in the end. I hate many things about FI.

It's tied to Nexus phones, or I'm sorry, pixel phones or whatever. Each phone number has to be tied to a unique Gmail address, which is annoying, blah, blah, blah, blah. The, like, radical simplicity of it's $20 for phone and it's $10 per gig, and it doesn't cost more. You can go, you can order 50 data sims from them and have every single single thing. device that you own have a project Fy sim in it and it costs you zero dollars unless they have a phone number. Yep. Maybe I should switch to FI. Do you like, do you have good T-Mobile service in your area?

You should not switch to FI. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how T-Mobile feels about FI. I'm sure they don't even notice them. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like, I don't know how committed Google is to FI.

That is always a concern with Google. Right. I would love, yeah, I'd love to switch to FI, but I really just feel like I would watch too much Twitch and I'd blow through that. Yeah. And then everything would be throttled. Yeah. You'd pay the $100. No.

No. I like to pretend like I budget. And therefore I would like to pay one amount per month for my phone. This explains your entire net neutrality thing. It wasn't about you weren't standing on principle. You just wanted free Twitch. I think Paul said that out loud. Oh, okay.

Probably. No, I think I'd say very specifically. That's out loud. By the way, there's a bunch of that neutrality stuff going on. I'm just not terribly momentous, right? So a bunch of senators, they have 50 senators now. Yeah. They need one more.

They're going to try to force a vote against – there's a congressional review act. They can force a vote to make people vote up or down on whether you want to overturn the FCC's decision. I think that's obviously a political move because even if they win, need Trump. Probably not going to approve that act of Congress. No. But I think that's a very clever mechanism. to make... Put people on the record.

Put people on the record as voting against neutrality because people are always very politically active about it, as you may have guessed from our show. And then 22 state attorneys general, I love saying attorney, I love pluralizing it, are suing the FCC to, that they, you know, did the rules wrong, basically. Right, because the whole thing,

we talked about this at lengthen the show before, but the whole thing was that they needed substantial evidence of market conditions changing, that is the thing that the lawsuits are all going to be about. So there's net neutrality stuff. It's just that's news. There's not a lot of analysis you can do underneath it. Yeah.

But it's still out there. It's still happening. Speaking of things that are probably going to violate net neutrality, Verizon apparently wants to start its own new standalone streaming TV service. And I have a philosophical question for you. What is a difference between an app and a channel? This was Apple's whole thing. It's funny that they're like putting this out, like, it's new.

It's app-based channels or whatever. Apple's like, the future of TV channels is apps. And really all that means is instead of one interface, there'll be 5,000. Yeah. The way I think of it, because I'm old enough to remember TV Guide. Yeah. TV Guide listed what was happening in all the channels. Yeah.

So TV Guide was an app for the channels. Yeah. A paper app. Yeah. It's like Nintendo's Project Labo. But the future is paper apps. With apps, each, you could maybe find a channel inside of an app. Yeah.

But each TV guide would be inside of that app as well. Now, that's currently the case. Right. Right. So, like, Netflix has a different user interface than Hulu. Right. And it's just like, well, wow, this is hell. There used to be one grid, and now there's a grid of grids.

Yeah. And each grid has another grid inside. The grids are vertically fractional. The grids are fertile. App channels are a grid of grids, is what we're saying. All right. I think, as I promise at the top of the show, we are very tired, not particularly sensible. App channels are a grid of grids, I believe, is where we're going to end this episode of the Vergecast.

Thank you for listening to this. As always, our sleeping ones are, in my mind the most fun. I had a great time, Eli. You did great, Paul. Thanks, thanks. Like a really good job. Thank you. Yeah.

I love having Deter here, too. We just end every show. Thanking each other. Like really sincerely thanking each other. There's a Star's album that begins with every member of the band's saying, my name is, well, the lead singer's name is Torque. So, like, my name is Torque. And that's how the thing begins.

It's very cute. It's a great album. You should listen to it. Anyway, that was The Vergecast. It ended with me just describing the beginning of an album from my year of 2000s. So that's where we are today as a family. We'll be back next week. We got all kinds of things going on.

Circuit Breaker shows coming back. We're thinking about ways to improve. prove it. Send us your ideas. If you watch that at CS or you've been watching on Twitter before, we're going to move it to YouTube. It's happening. But send us your ideas about a circuit break of a show.

You too. Anyhow, send us your ideas on that. Watch that if you haven't. Why did you push that button? He's going to come back for a second season. I think Andrew and Caitlin and Ashley are hard at work on questions to ask about various buttons. But whole first season, 10 episodes, it's out there.

You just binge listen to it. Go crazy. Ask yourself, why did I push all of these buttons? Ten hours later, you'll have some answers. So listen to that. You can also listen to Lauren Good. I'm too embarrassed to ask. That's on the Recode Network.

She hosts out with Kara Swisher. Keraswisher hosts Recode Decode and Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media, which is wonderful. You can also listen to our rivals on the weeds. But let them know that you're there. We are tech. I mean, they're Vox.com. We're part of Vox Media also. So you'd say we're on the same team

that our podcast together constitutes a team of rivals. Oh, my God. Did you just make straight up Obama Lincoln joke on this podcast? Thanks for listening. We are done. The promo code is promo code. Rock and roll. Paul.

We're at Abraham Lincoln Jokes. Good night, everybody. Rock and roll. Paul.