The Vergecast - OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro review / Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Pichai testify before Congress once again

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk with Verge reporter Allison Johnson about her review of the One Plus 9 and how it compares with their 9 Pro and other Android flagship phones. Politics reporter Makena Kelly joins the show the discuss Congress’ first hearing of 2021 with the chief executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Further reading: AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine 79 percent effective in US study US officials publicly question AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine data Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine website builds on a swine flu tool OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro announced with Hasselblad-branded cameras OnePlus 9 review: cheaper than the Pro and almost as good The lower-cost OnePlus 9R is official, and it sounds surprisingly strong OnePlus 9 Pro review: the elegant Android alternative Here’s how the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro compare to Samsung and Apple’s flagships The $159 OnePlus Watch is OnePlus’ first smartwatch Angry MacBook owners get class action status for butterfly keyboard suit Intel invests $20 billion into new factories, will produce chips for other companies Intel Unleashed, Gelsinger on Intel, IDM 2.0 - Stratechery The startup trying to augment audio reality in public spaces Yes or no: Are these tech hearings doing anything? Mark Zuckerberg proposes limited 230 reforms ahead of congressional hearing Jack Dorsey is just trolling Congress with Twitter polls now  Lina Khan is just the first step toward tougher US tech regulation Congress tries to get the FTC in fighting shape Microsoft rebrands Xbox Live to Xbox network The street prices of Nvidia and AMD GPUs are utterly out of control Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Allison Johnson joins us talk about the 1 plus 9 and 9 Pro. Dieter and I talk about Intel and a MacBook class action lawsuit. And then McKenna Kelly joins to talk about the latest disaster congressional hearing for big tech CEOs. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on

someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash 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 I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Redcast, the flagship podcast of congressional hearings. This will be one hour talking about Congress. No, that's not true, although there will be some talking about Congress. I'm your friend, Eli. Deirdre Bono is here. I'm your daily misinterpretation of how the First Amendment works. Very good.

Allison Johnson's here. Hello. I don't have anything to follow that. I'm just here. It's tough. Welcome to the Vergecast. It's a second shot. This is the one where you start really getting into the chaos of the show.

A little bit later, McKenna Kelly is going to join us. And we are going to talk about the congressional hearing on 230 that is, as we record, continues to take place chaotically. So I'm excited to talk to her about that. little bit later. Allison and Dieter are going to talk about the one plus nine reviews they did. There's some other gadget news in the mix. But as always, I want to start with COVID, the biggest story in the world. And right now, very much in the vaccines, who can get them, where are they? How can you get them phase of our one year long COVID experience? A bunch of news that we have on the site, you can go read it. Our science team is always covering the hell out of this.

The big kind of debate happening right now is around the AstraZeneca vaccine, which as of this morning, is not being reported as 76% effective. Here and around the world, officials are questioning it. We have a lot of coverage of that on the site. You can go read it. It is some combination of a science and public relations disaster for AstraZeneca. Yeah. Mostly the public relations, I think. But it doesn't help when you want people to trust the science when you're screwing up your messaging left and right.

Yeah. In the meantime, many, many, many doses of this vaccine are being held in the United States. They are approved in other countries. So there's some debate over the way should ship them before they go bad. We have a story called Welcome to the Age of Vaccine Diplomacy, which I promise you I will not fall down the hole of patent policy. But there's a raging debate about vaccines, the patents, letting other companies manufacture those vaccines outside the patent rules. it is not a great look for the United States right now. We're being very protective of the vaccine patents. Maybe we shouldn't be. But that is all happening. You can read about that on the site. I have to note, it has been two weeks since President Joe Biden announced that he would have a website by May 1st. Yeah.

That would let anybody find a vaccine. Here's a thing. It already exists. You just go to it. It builds an existing tool. I used it. There are vaccine sites around me that just show up. Some of the data is out of date.

like the part they're building it out. So unlike the last time, they're just expanding an existing tool. But we are going to hold them accountable to this May 1st step line. But it has been two weeks since he announced it. I continue to count. I will say that I went and got my first shot. Congratulations. Can I tell you this?

I had to drive an hour and a half away because I live in the woods. So I drove an hour and a half away. I will just, this is the thing that struck me about it. So I drove to like a local college, like gymnasium. It was basketball court. I got my vaccine. effectively a basketball court. And when you think about the army,

because it was staffed by people in the army, in their fatigues, when you think about an army taking over like a community college basketball court, that's dystopia, right? That's the end of the world. But this was like a party because everyone was so happy

that they're getting their shots. It was just the weirdest mashup of like how it looked and how he thought it was going to feel. And what was actually happening? I was just about to make a red dawn joke, but literally nobody would get it because nobody's old as I am. No, they remade that movie recently.

Like maybe like 10 years ago. Yeah, but does that remake count? Let's be honest. No, it's very bad. Anyway, if you are eligible, please go to one of the many, many websites. We actually have a story about how the websites are slow. They're being crushed under demand. The website that Biden is promising, hopefully will alleviate that burden, consolidate some data.

But if you can go, please go. And then lastly, we have a great story about people are leaving Google. reviews for the vaccination sites, and they're just very sweet and very earnest. So I go read that because it's the beginning of the end is here, basically, is how I feel. And after one full year of this, the shot took 10 seconds and I was on my way. So please, if you can, go get vaccinated. Hopefully it opens up as wide as president is promising. And that website continues to work.

We are tracking it very closely. We will continue to hold the administration accountable for their promises. But the website, you just go to it. So just go to it and see. Okay. Big reviews this week, Deeder. Yeah, I also reviewed the One Plus Nine. I reviewed the One Plus Nine Pro.

There's a wireless charger in the mix. There's a watch come in. One Plus held an event where they once again did the thing where there's a person standing on a virtual stage and they're like, look at the phone and then a giant floating phone appears next to them. Just like 50 foot tall phone just floating in space on the video. It was a lot.

Just look at how stunning the One Plus 9 Pro is. Okay, so One Plus, you heard us talk about, one plus a bunch. Last year with the 1 plus 8 and 8 pro, the story was like they're finally ready to take Samsung on head on. They're like they're going to go beat Samsung. And this year, like,

it's a little bit harder to tell the story because it's like, yep, they did it. They're legitimately a contender to Samsung now. So now this is their next shot. So it's a bit of an iteration story. But, you know, they did a bunch of really interesting things. And the big debate for me, honestly, is like

between the 9 and the 9 pro. You've got a million things to say about the Hasselblad partnership, but I think to me, the most interesting discussion is if you want this one plus phone, do you go for the nine or the nine pro? You reviewed them both, but what is the big difference between the two? Basically, for the nine, you're losing out on a few things, but it's not too much. You don't get the very fast wireless charging. You do still get like 15 watt wireless.

You don't get the brand new image sensor in the main camera. And weirdly, you don't get optical image stabilization in that camera, which is kind of the biggest bummer. You don't get a telephoto lens and you are not going to get millimeter wave. But outside of that, you get a whole lot. You get the fast 120 hertz refresh rate screen. You get the Snapdragon 888 processor. You do get the ultra-wide lens, which I love. I could go on about that.

Yeah, it's really, I mean, what struck me is you do keep all the really important things and you save like 240 bucks if you choose the nine. So for me it's kind of a no-brainer, but maybe I'm biased because I spent so much time with it. Well, on that list, like you, I think like the rail is plastic too apparently on the nine. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an aluminum. You look at that list and it's like, yep, that's the thing you would hold back if you were trying to save 240 bucks. the only thing on that list that makes me go, ah, really is the optical image stabilization.

That's the only one I'm like, yeah, that one, it feels like you were just trying to push people to upgrade to the pro. But everything else, it's like, yeah, you made a great phone at a great price. Here's a thing we should get into. There's no millimeter wave on the nine. I don't think that's a huge loss. Both the nine and the nine pro are support 5G on T-Mobile, or rather T-Mobile supports 5G on the 9-9-Pro. T-Mobile is selling these phones. Verizon has not certified it for 5G, which is a completely,

different process from getting, you know, certified for 4G or just working on locked on 4G. And AT&T is just never going to or... Really? Yeah. Just never going to get 5G on AT&T. Is that bans? Is that a certification process? Is that...

Okay. Let me put on my, like, monopoly bad guy hat. Okay. Let me be the voice, the voice of corporate America. Somebody at 1 Plus gave Justice League a bad review and AT&T is bad. No. Okay. So if you are, if you're running...

the wireless side of AT&T, which I have to specifically call out because AT&T owns Batman. So you're not the Batman executive at AT&T. You're the wireless executive AT&T. You are terrified of churning off your customers. Okay. Same with Verizon and T-Mobile. You're terrified that your customers are going to turn off to another provider. You have this huge new network that you are desperately hoping is the thing that causes an upgrade cycle

in a new wave of multi-year contracts and family plans. Okay. You're like, the network is the reason you're going to sign up for AT&T, not the iPhone, because you can get the iPhone everywhere. Why would you let somebody attach a phone to your network without locking them into a contract? So. I mean, apart from the fact that you're evil, like, anti-competitive, like, but that's the rationale here, right? They've got the new network. The old network, you can just like plug and play, mix and match, use an e-sim and just like push the button on your phone and connect to.

Yeah. The new network, you're like, that's my baby. You can't have that unless you make a deal with me. I guess that makes sense. So are you saying that we're barreling towards a world where only Apple and Samsung are definitely going to be supported by all three networks and everybody else is just like going to have to hustle and we're going to go back to a world of like carrier exclusives? I mean, that's what this feels like, right? Yeah. But like even Apple and Samsung, like it's not necessarily true that any iPhone out of the box can connect to all three networks and work well.

Right, right. And it's certainly not true globally. So like there's just that first, there's the first like, I think, practical excuse of like you've got a lot of bands, you've got a lot of frequencies, antenna designs haven't been locked. Like all that early part of the network stuff. And then there's, I think, just the dead ahead business consideration of if you want 5G, we want to sign you up for a 5G plan and put you on a device contract and maybe sign up your whole family and maybe get you addicted to HBO Max. and then maybe just move into your house, and then maybe, like, tenicle our way into every other part of your home.

That's just my impression of AT&T in general. Yeah, I guess. I mean, there was some weirdness with, I think, Verizon and, like, just being supported by Verizon full stop last year. So some of this might just be one-plus execution. But, yeah, there's, like, there's weirdness with provisioning on 5G. Like, you can't just, like, use any old SIM card, then, especially on Verizon, I've had problems where, like,

I take a SIM card out of one phone and put another phone. I'm like, oh, you're going to screw up the 5G. I was like, why? How? I don't get it. Yeah, it's not great. Let me actually make the case for the OnePlus 9 Pro. You do get the faster wireless charging.

The charger is $70, which is a lot for a charger. But it works. It's really clever. So they do the thing where instead of, it's 4,500 milliamps of battery, but they split it between two cells. And so what they can do is they can charge both of those cells independently, which basically doubles your charging rate. And so that's how they get from zero to 140 minutes. The longevity of those cells getting charged up that fast

when they're like half the size is maybe something you could be worried about. But it's kind of cool. You get OIS. You just get, it's just like nicer, I guess, is how I would characterize it. It's just like you get the little telephoto. You kind of just have a nice high resolution. And it's just a little bit nicer. But I think that I would never recommend that anybody go do it unless I, like, can have a 20-minute

conversation with them about what they like and care about and understand about a phone. Like, if you go seek this phone out and you want the pro, like, good for you. I'm not, like, it's a fine decision. But if, you know, just, hey, I want to buy a one plus one, what should I get? Like, nine every time. I'd agree with that. And I've, that's kind of in my head. the difference between like the nine and the Samsung S-21 is that if you're knowledgeable and you

understand what you're getting into with the nine and you're really into those features like the fast wired charging, etc., is going to be an awesome phone for you. But if you're sort of like clueless and you don't care too much, like the Samsung S-21 is just going to be like the easier, like everything just works. You get all of the 5G, you get the tell. a photo, you get stabilization. It's all there. Yeah, it's all there, including the ads and the apps. It's great. Yeah. Every time you check the weather. One Post doesn't even really have a big price advantage anymore, and that was their thing. They have a small price advantage. The pro is 970,

and then it's 100 bucks more to get the 256, and then the 9 is 729 is what I'm looking at here. Yeah. Yeah, so it's still quite a bit cheaper than the S-21. So you're paying less, you're getting a little bit less. It just kind of depends on you if you're getting a good deal out of that. If those are the things you really want, then you'll get a good phone. My perception of Samsung prices is they launch with a price. Yeah. And then if you just wait four months, like every carrier will be like, would you like three free? Four days. Just like bam. Yeah. It's like you can get like you can get a two for one Samsung deal if you just like wait patiently enough. Yep. So like that the price advantage of it's like you It just depends on the moment in time.

The list price, they definitely have the advantage, but, you know, I don't think 1-plus is going to discount as heavily as Samsung traditional discounts. So often when we have these debates about, you know, this phone versus the other phone, it comes down to which one has the better camera. I think in this case, that's not quite the necessarily the right way to think about this decision, because, I mean, I'll just tell you that S-21, definitely the S-20 Ultra, but probably the S-21, like, has a better camera, at least a better camera holistic experience. but I prefer using, as long as you're not turning on and like pixel peeping the photos,

I prefer using the Oneplus phones over Samsung phones, like pretty much every time. Yeah, I get that. Yeah, it just feels less Samsung. Yeah. And they were going in the right direction with one UI, and then they're just like, they're just backsliding. But we should talk about the camera. So the Hasselblad partnership. It's a $150 million three-year deal, and the first part of that deal is tuning the

colors to get that Hasselblad look. Also, I've never shot with a Hasselblad. I don't know that I could tell you, oh, I know exactly what to expect out of a Hasselblad. I, like, you know, I've watched other people in Verstaff use them. Like, do you get any of that Hasselblad essence out of this thing? I have

no idea. No, I've taken like two photos with the Hasselblad and it was terrifying both times, pushing the shutter. I mean, that's not really it's funny when they start talking about the color tuning because it's not something I'm aware of as being like a big Hasselblad advantage. It's nice. And I think like I don't,

I find it a kind of problematic like natural color. Like what does that mean? Do we really want natural color out of our phones? But regardless, I mean, they've done a nice job. I think it does a really good job with landscapes. But I wouldn't go, you know, I'm not over the moon about it. It's, It's fine. Yeah, it's fine. And it's right on the line of like complete bullshit that there's something there. Right? There's something there.

They did do some stuff. Like they get a little bit of credit. It's not just a logo, but it's not like way more. We had this thing in the line of the video where I like had like the scale. I think Marquez actually put it in his video of the scale of like complete just a just a logo deal to like Hasselblad made the camera. And it's like a three. two and a half. So zero, wait, zero is a logo deal.

Yeah, zero is a logo deal. Ten is Hasselblad made the camera. Right. And so you're saying this is like a three. Like a two point five. I don't know. Where would you put it? Yeah, it's right about there.

Like a healthy three. That's like someone in Hasselblad saw the camera. Yeah, no, that's literally what it is. They had like their Hasselblad, you know, evangelists or whatever they are, ambassadors. Like check out the photos and give their thumbs up or thumbs down on the color science. Yeah. I mean, it's promising that they're saying eventually there will be elements of Hustleblot design in the optics and the sensor. So they're threatening to go into like a five, six territory, but not quite. The scale is just extremely real now.

Yeah. While we're on the color thing, I want to talk about the ultra-b, but we're on the color thing. I do think it's fair to say that One Plus is trying to develop its own look. It's like if you took Samsung's vibrancy, turned it down a notch, and then, then you took the pixel's tendency to make things blue and just a little bit of the iPhone's tendency to flatten out highlights and shadows. That's where One Plus lives right now. And I would say that it gets into trouble more often than it should. It's great for landscapes, but it will just sometimes make the blue sky just so Azure, so crazy that it like veers into purple. So sometimes it just, it's aiming to do something.

and it just like overshoots the mark. It does the same thing with sharpening a bunch. But like if you're not opening it up on a desktop and like, you know, going to 100% on the pixels, a lot of the times you don't notice it. But like that, some of that those color misses, like you're going to see it because you know, color you can see on any screen. Well, also, I'm curious because you know, your background is camera reviewing. Like you came to us from DP review.

You were at a different camera review site before that. Now we have doing phone reviews. I think that makes a lot of sense because all. almost all we talk about in our phone reviews is cameras. Like, Deeter and I have had this debate for years. We've had it with our audience for years. Where do you measure the quality of the photo? Is it on the screen of the device itself, or is it off in the world?

Because my instinct is off in the world. That is not everyone else's instinct by far. But I think, like, you need to take all the photos off the cameras and then look at them on a neutral screen because then you can actually compare them. And then the very good counter argument, which I completely buy, I just, just not me, is, well, you're only going to ever look at them on the phones themselves. So the only place to really measure the quality is like on a phone screen because 99% of people will never take that photo to another screen. Yeah, and it's so easy to lose track of that, especially when you're looking for the differences. like the differences between a camera on, you know, any modern flagship is kind of in those

details, aside from like big color differences like you mentioned, Deeter. So as reviewers, you go, we go in and we're looking for those things and we're trying to see what they're doing and who has an edge where. But you do have to kind of step back and be like, hold on. I'm looking at this at 100%. I've been pouring over this image for five minutes. Someone's going to look at it for two seconds on their phone and, like, scroll by. And so, yeah, you do always have to keep in mind that, like, the bar for the consumer and that it's probably different from what we're looking at.

I just feel like for the longest time, our criticism of One Plus phones was the camera isn't any good. Yep. And then, you know, they sign this deal. They got a 2.5 brand deal out of it with Hasselblod. And now we're like, I said this around the iPhone review time, too. It's like all the flagships basically look the same. Like the idea that they have looks has all but faded away. Like three years ago, they all had looks.

And like, what One Plus is selling here is Hustleblood has a look and we're going to get you that look. And like, maybe they're inching towards it. But I just like, is more and more parts of the phone have like collapsed than we've ended up with, we're going to really look at the cameras. Because that was the place where in particular Apple and Google were so far ahead. Even that is flattening out, right? Yep. Yeah, and one thing that kind of struck us in our conversation with One Plus was just asking them about the computational photography aspects of what the camera's doing.

And, you know, Google and Apple spend so much time every year on what they're doing differently with, you know, multi-frame capture and tiling and all this. And it wasn't really a big focus for One Plus, which is not. to say that they aren't doing it or they aren't innovating on it. It was just kind of a striking difference between, you know, they've really gone in on this, this Hasselblad brand and kind of getting people to think about that with their cameras as opposed to doing all the computational stuff.

And I don't know. It's interesting. Are they doing the computational stuff? I believe so. I mean, we didn't get into it this round. Deider, you've had many more briefings with one. than I have. Yeah, so they are, but they, like Allison said, they can't just talk your ear off about it. It's, it's sort of like, other companies will, like, happily give you, like, literally

the camera engineer or, like, one step away from the camera engineer. One Plus doesn't do that quite as much. So you're left to guess a little bit more about what the, you know, the actual behavior of the camera is behind the scenes. On the whole, I prefer these two the Samsung phones, but I think Allison's right that, like, for most people, the Samsung phones are probably like an easier bet because you're just like, you're more guaranteed to get the whole package. But the thing that shocked me going into this review

and this like completely informed my angle for writing it is I was like, you know, I should check on One Plus's market share. And it's just like nothing. They got nothing. Zippo in the US. They're worse than the pixel. If you're not beating the pixel, you got problems.

So this is definitely still like, like, One Plus is trying to not be a phone for enthusiasts and like their brand has definitely moved in that direction. And like any normal person could go get a Oneplus and feel good about that phone. It's not just for enthusiasts anymore, but it's just for enthusiasts. Like, that's who's buying it. Well, yeah, I mean, the phone market right now is, you know, there's all these rumors that LG is going to sell its phone division. Yep.

They're also doing better than One Plus in terms of U.S. sales. Well, that's just not great. Yeah, that's just the U.S. Like, One Plus has a huge market outside the U.S. Yeah, yeah. Of course. LG is like at the point where they're like, well, we're not Samsung, we might as well focus on washing machines. Like we've got a better washing machine business.

Let's just turn our attention to refrigerators. This one costs $5,000 and makes ice in a circle. Yeah. Like that's their engineering attention. And they're just never going to win in phones. That's really, to me, the big question is Sony has all but dropped out. We're kind of like waiting for the other shoe to drop with Google. It just feels like every year they're, you know, we'll get a Google executive to tell us that they're really committed to the pixel.

And then it turns out they're not. I don't know how it's to describe that repeated interaction. One Plus is trying, but they have nothing. Samsung sales, I'm just looking, strategy analytics, S-21 tripled sales the S-20. Yep. Because of the immediate price cuts. And so we're just kind of back in this like Apple and Samsung race. Yep.

And it kind of feels like that the race is between iOS and Android. And then the Android market is just flattened itself into Samsung. Yeah, pretty much. In the U.S. anyway, there's other markets are. completely different. India is a completely different market. Of course, there's China. Even like South America, Kim Lyons actually had a really good story today that Motorola has localized the language in the phone for a couple of indigenous languages that are at risk of going away, which is really cool. And Motorola's actually really strong in Latin America. There's differences in

other markets. But yeah, in the U.S., like it's Samsung and Apple. And it's like, but that's what it is. Actually, we should talk about the 9R, Allison, because that, Speaking of India is like going to be potentially an interesting deal. Yeah. So wasn't part of the big unveil of the 1 plus 9 and 9 plus, but the 9R is going on sale in India only for now. The price equates to like 550 bucks US dollars. And it's another case of like you still get a whole lot. There's 6.5 inch display with 120 hertz refresh rate like the.

one plus nine, there's a step-down in processor, but you're still getting an 870 snapdragon chip set. And then you don't get the Hossabad branding on the camera, but you get the main camera from the 8T last year, which was pretty good. Yeah. And you do get optical image stabilization on that one. So there you go. What the hell? That makes no sense.

Is that just a different, it's like the hustle lot of people were like, we're not paying attention and they just like snuck it in the door. Super weird, right? It's so confusing. I don't know. So yeah, there's a couple other things like you don't get quite the fastest wired charging. There's no wireless charging. You know, you don't get the fancy new ultra wide camera. But yeah, it's potentially, it looks like a pretty smart set of tradeoffs to get like a, like,

a meaningfully lower price. So it'll be interesting to see if it makes it over this way. We didn't get the Nord last year. You know, there's a big, big gap between the N105G, which is in the $300 kind of category and the, you know, the 9 and the 9 Pro. So this could fit in there pretty easily. Yeah.

Then there's the watch, the one plus watch. It's $159. bucks. I will just tell you, the Vergecast listener, between us friends, I asked what the operating system was, and all we know is that it's an RTOS. It's a real-time operating system. Oh my God. That's what we know.

Which means it's not wear OS, which is generally thought of as a positive. It looks like the spitn image of one of the round opo watches. Yeah. And I'm sure it's basically running the same operating system. So it's kind of like a Fitbit operating system. It should last about two weeks.

It's got a bunch of like It's got a blood oxygen sensor and a step counter and GPS and blah, blah, blah, blah, all of which are going to be in One Plus's health app. I don't know if it'll connect to Google Fit yet or not. I think it'll be fine, but you should not expect third-party app support. You should not expect an ecosystem around it. I'm glad it only costs 160 bucks because that is right now, unless you really, really, really want it, spending more than $200 on a smart watch for Android is rough, right? It looks nice.

Yeah, it looks fine. I'll give it that. I mean, it's fully an appliance. Like, think of it as an appliance. Like, you don't care, hopefully, what operating system your washing machine runs, if it has an operating system, right? It might. Some of them do.

You don't really care what operating system your, like, you know, Echo has. Not really, right? So think of it like that. It's going to do some stuff, but it's going to do the stuff that it does when open the box and set it up for the first time, and never anything more than that stuff. Yeah. I mean, I just, you know, the entire watch market is like, because no watchmaker can adequately address the iOS consumer base, they can't, I mean, like, overwhelmingly, like, rich people

have iPhones. Like, that's just the, like, you can feel about that however you want. There are many ways to feel about that. But it is just true that that is how the market is split. So if you can't spend the money to make the most expensive thing because that market for you, like, people with a lot of money to spend who don't have iPhones is just a smaller number of people. Right. So like making that product for them, like it's just like not a good idea. What you want is to make a product that people with iPhones can buy because then you can make the most expensive one and like get that virtuous cycle of innovation.

And as long as Apple just sort of like doesn't admit or doesn't deny that they're keeping other. people from making watches that work well with iOS? They don't say anything about it, but like you can't get rich notifications and respond to text from a watch if you have an iPhone when any of their watch. Like they have limited the connectivity. I think it's always going to be stuff like this one plus watch. Like there just isn't a market for the high end watch that connects to an Android phone. Sure.

Because so much of the phone ownership, like so many phone owners who would otherwise buy it are just funneled towards an Apple watch. Okay, yeah, I'll buy that. But like this watch, even like the, you know, the Fitbit, the Versus of the world, running a lighter weight operating system, like can be very good. They survive the three-second rule or the two-second rule, I think it is. No, I call it the three-second rule. Like, no operation on your watch, you take more than three seconds.

Yeah. Right? Because if it does, you're done. But since Google put all its money in slow-ass wear OS and all its effort there, and we don't know what they're doing right now, you know, with Fitbit, But there's no sense of anybody being able to build that ecosystem other than Samsung with Tyson. But like, try and get a good map app on the Tyson smart watches. I have and you can't.

And even just like one of the two things that we know people buy watches for, it's notifications and health stuff. Yep. And like, you know, Tim Cook is out there saying Apple's biggest contribution to the world will be health stuff. Like that is his thesis for his tenure at Apple. and generationally what Apple will do for the world. I don't know how the Apple TV fits into that, but I'm confident they're working on it. You can use Apple Fitness on the Apple TV.

You like to ask you, you know, which person ties to the Apple Watch? You need a lot of mental and physical dexterity to use the remote. Yeah, that's true. It's like a puzzle every time. But anyway, but he's saying, like that's his thing.

He's building the sensors into the watch. I know it doesn't work with, what was the thing you were complaining about, Ant Plus with your bicycle? That's true. That's true. Like they're building a second proprietary wireless protocol. called, you know, gym kit next to the, like, they're doing stuff around the watch that makes it a little computer. And everyone else is kind of like stuck in limbo.

Yeah. I think this watch is like just a really good example of how far the two paths have diverged. Right. Like Apple is like multiple, multiple steps ahead. And One Plus is like, it's $159. It's very pretty. We won't tell you what operating system it runs. And on our chart of features, we're going to list that we're going to list the pixel density.

because that's what we got. Like we got a fill in the square. Like what else do we got? But, you know, good try for them. All right. We got to take a break. Allison, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

The video's up. Real collab effort, coast to coast, Deeter and Allison. Go watch the video, read your views. We got some gadget news to talk about. The McKenna is going to join us. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade,

no-code website builder used by teams at companies like perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist

or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance in burning out while you're trying to scale.

Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more than 125 categories. So you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review pass work, and get help scoping. the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus.

Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher 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 UPWRK. com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back.

Kind of big gadget news, like big tech news. Yeah. Of the kind we didn't really get before. I feel like in the four years of Trump, like stuff like this, just like fell by the wayside. Yeah. But it was nice to see. Like, Intel had a big analyst event, new CEO, big new plan. And like, there was just enough slack in the tech news ecosystem that everyone can pay attention

to it. Yeah. And be like, oh, wow. I actually think about this for a minute. Yeah. So Intel's doing a lot of the right things. They are going to build more factories. They're going to set up a business to sell their chips to other companies,

which is important because they're also going to allow other companies to, like, make system on packages with their X-86 chips. So they're going to have more customers that are able to do more interesting things with their core chips. And they're also going to, in addition to all of that, start outsourcing. the manufacturer of some of the stuff they want to make so that they can just leverage how far ahead of them TSM is, basically.

So Intel's big problems where they couldn't get down to five nanometers or even seven and, you know, that meant that they were behind Arm and behind, you know, Apple stuff for the desktop and like, just like everything kind of rolls out from there. And so they have this

multi-pronged effort to like set themselves up to actually participate in the modern economy of devices and computers in a way that they kind of haven't been, right? They had the modem business and then they're making chips and then the chips were for desktops and PCs and then, you know, servers. And slowly but surely the way that computers are just made, you know, the way that things are customized on the chip, the way that things are packaged, the, you know, Arm versus X86, slowly but surely things modernized in a way that they just could

produce for. And it's not just about the nanometers. It's about all of it. And so they're trying to say they've got it. They know what to do now. Yeah, I would, I mean, I would take, yeah, who knows, right? Yeah, there was a long pause there, which Andrew may or may not cut out, but it was me shrugging saying, can they execute on all of the stuff? I think the more important thing is like, this isn't Intel pivoting. It's Intel got rid of a CEO, hired a CEO that had been at Intel for many years had left, his come back. I'm going to say this.

He should watch the presentation. This is not what he, Pat Gelsinger's new CEO. His whole vibe is like, the returning warrior. Right. Like that's what he's saying. He's like,

I'm back to fix it. Yep. But if you watch the video, he's very nerdy and earnest. So it's not like a super aggressive vibe. It's just a very confident, I know what to do. And to your point, Deeter,

he said over and over and over. again, what we have to do is execute. And we have to go back to the like Intel standards. He had this one line that is just really stuck with me. Mostly because I, on the other podcast, I just talked to a lot of executives. And so like, I'm always on the, I'm always attuned to like the catchphrases of companies because you just hear them. They come out. And he's like, we got to go back to when we say we're going to do X, we deliver 1.1 X. Right. And it's like out to the world that means nothing. Right. Like, what does that mean? I am confident in. of Intel, like, they're always saying that.

Yeah, right? For sure. That's like the corporate culture reboot of the new CEO and the like lack of, you know, not invented here pride. Like they are spinning out a chip manufacturing business where they're going to make armed chips. And they're going to let other companies do stuff. They're going to make X86 chips at TSMC on their seven nanometer process.

Like he's like, all this preciousness is gone and we're just going to compete. Can they do it? I don't know. You know, we didn't really talk about the ads that, the Intel ads that they just made where they went up against Apple. We didn't talk about them enough. They made them, they're silly. Justin Long is silly. Like, that part of it is silly.

And as I watched this presentation, I realized, oh, they made those ads for the people who worked at Intel. No, yeah, for sure. They didn't make them for regular consumers. They made it until just like rah, raw of the team. Yep. And I wonder how effective that is, but it's always a, you know, interesting to think about who the audience for that stuff is. Because if you're Intel, all you've heard about is how Apple kicked your ass for like a year. Well, that's all they've heard.

There's also like the context of who is buying Intel chips. And it's, you know, it's from a consumer front, it's like down to like laptops and some desktops, right? Really, if you think about it. But they sell a bunch to cloud service providers, right? But can they get back on Android? They tried that for a hot minute. Can they get into other smaller devices? Can they get into any number of other things that they just haven't been doing. So they need to make everybody feel good about what they're good at on PCs, and they need to maintain that as long as they can while they start diversifying into all this other stuff. Yeah.

And I think the real question is all that other stuff. It's probably still not mobile, which is the big market. But we just talked about it in the United States. There's only two companies in mobile, really. Yeah. So to run a phone, you just need a constellation of data centers. That is the reality of your phone. Like, yep, there's a chip in your phone.

That chip's really important. Apple's very good at making those chips. Qualcomm is very good at making those chips. Intel is not so good at making those chips at all. They literally are just, they don't even do it because they're bad at it. But everything your phone connects to you is run off a data center, which is full at this point. There's a little bit of a transition going on. But right now, most part, it's full.

The data centers are full of. Intel chips. Yeah. And that transition is actually the scary thing because as like there's experiments with doing some arm stuff on those big servers, a lot of companies are like, oh shit, this is great. There's like stuff that we can do

and stuff that we can customize. Ben Thompson made this point in Strateree. It's one of his free newsletters. You should go look at it. Where when you buy an Intel chip, you're buying like a bunch of stuff that like your server doesn't need. Right.

And so you could like not have, if you could customize the thing to not include that stuff and make the stuff you do care about better, you're going to do that. And it's easier to do that on arm right now than it is with Intel. And that's the thing that they need to fix really fast. Yeah. Again, the question comes down to how fast can they execute? How fast can they spin up their foundry business?

How much, you know, demand can they pick up? Can they pull it off? And the things that work in their favor, which, you know, we're about to have McKenna on to, like, get into the weeds of, like, social media moderation policy, There's another gigantic policy problem in this country, which is like most of the chips are manufactured elsewhere. Right. There's a microchip shortage in the world right now. I think we mentioned this last week or the week before. But like GM is just manufacturing pickup trucks without a fuel economy chip in them.

So they're getting one mile per gallon less than the pickups with the chip. And they're just like, screw it. Like we're not going to not make pickup trucks. We're shab. It's like it's all we're here to do. we're just going to make it without the chip. Game consoles, massive shortages, because there's just not enough chip production capability.

So Intel is saying, look, we have chip production capability. We can pick up some of this demand that's not way on the bleeding edge. We'll make other people's designs. We'll ship our designs to other foundries. And by the way, United States and EU governments, we're not in China or a Chinese company. Yeah, we're going to put our factories in your countries. Yeah.

And I think that element of it, again, Again, over the 10 years the Verge existed, like, we haven't really talked about the geopolitics of chip manufacturing that much. And I feel like over the next, over the run of Pat Gelsinger's tenure as Intel CEO, we're going to end up talking about geopolitics of chip manufacturing a lot. Yep. But we're still going to talk about monopoly because can, but honestly, because can Intel, because things are moving on, like Qualcomm phone chips are made differently now than they were when Intel was trying, right? Can Intel build up the capabilities to make those kinds of chips? You know, can they catch up faster than everybody else is running ahead? You know what I mean?

Because I would love for that to happen because I would love to see some real genuine competition for Qualcomm on the high end. I really would. It would be nice to have some good Arm Windows laptops. That would be great. We have seen what happens with the Mac when it moved to Arm, and it just hasn't happened yet for Windows. And I would love that. I would love for Intel to, like, drive that. I don't know if they're going to be able to get there in time.

Yeah. I mean, in time is, like, really, what's the deadline? Deadline is Qualcomm figuring it out. They got all the time in the world. That's like, that's your deadline. Like, your deadline is the Surface Pro or whatever, Pro X? Yeah. Like that, if you're Intel and you're like, oh, we got to, we got to figure this out before the Surface ProX is great.

Like, who, pressure is off. Yeah. I think their real deadline is arm in, in data centers. But that is an entirely different topic. Anyway, we are trying very hard to get Pat Gelsinger on Decoder. If you're at Intel, just slack him. Just let him know. Don't do that.

Please don't do that. Please don't do that. We are going through official channels. But, you know, if you see him in the hallway, just ask him when he's coming on Decoder. But I'm excited to talk to him soon. All right. A couple other piece of tech news. I really just want to read this quote to you, either.

So there's a long-running lawsuit against Apple for the butterfly keyboard, class action. product liability suit. Yeah. And so for listeners, if you don't know, we see class action lawsuits basically every day and we don't write about them because they happen every day. It's just a thing that happens. It's part of like the substrate of the economy. But once they get official class action status from a judge and then the company actually

has to deal with it and there starts being things like discovery and whatever, that's when it's worth starting to pay attention. And so that's what happened here. Yes. So there's the lawsuit filed against Apple, saying the butterfly keyboard, which Apple has since replaced this past year across the entire line, back to the old kind of switches, but the

four-year experiment in butterfly keyboards resulted in this class action lawsuit saying the keyboards were defective. They argued about who should be in the class, the class got certified. Part of the arguing was some discovery that happened at Apple, and I just want to read you this quote. It's redacted,

but it's from an Apple executive talking about their attempts to fix the butterfly keyboard. No matter how much lipstick you try to put on this pig, it's still ugly. And that to me is like, man, we spent years saying, hey, these keyboards are bad. And they're like, we think they're good. We fixed it. It's all better now. And they knew. Right. And like, that, that is, it's that little peelback of Apple sometimes that is so revealing. I feel like when we would ask Apple about this, they'd be like, customers love this keyboard. Yep. And it's like,

but, but we, I guess we never asked if you love this keyboard. Because customers love, if they say customers love them, they're not saying we love them. If you think about it. Yeah. I mean, we were very clear that we, Walt Mossberg was very clear that he didn't love these keyboards. Joanna, Casey Johnston, like, many people, it's funny, Addy wrote this story, and she was like, the irony of me write, because she still has a butterfly keyboard. And she's like, the irony of me writing the story with doubled vowels is, like, very high. I think it comes through. Just going to read that story. You can, like, feel Addy is like, I hate this keyboard. Last little bit of gadget news, Dieter, you read about this startup called Spatial. Yeah.

Which I am utterly fascinated by. Okay, so this was my very first in-person demo since my last tech event, which was the Samsung Galaxy S-20 in March of 2020, or February maybe of 2020. And I wasn't going to go because like an in-person demo, but I was intrigued because I didn't understand what they were doing. I needed him to explain it to me. And I kind of thought I need to experience it because it's an audio thing. But I was also intrigued because this company has actually kind of got a murder. or a row of people on it. It's got a former Disney Imagineer.

It's got a former Nest engineer, who also was at Mozilla. It's got a former engineer from Apple who worked on a bunch of Apple audio products. It has, and this is near to my heart, former product manager for Handspring Trio. Just going to put that out there. So like a bunch of people that have made a bunch of really good stuff, right? So the product is called Spatial. And the idea is they want to make ambient audio. And so it's some combination of they can position sounds in space around you, which is not a big deal.

But they can do it with this abstraction layer that runs in real time that can just interpret the sounds to any arbitrary number of speakers. So you don't need custom speakers for this thing or even custom placement. They just try and figure out the best way to position the audio based on where you tell the speakers are. and then the actual audio that you're hearing isn't like the corny track you hear at a zoo. They have you set up basically a game engine for audio. So you have birds and rain and, you know, the wind rustling through the trees and a creek over there and the input from a Sonos stream and a microphone by the ocean over there and a dragon and all this stuff. And then all of those audio objects, there's literally a display where you look at them like, like in 3D space, and you like click on each object,

and like this is a bird, and the bird likes to fly at like this time of day, but there's a little bit of entropy there. There's a little bit of chaos there, so it does different things. When this bird is near a similar bird, it's going to chirp, but if it's all alone,

it'll just fly around. When the dragon comes, all birds are afraid of dragons, so they're going to shut the hell up until the dragon goes away. When there's rain, the birds quiet down, and the frogs get louder. So, like, you just program in the behavior

to all of these little individual audio objects. And the end result of all of this technology is kick-ass muzac. Or it's like a cool theme park area. You know, like you go to Disney World and like the Pirates of the Caribbean line is full of really interesting audio that's not on a track, that's not on a loop, that interacts with itself and interacts with you as you like, you know, trudge through the line. You've got the, I'm reading your piece and you've got to. line. It's like, whoever the customers end up being, it won't be an easy sell. And it's like, yeah, yeah, I get it. I would connect this to, like, we have talked about Atmos so much. Like, Atmos is object-oriented sound. And, like, you can have generative object-oriented sound.

Like, if you play it, if you play a video game and it has an Atmos soundtrack, that's what's happening. Like, it's just dynamically generating an Atmos soundtrack and things are flying around you. What it doesn't do is close the loop with the speakers. So with Atmos, like, It doesn't quite know what's happening in your room. It tells you where to put the speakers and you can do some like reference EQ tuning. Like every receiver can do that. Oh, so actually, neither does spatial. They don't know what's going on in real time in the room.

If you put a sensor in and it can like see you, it can do stuff. But they're not bothering to tune the sound actively to the room minute to minute. In fact, when I asked if they were doing this, they said that's a science experiment. You tune it to the room once and then you're done. Yeah. But you have to tell it where your speaker is. You have to tell. I have these speakers in these rooms and my walls are made a glass and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Yeah, that's more information than like your average Atmos receiver has. It's even more information than like the Sonas arc, the big one has. Where you stuff's like wave your phone around while it chirps at you. Yep. This is like, it knows what your room is because you told it. Right. It's not going to do some auto sensing science experiment. Sure. But you've told it where your speakers generally are what your room's made out of. And then it's like generating a sound. Like that's closing the loop in a real way. That to me is like fascinating. Right? Because it can mean like maybe you can accomplish this with fewer speakers. Maybe you could cheaper speakers or

The speakers that you already got installed in your museum lobby or whatever That's great market. Honestly like who is the market for this and like deep down I kind of like the market for this is Disney is going to acquire us so they can make it'll be easier for them to design their theme parks or the market for it is like Dolby will acquire them or yeah right or one of the video game companies like you can I can just see like that that we've spent a lot of time talking about Atmos. I think Atmos is great. Most people don't even have it yet. So I'm way ahead of the curve here. But once you have it, you're like, oh, I can see how this could get better for all these other kinds of audio situations

that I'm in. Right. So right now, it's like, I'm going to watch Justice League. I'm going to spend the next four hours of my life, four hours and two minutes, in gray scale, because I'm watched the gray scale one this weekend, in this, like, generated audio environment because I've been Atmos set up. Then I'm going to turn it off. I'm going to go upstairs and listen to music.

And my one son-o speaker in the kitchen is going to do it. And it's not going to know about any other speakers in my house. And, like, I'm actually not creating an audio environment. I'm just like, there's some music coming out of the corner. You could, like, link that all together. So there's one system that knows about all the speakers in your house. And it's, like, doing something cool. Yeah, I could be, I could get down with that.

I don't know about the birds and the dragons. But, you know, whatever. I mean, they took us to the engineer's house. So, like, we walked through his backyard. And there was this one moment where I, like, walked under his deck and they, like, had cave sounds and, like, bat sounds in there. And they were really good at, like, tuning the audio such that you couldn't hear it out, like, just a foot away, but you could hear it in the under when you were under the deck. And we just pointed to the speakers. And they were, like, standard shitty outdoor speakers.

They just, like, were careful about where they pointed them, and they were careful, you know, about how they programmed it in. So that when you walked in there, you heard the cave. And then when you walked out, you just heard the creek that was down the way. Yeah, I think one of the big questions, AR and VR are coming, they're coming around us. Like, a lot of our generated experiences are very personal. Like, you have to be wearing the glasses. Two people need to be alone together in VR. Yeah.

These kinds of things are like, these are shared experiences. Yeah. So imagine launching a company that demands a shared experience in a pandemic. That seems like not great. It's beginning of the end, Deeder. Okay. All right. I love weird new startups.

I'm glad we haven't talked about a weird new startup with a crazy. 80 on our chest in a year. So I was just excited to talk about it. We're going to take a break. McKenna is going to join us. This hearing is still going and Jack Dorsey is openly trolling Congress on Twitter while testifying. And a lot going on. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface

lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track.

Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era.

Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. 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. We're back. McKenna Callie is here. Hey, McKenna.

Hey. So we have pulled you away from a hearing. I'm just going to read the name of the hearing. The hearing is Disinformation Nation, social media's role in promoting extremism and misinformation. That's the name of a bad Netflix documentary, not a congressional hearing. A bad Netflix documentary has been brought up in like every hearing so far. So I think that's an okay, you know, reference to me.

Yeah, they're spicing up the titles here. But it's Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai in front of the House of Representatives. Which committee is it, McKenna? Energy and Commerce. I watched part of this hearing. It's still going on. It's like four hours of this hearing. I watched part of it earlier.

were watching it, you're going to go back to watching it and write it up with Hill Report. At is watching it. It's pretty embarrassing so far. Yeah. It's one of those where everyone's airing their own personal grievances with Facebook and Twitter and Google again. Yeah. They're just yelling yes or no questions at the CEOs, these three massive companies.

The CEOs, I would say, are having three distinct kinds of reactions. So Sundar, as always Sundar, very patient, very patient. very kind very much not answering the questions that's his entire vibe with these Zuckerberg is trying to conduct some sort of like college freshman intro to moderation class that's like usually his thing and then Jack Dorsey is just trolling them by checking his phone during

is that your phone sorry I apologize and Jack Dorsey is just trolling them by tweeting during the hearing right he had a Twitter poll go up so it basically had gone around. Everyone's like, wow, so many yes or no questions. It's kind of become a hearing meme in our niche little tech policy circle on Twitter.com. So now Dorsey went on, just tweeted a question mark with a poll, yes or no. And just a couple minutes ago, one representative finally brought it up and told him he's really good at multitasking. Wow. That, man, was he

unhappy about it? It's like, how do you even? I wish I could show you the face he made. I screened It was kind of it was like a little bit of a smirk like he didn't seem you know, he didn't seem to trouble by the fact that she caught him that the principal was telling him to turn off his phone in class. So the underlying policy issue of this hearing, which again, we've had a couple pretty good hearings recently. And then this one is just for some reason a mess again. But the underlying policy issue is 230. All three CEOs have been asked if they would support 230 reform. Zachary actually proposed in his opening statement, a reform. What was that reform? He is like, yeah, totally. Do a little bit of like tweaking to Section 230. Give somebody the ability to make sure that we're moderating the way you guys want us to. And we'll have like

some third party enforcer who maybe would be the FTC, maybe would be like a self-regulatory body. Like he wasn't very clear in that at all. But he's open to some changes. Of course, those changes. are very minor and really would just Facebook it's stuff Facebook is already doing so they're happy to have that encoded in law yeah I thought that the the lawmakers are playing this game now where they keep asking the CEOs to respond to one another and then just like at one point they just asked Zuckerberg what they what he thought of YouTube why which is just a great question he was like what do I think of YouTube it's very silly the thing that I've really noticed the most in this hearing is just how unorganized it is

I mean, every lawmaker has their five minutes to ask the questions that they want. But like we talked about earlier, like there is no narrative here. Like, what are we getting at? You know, what is it that they want? And it's hard to pull any kind of like straight narrative together at all about this. And at some point, you know, we think about the hearings in the past and kind of what I'm writing about right now is that hearings do have some kind of self-regulatory effect. If you get a lawmaker in front of Jack Dorsey or in front of someone and they say something

that's, you know, really important. And it can't instruct what the companies do on their own. But the fact that Dorsey is doing these like silly polls and Mark Zuckerberg has gotten so good at this hearing format of dodging questions and doing things like that, at what point do we get to that the hearings do nothing? Yeah. But introducing bills that likely will go nowhere, you know, we used to have things where the Honest Ads Act by Senator Amy Clutchard. That got Facebook and Google to have their own transparency ads transparency database. We're not seeing that anymore. We're getting to the point where you need to legislate or they're not going to do any self-regulation at all.

The different, I'll compare it to last year, we covered a lot of the competition hearings, right, in the House, NHS subcommittee. And like we saw immediate effects from that in the way that you're describing, right? Like Apple started opening up. It's like going to allow different default apps. Like we've just seen the push and pull of, oh, man, they're looking at us. We've got to change our behavior and maybe escape some of the scrutiny. Facebook notably responded by pulling all of its companies closer together and firing some CEOs. Everybody responds.

Here, but like in that committee, even the Democrats and Republicans, they absolutely do not agree on the solutions. They definitely agree on the problems. Even if the problem is as simple as we think these companies are bad and they don't have enough competition. So then like they were asking questions about the problem without grandstanding about the solutions because they might not disagree. Here, I'm not sure that Republicans and Democrats agree on the problem of misinformation on social networks. And I don't mean that in the like one of the parties is evil way. I mean, literally the question of should they moderate more or less is up for debate. When we talk about the anti-trust hearing last year, what we kind of talked about was that, well, everyone agrees that these companies have so much power.

Here we go. How can we get enforcers in better fighting shape to take on these companies, right? that was agreed upon between Republicans and Democrats at House Judiciary. Now, we're in a free speech issue, right? We're in a First Amendment issue, and that is extremely divisive, and that is extremely difficult to legislate around. When you look at Democrats, the whole hearing today is about misinformation. They want things to be taken down.

They want things that are algorithmically, you know, promoted when it comes to, like, extreme emotions, extremism, things like that. They want that stuff tamped down. But then you look at the Republicans and they're like, well, I'm being censored online. Don't, don't, no, don't moderate anything. And it's hard to come when it's a free speech issue like this, when it's a section 230 issue like this, where is the common ground? And I think that's the bridge that needs to be crossed that may not be able to cross at all between these two in order to get some kind of narrative and some kind of forward momentum moving towards reform. Yeah, I'm looking at Zuckerberg's 230, his proposal, right, which is it boils down to if you're a big platform. you should be more transparent and you should only get the protection of 230 if you show that you have some moderation capability. And what I was saying earlier, they asked Jack Dorsey to respond to that. And he was like, that sounds good.

I don't know how you define what a bigger small company is. And that might have been the most substantive exchange that happened during this whole thing. Because that's a really good question, how you define what is a big platform, what is a small one. But I look at that and it's like, well, when this third party enforcer you're talking about, like, who is it? who is on it, who staffs it, how often do they come by and check? Right? Because right now the process, the way 230 works is you're mad at Twitter for a tweet. You go and sue Twitter.

You're in the lawsuit. Twitter files a motion dismissed saying, we cannot be held liable for this citing 230 in the body of case law. And you're done. You're done. You walk away. You sue Twitter for a tweet. Does Twitter have to go to someone's office and be like, look at our moderation system. And here's our scale. Like we'd like our get out of jail free card now.

All of that is, that's the stuff that big companies are good at doing. It's not the stuff that small companies are good at doing. That's just compliance costs. And also it's like, when do you do it? And I look at it. I'm like, I'm pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg is actually proposing getting rid of 230 here. Like at the end of that complicated road, he's saying, for every lawsuit, I'm going to like get a punch card and show it to you. And so the default is that it's gone.

Right. And then Zuckerberg is in a great position because Facebook can pay whatever costs. It's renewing your 230 license. Yeah. Maybe like every quarter or something. Yeah. And it's like that's not what you want, right? Like what you want is better moderation that is more fair.

And I just, I haven't heard that from any of these, from any members of Congress in this hearing. It's mostly like, do you agree that hate speech is bad? Yes or no. And they're like, yes. Also, we moderate one billion pieces of content a day and something's going to get through. How do you think that one of the big questions coming into this hearing in particular was the insurrection at the Capitol and how these platforms might have contributed to it, it might have been planned on it? How has that conversation gone? Right.

So I think one of the better moments in the hearing having to do with the insurrection, I forget who asked the question. But Mark Zuckerberg was asked to take responsibility for at least some of what happened at the Capitol. And he, of course, dodged. And he placed more of that blame on Trump. It was Trump who did this. It was the Republicans who did this. Of course, not taking responsibility and being, we're the platform, right, of where these people posted to do this violence.

So I think it really is just kind of positioning right now. And it's so sad, but the thing that caused this hearing to happen, an affront to democracy months ago is not being really addressed at all. It's all these personal things, like something that Marjorie Taylor Green posted or something that somebody else posted. why did you take this down? I wish that the organizers of this hearing took some time to maybe like counsels more to counsel more with other lawmakers and build a narrative on what happened at the Capitol.

We saw such good storytelling at Trump's impeachment trial about all that work has been done. Yeah. Such good stuff being done in his impeachment trial to tell that story. Why couldn't we do that here? Of course, that's just not happening. Yeah. And maybe that's just not particularly the House of Front. representatives. I noted earlier you mentioned, like, as we were talking about the hearing, like, members of Congress are just up for re-election more often than senators. And so they're just, like,

motivated to grandstand to get the Twitter clip to run in the ads for the next election, which is coming up very soon. And like that part of it where like the members of Congress are themselves, like, very online posters, like, it waxes and wanes, but this just feels like a maximum moment of like, oh, we're just pure posters. Right. No, I think you're 100% right. It does come down to having what are your constituents telling you and then advocating for that, which oftentimes the issues vary. State by state, the issue community by community. You're not going to get any consensus. And that makes it very, very difficult to legislate. Have you seen any difference in how these companies are generally reacting to the government since the

change in the administration? So of course, like Amazon isn't testifying today, right? But Amazon at the beginning of the Biden administration, it's like, hey, we'll help, you know, pass out vaccines. We'll help do all this stuff. Of course, that's not a moderation issue, but they're definitely trying to cozy up a little bit more because Biden has appointed a number of people to serve an administration, you know, positions now that are really, really tough on tech. Yeah. I think Lena Kahn this week, who wrote that, that basically like viral legal paper about Amazon is now going to be at the FDC if she's confirmed. We have Tim Wu, the man who coined net neutrality, he's over at the National Economic Council.

So I think the companies are seeing that there is more of a threat under Biden. Now, of course, there's a lot of issues that need to be addressed first. We have the COVID relief. We have economic relief. We have gun issues now, too. But there is this little, you know, there is definitely a lot more momentum to get something done under Biden for sure. Do you think that's where Zuckerberg is saying, here's the 230 reforms, I would take, and like, right, they're proposing their own regulation in their own interest, right?

Right. Yeah. And I think they've done that before. So after the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg came out with a proposal for privacy regulation because privacy was really, really hot. Now, of course, nothing happened with privacy at all. Now, will this be the same case with the 230 reform? Who knows? It really depends on how this kind of Congress ramps up and what the priorities are this year. over the next four years. Yeah. I just like, I'm thinking about this hearing and one of the things that just really strikes me to your point, McKenna, is we're at the point where the hearings don't matter and Dorsey is kind of like not taking them seriously and he solved his biggest problem, which is that Trump isn't on his platform anymore. Right? Like that at the, every one of these previous hearings, like that was the elephant in the room, right? And he solved that problem and he's probably not coming back. Like we just had cave on on Decoder and I was like, is Trump coming back and he's like, he's banned, end of, do you want to talk about fleets?

Like, very much the vibe at Twitter is like, he's gone, we're not opening that door. YouTube's position is he's gone. We'll bring him back once the threat of violence subsides, which is as squishy as anything. So he's gone, right? Once you take that out of the equation, you are left with, why is Marjorie Taylor Green getting moderated on Twitter? And their set of policies is like clear and she's a cartoon character and she's like wildly over the line. I think she wants to get banned, right? That's a great for her in some way.

And so I just like the dynamic here is you've got one side that is the Democrats walking right up to what the First Amendment would allow them to do. And in some cases, Representative Matsui asked, what are you going to do about hate speech on our platforms? And what caught me is like, well, Congress can't do anything about hate speech. The First Amendment and a litany of court cases has said hate speech laws in America are illegal because of the First Amendment prevents them. But Facebook can do something about hate speech. So you've got the Democrats asking the platforms to do stuff that like Congress and the government can't do. And you've got the Republicans, I don't know, basically trolling their way into social media stardom. There's like, there's no path forward there as far as I can tell. No, it's all bad faith for the most part.

And I think Democrats at least realize that if they ask specific questions, if they're targeted enough, maybe it'll pressure them to do something self-regulatory. Now, how many times has Facebook done anything really self-regulatory? Well, they'll, oh, maybe we'll do some more privacy stuff in an ads database and things like that. But they're also minor. And it's, I mean, it is kind of meaningful in some ways, but it doesn't get to the length of reform and changes that a lot of people want. Yeah. One of the things that we talked about during the campaign was that that Biden and Trump actually had the same position on 230 reform? Like, Joe Biden was like, we just get rid of it.

And Trump was like, get rid of it. And it came from very different motivations. Is that still the administration's basic position? Is that still the basic democratic position? So I wouldn't say it's the basic democratic position. I think if you, anytime I talk to anybody, ask the White House about it, it's like, he said what he said. And it's like, when I say Biden said what he said, right?

And that's about as far as we get. But the basic democratic goal, no, I think I think it's shaped over time. I think people saw 230 and they were like, wow, 230 sucks. But over the past couple months, what I've noticed a lot is that it's, they realize that you can't do that. And things are getting a bit more serious. You can't just revoke 230. So when you think about Sesta Fasta and like sex trafficking stuff, that was a little poke in 230 that had a lot of ramifications that were not, you know, people didn't expect them to happen. Now, I think you're getting to the same place.

After a month after the insurrection, Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner introduced the Safe Tech Act. Now, if you look at that bill, it's a targeted 230 change that has to deal with being able to sue Facebook if somebody is harassing you or causing you personal threat or harm. There are these little poke holes that people are trying to poke out. And we just saw another bill reintroduced this week by Anna Ishoe, and that would poke a hole in 230. if a platform's algorithm has been found to amplify terrorist content. Oh, my God. Right? So it's all of these little little poke holes.

And I think we're going to see more and more of that. I think that's going to expand past 230 reform. And it's going to be like in privacy. I think we saw Amy Klobuchar send a letter to the FDC or something about women's violence against women and domestic violence and something about privacy there. We're going to see a lot more of that over the next like six. to eight months for sure. Yeah. I'm very curious to see how the process of incrementally poking holes in 230 goes. It's also interesting, you know, we had Klobuchar on for a Verge Live event

with Adi, you know, they like went in a fairly straightforward way. Like we asked her the questions. She answered the questions. Mark Warner just did an event with protocol. And he got like super mad. Like they asked him the questions. It's like, I don't believe a word you're saying. Can we get, can we go do something else? Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's a test. topic, right? And it's going, anything with free speech is going to be a very testy thing. And it'll be interesting to see if any kind of consensus is formed up this year at all. Yeah. It just struck me because they're the co-sponsors of the bill. And they're like, even their vibes about what the companies are doing was, we're totally different.

All right, McKenna, I cannot let you go without asking you about broadband because I know you and I both are like deep in the broadband weeds all the time. It seems like net neutrality is like on its way back in some way. It also seems like Biden's big infrastructure push is like going to include some broadband stuff. Just give me a quick update on that. Right. So there's an infrastructure package. Infrastructure Week is allegedly actually happening soon.

Right. So I know. It's ridiculous. But so they're playing around with how much broadband money is going to be in there. Now, Jim Clyburn in the House and Amy Klobuchar in the Senate have a package out. that's like over $80 billion for broadband investment. And they're pushing to have that included in the infrastructure package. Of course, that can be, you know, taken down a notch, maybe some less money, maybe it goes

somewhere else. But it does seem to be that broadband is a huge priority. There was an infrastructure hearing earlier this week. And Tom Wheeler, net neutrality man from the FCC was there. And then Mike O'Reilly, a former FCC person. So out of the four people they had to talk about infrastructure, two of them were people to talk about broadband. end. So I think broadband is going to be really, really big when it comes to infrastructure.

On net neutrality, Ed Markey said a couple weeks ago that he was going to reintroduce or introduce some kind of net neutrality bill in the coming weeks. I'm doing air quotes there because it's been the coming weeks and we have not seen it. But there will definitely be a push. Now, what that means for the FCC, it's two to right now. We don't have a Democratic majority in the FCC. So if they even wanted to do net neutrality, they couldn't. So Biden has a lot. to nominate one more person to sit at the FCC before the FCC can do anything. Well, technically has to nominate too, right? Because Rose and or so she's the chair, but she's only the acting chair. So doesn't she have to go through? Right. So I don't know when

her nomination is technically up. It wouldn't be because she was just nominated like two years ago. Remember, her nomination was like held up for a bit. So she's just appointed as the chair right now. So he will likely, we don't know if she's going to continue to be the chair, but we still need one other Democrat on there. That person could end up being the chair as well, but that decision, of course, hasn't been made yet. I see what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. Here's some like Virgin side baseball. So we're like, we just did a big issue, like a DIY issue.

We wrote a bunch of stories about DIY stuff. And we're like, what should the next one be? And we're like, oh, we should do infrastructure. And like literally our desk editor's meeting was like, we can't say that. we can't call it that we can't because then it will never happen it's like a self defeating prophecy like we are just we cannot say the virgin is going to do an infrastructure we cannot do it and we're going to try to do it i'm excited about it it's coming up later on but it's just funny how the phrase infrastructure week is uh is cursed in american life now ban

phrase yeah for real i'm akana i sadly i'm going to release you to go finish watching this hearing good luck okay no thank you for having me always like hopping on here to talk about the wonkiness of the Capitol. As always, Cedar, we've gone over. I'm sorry. It's not my fault. What are you talking about? It's not my fault.

I really want to talk to you. Well, two things, two little gaming lines I want to point out. One, Tom Warren is just totally chasing the story of Microsoft quietly ranting Xbox Live to Xbox Network. It's so nuts. Like, they just make a decision. Microsoft is running out of things to put the word Xbox in front of. Yeah. Just, it's funny when we had Phil Spencer, Andy Cutter.

He was like, we know. We know the names are out of control. But anyway, they're doing it very quietly. And like Tom just keeps blowing up their spots. Like Major Nelson changes his Twitter bio and Tom's like, I'm on it. So that story is really funny. And then Sean Hall also had a great story about the street prices of Nvidia and AMD GPUs, which are chip shortage wildly out of control right now.

So just want to call those out great stories. On the site, you can tweet at us. Dieter is at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. McKenna is at Kelly McKenna. Allison is Allison Joe One. So tweet us. We'd love to hear from you. I really encourage you to listen to this week's Decoder with Kevin Roos. It's about something very boring called Robotic Process Automation. But it's really just about computers using Excel on other computers, like at the heart of it, which I think the Verge cast audience will appreciate. Check that out. Next week on Decoder. We have Tracy Sun, who's a co-founder of Poshmark. That was a really great conversation. Read the Verge. It's going to be great. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.